D&D 5E Save Our Villians

[Tony Vargas]

In the PotA thread http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?p=6698111 the discussion has turned to keeping glass canon NPCs alive. Particulary villians that have been built up by the plot only to end up having so few HP that one or two PCs novaing on them could take them down in one round.

That's just how 5e is tuned. Lower hps relative to damage potential for faster combats. Bounded Accuracy making numbers a telling advantage. Put those together and 1 BBEG vs 4-6 PCs is over quick.

So DMs...what are your tricks for keeping your villians alive an extra round or two to give them a chance to deliver that really kewl attack or to escape to fight the party another day?

Set the villain up with a surprise round - he does his kewl thing, establishes his bad-ass-ness, then the party overkills him and breathes a sigh of relief.

As a DM I try to play the really important NPCs like they are my PC. They want to live. They want to win. Any clever means within the rules is fair play. DM fiat or deus ex machina is out.

That's a particular style, yes. "Clever" is prettymuch what the DM finds clever, so it's not really /that/ different from DM fiat in practice. You probably want to design BBEGs and important NPCs using full PC-creation rules, and use some of the players' favorite tricks against them.

 

[Celtavian]

Do you add something like 10 levels over their PCs level? I think I would also tinker with legendary abilities a little too, like the ones that take 2 actions? Just make it 1.

Right now I'm making abilities that provide healing to the legendary creature. I figure if they can mitigate damage while attacking it will allow them to heal damage. That might be easily countered by chill touch once the party learns of it. Therein lies the rub. Parties often have the means to exploit any weakness or counter any ability of a creature. I might have to use the usual method of raw hit points and statistics to make the fights like I want them to feel.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

Give max hit points to important ones. And if they fall make death saving throws for them. You don' have to tell the pc's you are making them as well. After downing an enemy I find pc's don't tend to check if they are dead after all.

If a villain npc has a decently powerful cleric as an ally they can be raised as well.

 

[Hand of Evil]

One of my best villain was the mom of a player character it is what happens when you ask questions in building background of characters.

 

[Uller]

Right now I'm making abilities that provide healing to the legendary creature. I figure if they can mitigate damage while attacking it will allow them to heal damage. That might be easily countered by chill touch once the party learns of it. Therein lies the rub. Parties often have the means to exploit any weakness or counter any ability of a creature. I might have to use the usual method of raw hit points and statistics to make the fights like I want them to feel.

This brings up an interesting point. So last night my villain survived to fight another day (after I gave him lots of extra spell-like power (including Stone Wall), gave him a 7th level caster ally in addition to the Shadowdemon he already had and fought a fighting withdraw from round one. By round 3 he fled, abandoned his allies to be slaughtered and had 43 out of 136 hp left.

This presented a new problem. While he had some "priest" NPCs about, not one had any healing spells. There are a few potions of healing around but other than than the only healing he had was to take a short rest (I allow NPCs to use HD just like PCs and my players seem to expect that).

Meanwhile the party had a priest of life and a paladin. So they were able to heal up a good bit, loot the room and then they decided that since they could not really go back the way they came (they used several castings of spider climb to get to where they were) and they couldn't wait there because the enemy would mount an organized attack, their only option was to plunge ahead and fight their way out.

This was a good tactic. The main villain could not engage them directly. He was all out of spell like powers from his magic weapon had down to 1/3 of his HP. So he was moving about the dungeon rallying his forces and sending them at the PCs. It was only the betrayal of an NPC that has her own agenda that saved the PCs.

Anyway...another thing for DMs to think about in coming up with ways of making big villains able to survive to fight another day is...then what? How does he heal enough to get back in there? Does he heal enough? Or is he left fleeing and finding other ways to deter the party until they give up.

And yes...someone mentioned up thread that giving an NPC villain a surprise round is very useful. My players manage to get surprise A LOT (they have a shadow monk who likes to use Pass without trace to great effect). When an NPC BBEG gets first shot, it can really set the party back on its heels and leave them momentarily thinking they are dead...gives the game a bit more of a 4e vibe.

 

[Warbringer]

Angry has updated the Boss fight articles for 5e. Worth a read

http://theangrygm.com/return-of-the-son-of-the-dd-boss-fight-now-in-5e/

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

In the PotA thread http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?p=6698111 the discussion has turned to keeping glass canon NPCs alive. Particulary villians that have been built up by the plot only to end up having so few HP that one or two PCs novaing on them could take them down in one round.

A couple sessions ago I had an NPC go down while trying to escape the wrath of the party. As she fled the party wizard got one last crack at her and took her out with a fireball. After the game I realized she had a cleric underling...she knew she would be fighting the PCs and they were dangerous. She could have had her cleric cast Deathward and she would have escaped.

So DMs...what are your tricks for keeping your villians alive an extra round or two to give them a chance to deliver that really kewl attack or to escape to fight the party another day?

As a DM I try to play the really important NPCs like they are my PC. They want to live. They want to win. Any clever means within the rules is fair play. DM fiat or deus ex machina is out.

Mechanisms I've used include:

1. 
   [*=1]Death Ward.
   [*=1]Augury/Divination in advance (which function mechanically similar to inspiration/Portent respectively, due to house rules) before engaging with PCs.
   [*=1]Armor of Invulnerability on a scro Eldritch Knight 12.
   [*=1]Class levels in Sorcerer on my dragons (for Shield, Counterspell, Mirror Image, Blur, etc.).
   [*=1]Everybody makes death saves. No auto-death at 0 HP. In your example, the cleric minion could have just Healing Worded the bad guy back on his feet after the Fireball.
   [*=1]Total cover, or at least partial cover from minions.
   [*=1]Overwhelming firepower close at hand. In one case, PCs were able to take down a neogi wizard using Evard's Black Tentacles (cast through a doorway into the neogi ship), but the spell ended on the same round the neogi hit 0 HP, because the PCs were too busy responding to an umber hulk sally to maintain the spell inside the ship. So a human slave stabilized the neogi with medicine checks (humans have a vested interest in keeping their neogi master alive, because it is customary to eat half the slaves of a dead neogi in the feast celebrating the transition of power) and he is still alive, unbeknownst to the players.
   [*=1](Similar to #7.) Bodyguards in a nonhostile confrontation. The scro Eldritch Knight mentioned above had two Planar Bound Air Elementals, a Fighter/Warlock mounted on a flying void worm, two spellcasters (Diviner 9 and Tempest Cleric 7, although the Diviner could not cast spells due to spelljamming helm effects), and nine scro troops with him (orc stats, plus breastplates and longbows). If the encounter had turned into a general melee instead of single-combat-for-fun-and-information, he was well-placed to make a fighting withdrawal if he couldn't win the fight outright.
   [*=1]Lucky feat.
   [*=1]Indomitable fighter feature.
   [*=1]Cloak of Displacement (again on the scro). PCs never discovered this because the PC who fought him used spells only, but it was there just in case.
   [*=1]Pre-buffs: Free Movement, Longstrider, Bless.

I've also planned but not yet used Contingency (Armor of Agathys V, or Dimension Door) on Warlock/Wizard hybrids. An extra 25 temp HP when you drop below 40 HP can make a big difference in survivability.

Basically, just treat the NPC like an NPC who has goals and actually wants to stay alive, and then do all the things that you can't figure out why your players don't do, like recon, recruiting minions, casting Death Ward, using poisons, and learning Shield. NPC opponents are super fun and I always feel a little bit guilty when using them because I didn't have to work to create them, like players do with their PCs.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Beyond that, I try not to have the most important bad guys be glass cannons. I build NPCs like monsters making sure they have appropriate HP to their CR rating. Some of them have class abilities similar to the PCs and also abilities not available to PCs because " monster". Any villain with a halfway decent CR is going to have enough HP to not get one-rounded. Looking at the DMG guidelines, even a CR 2 villain could have up to 100 hit points. A CR 7 or 8 villain could have close to 200 hit points.

Nitpick: offensive and defensive CR don't have to match, so there really is no "HP appropriate to your CR rating." Low-CR monsters in the MM (orcs, hobgoblins) generally skew high on offensive CR and low on defensive CR, so they are glass cannons. Some high-level monsters like mummy lords also skew offensive. Mummy lords only have 97 HP and AC 17 at CR 15, but they can output about 140 HP of damage per round plus a paralyzing gaze: definitely a glass cannon.

PCs, on the other hand, can and do have HP appropriate to their level, with no option to trade in HP for more offensive power. So if you make sure that NPCs have HP commensurate with their level, I'd argue that that is closer to building NPCs like PCs than like monsters. Which is perfectly appropriate, of course, if that's what you want to do.

Apologies for the tangent.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Anyway...another thing for DMs to think about in coming up with ways of making big villains able to survive to fight another day is...then what? How does he heal enough to get back in there? Does he heal enough? Or is he left fleeing and finding other ways to deter the party until they give up.

Then what? Then the gloves come off and he goes after the PCs specifically, and not in little CR-appropriate bite-sized packets either. If he's a wizard this could mean he blows 10,000 gp on an assault squad of ten Invisible Stalkers; if he's a warlord it could mean he gets a company of his most elite troops and passes out Drow Sleep Poison to all of them at 200gp a pop. Either way, he now has a specific grudge against the PCs in particular and knows something of their capabilies, and he will treat them like a military threat which deserves a military response including full recon and stealth considerations.

A major advantage of the PCs in my game is that most opponents don't expect a small group of humans and elves to pose a serious threat, so e.g. a dozen hobgoblins will be quite willing to engage since they believe they have the advantage. Once the NPC has tangled with the PCs and escaped, they lose that advantage. He's going to come back with overwhelming force, and the PCs are forced to either 1.) acquire overwhelming force of their own (break out the mass combat rules); 2.) evade the threat (perhaps proactively infiltrating his camp and striking directly at the NPC before his guards can respond); 3.) roll initiative and die.

 

[Uller]

Then what? Then the gloves come off and he goes after the PCs specifically, and not in little CR-appropriate bite-sized packets either...

By "then what?", I meant more in the short term. The problem I ran into last night (and this is partly because I was expecting to play tomorrow...not last night...so I had an hour to prepare instead of a rainy Saturday afternoon) is that I spent a lot of time thinking how my villain would escape the fight with his life, I didn't think about how he would react in the very short term (10-30 minute time frame).

It became clear to me he had no way to get back in the fight since he was spent. Since the PCs had completely circumvented the dungeon, he had ALL his underlings available. His only problem was getting to them and communicating to them what to do. I resorted to using dice on my map to represent various "units" and at the end of every round I gave them a double move.

I've been in real combat (to be clear...nothing anyone would call a fire fight...one-three shots fired in a hit and run...mortar attacks that never came close or IEDs that either we found or failed to do anything...I don't want to steal any valor here so I always try to make that clarification). I've lived in fortified positions surrounded by enemies with 120+ other soldiers. One thing that has to be considered in a situation like this is you can't throw all your forces into the immediate threat. Someone still has to man the walls, the towers, the gate. The force that has breached your defenses could really just be a feint...So I played it like that...Interior forces moved to the fight. Exterior forces left behind some to guard their posts.

Because the PCs didn't hole up but continued to exploit their breach the defenders could not mass at a rally point then launch a counter assault. They had to continue to press the PCs to try to lock them down. It was one long running battle and fun.

Between adventures in this campaign the villains have gone after the PCs. They tried to assassinate them twice and even sacrificed villagers to make weapons to use against the PCs and when that failed they tried to almost literally nuke them killing scores of innocent people. No...these guys don't mess around...