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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sunseeker" data-source="post: 6090970">When I build BBEGs in 4e, I love me some riders, debuffs, and effects that trigger on the basis that your foe is debuffed, it's like having multiple powers without having multiple powers.EX: At will: he does something like 2d6 damage and gives you a penalty to will(save ends).-If you already have the penalty, he instead does 4d6 damage and you are *shaken(or other fitting condition)* and the penalty to will increase to -4 and now applies to your save.-If your existing penalty exceeds your will mod this attack does no damage and instead dominates you, each turn you make a basic attack against a target of the BBEGs choosing.What's nice about this sort of setup is that it gives my BBEG wants and needs.  Singular powers with one-time effects don't do that.  My BBEG has weakened the mind of a target, making him more susceptible to his power, thus my BBEG wants to keep attacking that target.  Which gives him very nice interactions with marks, the BBEG will take the hit if it means a shot at dominating a player.In this particular case, his entire power suite was designed to emphasize the fact that he was trying more to dominate than kill you, as he felt the players would make great servants of his god, or at least tasty snacks.  He had knockbacks, teleports and various forms of evasion to get out of player CC.  I'm a tolerant DM, but I am not when it comes to stunlock, so I'm either going to jump the gun and give my mobs a lot of tools to get out of stunlock, or I'm going to be very heavy handed with the players when they start trying it.  It's one reason I play 4e over previous editions, while stunlock is possible, it is generally something a group has to optimize for.  It is not something that comes naturally.Another trick I like with my BBEG is to make them affect(and thusly be reliant) on the things around them, objects, minions, you name it.  I had a necromancer who was creating a zombie army in the bottom of an old shipwreck(on shore).  His attacks did little damage to the players(1d6+4 or something pathetic like that), but he had a minor to animate two zombies to fight for him, and whenever he damaged the players, it healed the zombies(who were quite the vicious little buggers).Then when he became bloodied, he activated all his zombies and merged with them, gaining their health(10 per zombie, and he had about 20) and increased physical defenses, he could no longer cast, but he was the size of a bus and hit like one too if you were within his reach 2.  The added knockback and proneing he could do in that form left my players quite scattered, it was a lot of fun.  The players didn't know this, so when they thought it was a good idea to focus-fire the boss and ignore the zombies, they were surprised to find that left the boss with quite a lot of health!I don't like giving my bag-guys a lot of powers, it's a pain to read.I like giving them special powers that do special things, making themes for them that accomplish all that stuff you want to do, without having to make a bunch of "this is the power I use to get out of this" and "this is the power I use to avoid that".  It just gets messy.One thing I really agree with you on, and I experienced this with a very rules-lawyery player, is that 3.X has been around so long, and some folks know it so well, that there's really no room at all for creativity.  If anything even remotely resembles the DM having gotten creative with health or statistics or spells or abilities of a creature, you get called on it.  I enjoy that 4e allows for more suspension of disbelief in regard to the fact that the BBEG can do that...because he's the BBEG!  He's the magically-empowered servant of an extra-planar being of pure chaos.  So he's got powers that do crazy stuff that reflects that?  Of course he does!  Or the master of illusion can create illusionary clones of himself to distract and defeat players?  He sure can!  There's no questions of "well what prestige class is he?" there's no "Well he's a humanoid whose a rogue so he can only have d6/level health!" there's no "what spell was that he just used, it's not in my big-book-o-spells!"  It just is because it is.  They have those powers because those powers are an extension of what they are.  Not because they took the right class or specialized in the right school.</blockquote>

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