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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SnowleopardVK" data-source="post: 5909160" data-attributes="member: 6677945">I've seen an actual AP in which the big bad is a melee fighter, and it was handled fairly well.Jade Regent, Major ending spoilers below:[SPOILER]In Jade Regent 3 of the final 4 enemies in the big final fight are primarily melee characters. The actual BBEG is a 15th level samurai (essentially entirely melee. He's got one SLA, but it's Alter Self, not a combat spell), and two of his team in the final fight are a 15th level ninja (rogue-ish, but again, not a caster at all) and a Wind Yai Oni (has about 4 strong SLAs per day, and a couple of at-will support SLAs like invisibility, but other than that he's another melee character).The only member of the BBEG's team who is even remotely a caster is his lover, a 15th level Oracle, and my players found her to be the easiest of the four to defeat (though admittedly they didn't actually fight the ninja so much as they convinced him ahead of time to betray his allies and flee mid-fight). Despite that, the mostly-melee group of villains still made for a good final encounter. Though perhaps a part of that is due my players having no wizard or cleric as well. Their casters were summoners, and an inquisitor, so perhaps that helped them balance the scale.One thing I did notice about the primarily melee group facing off with the PCs was that the four villains amount to a CR 19 encounter against PCs of 15th to 16th level. This is of course at least partly to compensate for the fact that the PCs have allies joining them in the fight, and that the villains are easily turned against each other, but I do wonder how much it's meant to compensate for that, and how much it's meant to compensate for the villains being primarily melee. Whatever the case though, overall, it worked.[/SPOILER]</blockquote>

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