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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy" data-source="post: 437116" data-attributes="member: 4036">I take it scry doesn't get used too much in your games?  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I find my big bads are either known to the pc's, or known to people the pc's come into contact with.  I don't have very many behind the scenes evil masterminds with fanatically loyal soldiers and limitless funds from which to pay mercenaries from the background.That's not to say that it is always apparent whom the bad guy is, or even that the guy is so bad.  But often times scry buff teleport makes it difficult to have reoccuring villains or any long term thorn in your heroes side.  If you've glanced him before, fought him, intimidated a name out of a crony, or charmed or dominated someone in the know, it's all academic.  Whether you go through 3 intermediaries or none, it still becomes a matter of somehow having every person who's not so nice be on alert 24/7 with no life except for preparing combat spells.Or even your middle bad guys, sure you can teleport away, if you happen to be a wizard, but you still haven't fixed the problem.The problem is, why aren't your bad guys doing it.  They aren't stupid, they've got the same access to the same spells.  Why not just pre-empt would be good guys as soon as it looks like they could be a threat.  Why waste time sending minions to die and equip your enemies when you can just sbt them.  If they are asleep, unless they've all got masterwork mithril armor, they are unarmored, spell depleted, and groggy.  Poof, kill priest, kill wizard, retreat.  Poof kill rogue, kidnap fighter.  Hold fighter hostage as slave labor incase good guys have rich cleric friends.Even a moderately challenging encounter can become lethal if prebuffed against a surprised party who is running at half or less strength.If you drop the watchman in the surprise round with a quiet spell or knife between the ribs, you can just coup de grace the other sleepers.And if the PC's can be in situations like this, it would make sense that the bad guys sleep, eat, or defecate occasionally and thus would expose themselves to weakness.I ran into one particular moment in games past where an evil wizard who was summoning demons en masse was working in his library and we tried to sbt him.  Miraculously, he had expended no spells as yet that day in his summonings and indeed had his full assortment of party combat spells prepared as well as a simalcrum and an illusion of himself on hand along with 10 armed guards who weren't in the slightest surprised to see a glowing buffed party of adventurers teleport in.You'd think evil wizards would occasionally be in their slippers pouring over books experimenting...But because of sbt, they either lose that part of their life, or come stamped with expiration dates.</blockquote>

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