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Message: <blockquote data-quote="painandgreed" data-source="post: 3027138" data-attributes="member: 24969">Maybe not bad design, but definatly a case of "Darwin". There are lessons to be learned that every NPC and PC past a level where they need to worry about disentigrate should think about. If an NPC has lived past that point then they should have such things instigated and they would extend beyond the immediate room. Was the vampire on home ground? Were there other obstacles that might have used up party resources? Was the area the vampire in barred by locked door, guards, or other alarms meant to alert him and slow unwanted guests? Was there physical protection for the vampire? Could they have used decoys or illusions to protect themselves from the first round of spell casting? Did they have screening troops with them? Could they have been invisible or otherwise not involved in combat till they had an idea of what the threat was? Did the BBEG know people where in their lair and could they have set up their defences differently? The BBEG will sometimes end up getting disentigrated on the first round of combat, but such results should be due to a long string of choices and actions by the party throughout the entire dungeon, not simple luck of a few die rolls. BBEGs didn't get to be BBEGs by leaving things to chance, but by being smart and capable, and should be given credit of such. If the players had a too easy of time killing off the BBEG, then the BBEG was probably doing something wrong and future BBEG shouldn't be doing the same things.I don't think I'm missing the point, I think I just had a different opinion. Granted, making NPCs in 3.x is time consuming. I noticed this fairly early in learning the game which began by DMing it. I'd say that reasons for this go to design flaws in the game itself such as expecting advancement of 1-20 levels in a year of play. Char-gen rules are a drain on DM, but I do think they add value to the game. Rather than separate rules to make NPCs easier to generate, I choose other methods. Slow advancement by returning to a more exponential XP scale. I have pregenerated NPCs of various types. And not commiting NPCs carelessly at higher levels. Heaven forbid that anybody should think that should be the solution for everybody. I have my DMing style, and it's the way I want to play the game for my own enjoyment. My players like it and I admit that some people who used to be my players didn't.</blockquote>

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