Anyway, the main thing is that I feel like the players completely have the upper hand, and I'm not sure what is the best way to respond to that. How do I balance what's fun for my players with what's fun for me?
It's not that I want to kill PCs, but I'd like to make the climax of the campaign tense and memorable. I'd like the players to have to use abilities they don't usually have to pull out, and maybe be inventive sometimes. And yeah, I'd like for the bad guys to get some good hits in, to show off their own abilities and make the situation seem serious. But then on the other hand, it seems like players always remember combats as more tense than they look from my side of the screen, so maybe I'm overestimating the importance of that aspect.
I know that getting attached to the idea of specific scenes happening is always dangerous, but do I try to salvage any of the showdown I'd hoped for, or do I just let it go?
Do I try to make things harder for them? Try to bring back some of the roleplay? Or is that me trying to impose my will and take away their fun?
How do I psych myself up to run a BBEG who's going to go down like an absolute chump when confronted with eight fresh PCs? I'm actively hating the thought right now, but maybe I just need to get over myself and learn to like it. I remember someone saying that the goal of being a DM is not to win, but to lose with style. I'm just not sure even how to do that when I feel so completely outmatched.
Sorry for the long post. Any thoughts or advice will be carefully considered.
To balance competing interests, look for areas of common ground and see what fits in that territory. Identify must-haves and nice-to-haves, and then make sure the must-haves are included.
I think you can definitely salvage some of the scenes you’ve pre-written, but likely not As Written. Probably, you can tease out the essential elements of those scenes and turn the key moment into a bullet-point. (Keep a list of these bullet points).
Now, your players are going to want to rely on their plan A (hunker in a hut and come out guns blazing). So there should be opportunity for that to happen. They also want to talk some smack, it seems to me, so there should be an opportunity to do that too.
I think if you re-cast the scenario, you don’t have to worry about the chump-thumping. One avenue that occurs to me is to protract the scene into 3 to 5 different encounters in which performance in the early encounters affects the final showdown in the last encounter. Then I’d use those encounters to drop in the bullet-point must-haves.
If I were psyching myself up and reimagining the showdown, it might look like a pursuit of strahd up a tower, each level locking behind the party so they can’t retreat. And it’s not “can you beat strahd?” It’s more like “can you beat strahd 3 to 5 times?” So the nova strat works out well at first, but as they move up the tower, they have to dig deeper to get those victories. So the sub-strahd bosses are perhaps his shadows and each has strahd’s stat block but a preferred strategy based on his abilities and accounting for your must-haves (legendary resistance turns into legendary power - grants the shadow an automatic success on whatever ability it is using). Defeating each shadow drops the key to the next floor and the wedding is at the top.
I’d do the strahd shadow encounters like this:
1st encounter - Beasts. The Shadow takes Strahd’s bat form and also summons some swarms of bats. Legendary Power affects his Bite Attacks when used. (Use the encounter space to drop in your must-have RP stuff. Strahd’s disembodied voice can do a lot go back-and-forth with the players).
2nd encounter - Charm. The next Shadow uses Charm (Legendary Power, if needed).
3rd encounter - Predator. The next Shadow uses Greater Invisibility, Spider Climb, and Multi-Attack.
4th encounter - Spells. The next Shadow focuses on Strahd’s Spellcasting. Make sure to use fog cloud, blight, and all 3 fireballs.
5th encounter - Strahd. By now, your 8 players have run a decent gauntlet of all your must-have scenes/RP encounters, have either used their nova strategy or played to conserve some firepower, and depending on how fast they did it all, they either catch Strahd during the wedding (so he’s surprised) or late (so he has some wolves summoned and some spells up). I’d also let him cast Animate Dead on any fallen PCs as a legendary action.
(This is all just by way of example. There are probably hundreds of ways to push your party off of plan A).
Anyway, the protracted encounter(s) would give you the room you need to balance the fun. And instead of a blowout there’d be a decent attrition before a final showdown. And you have the time to do the stuff you wanted to do. It might not be exactly how you envisioned, but it could still have a lot of what you’d planned.