That is exactly the inspiration for this concept. What am awesome villain.This makes me instantly think of Szeth, the Assassin in White from Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive.
That is exactly the inspiration for this concept. What am awesome villain.
My favorite part of him has always been that he's such a conflicted villain. The public sees him one way, but readers get to see his conflict in his POV.
This is why when I get around to making a full Assassin class or a new and better assassin rogue subclass, they will have abilities to help escape such spells.Slippers of spider climbing on the assassin or the PCs would help. A fly spell would also help things or even hold person is always good to stop a cool encounter.
This is why when I get around to making a full Assassin class or a new and better assassin rogue subclass, they will have abilities to help escape such spells.
I think a lot of Sanderson's character-building is weak (and often, perversely, he backs off when it gets strong and "normalizes" his characters! Which is a pity!) but Szeth is definitely a very well-rendered anti-hero who is actually fairly believable and interesting.
The only difficulty with such an encounter that I foresee is that it is potentially kind of a knife-edge in maybe not fun way. Specifically, if Szeth-a-like is too hard to stop, it may feel almost like a bad cutscene in a computer game (like Kai Leng in ME3, who does a similar thing - twice), where there's nothing that works and it's all pre-ordained.
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I'd also consider, instead of one high-powered Szeth-a-like, maybe three Szeth-a-likes of a lower power? All with the slippers of spider-climb and so on, but not Legendary and with low enough HP that they might be possible to take down that way. That way, even if the target dies, if the players nail 1-2 (or even all 3, just too late) of the assassins, they're likely to feel a lot better about the encounter.
If this is the first time the PC's/World "meet" this assassin a la the WoK prologue, then being more of a cut scene might not be a problem.
If you set the players up to fail, especially if there's really no possible chance of them succeeding, you need to look at ways to mitigate that, if you don't want them being bitter pretty long-term. The players aren't characters in a book, who don't exist when it's inconvenient. You put them on a mission to defend the king, then send a guy they cannot possibly stop to kill the king, they're going to be complaining about that (not about you necessarily, but about that event), until long after you retire from DMing.
I would suggest having them be witnesses rather than active, formal, defenders the first time this guy appears if you're going for that. That way they can decide to intervene (and they probably will), but then when it goes wrong anyway, they aren't psychologically "on the hook" for the failure. Then, when they face him more formally, there should be some kind of warning that he's after the person they're protecting, and they can use what they learned to try and be successful.
And trust me, if they're defending someone, they're likely to blow every single thing they've got to try to succeed. Spells, magic items, potions, etc. So they will find out if he's basically unstoppable, and will expend a lot of resources finding that out.