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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 7843040" data-attributes="member: 18">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.And yet, on the other hand, if he's too easy to stop, this encounter might be over in one or two failed saves, if the PCs have the right spells or magic items.I'd make him Legendary so he can shrug off a certain amount of cc, but if I was pretty sure he'd succeed in killing the target I'd want to make sure the players didn't feel too guilty or cheated. I have actually run NPCs like this and I've seen quite sane and normal players get preeeeeeeetty upset - not really with me - but it definitely honks them off in a way that can make them mad with the system rather than the enemy. I'd also have him run if he was out of cc-drop abilities.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.</blockquote>

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