So, after watching the Angel finale, I started thinking about good quality bad guys -- bad guys who stuck with the party for a long while, who could scale nicely in power without me having to level them up a ton. One thing that struck me as important was a lack of focus -- a good quality villain should be higher level than the party, but not focused, instead of being lower level but focused up the wazoo in one specific area. After playing for awhile, I've seen that a very focused character can skew the balance in their area of focus. So, for example, if I wanted to make a villain that the PCs should end up fighting in melee combat, I shouldn't make him their level but minmax'd for combat. That's not going to be cinematic -- that's going to be sucky for the party, and they'll quickly fall back and pelt him with grenades, killing the cinematic effect of the fight. He should be higher level, but not focused on combat, so that he's decent in combat, but also decent in a lot of other areas.
So, with that philosophy in mind, here's someone I modeled along the lines of an "Angel" bad guy -- maybe Season-5 Lindsey, if he had no powers:
Okay, so, notes:
- He's got all kinds of good scores, but none of them are great. At 16th level, he has no 18's.
- My party is 7th level, and this guy could comfortably outfight even the combat specialist guy in ordinary hand-to-hand, but he's not unstoppable, and he's not unhittable. My party's 7th-level gun-specialist could take him out with a lucky shot (Double Eagle, double tap).
- He has absurdly high ranks in Climb, Balance, and Jump. This is so that he can fight acrobatically and cinematically -- he's going to be leaping. He's going to be swinging. There might be chandeliers involved somehow. He will rarely be taking full attacks, since he'll almost always be doing some kind of "jumping slide across the table (Balance, synergy from Jump) to allow the benefits of charging" type deal with those skills.
- He's got the social skills to handle himself against the party's face-man, although the party's face-man will likely outdo him in the long run.
- And the kicker. His action points. Ordinarily, he'd roll 3d6 and take the best one. But not him. Oh no. He rolls 4d6 (from Negotiator levels) and takes the best one, and then adds +3 to it (Faith) -- and he can choose to spend another Action Point on the same roll as well, if he wants (from Daredevil levels). Conservatively, I'm guessing that "best of 4d6" averages to 4.5, and that means that if he spends two action points on something, he gets 4.5 (x2) +3 Wisdom (x2) = +15 on that one roll. This guy can cinematically do almost anything he needs to do that one special time, and he's doing it completely within the rules. (The 8/day note up there is from a variant rule I use that has Action Points accumulate like M&M Hero points -- you get (Level/2, round up) per day instead of a flat number per level.)
What this means: He doesn't dish out massive heaping loads of damage. He won't regularly be forcing massive damage checks. He isn't impossible to hit, and he isn't impossible to beat. But he does have the ability to consistently make himself a challenge to the party for a long, long time.
NB: As far as I can determine, this is a legal build. He had the Athletic occupation. He qualified for Negotiator with two levels of Charismatic, he qualified for Daredevil with cross-class ranks in Concentration and Drive ranks from Negotiator, and he's got all the necessary feats. I built him level by level to make sure that he qualified for each feat as he took it.
So, with that philosophy in mind, here's someone I modeled along the lines of an "Angel" bad guy -- maybe Season-5 Lindsey, if he had no powers:
Tacky said:
Okay, so, notes:
- He's got all kinds of good scores, but none of them are great. At 16th level, he has no 18's.
- My party is 7th level, and this guy could comfortably outfight even the combat specialist guy in ordinary hand-to-hand, but he's not unstoppable, and he's not unhittable. My party's 7th-level gun-specialist could take him out with a lucky shot (Double Eagle, double tap).
- He has absurdly high ranks in Climb, Balance, and Jump. This is so that he can fight acrobatically and cinematically -- he's going to be leaping. He's going to be swinging. There might be chandeliers involved somehow. He will rarely be taking full attacks, since he'll almost always be doing some kind of "jumping slide across the table (Balance, synergy from Jump) to allow the benefits of charging" type deal with those skills.
- He's got the social skills to handle himself against the party's face-man, although the party's face-man will likely outdo him in the long run.
- And the kicker. His action points. Ordinarily, he'd roll 3d6 and take the best one. But not him. Oh no. He rolls 4d6 (from Negotiator levels) and takes the best one, and then adds +3 to it (Faith) -- and he can choose to spend another Action Point on the same roll as well, if he wants (from Daredevil levels). Conservatively, I'm guessing that "best of 4d6" averages to 4.5, and that means that if he spends two action points on something, he gets 4.5 (x2) +3 Wisdom (x2) = +15 on that one roll. This guy can cinematically do almost anything he needs to do that one special time, and he's doing it completely within the rules. (The 8/day note up there is from a variant rule I use that has Action Points accumulate like M&M Hero points -- you get (Level/2, round up) per day instead of a flat number per level.)
What this means: He doesn't dish out massive heaping loads of damage. He won't regularly be forcing massive damage checks. He isn't impossible to hit, and he isn't impossible to beat. But he does have the ability to consistently make himself a challenge to the party for a long, long time.
NB: As far as I can determine, this is a legal build. He had the Athletic occupation. He qualified for Negotiator with two levels of Charismatic, he qualified for Daredevil with cross-class ranks in Concentration and Drive ranks from Negotiator, and he's got all the necessary feats. I built him level by level to make sure that he qualified for each feat as he took it.
