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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 1561727" data-attributes="member: 63">A good villain might be smart enough to not get on your radar.  He'll have his minions do stuff, and he'll protect himself with Mindblank, or at least Nondetection.  That's not a very unreasonable protection.  But you'll likely hear about the villainous goings-ons of his henchmen, and when you scry and teleport in to wax them, the villain will learn about it, and respond in kind, eventually.But that's not fun.What's fun is to get the characters involved in intrigue, or in dangers that have to be thwarted a piece at a time.  Not all villains are going to have lead-lined towers (or, in my campaign, opalite inquisitor masks that negate teleportation and screw with divination), but most of the high-level ones will.  I mean, it's not exactly a cop-out to have these superb defenses.  If you're going to be evil, and you have money to hire minions, you might as well invest in some anti-'Scry & Fry' magic.Let the PCs use their abilities.  That is key.  But you don't have to let them use their abilities to kill everything.  Some foes are smarter or better defended than others.  Let them Scry & Fry the underlings, discover clues, and rush to stop an evil plot going on elsewhere in the world while they try to figure out where the main villain is.  The villain is, of course, handily hidden in the depths of a dreamscape created by all the latent psionic energy of the sleeping people in huge metropolis.  He's somewhat vulnerable during the day, but when enough people are sleeping, he can hop from dream to dream.I noticed something in my last campaign.  For the first few sessions, teleport didn't work.  It gave the party time to get to know the world and be used to its cities, peoples, and so on.  Then, after about three months, the party figured out how to get teleportation working again, and at that point, all hell broke loose.  It took three months of game time to go from 5th to 9th level.  The next week, once everyone realized teleportation was working, saw the party negotiating with three world leaders across the continent, then finding a secretive hidden artifact that let them teleport an army onto a giant airship of doom, and then they had to teleport elsewhere to stop another villainous plot.Basically, what happened was that, all of a sudden, the world leaders got access to intercontinental ballistic missiles, and they decided to take out old foes.  So in about a week, the world was torn to pieces.The party gained four levels in that week.</blockquote>

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