Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 2893410" data-attributes="member: 1165">No he doesn't. The heroes just killed his important allies and are going strong, while he's wounded. He'll try ... later. Maybe he'll try to kill the knight when the knight is alone. There's no way he's going to kill the knight now.When heroes make bad choices (and that happens), it's their fault. When villains make bad choices (and it happens, since they're not all geniuses), it's their fault. I don't think a villain should undergo a personality change because someone snarked at them.I'll give an example. [sblock]I just finished reading Hot Springs yesterday. The hero of the story is Earl Swagger, former USMC Top Sergeant. The villains include Owney "the Killer" Madden (renamed Maddox for the story) and Johnny "Spanish", a "tungsten-nerved" Irishman.Spanish is a former armed robber and leads a gang of five men. Madden hired him to get rid of Swagger, after 11 Grumleys (a red-neck mobster clan - I'm so making NPCs based on them!) armed with a heavy machine gun couldn't kill him. Madden correctly predicted that Spanish would kick Swagger's behind. He was right. Swagger lived, though wounded, but Swagger's men were slaughtered. (The story takes place during the Segregation era, 1946. Spanish cheated, as any smart villain does, by using "new fangled" infrared lenses. Swagger lived by visiting an African American doctor, since all the "good" doctors were being watched.)Some days later, Madden gets tossed into jail after being set up by a rival, and Spanish breaks him out. Spanish says "this is a bit of a jailbreak and a bit of a kidnapping". Swagger figures out where they're going and attacks. Swagger kills all of Spanish's men, but Spanish is alive (and Madden is cowering in a corner somewhere).At the end Spanish catches Swagger by surprise. Swagger's gun is jammed. Spanish undergoes a massive personality change. He tosses a pistol to Swagger, about five feet away (novel term, not game term). Then they go shoot at it. It turns out Swagger's gun wasn't really jammed and had a bullet left in it. Whoops. So Spanish dies.Now if Spanish had used the massive intellect and cheating and otherwise dishonorable behavior that he had been using since the moment he was introduced, more than two hundred pages previously and demonstrated on multiple occasions (there's a lot of page time devoted to him), he would have shot Swagger right then and there. It doesn't matter that he had no way of knowing what Swagger's trick was. If he used that tungsten-nerved brainpower, he would have lived, then get to rescue Maddox and get millions of 1946 dollars, too.It makes me quite angry to see villains turn into idiots for no good reason. It's a shame, too, as the rest of the novel was really good.[/sblock]Let me see. Threatening a loved one is so overused that a very large number of PCs nowadays are orphans, or are estranged from their families, and you still don't know how they'll react. (DMs complain about that all the time - never predict what a PC will do.) Maybe they'll figure they can wait an hour. Maybe they'll figure that their family members get killed if something happens to the evil knight. Maybe it'll be something totally different. Sense Motive - that's not part of the challenge, in case the evil knight is lying or "leaving stuff out". Teleport (to your mama's house). Etc. Dominate can take away someone's free will because it's a spell that is clearly mind control. It doesn't break the suspension of disbelief and can even be suppressed or dispelled if the party was prepared.</blockquote>

Verification