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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lord Zardoz" data-source="post: 3919416" data-attributes="member: 704">There is more to being a RBDM than setting up traps for the players to walk into.  Though I will admit that this level of caution can make certain things difficult.  The answer lies in the "Burn it all down" mentality.  There are plenty of things you can do to make this aspect of their strategy work against them.The first thing that comes to mind is that you may want to consider using the 'old school' definition of dungeon, and start stocking them with large numbers of prisoners.  You actually do not even need to make the prisoners dangerous at all.  In fact, make them all genuine victims of the villains.  Once it becomes clear to the SWAT player that they should want to try to rescue the players, than you can start using that goal against them. - Assuming you have prisoners chained to posts and in cages that are all over the place, using area attacks becomes dangerous to the prisoners. - You can make your villains much more hateful if you have them start harming the prisoners.  Give a "surrender or the prisoner gets it" ultimatum, and then carry it out.  Also, I am sure that the villains will have no reason to not use Fireball type spells. - If there are NPC allies with the party, you can have them inclined to knuckle under when the threats start to get close to home. - Another failing of 'burn it down' tactics is that it is very easy to get the players to kill someone they should not have.  It is alarmingly easy to provide the players with reliable evidence that a particular person is evil and must be killed / taken out if they are too gungho.  However, this is also easy to unravel if your players hit everything with Detect Evil, Zone of Truth, and Detect Thoughts.  There are ways around this, however.As a last resort, you really may need to master the Xanatos Gambit (linked earlier).  For those too lazy to click the link, the Xanatos Gambit is a name for any villainous plot where after the heroes complete a task that they think works against a villain, the villain can then turn around and say "That was my plan all along, you fools!".  The entire plot of the Starwars prequels can be considered a Xanatos Gambit by Palpatine to become emperor.  The trick to a Xanatos gambit is that you have to successfully do the following. - The players need to know that the Villain wants to accomplish X - The players need to think that if they perform a task Y, that the Villain cannot accomplish X. - In order for the players to perform task Y, they must also perform task Z. - The completion of Z must enable the villain to acheive X+N.Here is a fairly basic example: - Villain Mc Nasty wants to obtain the Sword of Doom from the Crypt of the Lich King. - The players discover the nefarious plan, and learn that in order to steal the Sword of Doom, they must first slay the Lich King, and bring the sword to the Temple of Light to destroy the sword. - The players storm the dungeon first, and kill the Lich King, stealing the Sword of Doom. - When the players enter the Temple of Light with the Sword of Doom, they break the seal imprisoning the Greater Demon Tyrant because they fulfilled the Prophecy of Obscurity. - Villain Mc Nasty is actually the last surviving member of the bloodline of the ancient hero, and with the demon freed, he is now able to take on the power of the Ancient Hero, and bind the demon to his service (If he weren't a bad guy, he could imprison it anew instead). - Villain Mc Nasty saves the town from the Greater Demon Tyrant, and now has the very same Greater Demon Tyrant firmly under his control.  The priests of the church of Light anoint Mc Nasty as the Hero Reborn, and pledge themselves to his service.  Mc Nasty promptly tells the priests that the players wanted to release the demon, making the Players the new public enemy.  As the players flee, McNasty uses a Message cantrip to thank the players for killing the Lich King for him.- The players now chase the DM from the room, and vow revenge against Mc Nasty.This will work because while the players may know that McNasty wants the Sword of Doom, they cannot possibly know why without looking into it.  And if they find out having the Sword of Doom is a pretty sweet deal for a bad guy to begin with, they probably will not look past the obvious.  It is also a Rat Bastard DM thing to do simply because you will have gotten the players to screw themselves over.END COMMUNICATION</blockquote>

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