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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MoogleEmpMog" data-source="post: 5825364" data-attributes="member: 22882">The most effective recurring villain I ever had in a game was an agent of an enemy country in a fantasy action-espionage game.He encountered the players in their first mission and by the time a fight broke out, his side had overwhelming force. The PCs were in a fishing trawler, he had an ironclad frigate. He was a little stronger than any of them, but they could have beaten him in a fight - but the difference in their ships was overwhelming and they retreated. They did accomplish their goal for the mission, which was to find out what power was backing a spy ring in their country and what they were trying to achieve, so even though they fled it was still a "win."The PCs met him a second time, once again without fighting due to the circumstances, and this time he actually did foil them. Again, they might have fought him and won (or lost; he and his support would have been tough to beat), they might have succeeded without fighting him.The third time they encountered him, they were after an experimental submarine made by his country. They got aboard (losing their ship in the process) and had no choice but to fight him to the death. It was a close thing, but they did manage to kill him and comandeer the vessel.However, to patch over the ruffled diplomatic feathers, they had to send his remains back to his home country.Now, this was a setting with rare resurrection. Unfortunately for the PCs, the main mechanism for resurrection in-setting was something they knew this guy's masters had. The PCs weren't certain, but the players were, that when they were asked to turn those remains over they were ensuring they would see their nemesis again in some form.Their expressions when they realized they had to do it anyway were glorious.He was out of the picture for a long time, months both in- and out-of-game. Long enough for the players to start to believe his resurrection was a red herring. His former colleagues came after the PCs for revenge, they had other missions and adventures -And then they got a mission to infiltrate their nemesis's home country. They split up and worked with various local rebels, and one of the players made a series of bonehead moves that got him exposed. Cue the return of their nemesis, now a sort of Steampunk Darth Vader - more machine than man, with a magical power source. When they heard me switch to his familiar voice with a newly mechanical hitch in it (one of the benefits of doing voices at the table), there was a wonderful "Oh. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />." from multiple players, especially the one whose character was isolated.If the PCs had fought him as a group, they still would have had a chance to beat him, but their first exposure to his new form was a lone PC going up against an enemy statted to take them all on. The results... had an impact.They avoided an open confrontation with him until the very end of the game, and finally did defeat him in the sense that they were winning the fight against him and accomplished their objectives. Even then, he'd become sufficiently intimidating to them that they chose not to take the fight to the finish (both sides were fighting a running battle with a third party as well, and everyone was pretty battered by this point), and both sides survived.In that same campaign, the villain I originally planned to be the main bad? He was a teleporting magic user with access to the same source of resurrection as the one who ended up being the PCs' nemesis.After two encounters (one where he beat them handily but they escaped, one where he teleported away), the PCs tracked him to his safehouse and planted a bomb powerful enough to kill him in one shot. It was a harrowing thing because they had to avoid notice - and did. He died offscreen, in the rubble of a building that fell into a ravine in the middle of an avalanche, and his body was never found.He stayed dead, because they had a great plan, they pulled it off at great difficulty, and the red herring of his return was more interesting than him actually returning. It also set the players up to believe the guy who became their nemesis might not come back, and to be extra nervous when he did.</blockquote>

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