The best laid plans of mice and DMs

[KarinsDad]

Well the first mistake in my book, if you really wanted this sorcerer as a recurring character, was to not fudge his Concentration roll.

Actually, I do not consider that a mistake.

I consider it a major mistake to fudge rolls and in fact, I roll all of my combat dice in front of the other players.

I am a strong believer in fairness and I have found that unusual dice results sometimes make for memorable sessions and campaign events that would not occur without them.

Additionally, when the dice are hot and roll against the PCs, I have found that the players are forced to excel and come up with ideas that they would not have had to if the DM arbitrarily protects them (or protects the NPCs or the storyline or whatever) by fudging.

I'd rather lose a hundred NPCs (they are a dime a dozen) than lose a single player because he felt that I was unfair as a DM.

 

[RangerWickett]

Good advice from Thornir, methinks.

Then again, I took the easy way around that. I wanted a recurring villain who would last until the end of the campaign, so I made her immortal, and gave her tons of henchmen. The PCs would fight her henchmen and foil her machinations for a long while until they finally confronted her, and then she'd kick their asses (and if she didn't, she was one of those genius villain-types who has contingency after contingency to get her body away from heroes if they somehow manage to kill her, giving her time to reform and restrategize). Only after the PCs went to the trouble of figuring out how to deal with her permanently could they defeat her. The immortality gig was a major plot point, gained when the villain found a holy grail-esque item.

She had an immortal ally too, who they ended up fighting a few times. First time they fought him, they were actually just fighting the psychic manifestation of his soul (which was trapped in a gem). They 'killed' his body by putting him in an antipsionic field then tearing out his heart. Later, they got confused and tried to break his soul gem, thinking it'd kill him when actually it let his body reanimate since his immortal soul was now free. So they fought him again, and I didn't have a plan for what would happen (Hell, at that point, I didn't even have his stats handy). What they ended up doing was harming him, chopping him into pieces, and then tossing the pieces into a bag of holding.

This worried me.

Now I knew that the PCs had a way to circumvent my uber-cool ending I'd thought up; a really cool scene that they'd get a real hoot out of. If they ended up fighting the main villain, chopped her into pieces, and tossed them into a bag of holding, . . . well, that's a rather ignoble ending. So I decided to change things around a bit, and set up the finale in an extradimensional demiplane, so that any other extradimensional devices brought in would not function.

The finale is this Friday. I've managed to have a villain recur by carefully making sure the heroes knew about her before they met her, and by having them see her handiwork without having a chance to directly harm her. I even let them take a crack at her, when she had overwhelming odds against them, and even if they'd gotten one of those ridiculous critical hits of doom, her allies could have easily teleported her away. I hope the finale goes well.

So the lesson is, never design a recurring villain with the thought, "First they meet him, and then . . ." It's okay to take a friend they've talked to and turn him into a villain, or to have a shadowy distant villain only show up once or twice before the finale (and only then when heavily heavily defended, or in a position of great power).

She's been a fun villain. After their first fight, a lot of her allies were dead, but the PCs were defeated, so she spent a week torturing them, having paintings made of the event for posterity's sake. Then she tossed them in a dungeon from which they could escape, so that they would, as adventurers unerringly do, find out how to kill her. Then she'd learn what her weakness was, and find away so she'd no longer be vulnerable.

So recurring villains can work, though it's hard. My next goal is to come up with a way for the villain to fight the PCs a few times without dying. Now that'll be a feat.

 

[barsoomcore]

Very sound advice, RangerWickett.

Another tactic to make use of is to have the party introduced to the villain without knowing she's the villain. Or indeed, without her BEING the villain at that point.

But Season Two of Barsoom was memorable for having TWO recurring villains, one of whom made the noble sacrifice in the end to help destroy the other -- and the party spent most of the season worrying about which one they should be working with.

 

[RangerWickett]

Actually, I do not consider that a mistake.
. . .
I'd rather lose a hundred NPCs (they are a dime a dozen) than lose a single player because he felt that I was unfair as a DM.

It's cool to let the dice fall as they may, as the saying goes, because yes, you do get really weird stuff sometimes. And also, it's okay to fudge dice, if it helps a cool situation. It all comes down to what's best for drama. Case in point, I ended up designing the entire end of my last campaign based on a bizarre roll.

One PC had a history, only loosely fleshed out, with an NPC knight who hated the PC's family. The NPC knight was trying to frame the party and get them killed, and the PCs were fleeing the city. They stop to get some of their gear from an inn, giving the city guards time enough to block the two main gates. The party tries and fails to sneak out, so a melee begins, and I'm perfectly willing to let them escape, and to let the entire city's guards die; the encounter was designed so that the PCs got frustrated with the government the city belonged to, thus guiding them toward allying with another group further down the road.

So what ends up happening is that the NPC knight engages the PC he hates in combat, and the knight is holding his own until he gets held and falls to the ground. They don't have time to coup de grace him officially, but he's low on hit points, so if they hit even once, he'll probably die. There's an enemy mage about to take his action, and only one PC gets to go before him. He makes an attack, and I say, "He can only miss on a 1," so of course he rolls a natural 1, in plain sight of everyone.

He misses, and the enemy mage gets off a wall of force to seal off the fallen knight and protect him, so the PCs flee and leave the knight barely alive.

I mulled over this for a while, wondering what I could do with the knight who I'd kinda thought would die anyway. I ended up tying him in with the ending of the campaign, making it good fortune on the PCs part that they hadn't killed him (killing him would have condemned the PC's soul to hell; part of a weird arrangement with a demon).

So that time, letting the dice work oddly was good. But other times, like when the PC challenges the villain to single combat, and charges in with a battle cry, prepared to fight for victory, and then he rolls, like, 2 points too low to hit, or something. So you fudge, to keep up the drama, and to keep the player from feeling like a fool. And when you completely underestimate the damage dealing power of the party so that the villain will die in the second round of combat, you fudge to give him higher AC and more hit points, so that the final battle isn't anticlimactic.

A DM should never break the rules just because he's clingy to a particular 'cool' villain; you do it for the sake of the story, and for the entertainment of your friends. If you were a member of a group of 1st levelers who went through a Living Greyhawk game at GenCon meant for 8th level PCs, then I probably was your DM, and I'm proud of the occasional *ahem* fudge I made in that session so that you could be the heroes, rather than being mincemeat.

 

[Breakstone]

I think every DM's had one of those.

Mine was Sun Mao Tsu, a dispicably evil, cold-hearted, but ever-so-cheerful oriental villain who had captured an angel and was currently torturing it. Sun Mao Tsu scared the living crud out of the players, but they almost killed him in the end... had the Angel not appeared and announced, "I must bring him to the Celestial Courts, where we will finish this the just way."

Fortunately, the players were happy with it- they wanted Sun Mao Tsu to return, he was just that fun to interact with.

Then again, I have had a recurring villain who worked out. Korm, a mysterious, hooded wizard who was summoning demons beneath a city. There was always something... familiar to his voice, and he teleported away that first battle. He then kidnapped the friendly NPC henchman-type of the players, and when they finally defeated him, it was revealed that he was a double of one of the characters, and if one of them died, they both would die.

So he's been an undefeatable villain, and has been captured and escaped many a time.

 

[KarinsDad]

And also, it's okay to fudge dice, if it helps a cool situation. It all comes down to what's best for drama.

Drama will occur on its own with the right group of players.

DM "protected" drama is not necessary. I've never seen a storyline that wasn't better because the players were there. Hence, there isn't a storyline ever worth preserving by fudging (if you want that, read a book, the author decides all). IMO. And in fact, as can be seen by other DMs stories, unexpected elements in storylines typically force the DM to be creative and end up adding entire new dimensions to storylines. That happens less frequently if the DM fudges to maintain his storyline or to save his reoccurring villain. Again, JMO.

 

[LordOfBlah]

I have actually had decent luck recently gaming a group with baddies that keep comming around. Actually they befrended a pair of half dragon fighter/barbarians and a mindflyer sorcerer that where spies for a red dragon planning on attacking the town. They actually fought on the same side in one battle.

During a fight to take out some of the dragons minions the group of baddies appeared and the group had to teleport out.

In my last game session it was supposed to be the big climatic fight. The group played so well that we actually had to call it a night and pick the battle up next time. We had a 4 hour battle with only one death (the PC's) I was actually worried that I had over powered the NPC's but it turns out that I had to use every trick and skill I had just to keep my head above water. Good news is that there was no dammage to the NPC's when the battle picks up and the group is almost out of spells. I'll get my TPK yet

 

[Hypersmurf]

Actually, Psion, I think you're thinking of the cifal, from either the original Fiend Folio or the original Monster Manual II.

Fiend Folio.

Ugh, yecch. Monsters should not have acronyms for names.

Bad bad bad.

-Hyp.

 

[ciaran00]

Don't you know rule #45 of the neverending Book of DM Rules?

"Recurring villains don't."

It never works. The only time it works is when you don't plan on having him return, or use things like "True Resurrection".

Berandor

I don't think he meant recurring villain in the sense of his game jumping the shark with his villain reborn. He just means one that antagonises the PCs for a long time before he's finally killed in a heroic battle.

EDIT: Also, this reminds me of a Man in Black in my White Wolf game who botched while running and shooting at the players in a subway. He botched so bad (5 botches), he slipped on his own alligator-skin shoes, got his gun accidently tucked under his chin and blasted his own cranium out. Made me cry.

ciaran

 

[ciaran00]

In reply to the other posts in general... I don't think a DM should ever cheat in his own favour or in favour of the story. He should be better than that and accept the player's hand in his world. He IS entitled to cheat FOR the player though, IMHO. If the rules need to be bended for a cool PC, then by all means.

I keep my NPCs and my DM-ness separate. So an NPC is created with whatever statistics and he too has to deal with the world, staying alive, etc... so if the PC every legitimately gets the upper hand, then he gets to take the trophy home. If the villain does, the player knows that I'm not loading him up with bonuses for it to happen... There is nothing like a game where the players KNOW that fairness plays a major role...

ciaran