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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 1259511" data-attributes="member: 63">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.</blockquote>

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