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Message: <blockquote data-quote="grufflehead" data-source="post: 5346882" data-attributes="member: 35977">Firstly, be very careful about making it look like you are targetting specific PCs or weaknesses - it may cause bad feeling if someone takes no part in the climactic fight because you have taken them out with an ability/tactic/special move that the bad guy couldn't possibly know. However, as people have pointed out, if the PCs have been the major thorn in the lord's side, it is entirely reasonable for him to have a dossier on them (so he'll know the wizard loves his fireballs) and plan accordingly.- Speaking from recent experience, you might be surprised what you can do with environmental effects. For example module to look at, see spoiler:[sblock=Silent Tide spoilers]In the very first PF Society module Silent Tide, there is an encounter in a granary. It is dark, and full of fog so visibility is restricted to 5 feet, and everyone has concealment so miss chances apply, and bad guys can just 5' step away and 'disappear'. On top of that, the monsters - a form of undead - all radiate silence around them, so if the party are moving through the area, one of them might suddenly lose contact with the others. Plus, if you are close enough to see the bad guys, you are in the silence, so no spellcasting unless they have silent spell or there are no V components (rare)[/sblock]- How do the party get these exorbitant ACs? If the fighters are encased in metal, don't resort to cheesy rust monsters (which never used to affect magic anyway..), make the environment very hot or cold, so the longer they are in it, they start to take non-lethal damage. Use darkness liberally, and look for other things - slippery or uneven floors stop charging, and slow movement down etc.- A couple of people have mentioned that given the party is 7 strong and therefore almost the equivalent of 2 parties, then rather than double the number of monsters, spilt them up into 2 groups. Use a teleporter (or a simple sliding chute trap if TP is too cheesy) and have 3 of the party go somewhere else. Depending on what their marching order is, this may be a real challenge because you may end up with one group with all the fighters, and one with the two healers - then just ad lib something that will really exploit the weaknesses of each group appropriately.If you also give them another challenge to deal with at the same time, then they can't concentrate their forces on the bad guy. In the above example, 3 of the party disappear down the chute into a water-filled room. Even if they can swim/breath water (and remember that lovely ACP for swimming), if there are monsters in the water then they'll need freedom of movement to be any use. Unless they can all fly, they'll have to deal with the monsters before getting out - faced with the lord, will the group up top try and kill him, or help their pals who are about to drown/get eaten.- If you just want a stand-up fight, then make use of miss chances and DR to let the lord stand up for longer. Stoneskin (or equivalent) to take a chunk off each hit, Displacement means a lot of solid shots are going to miss , Mirror Image etc.- Someone else was laughing about the 'dedicated fireball tosser' (*snicker*). I have to say, an evoker would be the least of my worries. Rooms so small he'll catch most of the party would be one solution, I'd be wary of making the bad guy immune to fire because you've then completely nerfed this character, but if he has 2 levels of Rogue he'll have evasion which is the next best thing...- Another tactic an old GM of mine applied very successfully: change the scale of encounters. In the example above, if everything is very small, characters have to squeeze (maybe the villain is a midget, or at least a small race so he has all the corridors made 2' wide), the entire party can't be brought to bear at once, spells may blow back, line of sight is blocked by lots of twists and turns (which also stop running and charging). At the opposite end of the spectrum, our GM made everything huge. Not bigger monsters, but the castle was a mile long, rooms were hundreds of feet across. Now you have lots of space to use missiles, mounted troops, skirmishers with Spring Attack/Shot on the Run/Ride by Attack etc. Spells now cover such 'small' areas that battlefield control is much more difficult, and fireballs are a tiny blip on the battlemap- Lastly, do you plan on running another game at any stage? Because - and I'll direct you to the final scene in the classic 1980 movie Flash Gordon - even though he's a lord, and has all these minions, maybe he's no more than a 1st or 2nd level character. The PCs kill him in a couple of blows, and then you can have a nice big celebration that they've defeated the big bad and freed the land. They all live happily ever after and you stop the game. Except he wasn't the big bad at all, he was just the front man for the *real* villain, and while the heroes are off living it up, he's quietly slipped away...until your next campaign which is set 10/20/100 years in the future where the land is being threatened by a dark lord whose MO is strangely familiar...</blockquote>

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