Coming back to an idea I was working on... (DMing help)

[pso_zeldaphreak]

This (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=301638) was a thread I made a while ago, and now that I've had more time to work on other aspects of this campaign (I work slow >.<) I'm coming back to flesh these ideas out some more.

But I guess my first question should have been: Should I be designing nemeses/rivals as though they were characters themselves? I've not DM'd a full campaign before (only small pre-mades), and I'm not sure if I should be doing this differently. So advice there is appreciated.

The other primary question I'd have is: how would you go about designing the traps and such for a wizard's tower? Like end-game sort of thing.

[Totema]

That really depends on how you want to handle them over the course of the campaign. In the case of most enemies your party will fight - that is to say, enemies that are introduced, fought, and killed all in the same encounter - a stat block will suffice. But having recurring enemies almost always means that you'll want to advance them as the story moves on.

That doesn't necessarily mean that you need to have a character sheet for them. Making up some iterative stat blocks for the same guy will do the job. But the fact remains that they are obviously more special than the goblin that got trampled over in the first session.

So yes, it's greatly helpful to design a recurring villain as if he was a character himself. But necessary? I guess that depends on how you like to manage your campaign.

As for the traps, the DMG has some great guidelines for making traps. I recall reading about some powerful CR20 sample traps in some book, but alas, I can't recall which one...

[Know(Nothing)]

The most valuable lesson I know on statting-out villains is the old chestnut, "if it has stats, we can kill it."

If there is a story-crucial, so-out-of-the-PCs-league character that needs to interact with them, don't stat it out(friend or foe, for that matter). If it is just a higher-level character that happens to be there, yeah, probably stat it out.

I, personally, stat out everyone of importance that my PCs deal with, except the ones that are so powerful that the specifics of their powers are irrelevant. Now if the PC's are low-level martial classes and the NPC is a mid-to-high-level caster, I'm not going to bother statting them, I just jot down the basic stuff and what spells they're likely to have running. The closer the PCs get to the NPC's level and the more likely a fight will happen between them means it might be better to stat things out.

BUT, if you're statting someone out that is actually likely to engage in real combat with the PCs, DO NOT short-hand stat them out. Short-cuts and cliches and so on will betray you, and end with a supposedly-powerful NPC wrecked by the players in a couple rounds because the character wasn't prepared both in-game and out-of-game. That's the time to do some in-depth building.

I, for instance, wound up with my PCs bent on murdering the hell out of an epic-level Artificer. Now, the Artificer was so powerful that he wasn't even present for the encounter, but he did have powerful minions there to deal with the PCs. The Artificer attempted to talk them out of their foolish attack from a safe-room(he was evil, but didn't have any particular reason to want to kill the PCs), so he wasn't statted out. His minions though, absolutely were, down to team-style synergies and use of their home-turf.

Just do your best to know/predict your players, get good at fudging, and if you need to, call for a break while you properly build a character. Waiting for a fun encounter is way more satisfying, both as player and DM, than spitting out a half-baked anti-challenge.