bbeg help! So help me David, if you read this..!

[LairdMaon]

New to running games here. Forgive my inexperience.

I've got 2-3 players, one of whom is, shall we say, extremely knowledgeable and experienced. The other two haven't really played in a long time.

The adventure is a dungeon crawl. There will be trips to other planes ave alternate realities.

So far, so good, eh?

Thing is, I feel like I need to toss in some curve balls to keep the experienced guy on his toes.

What's the trick you ask?
I'm thinking gestalt BBEGs.

Thoughts?
Advise?

[Madbranch]

No need for anything like that imho. It might just make the other players feel useless in fights against them and you shouldn't do that.

Just ask him not to optimize too much, perhaps take t4 or t3 class. Fill the dungeons with plenty of traps, curses etc besides monsters. Add some puzzles, riddles ... It'll keep him and the others working, as they will all be challenged.

While he might've some edge with monsters, traps and curses, he might not be working on his CONSTANT VIGILANCE and might walk into a trap, has a curse bestowed upon his person, ...

[Jack_Simth]

New to running games here. Forgive my inexperience.

I've got 2-3 players, one of whom is, shall we say, extremely knowledgeable and experienced. The other two haven't really played in a long time.

The adventure is a dungeon crawl. There will be trips to other planes ave alternate realities.

So far, so good, eh?

Thing is, I feel like I need to toss in some curve balls to keep the experienced guy on his toes.

What's the trick you ask?
I'm thinking gestalt BBEGs.

Thoughts?
Advise?
The preferred method is to talk to the experienced player OOC and come to a gentleman's agreement that the experienced player tone it down and/or get the less experienced players up to the expected optimization level of the table. It's not powerful characters that are a problem (the DM can simply increase CR). It's not weak characters that are a problem (the DM can simply decrease CR). It's a significant disparity of PC power that's a problem (if you reduce CR, then the strong character steamrolls and the low-power characters get sidelined; if you increase CR, then the weak characters get sidelined and/or splattered... neither is a good option).

If you can't go that route for some bizarre reason, however....

Gestalting BBEG's is one way to go about what you want (although that's a lot of work, as it's almost as hard to build two BBEGs as it is to build one Gestalt BBEG). Catch being that this really just makes hardier BBEG's.

A lot of experienced players will be sufficiently familiar with enough monsters that they'll simply know what tactics to use against what monster, and use them. This is a form of metagaming (using out of character knowledge for in-character decisions). There's a few ways to combat this:
Do NOT use the descriptions or names in the Monster Manuals; Look at the picture, describe what you see. Why? A lot of experienced players will have many of the monsters effectively memorized.
Do NOT list the mechanics: Roll your dice behind the screen, and don't give the players the numbers for things like AC / Saves / DR / and so on. Again, this goes back to a lot of experienced players having many of the monsters mostly memorized.
Shuffle the critter's abilities when the players are NOT using knowledge checks. The critter has two good saves and one poor save, but the PC's don't make a knowledge on where the critter is vulnerable when picking their spells? Fine. Roll a die on the first save based spell to determine which save is the poor one. The critter has immunity to one element, vulnerability to the opposite, and a few resistances? The first time an elemental spell is used against the critter, roll to see to which element it is immune, set the vulnerability to the opposite element, and shuffle the resistances to avoid overlap (do NOT just arbitrarily reverse them; the player will catch on easily if you do). Et cetera.
Another is to homebrew your critters.
That'll make it difficult to use OOC knowledge IC, as the OOC knowledge no longer really applies. New players won't be affected, experienced players will regularly trip over their knowledge.

[LairdMaon]

I get what you're saying.

I kinda figured that dealing with gestalt opponents would encourage them to use teamwork as well. Show em that lone wolfing it can be pretty ugly on one's life expectancy.

[Vrock_Summoner]

I get what you're saying.

I kinda figured that dealing with gestalt opponents would encourage them to use teamwork as well. Show em that lone wolfing it can be pretty ugly on one's life expectancy.

Working with a party significantly less skilled than yourself against challenges appropriate for you is also ugly on one's life expectancy. Luckily and hilariously, D&D is the sort of the game where "lower my own effectiveness" is just as valid or more so than getting more competent players or trying to make the other players better, because if everyone is about equally effective, the world adjusts to their level.

Anyway, yeah, tell the guy to tone it down a bit.

[LairdMaon]

I getcha. I'll avoid the gestalt.

For the record, it's not Mr Experience that worries me about going line wolf. It's the guy that likes to sneak into dangerous territory under prepared and alone, trusting only his mediocre hide/move silently skills to keep him safe. Leaves no markers for the party. Doesn't even give them a heads up. Just wanders off to die. Er... Explore.

[Hellborn_Blight]

Encourage the optimizer to play something that is scaleable. That way when he needs to put the peddle down and save the party from a difficulty bungle or seven 1's in a row (I seriously rolled 4 in GDed row) he can. Don't be offended by me insinuating that you will bungle the difficulty at some point because it happens to every DM regardless of experience but even more so when you are newer. Sometimes you thought they would exploit the obvious weakness of a creature and then out of nowhere a party wipe happens. Having a player that can press a self realized oh **** button can be useful in those situations.

Down side of of this strategy is two fold. First, it can annoy the other players. When they are struggling fiercely, one player just seems to save their ass all the time tends to make them look weak or foolish. Nobody wants that kind of environment at their table, so use sparingly. Second, is sometimes the guy will handle the situation perfectly fine...and entirely alone. I had a character that was so strong compared to the rest of the party that the whole party wiped to 2 NPCs and I managed to defeat them by myself after the partys death. I couldn't save them from the DM's f'up (warforged Monk that was an optimized PC level character, and an optimized Wandificer of the same level. Two players died before initiative was rolled...), but didn't meet their fate, which was a really awkward situation, because I had just joined their game.

Still it's nice to have that guy that can use Celerity when it matters.

[LairdMaon]

Hah! Don't worry about offending or insulting me!

I'm here to learn and converse among equals. As for screwing up, I'm the guy that messed up Easy Mac and routinely burned water. Don't ask what happens when I make toast...

What if I gave them some kind of extremely limited, possibly costly, magic "get out of oubliette free" item?

[Jack_Simth]

For the record, it's not Mr Experience that worries me about going line wolf. It's the guy that likes to sneak into dangerous territory under prepared and alone, trusting only his mediocre hide/move silently skills to keep him safe. Leaves no markers for the party. Doesn't even give them a heads up. Just wanders off to die. Er... Explore.
So you've got a player that routinely makes bad tactical decisions?

Let him die a few times. No, seriously. Most people do learn.

[atemu1234]

Between the player who optimizes and yourself, teach the other players how to optimize. I once took a sorcerer 5 / paladin 5 and rebuilt it into an actual Sorcadin gish.

Let them rebuild, essentially.

[nedz]

BBEGs suffer from lack of actions, making them Gestalt doesn't help here. Whilst they will be stronger on paper, in practice it makes little difference.

[ZamielVanWeber]

I have slowly developed a love of Truenamer's for BBEGs. They can reliably get two actions (post 9), easily jack up Knowledge: Religion to use the sacrifice rules well, and are strong enough to have some nasty tricks but not so strong that they are dangerous to an intelligent/coordinated party. (Also I love that most players don't know them well so you have more options to avoid metagaming). This helps a lot when there is an experience gap (creative bosses that is).