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mr_odd
2016-08-09, 03:01 PM
I have always struggled with having a villain meet the party multiple times. They always seem to die on first encounter, or I railroaded the villain away leaving the players reasonably upset (that was in my first year as a DM).

What is the best way to have a main villain encounter the party multiple times throughout an adventure?

Right now this is what I have planned:
Session 1 - The party arrives at a Goron Village (yes, my world is pretty inspired by Majora's Mask) to find it to be slaughtered and looted. This village had encountered two different attacks, the first by a winged spirit of wind and ice (my recurring villain) and then a raid by dwarves. This "spirit" will have stolen a relic from the Goron village.

Session 2 - The party will meet this "winged spirit of wind and ice" (basically a demigod). He offers to buy a relic similar to the one stolen from the Goron Village that the party had just found, but that will definitely lead to a fight. He fights the party (this boss battle has three different stages). During the fight he will kill a young Goron adventurer that just joined by the party (played by a player I will bring in just for that session) and then escape during the third stage. He will not be able to take the relic from the party.

Session 3 - No encounter, dealing with the Dwarf stuff.

Session 4 - During a large battle between the Alliance's army and the Dwarven army, this demigod will show up to steal another, but similar, relic from a Dwarven war chief. He will partially fight the party but then escape once he has the relic.

Session 5 - The demigod will have a big showdown with the party. This is the final encounter, and the party will finish the adventure.

Koo Rehtorb
2016-08-09, 03:14 PM
Don't plan things so far in advance. Plan for like half a session at most. Certainly don't have a whole plot worked out in advance.

If you want an NPC to survive, don't put him on screen. Have him interact with the PCs through third parties. I suggest not being attached to the idea of a recurring villain at all, though. If it happens, great. If it doesn't, don't force it.

VoxRationis
2016-08-09, 03:18 PM
PCs play for keeps. Unless your villain has a truly unfair advantage in preparation or escape-type magic, there's a very high probability that they'll die in a combat encounter.
So firstly, don't give them combat encounters. Have the villain show up leading a force too large to assault, doing something only indirectly related to the PCs (i.e., not attacking them, but confounding their goals or attacking their allies/loved ones). Have the villain show up in a context where direct physical confrontation is ill-advised (the UN, giving a speech, for example).
Secondly, you can show the villain's agency without requiring direct action. Have minions refer to the villain's plans—making it abundantly clear that this one person is actively engineering things to be against the PCs' interests. Have third-party NPCs refer to the villain as someone they know about and seek to destroy.

Thrudd
2016-08-09, 03:50 PM
If you don't want to "railroad them away", then don't plan for them to be recurring. Anything can happen. If you want to build up tension, you can have the players hear about the bad guy or only see him from afar but never actually be close enough to fight. If the bad guy is powerful enough that the pcs can't touch them, that is one way to help ensure they last until higher level, but it can be frustrating to players when an invincible bad guy keeps showing up. Give the bad guy a magic ability that lets them escape at will (also frustrating, but if follows the rules they can figure it out and find a way to stop the bad guy fron getting away).

There's no possible way you can know what will happen in each of those sessions, who will die, what will happen in a fight. If you already know what happens, the players have no reason to play.

falloutimperial
2016-08-09, 04:09 PM
If you want a character to survive multiple encounters with the PC, I'd recommend giving them some sort of ability that makes surviving death easier. Perhaps, like a lich, they don't permanently die until something else happens. Perhaps their minions can come by later and reassemble them. Perhaps they are capable actors who can feign death.

Otherwise, I would put these characters in situations where direct combat is not possible. If they have a vehicle or ability to fly or tunnel when the party doesn't, they can stick around until the first or second turn of combat and get out of there. Perhaps the party interacts with them in a place, like an ordered city or in front of an army, where attacking isn't wise.

Another tact is to give the PCs a reason not to kill this character. Perhaps someone wants them alive or wants to redeem them. Perhaps they know something that will be lost if they die. Perhaps their death triggers something terrible.

Surpriser
2016-08-09, 04:49 PM
Right now this is what I have planned:
Session 1 - The party arrives at a Goron Village (yes, my world is pretty inspired by Majora's Mask) to find it to be slaughtered and looted. This village had encountered two different attacks, the first by a winged spirit of wind and ice (my recurring villain) and then a raid by dwarves. This "spirit" will have stolen a relic from the Goron village.
Two questions here:
How will the party find out about this?
What are they going to actually do once they are at Goron Village?
I would suggest some "saving survivors" encounter(s) - include the possibility of them failing and missing out on important information.
Also, this is a great opportunity to introduce the recurring villain. Show the damage he has done (frozen townfolk, knocked over trees,...) so that the PCs can already get some idea of his capabilities. Witness reports are great too, but keep them short, ony a few sentences at most. You don't want to read a book to the players.



Session 2 - The party will meet this "winged spirit of wind and ice" (basically a demigod). He offers to buy a relic similar to the one stolen from the Goron Village that the party had just found, but that will definitely lead to a fight. He fights the party (this boss battle has three different stages). During the fight he will kill a young Goron adventurer that just joined by the party (played by a player I will bring in just for that session) and then escape during the third stage. He will not be able to take the relic from the party.
This ... looks like a movie synopsis, not a game!
What if the party does not find the relic?
What if the party agrees to the trade?
What if the party tries to talk to the villain first?
What if the villain fails to kill the adventurer? (Actually, is the new player ok with having his character die on rails?)
What if the villain instead kills another PC?
What if the PCs manage to either kill or at least restrain the villain?
What if the villain does manage to take the relic from the party?
What if the party splits up with the goal of getting the relic away from the villain?
What if ...
Basically, if you answered any of those questions with "That cannot/will not happen", you should completely rethink your plans.



Session 3 - No encounter, dealing with the Dwarf stuff.
If there is no encounter, what are the players supposed to do in this session?
"Encounter" does not necessarily mean combat, although you should be prepared for it to become such.



Session 4 - During a large battle between the Alliance's army and the Dwarven army, this demigod will show up to steal another, but similar, relic from a Dwarven war chief. He will partially fight the party but then escape once he has the relic.
As for Session 2, this is a movie plot, not a game plan.



Session 5 - The demigod will have a big showdown with the party. This is the final encounter, and the party will finish the adventure.
Nothing bad about a good old showdown.
Just be prepared to change anything about it, from the actual antagonist to the location and goal of the encounter, to suit the changes the PCs made in the world.

To answer your original question, there are many ways to pull this off:
- You can just roll with whatever happens. Include many different antagonists for the players to fight, whoever survives the encounter, gets to become a (recurring) villain.
- If you have a certain NPC that you want to be a recurring villain, ensure that the party does not get a chance to confront them directly. Have the villain encounter the party in settings that make violence difficult or impossible, or let underlings handle the dirty work.
- One other important thing to boost survivability is to set up situations where killing the opponent is not the (best) way to success. Look at the Guide to Alternate Goals in Combat (www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?454210-Thread-from-the-Wizard-Forums-Guide-to-Alternate-Goals-in-Combat) for inspiration on encounter setups that don't necessarily require a "kill-or-be-killed" attitude.
- Be prepared for your villain to die unexpectedly despite your precautions. Reward the players for managing that, especially if they used clever strategy and tactics. Behind the scenes, prepare a backup villain to either take over or turn out to have been the real mastermind all along.

mr_odd
2016-08-09, 04:56 PM
Two questions here...

Thanks for all of your questions! I am definitely going to take them all into account.

As far as answering your questions, these are just super scarce details for the forum. I have detailed notes for each session. I'm basically just trying to create my own adventure module.

Knaight
2016-08-09, 05:33 PM
Some of this is system specific - to use one obvious example, it's much easier to have a recurring enemy in a game like Torchbearer where it's entirely reasonable on the player side to try and take fewer risks and force the enemy to retreat than to kill them - but in general the problem you're having is that you want to have a recurring enemy who actually shows up in personal combat repeatedly. That means they need one of three things:
1) They need to be strong enough to make fighting them a bad idea, while also showing up in contexts where escape is an option. This generally means they should either be on the slower end or obviously unable to traverse terrain the PCs can cross (e.g. being completely unable to swim).
2) They need to be able to escape reliably if a fight is going against them. Consider sea monsters who can just dive again if combat turns sour, or flying opponents who can at least get out of close range, or anything able to teleport. In higher tech games this often means something more like access to extraction vehicles.
3) They need to be able to come back from the dead reliably.

Darth Ultron
2016-08-09, 05:38 PM
1. The best way to keep a villain around is to not make them a non-combatant. If you give the villain a stat block and have them fight the PC's, there is a good chance they will die. You want the villain to be a problem, just not a combat type one.

2. As long as your not at a 1st level type power game, it is easy enough to have villains escape. You don't have to have villains fight the PC's to the death, they can run and live to fight another day. This can be tricky in some games as the PC's won't get the ''kill and loot'' XP, so you will need players that can live with that. You also need a way for them to get away without the Pc's stopping them.

3. As long as your above 1st level, you can just make the villain hard to kill. There are a couple ways to do this in the rules. Though it does work a lot better with more custom rules/magic.

RazorChain
2016-08-09, 05:54 PM
The problem is often about power. If the villain is more powerful why doesnt he just kill the PC's?

If he is less powerful then the PC's will kill him unless he has an escape plan.

I often give my recurring villains a shield/protection in the form of rules of society. The PC's cant just barge into the house of Lord General Tiberius and murder him, he is the Duke's brother after all. They could assassinate him but the group isnt comprised of cold blooded killers.

Another villain is a crime lord, Francis Corleone, the PC's have no dirt on him directly which means they have a hard time taking him down as he has a lot of henchmen, wealth and social power.

Another way is to make the enemy an organisation or a cult, but it wont be as personal

Another favorite of mine is after gloating the bad guy orders his minions to kill the PC's he exits the stage, supremely confident in that his minions will take care of those pesky PC's

Another way is to let the PC's defeat the bad guy and he surrenders. Do the PC's kill him in cold blood?
Or he falls of a cliff/bridge/tower his body never found, of course he returns. Or like I once did with a bad guy who had multiple clones and always came back after the PC's killed him.

There is nothing better for a good story than a reccurring villain :)

VoxRationis
2016-08-09, 08:03 PM
The problem is often about power. If the villain is more powerful why doesnt he just kill the PC's?

If he is less powerful then the PC's will kill him unless he has an escape plan.

I often give my recurring villains a shield/protection in the form of rules of society. The PC's cant just barge into the house of Lord General Tiberius and murder him, he is the Duke's brother after all. They could assassinate him but the group isnt comprised of cold blooded killers.

Another villain is a crime lord, Francis Corleone, the PC's have no dirt on him directly which means they have a hard time taking him down as he has a lot of henchmen, wealth and social power.

Another way is to make the enemy an organisation or a cult, but it wont be as personal

Another favorite of mine is after gloating the bad guy orders his minions to kill the PC's he exits the stage, supremely confident in that his minions will take care of those pesky PC's

Another way is to let the PC's defeat the bad guy and he surrenders. Do the PC's kill him in cold blood?
Or he falls of a cliff/bridge/tower his body never found, of course he returns. Or like I once did with a bad guy who had multiple clones and always came back after the PC's killed him.

There is nothing better for a good story than a reccurring villain :)

My players (and I) would absolutely kill a surrendering villain, especially if they already cut a swathe through his minions to get to him. Why would you let him get away scot free after his (likely on-the-clock or conscripted) minions died by the cartload so you could get to this point? I think the only player in my regular group who would even entertain the notion on its own merits (rather than, say, using the villain alive in a broader scheme or context) would be my father.

I would also advise against the "villain survives improbable fall" method of escape. It's cheap on TV, and it's cheaper on a tabletop.

RazorChain
2016-08-09, 10:10 PM
My players (and I) would absolutely kill a surrendering villain, especially if they already cut a swathe through his minions to get to him. Why would you let him get away scot free after his (likely on-the-clock or conscripted) minions died by the cartload so you could get to this point? I think the only player in my regular group who would even entertain the notion on its own merits (rather than, say, using the villain alive in a broader scheme or context) would be my father.

I would also advise against the "villain survives improbable fall" method of escape. It's cheap on TV, and it's cheaper on a tabletop.

I like your father already :)

That's because a lot of PC's are sociopathic villains bent on killing their way through all adversity.

This is the difference between Frank Castle and Bruce Wayne. Both had their families murdered by criminals which caused them to become vigilantes. Bruce Wayne became Batman and did not turn into a murderhobo. Frank Castle became the Punisher and became a murderhobo.

The Punisher is either projected as a anti-hero or a villain. Batman on the other hand is a hero.

I know that most PC's would just kill the baddie even though he surrenders, even though the baddie didn't kill the PC's families or tortured them. The PC's motivation might just be xp, loot and to tie up loose ends. Not to bash anyones playstyle as this is rather the norm rather than the exception.

I once ran a campaign with a normal group that liked to kill off their problems and leave no loose ends. So I had bad guys surrender left and right but still they got slaughtered, in broad daylight with witnesses.

So they developed a reputation as brutal anti-heroes, they weren't considered gentlemen or men of honor. One day a group of Justicars witnessed them killing a bad guy, the Justicars being one of the four largest knightly orders and devoted to the god of Justice, didn't like what the saw and tried to arrest the PC's. The PC's solution was to kill all adversity, so they solved their justicar problem...or so they thought.

Soon the PC's were on the run as wanted criminals. This is when the reclusive Count Tepes (the name should have been a big enough hint for the PC's) came to their rescue and offered them to fix their problems. Of course they only had to assist him with few tasks and their slate would be clean. The PC's jumped at the chance and things spiraled out of their control. After the PC's assisted with a regime change the kingdom was called the Nightmare Kingdom where a maelstrom darkens the skies so the vampires never have to sleep, and the humans are nothing more than cattle.

I think this is the only time I've brought a player to tears.

But on the bright side they didn't have to worry about the Justicars anymore!!!

VoxRationis
2016-08-10, 12:50 AM
For reference, the group cares about the morality of the situation, but that includes the practical realities of the situation. How many villains have you faced in tabletop RPGs who would actually divert from their plans in a meaningful sense after surrendering? Heck, even most villains in movies and television are only going to continue their plans from in prison. Killing them immediately only saves whoever they would have inevitably killed later, as well as a colossal headache and the chance that the villain might actually win in the end.

Lorsa
2016-08-10, 05:55 AM
I have always struggled with having a villain meet the party multiple times. They always seem to die on first encounter, or I railroaded the villain away leaving the players reasonably upset (that was in my first year as a DM).

What is the best way to have a main villain encounter the party multiple times throughout an adventure?

Right now this is what I have planned:
Session 1 - The party arrives at a Goron Village (yes, my world is pretty inspired by Majora's Mask) to find it to be slaughtered and looted. This village had encountered two different attacks, the first by a winged spirit of wind and ice (my recurring villain) and then a raid by dwarves. This "spirit" will have stolen a relic from the Goron village.

Session 2 - The party will meet this "winged spirit of wind and ice" (basically a demigod). He offers to buy a relic similar to the one stolen from the Goron Village that the party had just found, but that will definitely lead to a fight. He fights the party (this boss battle has three different stages). During the fight he will kill a young Goron adventurer that just joined by the party (played by a player I will bring in just for that session) and then escape during the third stage. He will not be able to take the relic from the party.

Session 3 - No encounter, dealing with the Dwarf stuff.

Session 4 - During a large battle between the Alliance's army and the Dwarven army, this demigod will show up to steal another, but similar, relic from a Dwarven war chief. He will partially fight the party but then escape once he has the relic.

Session 5 - The demigod will have a big showdown with the party. This is the final encounter, and the party will finish the adventure.


If you don't want to "railroad them away", then don't plan for them to be recurring. Anything can happen. If you want to build up tension, you can have the players hear about the bad guy or only see him from afar but never actually be close enough to fight. If the bad guy is powerful enough that the pcs can't touch them, that is one way to help ensure they last until higher level, but it can be frustrating to players when an invincible bad guy keeps showing up. Give the bad guy a magic ability that lets them escape at will (also frustrating, but if follows the rules they can figure it out and find a way to stop the bad guy fron getting away).

There's no possible way you can know what will happen in each of those sessions, who will die, what will happen in a fight. If you already know what happens, the players have no reason to play.

The above quote pretty much sums up what I wanted to say on the topic.

Never plan for villains to be recurring. The way you do recurring villains right is if you find they someone manages to survive an encounter with the group and still has a motivation to go into yet another fight. As in, after the fact recurring rather than before.

hifidelity2
2016-08-10, 07:08 AM
Another favorite of mine is after gloating the bad guy orders his minions to kill the PC's he exits the stage, supremely confident in that his minions will take care of those pesky PC's

There is nothing better for a good story than a reccurring villain :)
Mine two

Another one is to have them (initally) work for the villain and get to like them then have them find out later what they have done. That way they may not want just to kill them out of hand

You can also use minions to drain the party of Majic, HP's equipment so when they meat the Villian they are unbale to kill him BUT that the villian is not that good a fighter / MU etc he is just good at running things

JeenLeen
2016-08-10, 07:55 AM
From my small experience DMing and talks with my usual DM, I agree with those here that say you should not rely on the big bad surviving if the PCs meet it early.

I do think it's good that you map out the plot for your campaign, and you can have descriptions of what you expect to happen and the likely outcome(s). Better is to plan the most likely things that could happen (PCs fight boss instead of selling artifact and PCs sell artifact), and figure out the outcome for either. Also expect the PCs to think of things you didn't expect. Like maybe one of them tries to sell a forgery of the artifact.

If the boss is strong and has no reason to kill the PCs, it could thrash them and leave. It has the artifact it wants already, right? But it sounds like the PCs will run it off in at least one occasion, and that's risky. You could have it be something that respawns -- but make it obvious such is the case, like how obvious it would be if it's a lich. Maybe demigod spirits in this setting respawn at their temple, or something like that, if killed elsewhere. Perhaps a display of power when it dies is what tips the players off that it's not just some spirit but an actual demigod. That turns a stolen victory into a cool dramatic reveal.

But probably better is to have it so your plot is safe even if they kill the boss. If that spirit dies earlier, then change the background of the game so that the spirit is actually working for a stronger demigod, or was part of a team. The other one was stealing relics from another nation a continent over or something. The players don't know you changed anything, so it still feels like they took out half of Team Bad. Just leave hints, like maybe if it looks like the demigod will die, have it start talking about how "even if you defeat me, my sister will prevail. She already has the elven relics!"

mr_odd
2016-08-10, 09:21 AM
This is D&D 5e. The villain is a Fighter/Sorcerer Gish at level 8 plus a huge HP bonus and some magic items/unique abilities. He also has wings due to his race. I feel like saving one of his level four spells for dimension door along with one spell point to make it extended would solve this problem. He can dimension door 1,000 ft away and then fly.

Now here is my question: is that bad?

CharonsHelper
2016-08-10, 09:28 AM
I almost never plan out recurring villains.

Villains in general book it when things get hopeless, often with escape hatches etc. (Anyone hear about the high school principal who just spent 9k of the school's $ on an escape hatch? >.<) If they get away, they might show up again later. If they don't get away, it sucks to be them.

Trebloc
2016-08-10, 10:19 AM
One villain in a long running game I ran turned into reoccurring and really frustrated the party.

Initially she was just a mook that the group fought in an ambush, however she surrendered and gave up some useful information for her freedom. With this turn, she started to really evolve behind the scenes.

Every time the group encountered her, she would either escape, or surrender when things started going south. The group being "good", killing a prisoner was frowned on. And she would always ensure that she would have information that was too valuable to kill her over. There was even some times where the group specifically sought her out for her information.

Her item and spell selection would focus on defense and escape, so plenty of stuff to stop grappling or being 1-shotted or scryed. Granted, my group never played with anything silly that'd dish out 1000's of damage in a single attack, so that was also helpful.

Being a bard, she had Charisma through the roof, so would often use the locals to her advantage, even using the law against the PCs. She was also played as smartly as I could, since she continued to level with the party. She gained a knowledge of guessing how the PCs would likely act in certain situations -- a favorite of mine is when she cast an illusion that appeared to be her over a prisoner that the PCs were trying to rescue. The resident PC barbarian saw hated bard and went all out in a single charge attack, and was somewhat dumbfounded when there were no apparent responses stopping the attack, until the figure crumpled to the floor very dead, revealed to be the person they were supposed to rescue.

When the group finally retired after 5 years of playing, she remained the one villain that they never did slay.

MrStabby
2016-08-10, 07:10 PM
A couple of things I have used:

1) Bad guy first appears as a friend, or at least superficially a non-hostile NPC. Betraying the party may generate a decent amount of antagonism anf get the players invested

2) If the bad guy is a caster, spells like simulacrum are pretty awesome.

3) Bad guy only shows up when players have other things they would rather be doing

Koo Rehtorb
2016-08-10, 07:39 PM
1) Bad guy first appears as a friend, or at least superficially a non-hostile NPC. Betraying the party may generate a decent amount of antagonism anf get the players invested

Use this one sparingly. If you get a reputation of having NPCs who betray the party the players will start treating every NPC with an extreme amount of distrust.

MrStabby
2016-08-11, 04:09 AM
Use this one sparingly. If you get a reputation of having NPCs who betray the party the players will start treating every NPC with an extreme amount of distrust.

True.

Alternatively you can get a bit metagamey and set it up so that the PCs are going (by their nature) to do something to antagonise them and turn them into the bad guy.

Cozzer
2016-08-11, 04:57 AM
What I think is the most important thing, regardless of the system or the specific situations, is: give the player meaningful choices. Even if you decided there's no chance the recurring villain can die during the first two encounters and have given him a thousand escape plans and contingencies, make it so the character have a big impact on the situation during those two encounters. For the sake of your campaign, avoid the "villain defeats the heroes, gloats and goes away", or the "the whole point of this quest was defeating the villain and they do it but he teleports away" trope, or the "players suddenly discover they played into the villain's hands the whole time!" tropes.

Basically, the thing is: if your players make good choices, they need to FEEL good in return. And no, "but you survived despite your utter defeat!" isn't good. The villain surviving needs to be a "but" in a bigger result, not the whole result of the storyarc. :P

Also, you need to give your villain AND the PCs good in-universe reasons to survive the first encounters. In my campaign, for example, the PCs met a recurring villain the first time in a situation where neither of them could use violence without making EVERY other neutral party around into an enemy so they had to "fight" with diplomacy and try to get info out of each other. The second time, the PCs themselves decided to propose a truce with this villain to fight against a bigger threat, which was a good chance to showcase the villain's skill in combat and give them an idea of what they would have to fight against later.

Dr paradox
2016-08-11, 07:48 PM
I managed something interesting in the campaign I ran last year: the villain initially hired the party to retrieve some information for him regarding a long lost treasure. He was courteous and helpful and genuinely interested in making it an equitable relationship. After the job was done, he offered them a place in his expedition to go find the treasure, but the party also realized that he wanted the treasure for... Not exactly evil plans, but selfish and wasteful in the grander context of the setting. So, I got the party to betray the villain, earning his eternal emnity.

He and the party crossed paths a few times on the globetrotting adventure to reach the treasure, but they never made much of an effort to kill him because his plans weren't violent or evil, they saw him as a tragic product of his culture, and they felt a little guilty about taking advantage of his trust and goodwill. Ultimately, they saved his life and let him go, though his fortune and reputation were in shambles.

Good times. That's mostly what I can recommend - let the party meet the villain before they become enemies, give the villain a rich and humanizing motivation. I agree that you should steer clear of having the villain be an NPC who betrays the party - just have them be present at a state dinner, or a tourney, or in a business context, so they can chat and get each other's measure.

Lorsa
2016-08-13, 04:47 AM
This is D&D 5e. The villain is a Fighter/Sorcerer Gish at level 8 plus a huge HP bonus and some magic items/unique abilities. He also has wings due to his race. I feel like saving one of his level four spells for dimension door along with one spell point to make it extended would solve this problem. He can dimension door 1,000 ft away and then fly.

Now here is my question: is that bad?

It is not bad for a villain to try and escape or flee or whatever, if that is in line with the villain's personality and goals.

It is bad to expect it to happen so that XYZ can happen in the future. Ideally in RPGs, you should never have scenes with a forced or pre-determined outcome. Those are generally boring for everyone (except perhaps a few GMs who like that sort of stuff).

So while the villain might try to do those things, chances are he'll be dead before he can even cast dimension door. You never know what your players will do and how many critical hits they will get before an NPC's initiative.

GungHo
2016-08-16, 10:28 AM
The above quote pretty much sums up what I wanted to say on the topic.

Never plan for villains to be recurring. The way you do recurring villains right is if you find they someone manages to survive an encounter with the group and still has a motivation to go into yet another fight. As in, after the fact recurring rather than before.

Yep. You're playing a tabletop game, not directing a movie. It's more of an improvisational experience. If you'd really like to learn some techniques for improvisational storytelling, Keegan Michael Key (of Key and Peele, Mad TV, and others) actually has some really fascinating interviews that cover how to interact reflectively and what improv actors go through. It's really improved my own approach to DMing, because there are a lot of analogs.

Anyway, yes, if someone survives an encounter, they have the chance to become a recurring character (villain or otherwise). But, if the PCs are fighting to kill, it's hard to make bad guys mostly dead, and trap doors/emergency teleports are seen for what they really are.

Cealocanth
2016-08-19, 07:58 PM
Recurring villains only work when the players want them to be recurring. Their character facilitates a 'love to hate' relationship with the players. They are so engaging, so provocative, and so insidious that the players actively want to fight them. It helps if they want to see their face beat in with a sledgehammer too, but that tends to be more annoying then provocative. Recurring villains need to be powerful enough that one foiling of their plots is not enough to stop them for good. They need to be able to fail and fail and fail again, and still keep going back for more. The thing is, you probably won't know who would be a recurring villain until a few adventures in. Although you may design a Xykon-esque lich for them to fight, perhaps the playerrs just want to fight Tarquin again. They're really the ones that decide which villains get back up again.

FearlessGnome
2016-08-20, 10:04 AM
Give them the Run feat or a high speed. I tried to introduce a recurring Paladin of Slaughter. First fight they drowned him in summons, refused to accept his surrender, burned his corpse and hid the ashes. At level 2. You cannot stop players from metagaming the hell out of some things.

Guancyto
2016-08-20, 10:28 AM
Depends on what sort of person your villain is. For a Paladin of Slaughter, denying surrender, burning the corpse and burying the ashes is a mild reaction. (They didn't even pee on the ashes.) A petty thief might get to be recurring so long as he doesn't steal from the party, because he hasn't really done anything that terrible (but remember that you aren't going to be the judge of that, the players are).

So I guess the question is, what does the villain even want with these artifacts?

A smart villain (that is, one that isn't looking to die with honor) always plans an "out," a backdoor, an escape plan. Whether it's a scroll of Teleport, a handy trapdoor, a giant nasty in a cage that can wreak enough havoc to let him get away, a sudden tip-off to the city guard. There's plenty of options for a guy that's losing a battle to get out alive if he's planned for that! He might (in fact if you want him to be recurring, he should) have more than one; redundancy in escape plans is the thing that separates supervillains from smouldering piles of ash.

There's a little caveat with that - it can be circumvented, and it relies on the bad guy holding something back in case he needs it to get out alive. Also, if he just pulls it out of his butt (especially if he consistently pulls it out of his butt), the PCs will feel cheated. If the bad guy's reaction to starting to lose a fight is dropping a caged troll from the high ceiling, make sure a) there was actually a high ceiling and b) there was actually a caged troll up there. (Also, it doesn't always work, so you're gonna need a backup plan. Unless it's a personal vendetta, make sure there are at least a few ambitious lieutenants that can carry on the Great Work. So many bad guys are part of something greater than themselves or shaped by broader social forces, which won't stop just because they personally bit the dust.)

Also, about surrendering. "I Surrender Suckers" is practically a dead-horse trope by now. Players are way too jaded about bad guys surrendering nowadays for you to expect them to act like superheroes about it, always taking the bad guy back to jail. So, two things re: surrendering.

1. If the villain does get captured, make sure they have something to offer the PCs in exchange for their lives. The location to caches of money and items they stashed. Information on powerful people that the enterprising blackmailer could easily turn into cash. Rituals of empowerment that only they know. A guy doesn't get to be a big-time villain without knowing how to make himself useful. Make accepting surrender not a 100% guarantee that the group will be screwed over, so maybe they do get their hands on that cache.

2. Another dead-horse trope is how you can slaughter your way through hordes of minions and then the biggest bad guy will surrender and you're supposed to accept that. Well why in the sam hill do minions want to fight to the death? They've got lives just like everybody else! If the PCs are clearly scarier than their boss and their boss is clearly on the way out, have them decide to take their chances too. It's one thing for the bad guy to surrender(people expect the paragon or renegade choice at the end), it's another if surrendering is just a thing that people do sometimes.

3. Consider having them... not switch sides per se, but make a slight adjustment in their allegiances, taking 3-6 names from the "kill" list and adding them to the "don't mess with" list. If the PCs have a crime lord by the balls, let him really, earnestly offer to work with them. Let him agree to stop hurting people they care about and start hurting people they dislike (PCs tend to be very myopic in their ideas of who is good and bad; "helps me" makes them good, "opposes me" makes them bad). After all, a person doesn't stay a crime lord for long without the ability to recognize people vastly more dangerous than himself.

Hopeless
2016-08-20, 10:36 AM
How about an opposing team who actually do work together and unlike most evil foes don't backstab each other and most not all are honourable enough to not one shot the PCs because they look upon them like a potential mentor?

Then make the authorities more of a problem for adventurers think Rat Queens except that elvish trader has more say in dealing with the town's problems... Is the PCs!

wumpus
2016-08-22, 11:56 AM
One issue is villain advancement. In OOTS, recurring villains (at least specific PC antagonists) level every time the player levels, regardless of what they are doing. If you don't want this, your options are making former big bads into henchmen of bigger bad, or possibly some nastier sort of advancement. This is especially the case if there is a penalty in raising the NPC.

Using necromancy, rising as an undead (with CL adjustment), or possibly demon summoning to "get powerful fast" sounds like right up a villain's alley, and a real temptation to a power-gamer (hopefully his fellow players will beat anyone over the head with their sourcebooks until he realizes the danger). All these might let a former henchman (and player antagonist) become a [small] big bad, for at least one adventure.

arcane_asp
2016-08-25, 08:27 AM
I had the advantage during my groups main campaign - some (mild) time travel was involved, so the Villain could easily arrive as an earlier version of his 'main' self. The group quickly learned that at least one of the versions of him they killed were Chronal Duplicates, which very much spurred them on to track down the Prime Villain and defeat him. He was a Priest of Ioun (uber corrupted though!) seeking knowledge of time travel and eventually getting on a real power trip!

As mentioned earlier in the thread, duplicates, dopplegangers and sheer misdirection are great for keeping a really hated antagonist alive. Plus every time the PC's realise the real baddy has gotten away, their hatred of him will increase 10 fold. Even to insanely irrational levels, you might have to coat a villain in armour, shield & wall of force spells, plus have a couple of secondary monstrous forms ready, when the PC's go scorched earth :smalleek: