Challenging OP Players

[SorenKnight]

This is certainly a question that's been asked before, many of the typical answers don't satisfy me. I don't like the idea of taking away the player's toys, partially because I happen to be one of them in this case (I have better optimization skills than the GM and I've offered to help him). The party in question leads a burgeoning empire and has sacrificed thousands of innocent souls in the name of a dark god in exchange for vast power, Pit Fiend status for most of us and Nabasu demon for the odd man out. All of us still have eleven class levels on top of our Outsider hit dice.


The general idea for the finale is a bloody confrontation with the last hurrah of the forces of good. Either they'll destroy us in a battle the likes of which the world has never seen or we'll solidify our world conquest in the same. Either way our actions will shape the world for generations to come.


The question is how best to represent this last battle mechanically, and its one I thought to look to this forum for help with. I much appreciate anything you can offer.


The GM gave me a little bit on info on the rest of the world. The nearest major powers are Aztec style humans and some Viking Dragonborn with silver dragon allies, and there's certainly plenty of planar interests that might lend them aid as well.

Thank you!

[ViperMagnum357]

Perhaps the simplest is also the most extreme-if your group is a big enough threat to be known across the planes, eventually the major league good guys, god and celestial alike, are going to notice and move against you directly. That probably means recruiting epic level adventurers, especially good crusaders like Paladins and good Clerics to start cutting your base of power out from under you-that seems to be one of the more common tactics against evil gods and archfiends, rather than risk everything in an iffy decapitation strike targeting you directly.

If you continue to to endure, eventually the gloves come off-celestial paragons and gods of light take to the field of battle themselves with retinues of their most powerful servants-Solars, Wyrm or older good dragons, personal hierarchs/hierophants, and the best mercenaries limitless riches can buy.

That raises a question-you are fiends presumably on a mortal world, meaning you cannot normally die for good-to raise the stakes, the enemy will likely try to drag you to isolated stretches of Avernus and some desolate Abyss layer in order to kill you permanently, while depriving you of your stronghold and powerbase.

[Eldariel]

All the big mortals (basically any Clerics, Wizards, Druids or in general, 9th level casters) can be a major threat. The DM running on such level needs sufficient familiarity with the spell lists to play them up to the potential appropriate for the campaign. Same with ancient+ good Dragons, Solars, Planetars, etc. They all have enough power to annihilate 31 HD Pit Fiends when played appropriately. But there's no shortcut to it; if the players are playing up to their powers, throwing numbers at them won't work, the DM needs sufficient knowledge of the system and strategy to play enemies on a level where the PCs' options no longer autowin.

[Lazymancer]

The question is how best to represent this last battle mechanically, and its one I thought to look to this forum for help with. I much appreciate anything you can offer.
Do you want ideas on specific NPCs that will oppose PCs or on how the whole massive battle will be enacted?

[daremetoidareyo]

just when the PCs seem poised to win, a single truenamer 20 steps into the field and ripsbopen a portal to solarville, population: infinite

[Afgncaap5]

I definitely agree: there's lots of other adventurers out there, following the same rules that PCs follow. Have your players get flooded with reports of all of the dark god's greatest citadels being assaulted, warped, and nullified by daring knights, bafflingly unpredictable thieves, and powerful mages. Suggest that there are things that the dark god might have previously thought to have been "handled" that are coming undone; what if a percentage of its power actually came from siphoning off an elder monstrosity that's been chained at the bottom of an ocean, and all of a sudden that monster is just freed, both removing some power and also causing a terrible being of great power to be looking for quick and messy vengeance?

And while I agree that it's good not to take away toys, it's worth noting that each other major adventurer out there will have their own toys from their own stories, likely massive artifacts that, while potentially not on par with the massive empire of the pit fiend players, can seemingly throw the regular rules out of the window. Will the players react well to the Thief Of Lives, a rogue with a wishing stone in a ring that allows him to just trade lives with anyone he wishes as long as he can get within line of effect (no save, and it's frankly unfair that the ring appears on whatever new body the rogue switches with.) Or what about the Tocker Troupe, the league of mercenaries with the blessing of Time Itself that allows them to never fail at any task they set themselves to as long as it's a Tuesday or Wednesday? Odette Clarion's not a big fighter, but her Truerune Lodestone can nullify any magic in a hundred mile radius, and then prevent any more magic from being cast in the same area if the magic takes longer than five seconds to cast (here's hoping the forces of darkness out there have a lot of Quickened spells available...) And may heaven help the forces of hell when Erldara Phoenixdown literally starts helping the forces of hell by bringing swaths of undead armies back to life and turning the demons and devils into sanctified versions of whatever their existence was before they turned so vile. Erldara may be one of the most dangerous forces of good, using her powerful and unheard of arcane mastery to prove that there is no point of no return, and that redemption is not just possible but desirable.

You can probably come up with better examples that fit your own campaign world better, and it doesn't even have to be good people. Rival dark gods may have something to say about all of this, and they might be willing to forge temporary alliances with what's going on, and if they have some pull with the current evil empire then they can also start cutting away at the power sources.

And, of course, while you shouldn't make the cause of the players be hopeless, it can be fun for it to appear to be so. Imagine just one of the forces of good that needs assaulting just being a wall of goodness, ever advancing, crackling with the energies of joy, hope, love, and mercy, either changing anything that gets trapped too long in its inescapable light or crushing anything so evil that it can't exist where goodness does, basically turning it into something akin to the rules for avalanches or firestorms. In fact, if you turn to the DMG's sections on natural hazards and weather dangers, it might be fun to make some of the challenges not things that the players can "beat" so much as things that they have to "endure". You don't really fight an avalanche of snow or the thunderstorm that deals 1d10 d8s of damage every minute or the ocean while you're drowning under it. If you take those kinds of concepts and just rewrite them as being good or holy or divine or something then you start to change the rules of the game as the players expect them, but not as they fundamentally are. If something has stats your players can (and likely will) beat it, but if their enemy has no stats beyond the problems they can cause players then you're starting to get challenges that might wear them down a bit. Ultimately, there should always be an "out" so that the players don't die (be it a friendly necromancer who just needs an hour to get his warding runes properly written or an escape route that players can find with the right die rolls or something) but you can start getting the players to feel like they might be getting in over their heads before the final encounter.

I'm suddenly imagining a "drowning in goodness" scenario that can affect evil characters (or a "drowning in badness" one that can affect good ones). You can "hold your breath"
(or just gird your mental defenses) against the overwhelming force that you're trapped in by switching to some mental stat (Charisma feels appropriate but Will saves would do) instead of Constitution, then after you're done holding your breath, you need to make the Charisma checks (or "Will saves" if you insist...) with the DC raising every round, and on a failure leading to the character falling unconscious, then the character entering a sort of "dying"
state, and then finally switching alignments. Probably not a good thing to pull on players at most tables, but I'm suddenly eager to build a few mazes with this kind of affect in it! I think I'll make it my campaign world's holding places for the Talisman of Ultimate Good and the Talisman of Ultimate Evil, just in case I ever want those things to come into play.