SangoProduction
2022-10-11, 01:00 PM
Whether by magic mirror, some sort of simulacrum, or incredible freak circumstance that they all had evil twins, the "Evil Team" is quite an effective tool for an good encounter.
The basic principle is simple: Take a copy of your party. Set it against the party. Adjust levels of the copy party, change some items, or otherwise modify the environment around the encounter, to adjust difficulty to the players. Raising difficulty is as simple as simply giving the copies surprise round.
You get a full, detailed set of combatants prepared for you with (next to) no effort on your part, including spells. Gives you much more time to design the environment they face the encounter in, and make it more interesting. The party also can generally expect and see that whatever is pulled out from the copy-party was because it was pulled out by the party, and is fair game. It also tends to be a relatively close fight (because they are copies. Duh) and I've yet to have a group that wasn't on the edge of their seats or even panicking when it was pulled out. (Well, aside from the one that just got a bunch of crits the entire bloody fight.)
The basic principle is simple: Take a copy of your party. Set it against the party. Adjust levels of the copy party, change some items, or otherwise modify the environment around the encounter, to adjust difficulty to the players. Raising difficulty is as simple as simply giving the copies surprise round.
You get a full, detailed set of combatants prepared for you with (next to) no effort on your part, including spells. Gives you much more time to design the environment they face the encounter in, and make it more interesting. The party also can generally expect and see that whatever is pulled out from the copy-party was because it was pulled out by the party, and is fair game. It also tends to be a relatively close fight (because they are copies. Duh) and I've yet to have a group that wasn't on the edge of their seats or even panicking when it was pulled out. (Well, aside from the one that just got a bunch of crits the entire bloody fight.)