The benefits of an "Evil twin" team of villains.

[SangoProduction]

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.)

[icefractal]

As long as you don't mind some PCs dying. IME, more PCs tend to be "glass cannons" than the reverse, so in a mirror match it's likely that someone dies, and in a true mirror that's 50% likely to be the PC.

One time this occurred three times in the same month (in three different campaigns with two different GMs). The third time, my character was the right combination of pragmatic and lazy that I immediately proposed to my clone that we just flip a coin and the loser surrenders, which (due to having the same personality and not being directly under anyone else's control) he agreed to.

[Raven777]

One time this occurred three times in the same month (in three different campaigns with two different GMs). The third time, my character was the right combination of pragmatic and lazy that I immediately proposed to my clone that we just flip a coin and the loser surrenders, which (due to having the same personality and not being directly under anyone else's control) he agreed to.

Perfect opportunity to mess with the DM and follow it up by proposing to momentarily ditch both parties and go "experiment" a couple things... ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[Ramza00]

As long as you don't mind some PCs dying. IME, more PCs tend to be "glass cannons" than the reverse, so in a mirror match it's likely that someone dies, and in a true mirror that's 50% likely to be the PC.

Sorry Bro that I killed you. I could not let go of X event you did in our childhood. Also I am evil.

But since you are family and I love you I brought you back. Sorry about the negative level but that is your problem, and I was always better than you so what else is new. I did pay the 5000 gold of diamond dust out of my pocket but I did pilfer your magic gloves for it compliments my fleet-fingers.

Bye 👋