Protecting your Villain
by
, 04-07-2010 at 03:27 AM (3714 Views)
As a DM, it is very easy to get attached to your Villain. They are the antagonist for the party, and have been pulling strings for a while to make life miserable for your players... And then combat starts, and they go down within the first few rounds of the battle. This sucks.
It is not uncommon for a party to focus entirely on the key villain and ignore anything else in the encounter.This has been a huge problem for me until I read an article from Sly Flourish on How to Protect Your Elite Villains. I'm not going to go into comments on what can be found in this article, if you want to know then I am confidant you are more than capable of clicking the link and reading it yourself. In fact, go do that now before you go on reading any more. No, really, It's fine. I can wait.
Are you done yet? Good. There are some really good ideas in there, and I wholeheartedly support trying any of them. In this entry, I'd like to expand upon the article, and offer a few more ideas to make your villain a bit harder to kill.
Bond of Shared Pain
One idea I had after reading the Sly Flourish article was to link the villain to someone else. The villain takes half damage from attacks they receive, and the other half is transfered to someone else. There are 3 ways you can go with this:
- Link to an Ally - If your villain links himself to an ally of his, preferably one with a lot of HP, then this doesn't really stop the party from dealing heavy damage, but it does shift a good sized chunk of damage to a less important foe, and buys your villain a little more time on the battlefield.
- Link to a PC - This can work especially well in that there is a realistic chance they may kill their own party mate before killing the villain. In this case, it is sporting to not have enemies attacking the linked PC, perhaps drop a few hints that the link may go two ways if you want to see if you can get the party to attack their own allies. There should be some countermeasures to this the party could take. For example, all of the linked damage taken is of a specific type, and someone can help the linked member resist that damage type. Perhaps offer a way for the PCs to break this link (At the price of a magical backlash from the broken link attacking the linked PC).
- Link to an innocent - Linking the villain to an innocent can be very interesting. Lets say your heroes are dispatched to rescue a princess from some evil jerk. When they finally confront the villain, give them no clues about the link until they strike the villain. At this point, have the kidnapped Princess (Who should be close enough for them to see) scream out in pain, and grasp her bleeding wound in the same place where the villain was struck. It may become very clear very quickly that killing the villain may kill the princess.
In all cases, a couple checks could reveal the nature of the spell. Healing doesn't transfer the same way damage does, so the party could heal the victim of the link without healing the enemy, this should be rather easy to discover. Healing would be the fastest way to buy more time as they try and kill the villain without killing the link. Skill checks are a good way to overcome it as well. You could determine a DC for a Heal check, for example, to reduce the damage the linked victim will take. you could also do the same with Arcana or Religion checks to weaken and eventually break the spell. I like the idea of allowing PCs to use a minor action for such checks, but think it best if you limit them to one per turn. If the party seems at a loss for what to do when they discover that someone else is hurting, ask for knowledge checks, and throw them a couple clues.
I personally love the idea of making an innocent take damage whenever the villain is struck because the party is faced with a choice: Beat the villain the easy way, but kill an innocent... Or do it the hard way to save the life of an NPC.
The Bodyguard
There is a pretty good template in the 4e Dungeon Masters Guide, and it can be applied when you really need some extra protection for your villain. It's not that hard to take the same idea and apply it to pretty much any other game, too.
If you really want to have some fun, replace the marking ability with a power that triggers whenever the villain is attacked. Now if the party attacks the villain, they are met with several more attacks coming back at them in response, encouraging them to take out the bodyguards first. If you really want to be nasty, make the bodyguards a set of archers who sit on a higher level, and can only be hit by ranged attacks. They make their own attacks on their initiative, and unleash another volley whenever their boss is attacked. The general idea is to have more attacks coming at the PCs if they attack the main villain before taking out his bodyguards first.
Defensive Abilities
It's not hard to come up with some fitting defense-like powers. In reaction to a spell being cast at him which would otherwise hit him, your villain wizard throws up his hand and gains a +4 bonus to AC and Reflex until the end of his next turn from a magical shield he can create. In the players handbook, this is an encounter power for Wizards, but PCs also get many more powers than your standard villain has to pick. So you're safe to make it a recharge power. Roll a d6 at the start of every one of the villain's turns. If you get, say, a 5 or higher (or a 4 if you're really nasty), his shield recharges. You can adapt any defensive powers your players might be making excellent use of into something that can be a nightmare for them to try and take down. For example, Wizard's Escape (Found in Arcane Power for 4e) is a level 6 utility spell for wizards, which can be cast once per encounter. As an interrupt to a melee attack that would otherwise hit them, they teleport away 5 squares, and are therefore not struck by the attack. You can set things up where your evil wizard can use this to keep ducking behind his allies, and finding a safer place in the battle. His escape power starts to loose effect as he runs out of enemies to duck behind, and by the end, it is fairly easy to get to him again.
If your villain can't cast spells, you can adapt powers like this in a similar way. Maybe your dark knight gains the AC bonus from a parry maneuver, or the assassin can shift his way through the battlefield without provoking opportunity attacks in order to evade an attack. Once you have the basic mechanic down for "This is a way to protect my villain", it becomes a matter of flavor to justify how they get that mechanical bonus.
Mounted Defense
It never hurts to give your villain a good mount. Especially if you give him the ability to force PCs to attack the mount rather than him. This means players have to take out the villain's mount before they can even touch him. This could take pretty much any form you like, it could be an Orc riding into battle on a Dire Boar, and he rears up the Boar to make it absorb the attacks (And better yet, let the Boar attack adjacent enemies on it's way back down when it does this),
The 3 Stage Fight
As a frequent player of video games, I understand that a any big boss fight worth its salt should be broken into 3 very distinct and different parts. A mad inventor appearing in a three stage mech battle fits this bill. The mad inventor mech fight is something I was toying with the other day, but I'm having trouble applying the same mechanics to differ rent situations. Have him first appear in this giant mech, which is one of his inventions. When that has been reduced to 0 HP, a smaller mech crawls out, with fresh hit points. Give it different attacks, different stats, and make it faster, so it is like an entirely different enemy. Once that has been destroyed, the villain hits the eject button before his mech explodes (Remember to make this an attack), and the PCs finally get to throw down against the villain. You can call in reinforcements every time the battle leads to another stage, too.
So, there you go. A couple more ways to keep your big bad villain in the fight long enough to make him noteworthy.