Leonine Roar

Recurring villains are great in our favorite stories, books, movies or TV series.  What separates recurring villainy in those mediums from tabletop RPGs is that it’s easier to execute villain escapes.  The writers take some creative license and weave at least a mildly believable story or tactical reason for a villain’s escape.  And that’s it – we’re not chasing them ourselves, so we don’t get that upset.  (Well, maybe a little!)

In D&D, however, it’s just not that easy.  Recurring villains don’t get to graduate to “Level 2: Recurring” often.  Why?  During first contact with the party, they’re usually pin downed and killed well before you can say “You’ll pay for this!”  With the amount of truly debilitating effects that D&D 4e powers and attacks are capable of, it’s only become a bigger issue.

So what do you do if you’d really like to develop a villain over many adventures and levels of play?  Here’s some ways you can increase your villain’s odds of survival – at least just once!

4 Story Getaways

The Impostor.  This is a cool twist and one of my favorite hoodwinks!  The party believes, and hopefully, much of the evidence points to the person they’re poking their swords into right now being the big bad evil guy (BBEG).  It’s actually not that hard to execute from a storytelling point of a view, especially for a villain whose part of  a larger organization or has a lot of minions and bodyguards.  One of my favorite impostors (and movies)?  Watch Batman Begins.

Not Who She Seems.  Here the party meets or has a brush with the big bad evil lady (BBEL) – but she’s just a wallflower or an extra in the cast.  In the one-shot adventure I ran in Witchway Village this past Friday night, that’s exactly what happened.  During a birthday celebration of one of the party’s friends, there were a lot of gossipy evesdroppers and party-going personalities.  And one of the cast of characters happened to be the very woman they would later learn they needed to stop from polymorphing Witchway Village’s people into undead bugs and animals at the stroke of midnight.

Connections.  Everyone has friends, and powerful people tend to have powerful friends.  Extend that to powerful allied and friendly organizations, and a whole hellstorm of trouble is about to come your party’s way – before, during, and after the party encounters the villain.  Information, protection, weapons – all kinds of new and rich resources will help your villain escape.

Law & Order – and Corruption.   It may be D&D, where the law of the Wild West seems to be the standard, especially outside of communities, but villains are smart enough to not always fight to the death if that ultimate showdown is where everything is heading.  Plus not every party is into cold-blooded murder in every fight.  Surrendering to the proper authorities for punishment and restitution can be a story-rich “get away” of sorts, especially when the villain uses his far-reaching resources and natural leadership ability to corrupt a few authority figures and aid his escape.  The hunt is on – again!

4 Tactical Getaways

Combat Plans B and C.  Chain encounters and encounter locations together.  Don’t have your villain “last stand” and hole up in a single room.  If certain flunkies and minions aren’t putting a dent in the PCs, call for different reinforcements.  Waves of varying monsters between the party and the villain make for a great delay tactic while the villain withdraws to the next combat location. 

Home Field Advantage.  Make sure the terrain, especially on the villain’s turf, offers true advantages for the villain.  Like we know our own homes forwards and backwards, a villain will know his own lair the same way.  That means he’s quick to get to wherever he needs to, and using his minions and abilities, has eyes and ears on what’s going inside his casa at all times.  He’s a villain, after all, not an idiot.  Sidebar on terrain: I like the classic “we’ve been cut off… for now” natural disaster/terrain event.  Not sure what I mean?  Watch Captain America.

Multiple Exits.  That advice about holing up in a room?  Well, it’s even worse if it’s that last room in the dungeon with only one grand entrance in and out.  Avoid that.  There should be multiple ledges, stairs, floors, and even a few secret ways out of the BBEG’s ultimate lair.  Any villain worth its salt at least knows he needs options should he need to escape.  Now if only the party would stop perma-crowd-controlling him every round…

Villain Capture Resistance.  Which brings me to this!  Much like D&D re-tooled elites and especially solos in Essentials to actually survive and shrug off some action-denying crowd control effects, create a similar template that focuses on escape-denial, which is essentially a subset of action denial.  Applying most of the the existing changes to elites and solos you see in Monster Vault works, though you can tweak some of the monster abilities slightly to add superior movement options (i.e. mounts, flight, teleportation) and/or bonus speed when bloodied.  Focus on anything that limits mobility and make sure the villain somehow has a chance to reduce the impact.  Remember, she’s trying to get away!  But she’ll be back!

How Would You Escape?

Does your playgroup suffer from the seeming impossibility of recurring villainy?  What would you do to increase the odds of escaping the clutches of your party?  How have your villains escaped?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 21st, 2012 at 12:00 am and is filed under Design, Mechanics & Efficiencies, Storytelling & Roleplaying. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.