Depends on how – and how often – it’s done. If the character has his sword/superpower/killer spell for all the mundane slog-through content, but always loses it against, well, the only threat worth HAVING a great sword/power/spell against, the player never gets to see what he could have done against first-rate opposition. The worst form of this is when the gamemaster routinizes the routine encounters too – I’ve played with GMs who said “this fight is easy, don’t bother to roll it out; you win” for most fights and “you lose your sword. Now fight the big guy for real,” the rest of the time. Result: player never actually gets to use the sword/power/spell.
You have to be careful also with straining too hard against a player’s concept. “I always win” isn’t the concept I’m talking about. But don’t totally run roughshod over the player’s sense of who he or she is. I was in a magic-themed campaign once playing a magic-fearing physical barbarian. The GM made encounter after encounter in which my character succumbed to control and binding spells, gained spell-like powers, was given magical tattoos, and just generally drenched in magic despite it being the thing the character most detested. Eventually I was being turned into a magical familiar or roughly the equivalent, as I understood it.
I tried to explain that there might be a point to the character having to endure such transformation for some important plot reason or at a dramatic crisis; but to just make the campaign essentially about “you are too a magic user!” from Day One was enormously frustrating. No time was spent establishing the character for the changes to be a difference.
Needless to say, the other long-suffering player in that campaign was a crafter wizard (from magic-natured race) who was supposed to make magic items. The GM wouldn’t let him make any, for fear of game balance, and made all his spells temporary minor buff-type enchantments instead of permanent creations. So he literally could not perform the functions of his class, and could hardly cast any spells or wield useful items despite radiating magic energies as his birthright, and I was dragged kicking and screaming into deep entanglement with magic despite not wanting anything to do with it.
This is good general advice, particularly as your game gets more complicated and combat takes longer. Sure, it doesn’t sound so bad to say “Hey, you’re only out of the fight until you save” but A) Dice are notoriously capricious and it might take quite a while to save against the effect and B) In a big fight with half a dozen PCs and a big ol’ pile of enemies, even a round or two can add up to 30 or more minutes of sitting around unable to take any actions other than roll a save once per round.
Hm. I think I need to explain a bit better about my villains.
I run a 7th sea game. In that genre, it’s very swashbuckler-y, and while magic exists, there’s almost no -combat- magic (there’s portal-teleportation, weather control, fate-manipulation, animal shapeshifting, and some other stuff, but not ‘blam’ combat-spells.)
What I’m trying to avoid with my PC’s is what usually happens in my big, end-game combats: Everyone just crowds the boss and ignores everything else, reasoning that the big-bad can’t dish out enough damage to take them all out before they take him out. I know allies for the villain will help, but I’m looking for better ways to have the villain survive-and-frustrate, or perhaps even win, without resorting to GM-ex-machinas.
I DM’d 7th Sea, and faced similar problems - it’s quite difficult to find the right challenge for a decent, even a tad on the min-max’d side group. They’ll wade through hordes of mooks pretty much effortlessly, and even lieutenants provide little challenge unless they’re focusing on stuff the party’s weak at (ex : a musket sniper, when everyone in the group is a swordmaster).
The big mistake here is to rely on only just the one Villain. This never works, even if that one villain is extra-munchkinny. As soon as he’s got a few wounds, he’s done for, and he certainly can’t dish enough oomph to worry them.
The basic solution is quite simple : provide a group of X PCs with X-2 Villains (with one “boss” who’s even beefier than any single one of your PCs, while the other Villains are equal to or just under their combat level), plus a roughly equal amount of lieutenants, sprinkle brute squads to taste.
Since Villains are just as tough as Heroes, and every reroll the heroes throw away the Villain gets, this provides quite a bit of challenge, but it also means the final showdown is very crowded… which just means that if they want to gang-bang the boss, well, you don’t have to let them : that’s what the sub-Villains are for, to backstab them and/or provide meatshield services. Make them fight in cramped quarters, where they can’t reach the boss without slogging through the underlings first. Split them up. Throw chandeliers on top of them, or entangle one of them in a loosened sail.
Be careful however not to overdo it : if your group is mostly made up of courtiers, Dutch bankers, inept nobles and the like, don’t make all the Villains Xtreem death machines. Besides, the Villain group will likely need some skills of their own to further their dastardly plots on the way to the big finish.
And when/if the fight seems to go sour for the boss, that’s his cue to exit stage left , as a few fresh squads of brutes cover his escape. That’s what windows, secret doors, Porté portals, horses, the open sea and, in a pinch, a cliff (“no one could survive that fall !”) are for. In one scenario I ran, the “villain” (in reality, a really dutiful/obsessive Musketeer who got wrongly convinced the PCs were plotting against the King, and ran after them to the ends of the Earth) was saved by the arrival of Napoleon (or whoever the game’s stand in is, I can’t recall right now), in front of which the PCs couldn’t exactly off a servant of the King if they wanted to have a chance to explain themselves. The Musketeer seized the opportunity to slink away, (but not before cursing them and promising he’d find them again no matter how far they ran, obviously)
Another option is to give the bad guys “hidden bonuses”, in the form of open environmental maluses to the PCs. For example, a pirate cap’n whom they get to fight in the middle of a raging storm : if they haven’t got their sea legs, the boat throws them around like so many rag dolls (which translates to higher diffs on their rolls, or even random movements on the combat map with a chance to go overboard, and hang heroically by one hand of course), while the pirates laugh at the pathetic lubbers, showing their scuvy’d teeth in the process.
Or they could fight in a mist-covered bog of Avalon, where the Shidhe Villains are perfectly at home while the Heroes can’t see their own hands. You get the idea.
The most devious is, of course, to not have a confrontation at all. Play the heroes against each other by building suspicions among them over the course of the adventure (little “secret” notes are your friend). Turn a PC for realz by having the villain provide them with either the means to achieve one of their core goals, or out and out hand it to them on a platter. Maybe the Villain is actually fighting for something *they *believe in too : when that big reveal hits them out of the blue, how many of them are going to still be adamant he needs killing ? How many are going to opt out of the fight (or even switch sides) because the Villain actually has a decent shot of doing some good albeit by Eeeevil means ? How about if we add a Sorte henchgal to the mix, hmmm ? And if you do manage to turn the group against itself, are they really going to fight their buddies to the death ? Excitement ! Treason ! Promises of revenge all around !
Another way not to have a big finale is to play the environment as the main enemy in the scenario/campaign. A doomed sea voyage, or an excursion into deep Cathay in search of some mythical El Dorado, for example : along the way, pile wounds and long term penalties on them through various hazards. Hero A gets malaria, Hero B is covered in leeches, Hero C loses his superduper Montaigne blade in a mudpit (or, if you’re generous, let it get stolen by monkeys which they’ll meet again much later), Hero D whose shtick is pistols gets his powder irredeemably wet. And of course, mosquitoes and the occasional cannibal & gator attack. When they reach their goal, they’ll be thoroughly spent, at which point you can either throw a final fight (which will be challenging on account of the pile of maluses they’ve got by now, see above), or… throw nothing. Give them the prize for once - the slog was epic enough… and they still have to go back home. Carrying sacks of very heavy, very useless in a jungle gold
This works even better if you make them slog through hostile Ussura : over there, Mother Nature really *is *against them every step of the way.
Finally, a bit on the cheap side but it does make for memorable fights sometimes : the invincible, puzzle boss. Forget about their puny swords : this guy is a fricken beast. They’d need a cannon to even dent it ! Or… hmmm, are those gunpowder kegs ? If we could find a way to detonate one next to its head… Is that a Syrneth amulet under his shirt ? Quick, somebody get it off him ! Etc. For best results, have them first fight the invincible boss without any means to hurt him. None at all. He’ll trounce them effortlessly, of course. *Then *start them on the quest to find a way to beat him. Add one encounter before they’re ready along, so they’ll shit a brick and run away. And finally, the boss fight, against a guy they’ll really *delight *in [del]trouncing[/del]almost beating before he escapes, because he’s put them to shame twice.
I’m not familiar with 7th sea, but mechanically, it’s not hard to frustrate what you suggest.
First off, I’m going to assume there are ships involved. Ships are not famous for giving you huge amounts of freedom of movement. Unless you’re dealing with the Ghost Captain of en empty ship, there’s going to be a whole lot of other people around. They may not be -threatening- but they should get in the way.
I don’t really understand this talk of mooks vs lieutenants vs bosses - I assume that’s game specific terminology (because otherwise it’s too vague to be useful) - but you don’t need dangerous enemies here. You just need enemies that are either defensively tough enough to take a little while to beat down (good for blocking the steps up onto the quarterdeck) or who are capable of dealing enough damage that you don’t want them at your back.
If the PCs are -able- to “just focus on the big bad guy” then you have designed the encounter poorly. The big bad guy should not be alone, and should be able to use all the same cheap tricks - if the PCs want to try to gang up on him, have him stand between two big tough bruisers who can keep some of them off… and have a bunch of dangerous but fragile minions GANG UP ON ONE PC. Is that dirty pool? No, because they started it. If they realize they aren’t much enjoying the taste of their own medicine, maybe they’ll try a more distributed tactic.
Yup. The system is supposed to make the game feel “action hero-y” and like a swashbuckling movie. It thus defines three “classes” of NPCs : mooks (well, Brutes) are the kind of cannon fodder heroes deal with effortlessly, in fact they are dealt with in packs of 6 within the rules. Think “the Cardinal’s guards”. or “the Orcs that get counted off by Gimli and Legolas”. They die at the merest touch of a rapier, and even a whole bunch of them won’t really threaten a hero. Their entire purpose is to allow the PCs to show off, and provide a crowd for them to wade through and/or dispatch in cruel and amusing ways.
Henchmen are a bit tougher, they have roughly the same oomph as a hero, are tracked individually, and can take a smidge more damage than Brutes (although they’ll still die at the first actual wound).
Finally, Villains are the Big Bads - essentially they are PCs on the Dark Side. Same skills (plus some cheaty, overpowered NPC ones), but also same amount of tragic flaws and weaknesses, including, yes, one that forces them to explain their whole plan to the heroes should they manage to capture them
While it is an amusing game mechanic, it *is *heavily weighted in favour of the PCs throughout most of their adventures, since so many of the antagonists aren’t tough enough to withstand their full attention for more than a couple rounds, if that.
That’s sortof okay though - what it sounds like is that ArrMatey! isn’t making proper use of Henchmen - they should be ganging up on the PCs the same way the PCs are (trying to) ganging up on the Villain. Presumably no individual PC is going to be able to stand up to having several of these guys all hammering him while he focuses on the villian, and, let’s face it, it’s not any fun to be one of the PCs that dies while the others get the glory for fighting the villain, so eventually one would expect the PC(s) who are being ganged up on to need help from their friends.
So… maybe design your Villain with a strong ‘active’ defense - i.e. one that he can do at cost of offense to keep himself alive longer, and design your henchmen with a little extra bite.
Hm. Good suggestions, everyone. And I think that, yes, more henchmen are a good answer. What I need to do, however, is make each of them somehow unique and memorable. I’ve already got one lined up (The PC’s rather non-challantly murdered his brother a session or two ago. It was only barely this side of heroic, as they’d seen him beat the living hell out of one of their associates)
The trick will be to make them memorable -enough-, and still make them homogenous enough that it’s not a ‘the only thing uniting the bad guys is a hatred of the good guys’ thing.
They don’t really need to be memorable if you don’t expect them to survive their first encounter with the PCs. A visual feature or quirk is all you really need - the one with the eyepatch, the one missing two fingers on his right hand, the one who talks in the gravelly voice, the one in the garish purple top hat. That’s good enough for differentiation, and if you don’t expect them to last, that’s all they need.
Of course, if you do expect them to survive, it might be better to build them “as a team”.
But don’t totally run roughshod over the player’s sense of who he or she is. I was in a magic-themed campaign once playing a magic-fearing physical barbarian. The GM made encounter after encounter in which my character succumbed to control and binding spells, gained spell-like powers, was given magical tattoos, and just generally drenched in magic despite it being the thing the character most detested. Eventually I was being turned into a magical familiar or roughly the equivalent, as I understood it.