It’s time for the thrilling finale!
The villain gives a little monologue, the initiative dice roll, and now it’s time for an epic—
Oh. Never mind. The PCs already killed him.
It turns out it’s quite difficult to keep a single target alive when five highly trained killing machines (i.e., the PCs) are highly motivated to simultaneously release all of their death-dealing abilities on them. (Particularly if your stat blocks are simulating reality and/or you want that same stat block to function as Not a Boss™ in other situations.) So this is a systemic problem that you’ll find in a lot of different RPGs.
There are various solutions to this – mechanical, structural, and otherwise – but here’s one that works surprisingly well:
Have the boss show up AFTER the fight starts.
In other words, the PCs get into a fight with a bunch of the bad guy’s minions, and then two or three rounds later the bad guy shows up:
- The door is slammed open dramatically!
- The summoning ritual completes and the demon materializes!
- They teleport in with reinforcements!
- A helicopter swoops down from the sky and they jump into the middle of the melee!
- They were invisible the whole time and suddenly reveal themselves!
- A car with blackout windows drives through the wall of the warehouse and the vampire lord leaps out!
However the bad guy makes their dramatic appearance, this has three effects.
First, it’s a cool and memorable moment. This really shouldn’t be undervalued.
Second, the PCs will already be engaged with other bad guys. Their tactical positions may be far muddier than they were at the beginning of the fight. They are likely to have already blasted some of their most powerful combat options. In other words, it will be much more difficult for the PCs to focus their fire on a target that appears in the middle of the fight than one that’s available when the fight begins.
Third, even if they do wipe out the boss nigh-instantaneously, you’ll have pulled off an important bit of legerdemain: Yes, the boss died in two rounds. But that didn’t happen until the fourth or fifth round of the fight. So it will, no matter how illogically, feel like a big, satisfying fight instead of a curb-stomping.
Another variant here is to have the bad guys retreat to wherever the boss is, drawing the PCs after them in pursuit. This inverts the dynamic while expanding the encounter’s theater of operations and giving it a more epic scope.
It should also be noted that this whole dynamic can often organically arise if you’re using adversary rosters (either because the PCs are pulled into a running fight that takes them to the boss or because the boss is drawn to them).
You shouldn’t do this every time, of course, or it will become predictable and trite. (Although with enough variation in the boss’ dramatic entrance you can cover your tracks quite a bit.) But it’s definitely something to keep in your toolbox.
Someday I want to do the subversion of the first three paragraphs, where the big bad is protected by his status in society and can’t be touched. Until he finally crosses the line, and you find out he was just as fragile as any other normal person. Basically, getting clearance to kill the big bad was the hard fight.
Pretty sure there was a movie that did that somewhere, but I can’t remember which one.
@Brian:
There’s probably a bunch of movies which do that – outside of superhero stuff, live-action film usually doesn’t share the RPG assumption that a group’s leader is on a whole other level, physically, from their followers. And that’s without even getting into the nitpick that the action movie Big Bad is usually more of a schemer, with their top enforcer providing any “boss fights” needed (though come to think on it, that’s not a bad idea to steal for RPGs, either).
That said, my first thought was Lethal Weapon 2’s iconic exchange:
“Diplomatic immunity!”
*BLAM*
“It’s been revoked.”
@Brian
Robocop. “Dick? YOU’RE FIRED!” *cue Robocop now being allowed to attack the Omni Consumer Products executive*
This was a really thoughtful way to handle the problem—kudos for framing it so clearly.
I actually tackled a similar challenge in a guest article I wrote for Gnome Stew, though I approached it from a slightly different angle: how to bring a villain onscreen without the players immediately lynching him, especially outside of combat.
Hope it’s okay if I place a URL here for anyone interested:
https://gnomestew.com/meeting-the-villain-and-letting-them-live/
Thanks again for all your work—I keep coming back to your site for inspiration.
—Alexander Atoz
Another way to achieve a similar effect is to use distance.
In fiction, an enemy leader will often send in an advanced team or two to attack the protagonists while the leader is positioned at a distance, possibly with cover or some sort of special defenses.
In play, typically not all player characters are equally mobile, nor do all player characters have equally effective long range attacks. Simply positioning the archvillain at a distance can split the party’s focus, or lead to the party spreading out, separated by significant distance.
You may also add additional defenses to such a leader depending on your game. In a high level D&D they might have a Prismatic Wall or other special defenses.
In my run of the dragon heist remix I kinda managed to achieve the opposite effect, the PCs got spotted by Victoro trying to escape with the eye, and so a fight broke out, but because the player’s knew escape was a viable altnerate victory condition, it led to a fighting escape where they couldn’t focus fire on victoro quickly enough, allowing him to stick around for a good number of rounds as they steadily pushed past the remaining guards and out into the street before victoro’s chase wore him down enough to fall.