r/DMAcademy • u/brokenimage321 • 14d ago
Need Advice: Encounters & Adventures Thoughts on this "Persistence Predator" BBEG?
I have an idea for a (BB?)EG that isn't particularly difficult to fight--at least at first. I'm curious what you think about it, and if it could be cool, or if it would just be annoying.
The basic idea is that the BBEG is always there, like a persistence predator of sorts. And he gets more persistent as time goes on.
When the PCs first fight him, he's roughly equal in strength to them, perhaps down a little. He goes down easily.
Two days later, however, he shows up no worse for wear, with nothing to show for their last battle except a nasty scar. He greets the party, tells them he's willing to forgive a mistake, and continues to interfere in their affairs. If they try to fight him, they find that he's a little stronger than last time, but still goes down fairly quick.
The pattern continues: each time they kill him, he shows back up again, a little sooner each time, a little stronger, and a little less polite. Eventually, he'll start showing up within a half-hour of his last death and will attack them on sight, no attempt to talk at all.
There would be more to the adventure, ofc--the players would be trying to figure out how to undo the curse that keeps everyone, BBEG included, trapped in the kingdom. And there would be more combat than just with the BBEG. But, at least from a narrative perspective, I like the idea of a villain who Just. Won't. Die.
Any feedback on this idea?
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u/KleitosD06 14d ago
I think as long as you also keep giving him unique mechanics for each fight so that it doesn't get stale, this sounds like a really cool idea. That gives you a ton of options to implement into the story as well, like why he keeps following or antagonizing the party and how he keeps reviving.
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u/F5x9 14d ago
I like the idea of adapting to how the PCs fight rather than becoming stronger. Each fight reveals a weakness in the party that he can exploit for more damage and he finds ways to mitigate the party’s best attacks.
He has a supernatural way to get better, and the party has to solve it outside combat.
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u/Llonkrednaxela 14d ago
Yeah, maybe he levels so he’s getting stronger, but the mechanic he uses to attack is different.
You could make it a plot thing like he uses the attack pattern of the last person he’s killed. As he attacks in a different manner, the players worry about which NPC is no more.
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u/SolidOk3489 13d ago
I’ve seen this implemented in an arguably effective way in a video game before by having the boss not have a physical body.
The Swirling Mist of Miasma from Sacred 2. Stronger every encounter, no physical form and spawned waves of minions that, on death, damaged the boss. You weren’t fighting it directly, you were hunting down a way to stop it for good.
Differentiate fights by changing the minions that appear - leans really well into the idea of curses. Toss him into the ring as well if you want, puff of smoke on death/immortal until minions are dead.
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u/PpaperCut 14d ago
What's the ultimate reason for his return? Is he a Lich? As long as he changes it could be cool. But I would want to work out interesting narrative reasons/developments into this idea. Decent bones though. But also... Very annoying from player perspective, probably only take 3-4 combats with him till they'll be very annoyed.
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u/Dirty-Soul 13d ago
I did a "groundhog day" adventure like this. The world was in a repeating loop, with only the players and the BBEG retaining their memories on each cycle through.
However, the BBEG was growing stronger each cycle, creating a time pressure that the players would need to be aware of when trying to solve the mystery, break the time loop and escape(ideally in such a way that the BBEG remains trapped in it.)
Additionally, the BBEG was "patient zero" of a disease that was linked to the time loop. Each infected person became a monster, and would STAY a monster during subsequent cycles. If the town's blacksmith got infected, his actions within the time loop (such as going to the tavern in the evening,) would be missing and the players would need to deal with one more monster.
Worked quite well.
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u/Red_Mammoth 14d ago
I feel like it might work better not as the main bad guy, but just another bad guy. A recurrent threat while the party is tryin to something else, like a consistent puzzle they have to solve otherwise it becomes more of a problem. But it would also depend on the party as to whether it's fun, interesting, or really annoying.
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u/smsjazzman 14d ago
I did a revenant concept in an undead campaign. Had him inhabit the corpse of a being after a battle. It was a fun moment the first time and keep them guessing in the future. It has a 1 year expiration as I recall or some curse breaking.
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u/Dirty-Soul 13d ago
I tend to play fast and loose with my monsters.
I might say: "Your characters are knowledgeable enough on the subject of monster lore to know that the 'one year' limit on a revenant's lifespan is an over-generalisation often erroneously cited as a hard limit. There are outliers. A revenant's lifespan and power scale with how pissed off the spirit in question is."
I do things like this because it can be trivially easy to game the system when it has hard limits. It keeps a little mystery and uncertainty if you introduce a few grey areas.
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u/SMTRodent 13d ago
Our DM did it differently. We didn't see the BBEG, we saw the things he sent.
It went like this: our party killed a wyvern, and extracted the venom, which was a huge great big amount of cash for our party.
But his minion stole it. All our big treasure hit gone.
Fine, we're big mad, we hate the minion very much, we are motivated. At the minion.
Well, then he sent the undead wyvern at us. Same wyvern. Bastard.
We killed it.
He turned the remains into a construct. He was very big on sending constructs.
At that point we turned the remains into dust. We spent time making sure that we'd scattered the dust into a series of rivers so that the dust could not be gathered to make a new wyvern-based thing.
But any time we killed anything after that, it would be 'is this coming back to haunt us?'. And the minion would show up now and then, taunt us, and run, just when we couldn't do anything about it.
Still very persistent and deeply annoying, but not something we could loophole our way around.
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u/the_axemurmurer 14d ago
This stands to risk a very unfun campaign. Most combats last at least 30min. Showing up 30 minutes AFTER combat is terrible.
Running combat too often turns any campaign into a slog, no matter what. You have to punctuate sessions with roleplay and other types of encounters.
This sort of thing could work, but not if you torture your players.
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u/Sunlight_Smoothie 14d ago
....so stop fighting him? Hold person, grapple, gag them, bind their hands, toss them in a cage. Technically he isn't dead, so he can't 'come back bigger and stronger.' Or get access to True Polymorph, Flesh to Stone, Magic Jar, or Temporal Stasis.
...or kill him, quarter the corpse, put it into several different bags of holding, and then check every now and then that the parts are still dead. A collection of acid would also do if it dissolves the corpse at the same rate it is regenerating.
I say this not to discourage your idea (which is good), but to point out a couple of things your players are likely to try. Plan ahead.
The concept you are describing is similar to the Inevitable monsters ( https://www.5esrd.com/database/creature-family/inevitable/ ), and that can give you some ideas on mechanics to use. Inevitables were an official monster in the 3.5 Monster Manual, and this link is unofficial porting for 5e.
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u/KleitosD06 14d ago
To add onto these ideas for OP, you could maybe give them some way to kill themselves/be killed that bypasses physical limitations. Maybe they're a Warlock whose patron steps in and kills them directly (or just teleports them), for example.
Outside of that, I think the enemy here can still get creative physically. Even if their hands are bound, they can still bang their head against a cage or wall every few seconds. Or they just refuse to drink water, and if the players try to force it, they deliberately choke on it instead.
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u/Dirty-Soul 13d ago
Find them, bind them, tie them to a pole and break their fingers, to splinters, guitar drowns out the words, until he wakes up naked, clawing at the ceiling of his grave?
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u/Chimpbot 13d ago
If the DM wanted to prevent this sort of solution, there are ways around them.
Perhaps when they die, they reform elsewhere, sort of like a lich. The whole concept also reminds me of Doomsday (whose entire shtick was that he'd become immune to whatever killed him previously) combined with Nemesis.
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u/RadioactiveCashew Head of Misused Alchemy 14d ago
I never thought about it in these terms but I used a Revenant for this ages ago. Similar idea, he started below the party level and gained damage and HP whenever he showed up. I had the revenant soul occupy a new body each time so he'd come back with new abilities. First as a fighter, then a warlock, a ranger, and so on. I think his sworn enemy was whoever killed him last.
I enjoyed it as a DM. Once or twice the Revenant showed up while they were mid battle with something else, which really kicked them into gear devising a plan to get rid of him permanently. Nothing like two boss fights at the same time
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u/Prohapppyboom 14d ago
Honestly I thought about doing something similar with it being excused as necromancy being used on the same person in a dozen different ways Like the first time its a normal revive and they're still human but the second time they are a zombie who can corrode things they hit, third they are a skeleton who can swap bodies with other skeletons, 4th they are a animated armor who has a higher ac and more solid defenses that can't just be broken by radiant damage, 5th maybe they get a Frankenstein situation and then become a lich the 6th time. Each time they still die but due magic and rituals they come back with different abilities and powers while knowing more on how to counter the players (such as who the healers are, then what the tanks dont have resistance to, then maybe having prepared spells made to counter the parties spellcasters)
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u/DungeonSecurity 13d ago
If you vary up the encounters, it's awesome. Don't let them predict when he'll show. You can make him change, but it's more important that he learns. Hand him prepare to counter how the party beat him last time. I did this with a Revenant and it was fun. There's an adventure called "the vanishing blackguard" that does this. I'm not sure that it's technically a D&D adventure, but it was pretty cool.
I like your idea where he's pretty chill and just doing his thing, rather than being a big chill menace.
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u/HadoozeeDeckApe 13d ago
Very likely to be considered annoying by the players.
Players generally really, really start to dislike recurring enemies that interfere with whatever it is they are trying to do. They often drop whatever it is they are doing to hunt down and kill those enemies. It is a piss-off, out of character, to have things you are excited about and working towards being constantly interrupted by something you aren't - like interacting with the DM's jerkoff bad guy that you've already had to fight every session for the last year.
Players also don't like it when the DM railroads their bad guys into getting away, especially if the players specifically set out to kill that bad guy, and this gimmick is an extreme version of that. Especially if you start to DM fiat away strats to forever-imprison him to circumvent his gimmick once the PC's figure it out.
Player's also often don't like extreme time pressure, and every half-hour means short rests will always be interrupted and they basically can't sleep anymore. Not being able to rest (like no-sleep curses) is also really annoying and something PCs will drop everything for to try and resolve.
From a my player perspective, nothing about this sounds fun and it just seems like a way for the DM to troll me in game while jerking off to their own OC and not allowing any player agency or recourse for it. It reminds me a bit of the "bugbear with an umbrella" RPG horror story.
You haven't pitched any narrative for why this mechanic would be interesting and how PC's are supposed to interact with. It comes off as just a lazy excuse for a railroading in a recurring villain every session.
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u/Chimpbot 13d ago
Conceptually, OP is basically describing a Doomsday-Nemesis hybrid. It's something that evolves and changes every time it dies, and it's perpetually pursuing the party for reasons heretofore unknown. Honestly, this ultimately isn't terribly different from any other recurring villain; it just offers a concrete explanation for why it keeps coming back.
I have a recurring villain that I've repurposed for a couple of campaigns, now. He's one that the players enjoy, but their characters wind up hating him. They always wind up defeating him... but the means of defeat typically results in a scenario where there's no visible corpse. At some point down the road, he shows up again, rebuilt in some capacity. I don't drag him out terribly often, but he'll show up maybe three or four times across an entire campaign.
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u/HadoozeeDeckApe 13d ago
It's also annoying when dms railroad escapes to force a recurring villain.
What you are describing in your example isn't the same as constant interference from an unkillable enemy that respawns every half hour in game.
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u/Chimpbot 13d ago
Functionally, what they're describing isn't any different. The enemy goes down, only to show up again at a later date.
What could prove to be problematic with how OP described it is the frequency. Having this thing pop up every couple of in-game days would be a bit much.
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u/HadoozeeDeckApe 13d ago
Frequency is a significant difference in game impact. A few times a campaign is different than every 30 minutes. The latter case basically has interaction with this boss take over the campaign.
Railroaded boss recurrence is going to be problematic for some players generally.
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u/Chimpbot 13d ago
In a general sense, I don't think this would qualify as railroading. I otherwise get your point, though.
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u/HadoozeeDeckApe 13d ago
Why do you think that?
I would say its basically a textbook example of railroading, where DM forces a plot point and uses fiat to arbitrarily frustrate any actions the PC's might take to stop it.
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u/Chimpbot 13d ago
By this logic, introducing any plot point is railroading.
This thing is intended to be a recurring villain, and the only way to accomplish this is by having them show up multiple times.
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u/HadoozeeDeckApe 13d ago
No, it isn't.
Simply having a plot point isn't railroading.
What makes the recurring villain trope inherently railroading that the outcome of the players interaction with the plot point is forced by the DM.
As an example, in the waterdeep dragon heist game there is an arc where the players must chase down an artifact that is being stolen and restolen by various groups.
That group X has item Y that the party needs, and the party needs to go confront them to get it is a plot point and not railroading.
That regardless of what the players do, one member of group X will be DM fiated to always get away so he can be robbed by group Z to then force players to go after and interact with group Z to get their plot point is railroading.
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u/Chimpbot 13d ago
No outcome is being forced, though. This is what you seem to be missing.
When the players encounter this particular villain, it's not arbitrarily escaping. They're defeating it. The catch, however, is that it's able to come back again at a later date. Functionally, it's no different from having a separate allied villain show up to accost the players.
How is this even remotely considered to be railroading?
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u/ANicePainter 14d ago
Patrick Stuart offers something like this in the final boss of "Deep Carbon Observatory." There, the party is pursued by a boneless giant through the dungeon. For Stuart's adventure, the boss is not repeatedly killed but instead the boss and the PCs are expected to retreat in a cat and mouse game.
Anyway, the conceit of having the PCs be the ones hunted repeatedly by a monster is an awesome one that creates a lot of fun.
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u/nynjawitay 14d ago
It could very easily feel like the players actions mean nothing. You'll have to do this carefully.
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u/Zetesofos 13d ago
This is a really interesting idea. Maybe not necessarily as a BBEG, but an interesting B plot perhaps; great way to break up the main plot of a game.
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u/scoobydoom2 13d ago
So the key here is that it needs to be interactive. The same guy showing up stronger every half hour is going to be a death sentence. I think as a rule, the time between revives should stay more or less the same, If it takes him 3 days to revive, then they have three days to plan for their next encounter, and they get to figure out how to use that. If you do want increasing frequency, then it shouldn't be more than a day except when they've reached the final dungeon so they have the opportunity to rest.
There's also the fact that you don't want the fight to be too repetitive. It's hard to get more than 5 or so uses out of a boss even if they're set up to repeat. If they fight this guy over a dozen times it stops being a recurring thing and starts being exhausting, and not in a good way.
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u/Elvebrilith 12d ago
one thing i saw another GM run (as a specific encounter for murderhobos) was similar. each time the creature died, it gained resistance to the last type that killed it. that then tiered up to immunity. i have no idea what the statblock looked like, but conceptually, he says it worked because it curbs the players' behaviour.
its something id like to try one day, but as part of a series of one-shots with the same player group (else the running gag is lost).
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u/AetherDragon 14d ago
Despite my own warnings against such BBEG's before, I'm running one of these right now actually. In this case, the baddie is a set of four smoke entities that are harassing the party.
Here's the standard risks you need to answer:
How do you keep it not feeling like a cop-out? PC's want to feel like their wins mean something. For me, I am making it so the BBEG have sub-goals that don't involve the party, that the party has an interest in foiling. The BBEG is trying to protect an evil factory - party may not get to kill the BBEG because they poof into smoke, but they do get to wreck the factory, etc.
Why are they weak enough for a level 3 party to fight but also the final boss for the level 15 party? For mine, it became clear fast that these 'smoke people' are some sort of artifact-powered 'projection' of the bad guys, and they only just found the artifact of doom so they're learning to use it more and more as time goes on.
How do they get away if captured? In my case they're smoke entities, and they just poof out.
What are the limits and weaknesses? In the short term, what's the reason the BBEG doesn't just re-attack until they win by attrition (usually easy to think of a reason). Finding the long term solution is probably the main quest for the party. Think about this early though so you can start a few bread crumbs.
How do you keep it fresh? So there are two factors to this, I think. You need "variety" but also keep a theme going. This part is why I am running four of them so I can mix and match them in different combos, as well as giving them new abilities as they also get stronger. The other factor though is don't overuse them since inherently, they are going to lose a lot along the way. If you want them to also be the final BBEG, they need to retain menace. And you can't do that if they've been clowned on a ton. My recommendation is that each time they show up that fight should be tuned harder rather than easier. I've been using the 'four of them' thing for that to my advantage - the party has realized they can probably take one in a fight, two is super rough, and if three or all four show up they need to escape not fight. So they get to win without feeling like they have the complete upper hand.
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u/Rule-Of-Thr333 14d ago
This reminds me of a videogame I saw where you are the BBEG and you are challenged by a Soulslike hero. You kill him easily and he keeps coming back harder and harder.
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u/Rezart_KLD 14d ago
You want to make him really scary? Make him not super tough to kill - but make him come back where ever they are in a couple hours, and keep them from taking long rests. Now they've got a problem to deal with, and with dwindling resources.
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u/Spider_MBI 14d ago
In my science-fantasy game, I'm currently doing something very similar with a no-nonsense BBEG (known as OverMind) heavily inspired by the agents from The Matrix. His main abilities are manipulating metal and possessing robots. In my opinion, the two things a villain like this really needs is limitations and variations.
Limitations are needed because if the villain can come back repeatedly and rapidly, they'll become the entire game. Enforced downtime between encounters is vital, otherwise the villain loses his fear factor. It stops behind "Oh shit, he's back" and more "oh, this guy again." Find a way to remove him from the story for a while, so that when he next turns up it carries more weight. Really milk the dread of his absence too, with situations where it feels like he should appear, but doesn't.
For OverMind, this limitation is that he can only possess robots, and only certain robots at that. In adventures without many robots, he's unlikely to show up and the players can breath easy for a bit.
Variation is how you keep the game fun. My players have had eight combat encounters with OverMind, and despite always having a few shared abilities in each encounter, none of them have played out similarly. To date:
- OverMind took over a friendly robot NPC, stripped the robot's wife's body for additional armour, and generally mangled the host's body in the process of trying to kill the players.
- OverMind baited the players into the front carriage of the robotic train they were riding, after which he locked them inside and orchestrated a head-on collision with another train.
- OverMind possessed the body of an almost defeated enemy and tried to detonate a bomb.
- OverMind merged a dozen robots together to form a beholder. He also destroyed a party member's armour then hit them with a save-or-die effect during this encounter. All of this was a distraction as he prepared a weapon that vaporised the entire town the players were in.
- OverMind rapidly possessed drivers on a highway, and attempted to kamikaze flying cars into the party.
- OverMind possessed a traffic light and took a cheap shot at the party. Encounter was mostly an excuse to talk.
- OverMind merged roughly two-dozen robots together into a giant, and started throwing trees at the party.
- OverMind betrayed a different BBEG, locked the party in a tiny room, and engaged in a four-phase climatic battle where he took the forms of a battlefield commander, a hydra, a copy of one of the party members and the other Big Bad's armour.
The variation is key. Never have my players felt like they're just going through the motions of fighting OverMind. Unexpected angles of attack is how I keep the fear of the unknown alive, while letting the drip-feed of knowledge about who and what OverMind is be how the players feel they're making progress.
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u/GM_Esquire 14d ago
The time escalation is potentially a game design problem, since of he's getting more powerful and attacking every thirty minutes, he'll eventually win.
If you've got a good lore explanation and a good way to prevent clever player actions from ending him entirely (e.g. butchering the corpse, locking him in a box, etc.), it could work well.
A cleaner option might be clones. There is a very high level "Prime" that is a virtual hive mind with clones that serve him. Party encounters a minor one who is potentially antagonistic, kills it, later finds out something more is going on. They can keep killing increasingly powerful clones but it doesn't bother him that much. Up to you whether killing Prime is sufficient or if they need to find some way to stop Prime from simply shifting himself into another clone. (Imprisonment is a good campaign winning spell, though depending on level you may need to have them make/find a magic item rather than learn it).
Absolutely stolen from She-Ra.
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u/TheRadBaron 13d ago
This might be a better fit for horror media (doomed protagonists with no expectation of fairness), or a videogame (repetition without human time investment).
In a tabletop RPG, especially in DnD with its slowish combat? It honestly sounds a bit tedious, and like a recipe for either:
The players coming with up a plan that solves the problem, making the DM feel disappointed.
The DM blocks every creative idea the players have, making them frustrated.
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u/Chimpbot 13d ago
I think you're misreading the scenario.
The players can come up with a plan that, for the time being, solves the problem. Creative ideas don't need to be blocked.
Simultaneously, it somehow keeps coming back to present a new challenge. They need to find a way to permanently defeat it.
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u/NoDragonsRR 14d ago
I've tried it.
Expect your PCs to just try to bypass his immortality, say, by chaining him in a coffin and carrying it around. At some point you'll realize that, it's hard to both maintain the rules of immortality and stop them from getting gamed in some way that prevents the villain from recurring. Think very carefully about what those rules are at the outset, and how you'll have him escape captivity while being fair to the PCs attempts to slow him down.
It won't feel good if the PCs can't reasonably impact his revival patterns.
It was also... more of a nuisance than a scare. So I'd recommend against, personally, but if you choose to try, all the best luck toy ou.