How do you create villains the players can love to hate over a period of time? I'm planning on a necromancer being my players first villain but I'm afraid If they face off with him they won't recognize the fight is not meant to be won, they should retreat and live to fight another day, gain the upper hand by other means. Which is making me think to avoid an encounter with him at all until the final battle, but if they have no interactions with villain up to that point why would they care?
which leads to another question: How do you feel about "unwinnable" fights/encounters? How do you handle them? Is this a question I should ask my players? I am going to try to explain to them that I believe failure is a good thing (especially in D&D where dice are involved) and necessary to tell a good story. Overcoming obstacles and all that... They are all relatively new players and all their experience with D&D is first hand. (been playing for 9 months in our first ever campaign currently with someone else as the DM). I also don't want to dictate their successes and failures either though, If they encounter the villain and kill him the first time they meet him somehow, so be it.
So how do you make your long lasting villains that your party loves to hate?
If the villain is killed, you could have them revived off-screen. Imagine the confusion and surprise the players will feel when they encounter it again later on. Even if the villain is low level and doesn't have spells to revive it, who knows what sort of magical items it has? A ring that brings the wearer back to life an hour after death, but only has one charge and then it's no longer magical is a good low level solution. Most parties won't go to burying the boss but just loot them and leave the corpse to rot.
You could also have the villain hang back and accomplish some goal while it's minions tie your heroes down, then it leaves and they are unable to pursue it (teleportation, really narrow hallway that's crowded with it's minions, etc.) so they feel like the villain got away and will be more interested in hunting it down. Then let rumors reach their ears about the shenanigans it's been up to since it escaped.
Just some suggestions, there's a lot of things you as the DM can do to ensure a villain survives or comes back after a party believed they dealt with it.
Yeah, the old “you’re beneath me, minions deal with them” then he leaves is good. At first, he probably doesn’t even know who they are, but they know him. It won’t be until the party screws up his plans a couple times that he’d bother with them. And don’t have him show himself to them often. Let the party deal with his lieutenants for a while, so when he does show up it’s more of a big deal. And have him escape 2-3 times, to build up the frustration, which will mean a bigger payoff when they finally do win.
Make him responsible for the death of an NPC the party really likes to make it personal. If he knows any of them by name, he might throw a sending at them to taunt them occasionally. Have his undead minions attack with little notes wrapped around the skeleton’s bones.
My experience is that villains the PCs love to hate are mostly created by accident -- you use a villain, he survives for whatever reason, you either bring him back or players decide they really want to chase him down.
My experience with unwinnable fights is that they result in TPKs or fiascos (depending on whether the fight was actually unwinnable), as players don't magically know that you've decided a fight is unwinnable and thus tend to fight to the last rather than fleeing or surrendering. This is not always true, but it's true often enough.
I recommend early interactions with the villain involve him having goals that don't actually require him to fight the PCs. For example, an early encounter might be that the necromancer plans to kill the local duke, and brought along a mess of zombies as a distraction. You decide ahead of time it will take him two rounds to kill the duke, after which he will dimension door away (leaving his disposable zombies behind for the PCs to mop up). If the PCs can deal with the zombies before that happens, they disrupt his plan and he leaves early.
I agree that unwinnable fights are problematic in D&D. Story-wise, they make so much sense, you would think that players would respect them, but no, they either think of a way to prevent the escape you planned, or willingly submit to a TPK.
In order to build rapport with a villain you don’t intend to fight until later, you can make him very communicative, and unwilling to hurt the party; living in his own reality where they all get along. As they thwart more and more of his plans, he takes more and more interest in them. He might hide in the warehouse and Thaumaturgy his voice to boom through the room so he can talk to them, but stay hidden. He might send a Zombie to their tavern with a note written just to them. He might send gifts like an enchanted mirror so he can talk to them, and he might mention interactions with them they didn’t know they had. He’d reveal things like “That was a lovely dress you wore to the market today. I know I already complimented it, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since then.” The only person to compliment it today at the market was an old man pushing a farm produce wagon. He had used disguise self and interacted with them and they didn’t know it.
A suggestion is secondary NPCs. Introduce your big bad, but have two NPCs on stand by if needed. If your players are stubbornly trying to fight him and losing you can introduce a good npc of roughly his strength as a rival to save your group. They probably should be a Druid, cleric, or Paladin so they can stabilize your party after chasing him off and the Npc can be your hook to the villain, they can then give your party objectives to help the savior weaken/take the villain down. The savior can also be killed off or incapacitated further down the quest chain to give your party motivation to defeat your villain and also explain why s/he isn't there for the final battle. On the other hand if your party is doing too well against your villain you can have a secondary villain appear to assist him like a second in command. This one will be weaker and simpler than your big bad but the added help should be enough to turn the tables on your party and the good npc can still step in to prevent a TPK if necessary, the extra villain can later be killed off as milestone villain.
How do you create villains the players can love to hate over a period of time? I'm planning on a necromancer being my players first villain but I'm afraid If they face off with him they won't recognize the fight is not meant to be won, they should retreat and live to fight another day, gain the upper hand by other means. Which is making me think to avoid an encounter with him at all until the final battle, but if they have no interactions with villain up to that point why would they care?
which leads to another question: How do you feel about "unwinnable" fights/encounters? How do you handle them? Is this a question I should ask my players? I am going to try to explain to them that I believe failure is a good thing (especially in D&D where dice are involved) and necessary to tell a good story. Overcoming obstacles and all that... They are all relatively new players and all their experience with D&D is first hand. (been playing for 9 months in our first ever campaign currently with someone else as the DM). I also don't want to dictate their successes and failures either though, If they encounter the villain and kill him the first time they meet him somehow, so be it.
So how do you make your long lasting villains that your party loves to hate?
If the villain is killed, you could have them revived off-screen. Imagine the confusion and surprise the players will feel when they encounter it again later on. Even if the villain is low level and doesn't have spells to revive it, who knows what sort of magical items it has? A ring that brings the wearer back to life an hour after death, but only has one charge and then it's no longer magical is a good low level solution. Most parties won't go to burying the boss but just loot them and leave the corpse to rot.
You could also have the villain hang back and accomplish some goal while it's minions tie your heroes down, then it leaves and they are unable to pursue it (teleportation, really narrow hallway that's crowded with it's minions, etc.) so they feel like the villain got away and will be more interested in hunting it down. Then let rumors reach their ears about the shenanigans it's been up to since it escaped.
Just some suggestions, there's a lot of things you as the DM can do to ensure a villain survives or comes back after a party believed they dealt with it.
Yeah, the old “you’re beneath me, minions deal with them” then he leaves is good. At first, he probably doesn’t even know who they are, but they know him. It won’t be until the party screws up his plans a couple times that he’d bother with them.
And don’t have him show himself to them often. Let the party deal with his lieutenants for a while, so when he does show up it’s more of a big deal. And have him escape 2-3 times, to build up the frustration, which will mean a bigger payoff when they finally do win.
Make him responsible for the death of an NPC the party really likes to make it personal.
If he knows any of them by name, he might throw a sending at them to taunt them occasionally.
Have his undead minions attack with little notes wrapped around the skeleton’s bones.
My experience is that villains the PCs love to hate are mostly created by accident -- you use a villain, he survives for whatever reason, you either bring him back or players decide they really want to chase him down.
My experience with unwinnable fights is that they result in TPKs or fiascos (depending on whether the fight was actually unwinnable), as players don't magically know that you've decided a fight is unwinnable and thus tend to fight to the last rather than fleeing or surrendering. This is not always true, but it's true often enough.
I recommend early interactions with the villain involve him having goals that don't actually require him to fight the PCs. For example, an early encounter might be that the necromancer plans to kill the local duke, and brought along a mess of zombies as a distraction. You decide ahead of time it will take him two rounds to kill the duke, after which he will dimension door away (leaving his disposable zombies behind for the PCs to mop up). If the PCs can deal with the zombies before that happens, they disrupt his plan and he leaves early.
I agree that unwinnable fights are problematic in D&D. Story-wise, they make so much sense, you would think that players would respect them, but no, they either think of a way to prevent the escape you planned, or willingly submit to a TPK.
In order to build rapport with a villain you don’t intend to fight until later, you can make him very communicative, and unwilling to hurt the party; living in his own reality where they all get along. As they thwart more and more of his plans, he takes more and more interest in them. He might hide in the warehouse and Thaumaturgy his voice to boom through the room so he can talk to them, but stay hidden. He might send a Zombie to their tavern with a note written just to them. He might send gifts like an enchanted mirror so he can talk to them, and he might mention interactions with them they didn’t know they had. He’d reveal things like “That was a lovely dress you wore to the market today. I know I already complimented it, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since then.” The only person to compliment it today at the market was an old man pushing a farm produce wagon. He had used disguise self and interacted with them and they didn’t know it.
A suggestion is secondary NPCs. Introduce your big bad, but have two NPCs on stand by if needed. If your players are stubbornly trying to fight him and losing you can introduce a good npc of roughly his strength as a rival to save your group. They probably should be a Druid, cleric, or Paladin so they can stabilize your party after chasing him off and the Npc can be your hook to the villain, they can then give your party objectives to help the savior weaken/take the villain down. The savior can also be killed off or incapacitated further down the quest chain to give your party motivation to defeat your villain and also explain why s/he isn't there for the final battle. On the other hand if your party is doing too well against your villain you can have a secondary villain appear to assist him like a second in command. This one will be weaker and simpler than your big bad but the added help should be enough to turn the tables on your party and the good npc can still step in to prevent a TPK if necessary, the extra villain can later be killed off as milestone villain.
Thank you, great suggestions.