Logician
2010-10-09, 09:25 PM
I'm soon going to be running the first session of the first campaign I've ever DMed soon, during this session I plan to introduce 2 major plot npcs. One is the "dragon" of one of the empires (the campaign features three such empires at war) who they will almost definitely fight later in the campaign, and the other they may or may not fight depending on how they go about things.
The problem is that i would like to stat these characters out before the session just in case some character goes Leeroy Jenkins, yet the offending party member should be either killed or forced to run in either case. The point is is that I'm not sure how late in the campaign i want the PCs to be capable of killing these characters, so i don't know how powerful to make them. I'm worried that if I overdo it, the characters may be unable to kill the npcs until far to late, and if i make them to weak they may be defeated to early.
So, how do you make your bosses who you don't want the PCs to defeat until later in the campaign balanced? I would like to keep things "open" and thus want to avoid just editing the npcs stats whenever i want.
In case one is wondering the party are all lvl 6 and highly under-optimized, a healer cleric, a half-dragon fighter, a warmage, some shadow-fey ranger (forget the name), a barb, and one who hasn't decided yet (but is considering monk).
the npcs in question would be a sorc (the one who the PCs may or may not fight) and I've yet to decide on the dragons, but he will be a fighter-type class.
The problem is that i would like to stat these characters out before the session just in case some character goes Leeroy Jenkins, yet the offending party member should be either killed or forced to run in either case. The point is is that I'm not sure how late in the campaign i want the PCs to be capable of killing these characters, so i don't know how powerful to make them. I'm worried that if I overdo it, the characters may be unable to kill the npcs until far to late, and if i make them to weak they may be defeated to early.
So, how do you make your bosses who you don't want the PCs to defeat until later in the campaign balanced? I would like to keep things "open" and thus want to avoid just editing the npcs stats whenever i want.
In case one is wondering the party are all lvl 6 and highly under-optimized, a healer cleric, a half-dragon fighter, a warmage, some shadow-fey ranger (forget the name), a barb, and one who hasn't decided yet (but is considering monk).
the npcs in question would be a sorc (the one who the PCs may or may not fight) and I've yet to decide on the dragons, but he will be a fighter-type class.