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elliott20
2007-03-08, 03:49 PM
I'm curious as to the complete trainwrecks of a BBEG you've ever seen. In my years, I've been responsible for coming up with BBEGs that were either just too absurd, too stupid, or too poorly executed.

Here are a few of them

The Zoo Keeper
Anyone whose ever watched futurama will know where this guy came from.

"He has a violent badger with a troubled past. An elephant who never forgets... TO KILLL!!!! and his secret weapon... citizen snips..."

He was just a high level druid with lots of summoning spells and had a decked out familar. As funny as his initial appearance was, he proved to be a pretty ineffective villain and he was just not a very interesting character beyond the first line gag.

OCD Villains

This one my friend was responsible for. He came up with an idea that the villain was severely OCD and would compulsively HAVE to put up slippers in his castle. This was initially introduced to give hte players a chance to exploit his weakness and use it against him. But after the 5th time we encountered that display of OCD, it just got really annoying.

Black Knight of Doomiest Darkest Hearts Angst

There was a while I was so hung up on writing the supremely dark and evil villain, that the villain ended up becoming more of a caricature than a serious villain. He was so over the top that eventually, one of my other gaming buddies brought him back in his campaign as an angsty, goth version of himself, fully letting him get lampooned for it. what made the parody even funnier was the fact that he was actually a very low level character who given the right amount of pushing, might make black guard one day but for now feels more like a Street fighter Dan. Speaking of which...

Dan Hibiki

Yes, he actually made it as part of the NPC villain cast in one game session. At first it was interesting, but then his antics got annoying really quickly.

pestilenceawaits
2007-03-08, 03:59 PM
I had a villain that was basically an anti-paladin (pre 3.0 blackguard) he was dark and fearsome but for some reason the PCs punched his ticket way to easy the first time against them they killed his mount (very easily) he came back with a dragon mount which they vorpaled in one round he ran away again to ambush them in a dark alley they did stone to mud and he made a series of very poor saving throws and ability checks and sunk up to his knees in mud which was promptly turned back into stone they then vorpaled him (I should have never introduced that sword) since they liked the guy (as a nemesis) and they had some history with him he was raised by his dark God as a death knight and was promptly turned by the cleric. so despite him being decently powerful he was useless and eventually he decided to cut his losses. (I have threatened to bring him back into our 3.5 game as an epic undead blackguard but it hasn't happened yet).

Dairun Cates
2007-03-08, 04:09 PM
You know. It's not really a bad concept, because the players loved him as a nemesis, but the first two times with him didn't turn out as well as hoped.

So, player takes a 3 point nemesis (supposedly stronger than the actual character and out to harm them). So, since their character is a mercenary, I create a higher level mercenary for them to fight. Theorhetically, an entire party should be fine against them. Now, being a ranged fighter in a modern campaign, they have good HP, but not incredibly high for a bad guy, but they can deal it out and are God in ranged combat. Kinda a half-way glass cannon with explosives.

First time he shows up. He takes out 1 party member. The other one puts up a decent fight and exchanges blows by holding a long drawn out sniper battle. But then, the robot runs up and punches him and does serious damage almost knocking him out. I underestimated his melee combat a bit. So much for a serious fight.

The second time they fought. It was in this cool zero G battle that ignored movement rules for being able to move in a straight line once or twice a round. Very fun idea. They start fighting. I've uped his melee a bit, he tricked the players into only bringing three of their people (out of 6, and one is a tech genius) and he has 5 mercenaries on his side. The mercenaries are weak, but the shocker was when the robot, who now has a bagette thats hard enough to be a great club, crits and does nearly full damage while his superstrength was activated. Unconscious in one hit on round 3.

He turned out to be really interesting in the long run, but Ranged fighter vs. Super Melee Fighter = bad idea.

evil
2007-03-08, 05:21 PM
My group fought a completely Unoriginal Lich with no backstory or reason to be doing what he's doing. We got him down to almost nothing, then he summoned a Fiendish Tyrannosaur and got a TPK.

MeklorIlavator
2007-03-08, 05:24 PM
Bragg the lesser from the Fallen angel one shot at wizards.

BBEG's first line should never be "Suffer the the wrath of X the Lesser", its really a mood killer.

Black Mage
2007-03-08, 05:29 PM
In a friends campaign, the BBEG was leading a horde of undead out of the underdark to take over the surface. Our party was captured by said BBEG. Escaped. Got killed in some tunnels getting away from him. BBEG finds our bodies. Then my friend says that the BBEG ressurected us for no reason at all. Just to let us escape and try to stop his plans. We all smacked him in the back of the head and told him we were done with that campaign unless he could figure out a way to continue it with a decent reason for our characters coming back. Not just because the lawful evil BBEG wants to give us a second chance. We never played that campaign again.

Jade_Tarem
2007-03-08, 05:37 PM
One time I had a brief backstory wherein two twins, one a paladin and the other a blackguard, killed each other in some grand war in the past. Now, times are tough and a group of clerics opted to go ahead and resurrect the good twin. The idea was that they screw up and resurrect the bad one, and then the bad guy could pick up his crusade of world domination through trickery (by people believing he was the good twin) and conquest. I got halfway through the backstory exposition (about to the part - "A team of clerics recovered the body of Erec the Pure") when one of my players said "lemme guess - it's the wrong twin." Ouch. Talk about predictable. That pretty much killed all the surprise and suspense. The campaign crashed very quickly.

silentknight
2007-03-08, 06:47 PM
Created an "origin of the world" myth that resulted in a primordial evil becoming bound into a mortal body and then exiled to a demiplane prison for all time. Seemed like a really good story, the players even liked it.

Well, there happens to be a cult that is dedicated to releasing this entity that is the embodiment of evil. One of the cultists, a powerful wizard, tracks down the prison demiplane and releases the BBEG.

Now, I had decided on a certain timeline that involved the entity traveling around the game world absorbing concentrations of evil, necromantic magics (such as undead or chunks of its primordial form still in existence) until it eventually had enough power to challenge (and defeat) the Gods. It was up to the characters to try to defeat the entity before it became too powerful.

And so they tracked it down with an ingenious combination of spells, long before it was powerful enough to even be a challenge to THEM, let alone the Gods. I don't think it lasted more than 4 rounds. I still cringe when I think about how ineffectual it was against that party.

Galathir
2007-03-09, 12:25 AM
I didnt' create this BBEG, but for a one-shot our DM created this extremely powerful Wizard Lich. Our party was level 15 and I think the Lich was around 19 or 20. I was playing a IotSFV, with Craft Contigiency (Very cheesy, I know, but we were just having fun). The Lich didn't even live to take an action. Surprise round, I disable all his buffs and his Prismatic wall, then killed him next with some kind of maximized empowered spell of something. The DM just shook his head and laughed.

Wippit Guud
2007-03-09, 12:51 AM
The Deadly Bulb!

Even as far as Tick villians go... he takes the pig...

LotharBot
2007-03-09, 01:29 AM
I didnt' create this BBEG, but for a one-shot our DM created this extremely powerful Wizard Lich....

I leaned over to tell my wife about this post, because I thought it was funny. She was reading the exact same post at the exact same time. Weird...

Anyway...

I thought Jon Irenicus (Baldurs Gate 2) was a really awful BBEG, though IMO it was more the execution (felt contrived and overdone) than the actual concept (powerful caster who wants to steal your soul.) But the worst was the guy from Dungeon Siege 2: the helpful old man NPC turns out to have been setting you up the whole time, and the game's cosmology requires you to let him go in a cutscene because there must be evil to balance your goodness. That's a god awful way to end a game.

The game I'm currently running had a great god-awful BBEG at the end of one chapter... we had an NPC sorcerer come along with us on a quest to rule another plane. He said he couldn't pull it off but he thought we could. Well, he detected as evil, and every member of the group independently came to the conclusion that he was going to backstab us at the end. So, we get to the end and our dwarf fighter AND our half-orc barbarian are both standing next to him, prepared to tackle him the moment he starts casting anything resembling a spell. If he'd gone invisible and been able to throw spells at us, he'd have been an interesting fight... but as it was, he was an afterthought to the fight before.

Thexare Blademoon
2007-03-09, 01:31 AM
who now has a bagette thats hard enough to be a great club

Um, wait, isn't a bagette a kind of bread? Or am I thinking of something else? :smallconfused:

Dhavaer
2007-03-09, 01:42 AM
Um, wait, isn't a bagette a kind of bread? Or am I thinking of something else? :smallconfused:

It must be dwarf bread.

TheOOB
2007-03-09, 01:45 AM
I had a BBEG once that was a split personality of a paladin...that didn't work well.

Krimm_Blackleaf
2007-03-09, 01:53 AM
One of the BBEG's in my campaign is, I'm beginning to suspect, a childish itch on the backs of the PC's backs. He just pops up randomly to blast a little bit, cackle, and leave. I gotta boost him in power, he's almost the same level as the PC's...He's also got to become more evil. He's only Chaotic Immature, he needs to be chaotic EVIL.

CASTLEMIKE
2007-03-09, 04:55 AM
I had a villain that was basically an anti-paladin (pre 3.0 blackguard) he was dark and fearsome but for some reason the PCs punched his ticket way to easy the first time against them they killed his mount (very easily) he came back with a dragon mount which they vorpaled in one round he ran away again to ambush them in a dark alley they did stone to mud and he made a series of very poor saving throws and ability checks and sunk up to his knees in mud which was promptly turned back into stone they then vorpaled him (I should have never introduced that sword) since they liked the guy (as a nemesis) and they had some history with him he was raised by his dark God as a death knight and was promptly turned by the cleric. so despite him being decently powerful he was useless and eventually he decided to cut his losses. (I have threatened to bring him back into our 3.5 game as an epic undead blackguard but it hasn't happened yet).


The +0 Soul Locked Template from Heroes of Horror is another nice way of bringing him back repeatedly.

Dairun Cates
2007-03-09, 05:09 AM
It must be dwarf bread.

Dwarf... Cafeteria. Same difference. It's a long running group gag that's become occassionally deadly.

BlueWizard
2007-03-09, 06:44 AM
I once had an Epic, invincible ogre-mage That I brought in just to taunt the players. The players ignored the speech I was set to give and zapped him with a disintgrate ray that overcame the Magic resistance, he then rolled a one on the save {the only way he could fail}, and threw my game for a loop. It was fun as I scrambled to reorganize the enemy, and the players loved foiling my bad guy before I could even start.
Okay, so not exactly the same, but it was a failed BBEG in my game.

Tobrian
2007-03-09, 07:37 AM
In a friends campaign, the BBEG was leading a horde of undead out of the underdark to take over the surface. Our party was captured by said BBEG. Escaped. Got killed in some tunnels getting away from him. BBEG finds our bodies. Then my friend says that the BBEG ressurected us for no reason at all. Just to let us escape and try to stop his plans. We all smacked him in the back of the head and told him we were done with that campaign unless he could figure out a way to continue it with a decent reason for our characters coming back. Not just because the lawful evil BBEG wants to give us a second chance. We never played that campaign again.

Perhaps the villain had a severe case of TV split personality, like the housewife/female assassin from Heroes? And his nice side resurrected you because he is trying to stop himself by getting adventurers like you to foil his plans and kill him in the end?

pestilenceawaits
2007-03-09, 10:35 AM
The +0 Soul Locked Template from Heroes of Horror is another nice way of bringing him back repeatedly.

Thanks I will take a look at it.:smallsmile:

kellandros
2007-03-09, 12:29 PM
Yes, I was that robot.

The indestructible loaf of bread was a fun weapon. It was my first introduction to the advantages of 2 handed weapons and big strength bonuses. If you want a real horror story, ask him about Critical Successes on disguise checks...

silentknight
2007-03-09, 01:24 PM
Dwarf Bread, as in war biscuits from Discworld? Baking is a dwarven martial art in Discworld!