long-term boss balance

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.

If they are NPCs, you could always simiply add or remove class levels whenever you think the PCs should be able to defeat them. Stat them out at say, level 15, and if you want the characters to defeat them at level 10 later in the campaign, just take of a few levels. A level 12 sorc will kill a level 6 PC just as well as a level 15 one, your palyers probably wont notice if the level changes. If they do, you could always say he was level-drained.

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Originally Posted by Ilmryn

If they are NPCs, you could always simiply add or remove class levels whenever you think the PCs should be able to defeat them. Stat them out at say, level 15, and if you want the characters to defeat them at level 10 later in the campaign, just take of a few levels. A level 12 sorc will kill a level 6 PC just as well as a level 15 one, your palyers probably wont notice if the level changes. If they do, you could always say he was level-drained.

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This was the first way i thought of to deal with the problem, and funtionally it does work the best, but i was trying to avoid that as the campaign aims to be fairly sand-box and thus i would feel like i was cheating my players a bit if i was editing the significant npcs combat stats based on "Do i think this is dramatically appropriate? Do i like the way this means this npc is going to die/effect the game world"

Its not horrible if I do of course, I believe myself to be a good enough DM to be able to accurately judge these things, but of course I would think that. I would just rather avoid it.

If you want to avoid "cheating", simply strt them at a lower level than you expect the pcs to beat them at, and then siply have them gain levels over the course of the campaign. If pcs can gain xp and levels, then it would be logical that npcs can do so as well.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ilmryn

If you want to avoid "cheating", simply strt them at a lower level than you expect the pcs to beat them at, and then siply have them gain levels over the course of the campaign. If pcs can gain xp and levels, then it would be logical that npcs can do so as well.

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I'm embarrassed not to have thought of this myself, thank you, consider this thread answered.