Big Bad Evil Guys – Making Tough Individual Enemies

Sometimes you don’t want to be bogged down dealing with multiple enemies that try to out-flank your players. Maybe it’s the end of a dungeon, and they need to have a final boss fight to clear the area for good. Maybe you just want to put the fear of losing their characters into the forefront of your players’ minds. Big bad evil guys, or BBEGs, are your go-to solution for this kind of problem as a GM.

But how do you make one bad guy a match for multiple players? Your players are probably working their hardest to become the leanest, meanest killing machines in the wasteland, after all. There are three main methods you have at your disposal as a GM for making enemies tougher.

First off, you havearmor. Having enemies with a high damage threshold can prevent characters from doing much damage, making them last longer and tougher to beat in a fight. Keep in mind that depending on your rules, armor may degrade. Natural armor, however, is immune to degradation, and is excellent for making enemies tougher to beat regardless of your rule-set.

The second easy way you have to make enemies tougher is increasing their damage per wound. Damage per wound is effectively a measure of the amount of damage that has to be dealt to an enemy before you can leave a lasting effect. Don’t just increase this willy-nilly! Damage per wound for characters and creatures corresponds to their physical size; larger enemies have a higher damage per wound value, and smaller enemies have a smaller one. For example, most alicorns and buffalo are about 1.5-2x the size of an average pony, going by volume (Not by height). Their damage per wound value at the same level is correspondingly higher, usually by about 2 points. This size increase can be extrapolated based on volume. For every factor of two larger than an average pony your boss character/creature is you should increase its damage per wound by two.

A manticore, for example, is between 8(2^3) and 32 (2^5) times the size of a pony. As a result, its damage per wound should be between 16 and 20. Be aware of the limitations of this method – starting at damage per wound 30, characters and creatures become one MFD step easier to hit. They continue to become one MFD step easier for each four points above that, i.e. 2 MFD steps easier to hit at damage per wound of 34, 3 MFD steps easier at 38, etc.

The increase in damage per wound for player characters as they level is a metaphorical representation of their growth – as a character increases in level, they literally become larger than life in terms of how they receive damage. Be aware of that fact if you’re increasing the damage per wound of character or creatures which aren’t pony-sized, especially if you’re doing it just to make that opponent tougher to beat.

The third and final way you have of making your big-bad tough to kill is their endurance score. This little number influences quite a lot of things, not the least of which are the points at which your big-bad becomes crippled or dead. Giving them a really high endurance score may not suit your needs as well as modifying the cripple and maim points for your boss – don’t be afraid to give your boss characters and creatures abilities similar to the Life Giver or Zebra Augmented perks or traits. Making creatures and characters that don’t respond to damage in ways the players are familiar with is really great at invoking a sense of challenge, or (more often than not) abject terror!

Hopefully these tips help you out when making your boss fights. For more situational difficulties, consider using your environment to make the fight more interesting for players. Stationary obstacles, traps, illusions and special abilities can all help a boss to avoid damage while thwarting player character attempts to push through.

Group Initiative

For the GM, particularly when dealing with large numbers of enemies, it is simply impractical to roll and keep track of initiative for every single enemy. Grouping together enemies by some common characteristic can help accelerate combat drastically. This should be handled with care; it’s not recommended for GMs to roll all of their forces’ initiatives as a single group, because that can end up simply annihilating the player characters before they’ve even had a chance to retaliate. Instead, break things up so that each combat round has a chance of getting an even mix of player actions and enemy actions. Having several initiative groups of 4-6 mooks each with a single stronger combatant who gets his own initiative works particularly well; if you have enemies of more than two clear types you may want to simply group them together based on power and ability.

Initiative groups should be made such that they help you as a GM to minimize the time spent rolling for each combatant.

Fireball Formation

Armies tend to march in lines; navies and air forces tend to fly in formation. This is rather silly, when you think about it, because it makes it easy for would-be assailants to get a clear shot at multiple combatants (which is why it usually only occurs when they’re parading far away from any sort of battlefield). That sums up fireball formation in a nutshell – when you bunch ponies or other characters and creatures together, it becomes much more likely that even misfires will hit someone or something important. When you have large number of characters trapped in a small environment or forced to fight into a narrow passageway, they’re moving into fireball formation. Such characters are much more vulnerable to area of effect weapons and spells. While not practical for all enemy types – intelligent and well trained combatants would know better than to do this – if you know your players have Area of Effect weapons or spells, giving them opportunities to use ’em by putting your hostile forces into fireball formation can be very satisfying for everyone involved.

Basically: Fireball formation enables combatants on both sides of a combat to very quickly increase the death toll and finish combat more rapidly. As such, it is a valuable GM tool – if a combat is moving too slowly or taking too long because you have too many combatants on the field, the use of area of effect spells (or grenades or similar weapons) is a quick and easy solution to your time crunch.

“They were ponies, once…”

Lots of things can happen out in the wastelands that are worse than death. Things that can break ponies’ minds, destroy who they are down to their very souls, and warp their bodies beyond recognition. Always bear in mind, GMs, and never let your players forget that Fallout Equestria has a very high magical and radioactive background count, and that most of the water supply is corrupted with the horrifically mutagenic taint. Sure, there are ways to escape the radioactive heat – but not forever. Eventually one of them won’t get so lucky.

And then you’ll be glad you read through this section.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 910