How would you play off a evil (or even good) powerful NPC that constantly tracks the party without making it neither boring or repetitive and also more "natural" if it makes sense.
I was thinking of maybe a Nemesis type of presuer but in a more golem form that will relentlessly track down the party and kill/capture them.
Anyone have any other good ideas on how to play it off?
>I was thinking of maybe a Nemesis type of presuer but in a more golem form that will relentlessly track down the party and kill/capture them.
http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Inevitable
>>47913962
Yea but thats more focused against evil or law breaking characters. Plus the presuer i was thinking of using was created by the BBEG to hunt down a group of goody two shoe Players.
>>47913918
Watch the terminator. And predator
>>47914037
So take the statblocks, reverse the alignments and give them new names. Wow, that was hard.
>>47913918
>>47913918
>PCs
>Smart enough to run away
>Lawful good but also edgy Paladin has triggering fear of skeletons
Time to break out the BONE ZONE!!
Watch Terminator 1 and 2, and play metroid fusion
Also, don't feel like he has to show up everywhere. Perhaps once every two or three sessions. And don't pull punches, demonstrate its overwhelming once in a non-lethal way, then start fucking PCs if they refuse to run.
>>47915133
>and play metroid fusionThere are currently at least ten Samus Arans onboard this ship.
>>47915133
> And don't pull punches, demonstrate its overwhelming once in a non-lethal way
I remember a DM who would play a BBEG like a edgy anime anti-hero who would constantly kick our asses with bullshit reasoning and then spare us all the time with edgy excuses like
>You need to train harder maggot
>You don't earn the right to die
>Let you remember this day and tremble before me
And then like that he would vanish or run off or some dumb shit and leave us there back down to negative health or lower and then we would get our health back like almost to easily
I left after the third time this happened and realized that the DM wouldn't actually kill us with this edgelord
>>47915291
That's pretty shitty. But so is springing an undefeatable enemy on a party without warning
>>47915449
A good warning of a powerful enemy would be dead bodies, loud horrible sounds and even a signature of the enemy if they are intelligent enough for it and its there style
Having one of those pop out of thin air or crash through a wall/ceiling/floor without any clue or even idea of him appearing is just bad DMing
>>47915518
Not the guy you're responding to, but I find "not really subtle at all" clues like these not to be enough for most players.
>>47915534
Well what kind of clues would players most recognize easily??
>>47915633
Beating beaten up and/or killed.
Or having their gear stolen or destroyed, but that one's less immediately applicable.
Again, at least in my experience, most players seem to think that NPCs exist to show off how badass they, the Heroes, are. Just because your monster or BBEG went through a pile of elite soldiers doesn't mean anything, because after all, the 4-6 of them are way tougher.
>>47915656
So more like, make it personal like for say, the big strong killing machine had the ability to steal power from one of the players magical items, making them useless and him getting its ability
>>47913918
The absolute first thing you need to, OP, is make sure your players will run away. A lot of players just assume that the DM will only throw them at things they can overcome, because that's usually how games work. You need to break them of this. Tell them they can always run, let them know that sometimes running is the best option.
Second, they need to know WHEN to run. They should know that when the beastie shows up, it's time to go. The monster needs to be threatening, overwhelmingly powerful, and/or horrifying to behold. Players may choose to fight Kirby and get punched through the planet's core, but they need to know about that part beforehand. Kill someone they know is powerful, destroy a city single handed, or whatever else you can to demonstrate that your monster is not to be fucked with.
Finally, don't use it too often. It may be tracking them, but it shouldn't show up so much as to become a chore to run from. The players will get used to it, and it won't frighten them anymore. They'll just be running because they have to at that point.
Oh, and do eventually let them have a climactic showdown with the thing where they finally beat it. That's always a great feeling.
>>47915633
Could go the FFVII route and have him easily kill something that the players themselves would find challenging or impossible to defeat
>>47913918
Here's what I would do.
Make it a fairly tough elite, that the players totally can beat if they actually try at least a a a bit, but when they do it... they don't get exp.
For killing this thing, they suffer exp/stat drain. And it can resurrect itself and keep tracking them, and also has means of escaping means of imprisonment that aren't high-level spells or powerful artifacts worthy of their own quest chain.
After second or third encounter, they will run like crazy.
How about a really really really really slow moving ghost that is invincible and immune to any effects short of a gods intervention that can instant kill the players if they touch him
At first they will call bullshit before realizing that the thing moves a feet per round and travels half a mile per hour and will easily escape. Until they forget about it and it eventually catches up to them at the worst of times
Fun but fair
>>47916520
Been playing spelunky?
>>47916669
A little, but do you think its a good idea?
>>47916784
It could end up being more comical than scary, past the very first exposureuntil it inexplicably starts moving a little faster
>>47916852
>>47916852
oooohhhh, maybe the higher the party average level, the faster it gets until its as fast as a running man, chasing them in there lvl 20's
>>47914175
Can you explain that again?
Because I got my dick caught in the stat block.
>>47916520
I forgot to mention this but the concept already exists, sort of, look up living sphere of annihilation
>>47913918
If you don't want to make it too annoying for the players while still threatening the party, you could have it keyed to the characters.
So like if John's elf dies and he rolls up a dwarf, the thing's still after the other original party members but ignores the dwarf.
Or it could be sapient and sort-of reasonable.
"I was sent to kill Marcus the paladin. I see a man who fell trying to serve the greater good. Catch you later."
>>47913918
My current campaign had an antagonistic NPC sergeant get left for dead by one of the players. He was pretty memorable, so I pulled some strings and had him return as a Revenant. He's blended back into the military, and is deadset on revenge.
He's got very vivid, hateful memories of his brief, fatal time with the players, and since it matches with his callous demeanor it lends him a certain level of subterfuge. Combined with his status, I gave him a variety of angles with which to hunt down the player.
He's been killed once, but there's still a chance he'll come back because Revenants are fun.
Keep a background tab on the pursuer as the players travel, and slowly move him/her/it along behind them, at a reasonable pace depending on the things ability to track the players. Don't have it constantly on their heels, since it would be unfair if the players successfully lose it, only for it to be right behind them the minute they enter the next city. If you don't mind this pursuer mingling with ordinary citizens in the world, the party could even discover their pursuer has found what city they are in, but is questioning the citizens, or just roaming the city in search of them, so they have to keep their heads down.
Also a really good way to ensure this pursuer keeps relevancy and threat is to have it show up at least once in the worst possible situation. For example, say the party has been on a quest to take down a corrupt baron and his tyrannical city guard, and they have torn through his troops and are now in a heated battle within the baron's mansion, facing the baron, and perhaps his last few soldiers. It all goes normally as they players are in pitched combat, when suddenly the doors explode into splinters as their pursuer has finally found them again.
>>47913918
I did this once in a FATE game. Pretty nifty idea, actually, in that the pursuer couldn't be defeated by conventional means, and the party didn't know its weakness.
It was an efreet who was entirely made up of fire, so it had no physical form to damage. The only way to defeat it was to completely submerge it in water. Unfortunately, the party operated in the mid-west of the United States, so there was very little of that, and the thing was a lot more powerful than them in terms of raw strength.
They finally defeated it by luring it to a pool and managing to shove it inside.Too bad the guy who summoned the efreet can always just call on another one
other than making some sadistic fuck like ramsay bolton from GoT, i'd make someone who is sarcastic, absent minded, somewhat easy to trick but retardedly strong as fuck -- someone who can travel faster than anyone and literally kill them one hit.
>>47915702
Do this OP. This is good advice.
>>47920003
That sounds interesting, it becomes a matter of who sent it and why.
Also OP,
Don't overuse the pursuer, it's very easy to do but it loses the tension very fast.
>>47916520
Makes me think of Wizardry 4. I think I'll use something like that.
>>47922847
Sounds like the Phantom Pain Man on fire
Would having the powerful character be terrible with directions help limit the frequency of encounters while still keeping said character dedicated to the hunt and hostile towards the PCs?
Also what sort of signs could be used to alert players that such a threat is in the area?
>>47926319
Maybe have it be that rather than the pursuer be bad at pursuing, he has multiple targets besides the party, so if they get far enough away or cover their tracks well enough, he'll go "fuck it" and start working on a different target, then come back later.
>>47913918
A BBEG candidate chasing you for their personal artifact of power. Let them have it long enough and they become BBEG tier. The PCs have to play strategic keep away while carrying a beacon power artifact. Run away too fast and the pursuer starts rampaging to get more power to increase pursuit speed or power a teleport.
Being from another dimension, the pursuer experiences time differently in this reality. To him, all encounters with the part are a single moment, but the party experience his presence differently, with him seeming to appear at random, remain unseen for weeks or even months, disappear in to thin air mid confrontation, or sport injuries the party has not yet inflicted on him.
>>47926319
Give him a distinct method. Alternatively, take a line from the Italians.
>[...] the ways of assassination -- poison, strangulation, or a steel blade -- were the same. And when dealt out to public figures, or for reasons of state, death was often a theatre of ignominy, with bodies hanged from the windows of government buildings or cast like carrion into central squares. In cities where the tight community and the individual were closely joined, punishment for capital crimes against the prince or public good had to be bloody and had to be seen to be so.
>A little later, as though performing a well-known ritual, two men stripped the dead Count [Girolamo Riario] of his clothing and threw his body down into the principal piazza, where a crowd quickly collected to hail the deed and offer kisses to the conspirators. Once Caterina Sforza Riario and her children, who had been in another part of the palace, where taken prisoner, a mob sacked the building and an immense fortune, most of it in jewels, vanished.
>[Duke] Giovanni Andrea's body was seized upon by boys, pulled jeeringly out into the streets, and dragged through the city, pelted with stones, beaten, and slashed with knives. It was then pulled along to his house to be hung upside down, next to a prominent window. Taken down the next day and by now headless, the corpse was again dragged through the streets. The authorities had removed the head, saving it for a later ritual. In an exercise of traditional symbolism, the sinning right hand was cut off, burned, and nailed to a column in a central square. A poem of the day claims that a few people ate bits of Giovanni Andrea's heart, liver, and hands. Whatever was left of the corpse was finally fed to pigs.
Once the character has been introduced to the character, along with his motives for killing the party, they'll be quick to pin any prominent murders/assassinations on him. Useful for paranoia, as he doesn't need to do all the brutalizing himself.
>>47926319
>>47926407
I'm a fan of slow, unstoppable things. So, like, a golem with a bum leg. Or no legs. Just make it slow, or bored about chasing. Vampires would be pretty chill about chasing stuff. I mean, they have endless amounts of time to do so.
>>47913918
why did they put clothes on the Nemesis BOW platform, anyhow? It's not a soldier, it's fucking ordinance.
>>47927559
Its a "power container" or something like that.
Basically its acts a both a protective trenchcoat as well as a constrictor so it doesn't have any unwanted mutations and becomes a uncontrollable B O W
>>47913918
Quick make a Nemesis is love Nemesis is life greentext
>>47913918
I have a PC pursed by something like that. he is the embodiment of a curse and it's goal is to devour everything about the character.
He doesn't actively try to hurt anything that is not the character, but its mere persence erase her from the memories of anybody that could know her existence.
>The PC had to re-encounter the party two times already.
>>47917149
Monkey take creature
Monkey reverse alignment
>>47913918
Been playing around with this idea a lot since I've set up a character like that in my own campaign idea, and while it's nothing that hasn't been said in the thread:
>Dread
The PCs aren't going to be able to win a resource war with the pursuer, for one reason or another. Maybe they can win a battle with the pursuer, or make a decisive escape, but the victories are always small or superficial until a permanent solution can be found. You can do this in a bunch of ways-- most obvious way to do it is to just ape Nemesis or Terminator, and it'll work great, but there are other ways to do it, too. For example, my pursuer NPC isn't exceptionally strong or durable, but he doesn't doesn't stay dead, and he has his own machinations-- his presence is a sign of worse things to come.
>Timing
The best way to use a pursuer is to have them show up at the worst possible moment. Let's say the party is navigating a maze and they reach an intersection, when the pursuer blocks the exit out. Or maybe they're in the middle of a big battle, when all of a sudden they see a familiar silhouette making a lumbering beeline for their location. The timing causes panic, and forces the party into unique situations. Just having him show up wherever lessens the pursuer's ability to do this.
>Appearance and Behavior
Have them be fucking scary. Take some cues from horror movies-- how they look is important, otherwise the Terminator endoskeleton wouldn't be so iconic, but actions speak the loudest. One of the first things the SA-X does in Metroid Fusion is demonstrate its power over the player by blowing a wall apart, before turning to flash an ominous glare at the player-- not Samus, mind, but the person playing-- before calmly leaving. No rush, just a calm, calculated predatory gait. That kind of stuff leaves an impression.
>>47928416
>Importance
Kind of a self-explanatory one, but if they're just some scary guy, no one's going to give a fuck about the pursuer. Tie him to the story in some way-- maybe a righteous hunter gone mad, or an aberration from beyond time summoned by the dark lord.
>Misc ideas
I was thinking about having my own pursuer have their own leitmotif to signify their presence without having to announce it. It's a little meta, but I think it'd be neat, almost like the PCs can feel it coming.
Anyways, that's my two cents about it.
>>47928505
Any suggestions for the leitmotif? I can think of a few, but I'm afraid they're a bit too vidya.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EbXcDV5zoE
