I once ran a bargest who spent so much time buffing a bunch of bugbear barbarians that by the time the PCs got to him, all he could do was levitate and throw thunderstones at the PCs.
The PCs had taken out goblin worgriders, hobgoblin pikers, and the bugbear ragers (enlarged and bull strengthed too!) with relative ease. The worgs pretty much ran away (I guess they're wiser than goblins!).
Easily the worst villain I've ever run is/was the 'Chak' from part 3 of the 1e module 'Needle'.
After a long struggle with a hideous maze filled with invisible disintegrations fields and fiendish traps, to dump the party on a brass dragon surrounded by some 300 man sized spiders who say 'we greet you with open legs. Gee Whiz.' sorta shattered the tension, to say nothing of the suspension of disbelief.
I actually had to SHOW THE PLAYERS the boxed text in the module to get them to believe I wasn't pulling their leg.
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The Grell priest in Night Below. Party blazed through the sneaky Shadow Dragon encounter, and scoffed at the Grell's pathetic flame strikes and whatnot, only to suffer the death of 10,000 saves-or-be-paralyzed from it's *minions.*
Stoopid multiple-attacking-save-or-die encounters. Grell, Ghouls, Carrion Crawlers. Just plain mean...
I once put an Eldritch Knight on the back of Huge Black Dragon, and the party 2-rounded it. And the EL was about 2 or 3 higher than the party level. And this was before the Goliath Ranger with Str 30+ and Paladin with Monkey-Gripped Fullblade (4d6?) could kill it.
Or the time the level 2 ranger & paladin charged a CR 8 Cave Troll and 1 rounded it (with a little help from a fiery archer....)
At least they taught me to DM better.
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aka Steven T. Helt
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I remember as third level characters,we once killed an illithid in the surprise round. Even better, there were only two of us, no one else got to go yet. He was talking to us - pointing out he knew where the others were hiding, when the fighter, hidden in a pile of gold and wearing a ring of mind-shielding, bursts out and crits the mindflayer with a longbow in mid-monologue. Then I charged it with a quarterstaff and crit it again. Dead!
That DM had bad luck with mind flayers. I recall over two campaigns hi illithids suffered indignant, rapid deaths three times before he wrote them out of the DnD game forever. Good DM, he didn't run them stupidly, just couldn't avoid crits and sad initiative rolls.
My worse villain is actually just a set of encounters (anvils will randomly fall from the sky, critting PCs with death from above, before a planned, re-occurring villain will not escape its first encounter with the PCs). My epic party this last year included a fatespinner bard, a raumathari battlemage (with an extra sudden quicken and three sudden maximizes) and a powergamer cleric (divine metamagic indeed). When they get to these doors protected by superpowerful outsiders, they open each door, launch the outsider and immediately doomspeak (held action), followed by a quickened disintegrate and a still-occurring implosion. CR21, CR23, CR24 - one after another, one per round.
That stuff didn't exist when RTH was first created, and the duration for implosion normally doesn't last between encounters. But half my epic party blew through each of those with essentially no damage or loss of resources.
But, hey - Acererak got four of them, plus some special guests.
In my early years I GMed a Star Wars campaign and created an Im perial Admiral who was the main villian for my story.
This was back when my DM skills were not so hot so I had this railroad of a story the players were to ride on. The Admiral was to pop up a few times to establish himself as the villian and he would be taken out in the end of the story durring a big starfighter battle.
Anyway the first time they meet him they are in cuffs beign taken into a star destryers holdign cell and he was gloating and what not.
Durring their escape they see him and a bunch of stormtroopers down a hall and the point was to have the PCs run like Han did in the original starwars.
Well it didnt work. One players made a called shot to shoot the Admiral and he rolled so perfectly I had to concede. The Admiral went down.
The party went on to take down enough stormtroopers that one guy was able to run up to the admiral on the ground and shoot him full of holes including one to the head.
After they escaped they even told me they did that on purpose because they saw I was setting this guy up to be the lead villan and wanted to ruin my plans.
Well I showed them. He showed up later anyway just like in my script (upon reflection it was a script..not an adventure). He was all cyborged up but he was still kicking.
Im so embarrased. Well it was a learing experiance.
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aka JoelF847
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I can't say I've run this villain, but in college, amongst my group of friends, there was a legendary new superhero campaign (using the Villains & Vigilantes rules), where, after spending a few hours making new characters, the GM started the campaign by saying that the characters had gathered together, and were confronted by a man who grew to 20 feet tall, burst into flames, and shouted, "I must stop your mission!"
I was playing dnD with my friends and I ran a Githyanki vampire demigod super psion and completely got my ass kicked because my friends got like 17 twenties in a row.
I was playing dnD with my friends and I ran a Githyanki vampire demigod super psion and completely got my ass kicked because my friends got like 17 twenties in a row.
I have a friend who does that EVERY SESSION!!!! And she's not a cheater. Good thing she's playing a bard in my game; another dude has to DM her paladin....that's just sick with her Critical Smites.
But I have had to DM her half-orc barbarian Chewie (His ear got bitten off and it was chewie--ugh!) and a goliath ranger (she often carried the horses). Both with axes, so x3 crits. My poor NPCs....
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I ran Dragon Mountain, and the party after learning to hate Kobolds and the endless fights with the various clans in the mountain...walked in on The Infernal Red Dragon...only to take her out in 2 rounds. How very anti-climatic.
Ive often wanted to convert tha mini-campaign to 3.5 and do it again. Who knows maybe Ill fare better the next time. ;)
hmmm.... I have two. (only?)
My first turn at GMing in CHAMPS I created a master villain were-wolf. He had lots and lots of real wolves. I planned to swarm the heroes with dozens of the critters--you know my 3 dozen to their 3. One of the problems of CHAMPS is that the wolves could not harm the heroes. One of the other problems was that I had spent so many points creating wolves the villain could not really harm the heroes either. Turned 12 to 1 odds, into one against 3.
I have already forgotten the second one.
I'm assuming 'worst' is referring to the effectiveness of the villain (or lack thereof...), so with that in mind, I'm going to have to say Tzolo, or whaterver her name was, from the Mud Sorcerer's Tomb. Granted, she was quite a powerful NPC from a numbers standpoint. However, the fact that she starts the encounter inside a coffin in a state of temporal stasis, really didn't do much for her survivability. Oh sure, there was this mystical force that shielded her from any attack, but only one attack! After that, she was free to stand and combat the PC's, who incidentally were surrounding her in the coffin, and had embarrasingly high initiative scores...
High PC initiative + Prone sorceress = very, very quick encounter...
Disappointing.
My worst villain was that way on purpose. I created a dungeon filled with traps and undead and loads of foreshadowing implying a powerful lich resided there. Then, in the final room, a skeletal creature with glowing, red eyes stood up from a throne. It was wearing a crown and tattered robes and carrying a scepter in one hand and a wand in the other. My players kind of freaked out because they were only 5th level at the time. However, it was only a standard skeleton with rubies in it's eyes and a continual light spell on a stone in it's skull. It had some magic items strapped to it, but it did not know how to use any of them.
They killed it easily but were convinced it was all some kind of elaborate trap. Then they read the journal of the necromancer that used to live there who had never quite succeeded in unlocking the power to become a lich. He just animated a skeleton to pretend to be one hoping it would frighten off anyone raiding his home.
I've had plenty of villains go down way too quick, but none of them were particularly memorable.
Huersefful, "The Shrouded Eclipse" male human lich sorcerer 22/archmage 5 from the Quicksilver Hourglass in Dungeon magazine issue 123. Quite an interesting adventure ;)
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Oddly enough, the worst set of villains I ran both came from the quicksilver hourglass. One of the players basically optimized everyone's character to the point where they 2-rounded Eravatius. a friggin demigod in 2 rounds. it was pretty embarrassing. then there was another point where one of the monsters (I can't remember the name right now) followed the players into the room with the flying ball of corpses. then they flew out. Epic level monster and they didn't even have to attack it. My god. I kept heaping praise on the awesomeness of this adventure and most of it had the players laughing.
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The second campaign I ever ran 20 years ago had as its main villain my own creation (which was a snafu on its own because I didn't understand monster creation rules or guidelines). His name was Geck-ma and he sort of looked like a cross between a gargoyle and a vampire with a giant orange gemstone in his chest. He fought using magic through projected images and used his chest stone to draw mystical power from electrum pieces (yeah, I thought electrum involved electricity so it made perfect sense to me.... I only found out later that electrum was just a silvery metal less valuable then gold). In the "final" encounter the party ran into him in his lair which was filled with electrum bars and electrum pieces (which was just stupid as heck, what was I thinking). Anyway, he was doing things like drawing power from the electrum to act three times in one round and casting 9th level spells through 6 different projected images at my poor 14th level players. Naturally I killed everybody, and was thrilled to death about it until I asked everyone to play again and they all politely declined.
Boy did I think I was creative.... lol. They got some payback against me though. I played in a game where one of those players DM'd Undermountain and I played a Wizard who I called the Puzzler (I was such a Batman dork) and the DM had me lose my spellbook in our first encounter in the underhalls. He also had an evil Thayan disintegrate my clothes. So I was running around half naked through undermountain helping my commrades fight using my trusty dagger. I totally deserved it.
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I once ran a bargest who spent so much time buffing a bunch of bugbear barbarians that by the time the PCs got to him, all he could do was levitate and throw thunderstones at the PCs.
The PCs had taken out goblin worgriders, hobgoblin pikers, and the bugbear ragers (enlarged and bull strengthed too!) with relative ease. The worgs pretty much ran away (I guess they're wiser than goblins!).
Easy. Kazmojen out of Cauldron. He tormented the party throughout the entire campaign. The final straw was when Kazmojen kidnapped Jenya. At that point, the party said SCREW IT, and so ended the campaign. They still talk about him, though... Good times, good times.
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If in worst you mean that one villain that causes my players hearts to skip a beat in fear from the very mention of a name, then that would have to be my all time favorite: Gaira the Earth Demon.
I created him after watching Ninja Scroll for the first time (this was back during 2nd Edition). He is one of the few NPCs I've created that my players have never truly beaten, so each time he's encountered they are always intimidated. Even though there have been times where they could have easily taken him out, someone in the party would always do something that he could take advantage of and use it to turn the tables on them.
And though I don't use him too much these days, his very name still causes them to quake with fear.
I had a vampire 9th level warmage once that drove the party absolutely crazy. They had been trying to find him and steal his pouch, but didn't know he was a vampire. Funny the things blue dragons leave out when making bargains.
They eventually caught up to him in a hazy, torch-chandelier filed room with 60 ft ceilings that was at least 100 ft either direction. He started out spider climbing the walls invisibly, then once they broke that, he hid in the torch smoke in gaseous form healing. When he wasn't hiding, he was sniping them with various energy orbs hitting their touch ACs for high damage.
When they threw the cleric with a high touch out there, he dropped fireballs for them to try and reflex out of the way before she could even attempt to turn, but he had resistance to boot. It took them 2-3 fireballs before they spread out enough.
They eventually ran out when he was hiding and healing, then sealed the door shut so he couldn't gaseous form under the door after them. He's still out there, a few levels under them now, but easily still a challenge and ready to drive them crazy.