Lots of ways to deal with this. You've already mentioned flying and dimension door.
The "villain" is actually a minion disguised as the real villain. When the party discovers this, the real villain is far away.
Invisibility and non-detection.
Speed enhancing items and/or spells.
Entangle the party and flee. Or grease, obscuring mist, etc.
Swarm the party with low-level minions.
Summon a meat shield.
Secret passageways with locked doors.
Burrowing, earthglide or other means to travel through the ground or stone.
Tree-stride scroll.
Just scroll through the spell lists to see what spells allow you to hide, run, teleport, sneak, etc...
Hate to say it, but if a party is truely determined to bring your NPC down then you'll have a truely hard time to do it without magic.
Your martial villain could have a wizard minion who uses a scroll of teleport to get them out for example. They can use Potions of Invisibility to make themselves invisible first, so that buys them a round or two so they can setup the teleport.
Another option is to set up the scene so the PCs hav eto choose between hunting the villain or letting something bad happen. Someone important (party member, important NPC) could be left dying and they have to get to them quickly, in that time the villain escapes. Or he activated some sort of bomb/self-destruct that will kill lots of innocents if they don't disarm it.
Collapse a tunnel behind the villain so they can't follow directly, or have an army of mooks block the way (easy to cut down but, no real threat to the party, but will take time).
But as I said, if they're truely determined, it's not easy.
If there is a very powerful caster as the overlord of the enemy, he could use a refuge spell and give the prepared object to his lieutenant, who could speak the command word to be transported to his master when the pcs come after him.
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I prefer to use the "Darth Vader" model for the Big Bad Guy. He isn't getting away from the PC's. They're trying to get away from him! Now, he's generally too busy to worry about the PCs (much). But their day will come.
In the mean time, there's a little bad guy for the PCs to dispatch / keep busy with. But, they should act fast, before before the boss returns. . . .
Hope that gives you some ideas.
Mislead is an awesome spell for that. Before they know something's wrong, your villain is long gone.
If you really want to make sure the villains get away, maybe they weren't there to begin with? Spells for them to taunt the PCs from afar can be handy here too, whether it's spells to whisper across a distance, communicate telepathically, hire a doppleganger to get killed in their stead, or summon an outsider to relay their message, all keep the villains safely out of harm's way.
Of course if you want them to be able to fight+flee, that's going to be harder to pull-off.
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Spells, lots and lots of spells.
The best way to keep the party from the bad guy is to never have the bad guy anywhere within reach. Obstacles, traps, and terrain will keep the party from the baddie while he shouts out commands to his minions, or just taunts them.
Separate the party. My own GM has done that a few times to keep the party from killing his own escaping bad guys. A few times, it almost killed a couple of us. This can be done with obstacles or other NPCs. Have a few challenging NPCs tailored to the party and play them really smart. Force the party to decide who to go after, and make the expendable NPCs easy targets.
Do you keep track of how close to actual death the NPCs get? If your party just leaves them for dead at a few hp before death, assume the ones you want to return stabilize and had a minion pick them up. If the parties stab them a few times after they fall just to make sure they are actually dead, have a minion pick up the body and raise him.
If the party incinerates the body, you always have resurrection. The minion just needs to bring a dust pan.
Of course, you don't have to tell the party how this guy keeps coming back. He could just keep showing up, and when asked why he didn't die have him sarcastically exclaim, "Wouldn't YOU like to know?"
You have several options in addition to escape spells:
1. The BBEG should be several levels higher than the PCs until they get to the climax where they confront him. So for those early meetings the PCs should be quite weary of trying to kill him since it could be quite likely that he'll kill them all.
2. The BBEG should always have minions with him. That way when it's time for him to go the PCs have to deal with the minions before going after him, giving him time to get away.
3. The BBEG puts the PCs into a position where they can't kill him then and there. They don't know where he's holding the kidnapped villagers/princess/etc and if they kill him here his minions will likely execute the hostages before the PCs can rescue them.
Wall spells are a personal favorite of mine. Not only do they stop the PC’s from following but they can trap them in dungeons or separate the party for some one-on-one taunting.
Also, if your PC’s are that obsessed with tracking down and killing everything, you can really make them pay for it. Give the villain a trap filled escape route, make them cross hazardous areas to get to him or best of all, have his illusion spells do it for him while he laughs maniacally from the shadows.
Jetpacks!
Nah, but seriously. A lot of good ones have already been thrown around.
-Teleport/Fly spells are pretty obvious. Might be particularly frustrating to a determined PC since this manner of strategy is most transparently pulled from your "Oh Crap he's not supposed to die" pile
-Trapdoors/False walls/Secret Passages. That snidely whiplash/Clue "I'll get you next time!" deal can be played up, but it doesn't have to. It's good to have the villains smarter, better, or more prepared than the PCs. Environment is a big part of that too.
-Mounts! Flying or otherwise. Zorro whistles for his griffin and he's off. Doesn't have to be an animal either. Broomsticks, flying carpet, floating castle, airship, whatever. You name it. You're at the top of a keep and it starts shaking with explosions and BAM. Villain leeps out of the window and the last thing the PCs see is him standing on the deck of a flying ship cackling and bowing and speeding off into the distance. If they can pursue in flight, they get blast of cannonball to the face.
-The Doombot idea is a good one-- that you were fighting the wrong guy, it was a minion in disguise, a complex illusion. A scared, paranoid PC is a good PC. You could even pull like a sort of hologram style scry-mental-projection magical image kind of thing.
-Overwhelming reinforcements, forcing a PC retreat. Or if they're stupid, they die I guess.
Also, jetpacks.
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If you haven't fully created him yet, you could make him more valuable alive then dead. This can be done in many ways.
- He holds knowledge that will be lost if he dies, and he brags that "speak with dead" won't work if he is killed (for who knows what reason. You're the GM, make it happen.)
- He is actually loved by the community and killing him will make the party look like villains, send the law after them, and possibly ruin future plans.
- He has a contingency plan in place that if he dies something extremely horrible happens. Think of it like the atomic bomb sidecar in "Snow Crash." One of the games I played had the main villain as a lich who was set up by the creators of the world as a protector of secret knowledge. Her phylactery? The core of the planet! You don't have to go to those extremes, but you get the picture.
- He has a MacGuffin that the party really needs. Look it up if you don't know what that is. Anyway, if they kill him they won't learn where it is or how to get to it.
- Killing him is morally wrong. While this reason won't well work if the party does not have a paladin, it works wonders with Lawful Good parties that do. By some spell or freak accident, the main bad guy is a child. Or he is severely disabled. Or when they meet him face to face, he is very old and infirm, and unable to physically leave his bed. In these cases, the party could end up arguing for hours on what to do. Of course, he doesn't really have to young, disabled, or old. He could just appear to be so and have an elaborate set up of disguises and illusions.
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-Trapdoors/False walls/Secret Passages. That snidely whiplash/Clue "I'll get you next time!" deal can be played up, but it doesn't have to. It's good to have the villains smarter, better, or more prepared than the PCs. Environment is a big part of that too.
That's my favorite. Like the scene from Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom where the bad-guy drops to the floor and rolls into a crevice that seals up behind him. Very cool.
The bad-guy stepping onto a pressure plate and being dropped down a chute, with a stone slab grinding into place over him so that nobody can pursue, or a similar sort of 'getaway trap' can make for a nice non-magical solution, when the villain can control the location of the encounter.
If he's got access to a movement type that the PCs can't emulate, such as a 90 ft. swim speed, or a burrow speed (especially with earth glide!), he might be able to just jump off a dock and zip away underwater. Even if one or two PCs might be able to beast shape or wild shape or similarly attempt to pursue, the whole party isn't likely to be able to, and, if he thought ahead, there's a trained (or dominated) giant octopi or something waiting to deal with pursuers. (Giant Octopi are great for slowing down pursuers, with all those grapple checks!)
Misdirection (and not just the spell of that name) is wonderful. The villain throws something at the floor. (Homebrew elixir of obscuring mist? 10 smokesticks bound together and lit on fire? Some Tien 'eggshell grenade' full of 'smoke powder' or something?) The PCs wade through the smoke/mist, and clear it in time to hear a portcullis clang shut and see his red scarf and black greatcloak flapping away into the distance behind the portcullis, which they begin disabling / disarming / destroying to get to the fleeing bad-guy. The real bad-guy grabbed a rope and was hauled up to the second floor through a concealed hatch in the ceiling, under cover of mist, while a minion wearing a similar hat and cloak is leading the PCs on a merry chase...
Locate object is a decent way to 'track' someone who is still nearby. Make sure that any distinctive visible items he is using are duplicated among his minions, or props that he tosses to a gargoyle or mephit minion who slowly flies away in the opposite direction, while he flees absent the easily-identified stuff that was just for show.
"I locked on to that ancestral relic curve blade he's always going on about! He'd never leave that behind! Follow me!"
'Doombots' are also fun, using simulacra spells or doppleganger allies or specially chosen disguised commoners enhanced with the modify memory spell and a generous helping of drug-enhanced brainwashing to actually think that they are the bad-guy.
"The Masked Meanie was really mean old shop-keeper Smithers the whole time! Jinkies!"
Swarm the party with low-level minions and simply WALKS away.
I made the experience if an villian escapes by a way the players think "Damn we had stopped him if..." is the best villian escape.
Simply a "I-Escape" button is not good, it's like the old "Deus ex machina", a cheap solution...
I remember one villian where I used this, unfortunatly he never occurs again, because we skipped the campaign.
The players assaulted his encampment at the beach, they slaugther every guard. Then confronted the villian (a Blackguard).
The Blackguard simply walked toward the player, and made his way througth them. After getting on the other side of the group (they are still figthing against some guards) he raised the fallen and simply walks away while moking the Groups Paladin: "We will fight... another day"
Dimension door only has a verbal component, which means that even a tied-up villain can use it to make good his escape. The party that I play in has a tendency to try to question defeated bad guys, and we have been on the receiving end of this. Ungag the evil wizard to get info about the Big Evil Plan, and POOF! They can't really get all that far this way, but even two castings will make them very difficult to find and buy more than enough time to slip their bonds and enact some more definitive means of escape. This trick works well for wizards who have Spell Mastery to prepare it without access to their spellbook.
A shape-shifting druid can fly/swim/run away, and hide their trail. Very infuriating.
I killed one of my GM's recurring villain. He really liked him, and had a lot of plans for him, but I had an item he had forgotten about that let me deal the finishing blow as he tried to escaped.
If it's high level, you could use magic, obviously. I knew a guy who had a level 17 PC wizard who had spells on him so that if he died, all of his equipment was teleported to a clone that was in some sort of base that was protected by a stupid amount of spells.. I never played with that specific character, but he knew the game through and through, and as far as I understood, he was pretty much unkillable, short of divine intervention or another mage who knew exactly what he had set up - naturally, the guy protected the knowledge of his defenses as much as he did himself.
A method not related to rules.... talk to the PC's. Talk to them about a recurring villain and if they are interested in the concept. Specifically address the player who likes to stop them, ask them if they watch tv shows where the bad guy gets away and why they do/don't like that.
If the players think that the concept is cool to have happen once in a while, you now have the ground work for doing this in play.
1) start by telling them the villain is going to get away, that this is now an accepted fact.
2) give a different "win" condition. For example saving the princess, or whatever. The bad guy is going to escape, but can they stop him from his goal. This gives them something else to focus on.
3) an advanced technique: ask them what goes wrong, what mistakes they make that lets the bad guy get away.
3 is an important piece in fiction. The hero makes a mistake, now part of the story is making up for this mistake. It gives the hero personal motivation that isn't a piece of dry background written down that never comes into play. It is a motivation that arose directly from the story, during play.
What this gets into is thinking about the game more like a piece of fiction and less like a tactical board game (not that there's anything wrong with that, as I'm personally guilty of being the player who rallies the party to kill the bad guy more than once).
A short story: We had a fallen paladin in our group, in a moment of desperation he grabbed an intelligent demon sword to kill someone. The group tracked him down and killed him afterwards. Later he rose as a death knight, who had a compulsion to kill clerics. At this point I'm playing a cleric of a law god, who has a holy symbol tattooed on his eye (the god is always vigilant, etc). We lay a trap for the death knight, where I'm the bait. Turns out the trap wasn't very good, he kills me and takes my holy symbol as a trophy. So my character is raised, but his eye is still damage. Now he's a one-eye cleric of law who's hellbent on tracking this death knight down and redeeming himself.
Gaseous form or ethereal jaunt. Escape through the vents or through a different plane. Easy, peasy.
My DM once used a guy (Sirus) that had a glove sewn to his pants. Once per day, when he thrust his hand into the glove, it cast teleport on him.
He attempted to kill the party on multiple occasions, but he was always too scared to attack my character. When we first encountered him, he used a Wand of Blink to escape through the shanty town huts and stuff. Well, I'm a Half-Orc Ranger/Barbarian with a 24 str (28 when raging). I can run through walls too! Of course, I leave holes...
Picture Shadowcat running from Juggernaut in X-men 3. He saw me chasing him through the walls, hid, and used a sneak attack on my character. He almost maxed the damage. I looked at him, grabbed his dagger out my chest, and stabbed him with it. At that point he teleported away.
After that, he only ever used ranged attacks if my character was around. If she wasn't around, then he engaged in melee.
One of the most foolproof escape plans is contingency. Tie it to dimension door, teleport, gaseous form or whatever and have it set to go off whenever the villain is reduced to ~10% hp. It gets around the issue of PCs actually having a chance to foil their escape once they've decided it's time to hit the road.
The target is personal so a minion can't just cast it on them, but there's always Use Magic Device to cast from a scroll. If they have a bard minion with the borrow skill spell (or even any minion with a borrow skill scroll), they don't need any ranks in it themselves.
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A method not related to rules.... talk to the PC's. Talk to them about a recurring villain and if they are interested in the concept. Specifically address the player who likes to stop them, ask them if they watch tv shows where the bad guy gets away and why they do/don't like that.
IMO-- depends on the 'villain'-- A "magnificent bastard" who is much more simply "on the other side" a lot of the time and is therefore our "adversary", but not really a personal enemy (especially in non-aligned and/or 'gray area' worlds where the forces opposing the PCs in a given adventure, or frequently opposing the PCs in many adventures, aren't totally evil and the side the PCs are supporting may be "good", but not all good), I'm okay with it. If it's a real nasty bad guy of the sort that really needs to die or be brought to justice-- then no, I'm not really happy with the recurring villain, but I accept it if that's the game the GM insists on playing... however, I don't like such a villain getting 'deus ex machina' escapes when we've got him nailed to the wall-- if we've figured out how to prevent the scumbag's escape, we should get to put him down.
3) an advanced technique: ask them what goes wrong, what mistakes they make that lets the bad guy get away.3 is an important piece in fiction. The hero makes a mistake, now part of the story is making up for this mistake. It gives the hero personal motivation that isn't a piece of dry background written down that never comes into play. It is a motivation that arose directly from the story, during play.
What this gets into is thinking about the game more like a piece of fiction and less like a tactical board game (not that there's anything wrong with that, as I'm personally guilty of being the player who rallies the party to kill the bad guy more than once).
I really don't like this technique that you've mentioned. Yes, it is an important piece in (some) fiction. Not necessarily the fiction that I enjoy. I don't like having my PCs make mistakes if I can avoid it, and I certainly don't like having to deliberately help create a mistake in order to further the story in this way. If I'm going to participate in a game where a recurring villain is going to be a feature, I'd rather help the GM create some really clever escape plan to insert into the narrative, rather than have the narrative be the villain getting away because we (the PCs) f***ed up. Goes with anything for me in RPGs-- I'm much happier to concede a "loss" in a scenario because the forces opposing us were better, than I am to deal with a loss because my fellow players and I just sucked at it.
I do like treating role-playing games more like fiction/collective story-telling than like a tactical war-game (and I really hate it when the game devolves into a board-game style tactical encounter), but I detest stories where major plot points turn on the hero's incompetence, partly if it's a momentary burst of incompetence or bone-headed mistake that is otherwise out of character for the hero. I mean, the villain gets away, we lost the battle, whatever, because we screwed up? Sounds like as good a motivation for falling on your sword, as for seeking redemption (though I confess, it's reasonable to play a hero who committed a major error and is trying to redeem him/her-self-- it's not my favorite background-- if I create a character who has the motivation of 'seeking redemption for past wrongs'-- it's not because of a stupid mistake, it's because the hero did something really evil in the past and needs to atone for it).
Then again, it's like the 'James Bond' plot device, where our wonderful hero always gets captured, gets told the plan, and escapes. Personally, I hate that in stories too... especially after the second time it happens with James Bond? Someone should have just killed him outright, instead of wasting time with a stupid death-trap that he gets away from.
I understand this method of yours is highly interesting and fun for some people. It isn't something I'm interested in participating in.
I understand this method of yours is highly interesting and fun for some people. It isn't something I'm interested in participating in.
Yup, and different people like different types of stories. You'll note, that point 1 was talking about what is interesting.
And yes, badly executed scenes will always be bad. Just like bad writing/directing/acting can ruin a movie.
For example, most of the methods people have proposed so far are either ineffective (gaseous form has a lot of flaws) or can be beaten (dimensional anchor). As a player, if I know someone has a tendency to try and escape, I start casting a lot of dimensional anchors.
On the other hand, once the GM tells me his goal, now I get to help him write the story in a way that our group likes. If you were participating in the story, you get to help act it out in a way that avoids all the things you hate. That's the point of the cooperative approach. The GM doesn't make up some deus ex machina, you help provide context for why and how.
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Yup, and different people like different types of stories. You'll note, that point 1 was talking about what is interesting.
And yes, badly executed scenes will always be bad. Just like bad writing/directing/acting can ruin a movie.
As soon as I read your idea, i thought it sounded really cool and I would definitely go alomg with it... But I know my players would balk. I wondered how I might adapt that and, if the NPC was going to escape anyway, I think I could get buy-in.
"Malmoticus is going to escape. The way things have unfolded, you won't be able to stop him from teleporting before you can reach him. However, this can be more interesting if...." and then present your idea. Leave it up to them. If they prefer the npc's genius is such that he escapes without some fortunate turn helping him, then so be it. If they choose to have tried to take a shortcut and leap to a ledge rather than run the long way around and slipped, giving him the moment he needed to poof out of there, then so be that, too.
I killed one of my GM's recurring villain. He really liked him, and had a lot of plans for him, but I had an item he had forgotten about that let me deal the finishing blow as he tried to escaped.
If it's high level, you could use magic, obviously. I knew a guy who had a level 17 PC wizard who had spells on him so that if he died, all of his equipment was teleported to a clone that was in some sort of base that was protected by a stupid amount of spells.. I never played with that specific character, but he knew the game through and through, and as far as I understood, he was pretty much unkillable, short of divine intervention or another mage who knew exactly what he had set up - naturally, the guy protected the knowledge of his defenses as much as he did himself.
Foxglove's importance was waning at that point. I'm not heartbroken that you managed to put him down a couple of encounters ahead of schedule. The biggest problem with that was that he was the one who had the information you needed at the time, so I had to BS the whole march into the enemy nation looking for the bear. It was your loss, really. XD
I rarely use any recurring villains, because if a bad guy gets away, my players will cry "PLOT ARMOR!" However, the two things I have used were 1) a special swarm form ability granted to the NPC mentioned above. Foxglove was a druid corrupted through arcane torture and 2) dimension door. Dimension door is great, but if you use it to get completely out of view, your players may do like mine and act like you cheated them.
Though that may have something to do with the fact that arcane magic in my current setting is restricted largely to a single organization who is bent on universal domination.
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I understand this method of yours is highly interesting and fun for some people. It isn't something I'm interested in participating in.Yup, and different people like different types of stories. You'll note, that point 1 was talking about what is interesting.
<good stuff cut for space.
On the other hand, once the GM tells me his goal, now I get to help him write the story in a way that our group likes. If you were participating in the story, you get to help act it out in a way that avoids all the things you hate. That's the point of the cooperative approach. The GM doesn't make up some deus ex machina, you help provide context for why and how.
We agree on the general idea of role-playing and the cooperative approach (and of course, even in posting my differing views as a contrast to your thoughts in that post, I was not condemning your way of play). :D
BTW-- your pt 1 idea-- a recurring villain, I could live with that (especially if I knew that was the intention) in a campaign-- the only part I really personally dislike is the pt 3 -- villain escapes because the heroes made a mistake (thought I should pop that pt in if it wasn't clear that pts 1 and 2 don't raise my hackles all that much). And yeah, I'd enjoy helping steer the story towards the 'clever villain has reasonable, good, effective escape plan that he/she successfully executed before you could stop him/her' over the "what did we do wrong this time?" reason for the villain's escape. Or, y'know, if it wasn't my character's mistake (unless I really did screw something up in the encounter), sometimes it can be fun to play the guy who gets to make the sarcastic remarks about whatever mistake my compadre made that resulted in the villain's escape... ;)