phedre said:
My question to the last few posters:
If you were the one in charge of making a town fight fun, exciting and interesting for the players and you had a spread of player levels from 3-43, with a 1:3 NPC to PC ratio, how would you do it?
I ask because I don't know of many ways to keep BBGs and their major henchmen alive long enough for a good fight, other than thresholds, large amounts of body, and layered defensives. There's always the split wave battle, or some sort of trick to make only some people able to affect the BBG via a plot device (mark, pantherghast style monster, ritual of woe, etc).
Also important to keep in mind is that everyone has a different preferred style of game. Some love the defensives game, others enjoy the moral quandary of a likable bad guy. Some always want to be the hero, others like the stuff that challenges and scares them so much the line blurs until they're completely immersed.
Honestly, I prefer game tricks like split waves to just piling on more defenses on the BBG's card. Big crowds vs single human-sized monster is generally a pain in the rear to marshal in anything approaching a fair manner, and really isn't much fun for whoever gets stuck playing the BBG. So, my ideal theory :
I'd set it up so the players have something to defend, rather than letting them be on the offense. Say there is a series of ritual magics they have to cast, in a specific order so the town is defending the local circle for x period of time. My preference would be something fun like an hour, more if the PCs screw it up. Either let a player find out via an earlier mod, or have whatever NPC/PC leader know to let it be known that the BBG has a horde of weaker minions that is going to try to force their way in by attrition. Keep the players interested by having the BBG out at a safe distance from their lines, encouraging his minions and occasionally throwing poorly aimed packet attacks at particularly annoying taunts.
Once each ritual is completed successfully, bump up the power of the minions slightly as the BBG gets more worried and calls in tougher stuff. Occasionally (my sense of the dramatic says just after each ritual completes), have the NPCs die in place, and stop spawning for a few minutes to take a breather and let the players do the same. Keep the pressure on, though, you want to establish the feeling that the people holding the line are all that is keeping this going. Tension is half the fun.
Once a half or so of them have been cast, start having single more powerful minions rift in behind the lines, to peel off the higher level PC's into dealing with them. Just before the last ritual finishes, have the BBG rush the circle with all of the available NPCs.
If your level split is -really- uneven, say 15 pc's under level 20 and 20 in the 35+ range, then you could split the mod entirely and need casters in both an Earth and Celestial circle, allowing your players to discover that one or the other is likely to draw lesser opposition. That gets tough given the low number of NPCs, though, so you might be better off sending them to go find a ritual component you just discovered you need for the last spell, being held in the enemy camp. It helps to establish a named lieutenant to the BBG in the plot specifically for this, and to serve as a later BBG after being thwarted. The low-level folks will -love- having someone they thwarted earlier come back for revenge months or years down the line, and sneaking in to do damage by hitting 'em where they don't expect it is great fun for the little guy.
The hard part of this is how you do treasure distribution in such a manner that it doesn't feel like a long fight for nothing to the people on the line, since they're likely to be too busy to loot.
So there's my quick high-level thought on the matter.
