Two weekends ago I flew across the pond to Chicago to attend Anime Central, the third largest Japanese animation convention in the US. The convention has a surprisingly large tabletop games presence, with a whole corridor of conference rooms booked out for everything from Pathfinder RPG to Magic: the Gathering.
There’s a fair amount of overlap between fans of anime and tabletop RPGs, and nowhere is that overlap more direct than Maid: The Role-Playing Game. Japan has produced its own tabletop roleplaying games since at least as far back as the 1980s, but in 2008, Maid RPG was the first of those to see an official English translation.
It’s cartoonish, unpredictable, and sometimes—if you use the optional rules originally published in an expansion book—downright lewd. Critics have dubbed it “a joke RPG” and even the translator called Maid RPG a “goddamn weird game”.
And after some friends online convinced me to run a game over Google+, I wholeheartedly recommend that every D&D player and RPG designer play this game, at least once. Read on to find out why.
Tentacled horror Nyalathotep of the Cthulhu mythos appears in a new animated romantic comedy airing now in Japan.
In this season’s Haiyore! Nyaruko-san, the Crawling Chaos of H. P. Lovecraft’s horror stories appears as a cute grey-haired high school girl named Nyaruko who shows up to rescue a boy from a nightgaunt attack.
Joker frantically pokes at the holographic control panel as the Normandy rushes to outrun a blast wave. As the engines crumble, the ship hurtles toward a deserted planet.
Shepard takes off his VR helmet and hands it to the arcade attendant.
“Thanks for playing Normandy! It’s one of our most popular VR games!”
Shepard nods and strolls back to his job at the food court.
There’s a great sniper scene in the movie Full Metal Jacket where a sniper takes out one of the soldiers, and the rest of the squad is pinned down debating whether to rush out and save him.
You can’t easily recreate the same scene in 4th edition D&D. Instant kills are unpopular and combat tends to happen at short range. Still, it’s possible as a DM to create an encounter with long-range attackers.
Sniper as a warmage
The warmage was a concept formalized in third edition’s Complete Arcane. It’s an arcane caster who wears light armour and learns offensive and support magic through arcane military training rather than research.
Build such a creature by statting up a level 1 wizard with the war wizard build, using the quick NPC rules. Add some light armour to up his AC to around the average for his class.
The key here is to give him the Magic Missile spell, with an unusually long range of 20 squares or 100 feet. The latest version of this spell will only deal 2 or 3 damage, but they can use Stealth (given +6 from training and Dexterity) to hide immediately after they shoot, and a full level 1 encounter will have five warmage snipers working together for an automatic 15 total damage to one PC per round, enough to bloody a PC. If the enemies get close they switch to a spell like Stone Blood or scorching burst.
Sniper as rogue
The rogue (scoundrel) class can take the Sharpshooter Talent class ability, which grants +1 to attack and increases the range on a crossbow to 20 squares, or 40 at penalty. The advantage over the warmage setup is that they gain 2d6 bonus damage when they have combat advantage from being hidden, and they can hide every round after firing. For a rogue with 13 Dexterity, the average damage of 1d8+2d6+1 is 12.5 per hit.
The thing is, this might actually be very unfair. You’ve got an opponent 20 squares away that you can’t see, perhaps a team of five rogue snipers, and they’re hitting you for a third to a half of your HP per shot. The NPC rules allow it, but monster rules tend to hold to a certain balance.
Sniper as a monster
There’s no reason in 4th edition D&D to limit yourself to normal character rules for building opponents, even if your snipers are human. Simply start with any artillery creature of the appropriate level and work from there. Look for one that strikes at a very long range, and give it helpful terrain like a position atop a cliff. Count the terrain as part of the encounter XP budget, if it gives a strong advantage to the opponent.
posted Wednesday, March 7th 2012 by Jonathan Drain None of the Above
When I’m not writing about Dungeons & Dragons, I’m a website developer in my day job. I find myself habitually critiquing websites, and Wizards of the Coast’s official D&D homepage is no exception.
Here are my top five problems that you want to avoid to make your site better than WotC’s D&D website.
Keep page load times to a minimum
Opera web browser has a little-known feature that shows you how much data. WotC’s site takes a whopping 2MB to load. If you felt like their site was slow, it’s because it’s transferring five to ten times more data than a normal website.
Even in this age of broadband internet, keep your webpage below 500KB, and ideally below 200KB.
Keep design uncluttered
In the late 1990s, the trend in website design was to cram as much content into the top of your page, on the mistaken belief that users don’t scroll down. The result was cluttered websites that make it hard for the user to find what they’re looking for.
Modern “web 2.0″ principles recommend a minimalist layout that helps the user find what he wants, rather than what the publisher wants the user to find. Nobody comes to a website to read advertising billboards.
Let your users stay logged in
When I visit the D&D Compendium to look up some monster stats, it logs me out after a day or two and I have to enter my username and password again. This is a very short time to keep a user logged in. Many popular websites allow you to stay logged in after a month or even more.
If your site has a login, let users stay logged in for at least a month, unless you’re running something high-security like a bank.
Readability is key
In 1999, the trend was to use small fonts, because they looked neat at low resolutions. Now, the average screen resolution has doubled and anti-aliasing makes bigger fonts look good. The average web user is older, and not all of us have perfect eyesight any more, but WotC’s using an even smaller font size than their own website 13 years ago.
Make sure your main article text is well-spaced, has good margins on either side and is an easy to read font size.
Here’s a house rule I use in a play-by-forum D&D game. I think it speeds up combat a lot, and I’m interested in hearing how well it works for other groups.
Group Initiative
Make a single initiative roll for the opponents’ side. Use the initiative modifier of the opponents’ leader or whoever has the highest initiative modifier.
Make individual initiative rolls for each player character. On a forum game, the DM can make all the initiative rolls to save time.
First, any PCs who beat the opponent in the initiative take a turn. They can act in any order.
Next, all the opponents take their turns.
Next, all the PCs take their turn, even PCs who acted before the initiative. Again, they can act in any order. Once all PCs have taken their turn, the opponents take their turn, and so on.
Advantages
On a forum game especially, you don’t have to wait for the person ahead of you in initiative order. Waiting is a bottleneck. When a player is ready to take his turn, you don’t want to make him wait, or he might not be ready when his turn comes up.
Characters with high initiative bonuses are still valuable, because they get a bonus turn at the start of each combat. This is really what happens anyway in normal initiative.
A character can wait for an ally to coordinate their attacks in the same turn. For example, a fighter can wait for the cleric to heal him before he attacks.
Drawbacks
The enemies all get their turn before any PCs can react. This can be dangerous if they gang up on one target.
Certain rules expect normal initiative, and you’ll have to improvise. For example, some D&D 4e monsters take extra actions ahead of their normal initiative count.
Feedback
What’s your experience with group initiative rules?
Over at Critical Hits, Vanir (who you may remember from the blog Stupid Ranger) has written up a list of 10 epic level problems nobody thinks about. For instance, where do you get the epic level soap necessary to wash off epic level bacteria? And how do you speak to normal folk when your voice booms with deific thunder?
Then there’s this problem:
Woe betide the fool who ascends to godhood at a family reunion. Does your family worship you now?
Commenters on my last article raised some very good points on the historical accuracy of archery in Dungeons & Dragons, or perhaps lack of it. This gave me cause to do some research on the difficulty of long-range archery.
According to various estimates, the mediaeval English longbow had an effective range of 180-250 yards (540-750 feet or 108-150 D&D squares). However, at this range archers would fire into enemy formations rather than individual targets. Only at shorter ranges would an archer be expected to hit a man reliably.
The modern day sport of clout archery shows that this kind of shooting is entirely possible. Men shoot toward a flag on the ground 180 yards (540 feet) away, with one point for landing within 12 feet and more points for landing closer. This suggests that even with mediaeval wooden bows and little training, a man could indeed shoot into a formation of men at 180 yards.
In shorter-range target shooting, archers are expected to hit a 40cm target at 18 metres (60 feet) or a 122cm target at 90 metres (295 feet or 98 yards). Traditional hunters typically shoot deer with a bow at a range of 25 yards (75 feet) or less.
D&D 4e’s shortbow has a range of 15 (75 feet) without penalty, 30 (150 feet) at -2, very close to what modern hunters describe. One says, “All my animals taken are between 7 and 25 yards [21 to 75 feet]. I practice beyond that but I can really see the arrow dropping off after 25 yards so I stay under that.”
That range increases to 20/40 (100/200 feet) for the longbow and 25/50 (125/250 feet) for the superior greatbow. Here we have a small problem: how do you simulate the mediaeval longbow, which by some estimates could fire 250 yards (750 feet) with an accuracy of perhaps five feet?
The only real difference between 3e and 4e’s archery is that 3e lets you fire very long distances at reduced accuracy. A 200 yard (600 feet) shot like a mediaeval archer or clout archer incurs a -12 penalty, so a trained archer can hit an unarmoured man some of the time. Unfortunately, D&D 3e doesn’t simulate mass combat well, so the massed archer effect isn’t directly equatable.
Although D&D 3e technically lets you shoot a longbow at 1,000 feet, in practice it’s not feasible. You take an impossible -20 penalty to the shot, giving an unarmoured man an equivalent AC of 30.
I’ve spotted an odd difference between D&D third and fourth edition, in how they handle moving and shooting over long ranges.
In my last D&D 4e session, the players made the ill-advised choice to split the party. Half went into the woods to look for the creature who was menacing the village, while the other half stayed in the village to look for clues.
When the scouting party finally encountered the creature, it was 500 yards away from the village. Combat began with two of the player characters 300 squares away from the creature.
This sort of long range is where 3e and 4e play very differently.
In third edition, you can run 4x your speed. If your base speed is 30 feet or 6 squares, you can run 120 feet or 24 squares in a round.
In fourth edition, running only increases your speed by +2. With a run-double-move, an unencumbered human’s top speed is only 16 squares, or two thirds of what it was in third edition.
Ranged weapons are similarly shortened from their third edition counterparts.
In 3e, a light crossbow has a range of 75 feet or 15 squares without penalty, with a -2 penalty for each full 80 feet or 16 squares. The maximum range is ten such increments, so you can technically hit a target at 800 feet or 160 squares if you’re lucky or talented.
In 4e, the crossbow has a similar range of 15 squares without penalty and a further 15 squares at a -2 penalty. However, you can’t shoot any further than two range increments, so your maximum range with a crossbow is 30 squares or 150 feet.
This short range of D&D4e is no problem inside dungeons, but a bother at long-range battlefield stuff.
It’s also lacking in realism and historical accuracy. A person can easily run 120 feet in six seconds, or a quarter-mile in a minute. Not only could the English longbow shoot further than D&D4e’s 200ft (40 square) limit, but King Henry VIII ordered that archery practice ranges be at least 220 yards or 660 feet (132 D&D squares).
My question of the day: Why do you suppose the D&D designers shortened ranges this way? Does it enhance the game, or hinder it?
A couple of years ago I came up with an idea for a particularly unfair combat encounter involving a dragon who takes every advantage of his terrain and abilities. I never inflicted it on my players, but other Dungeon Masters may not be so merciful.
Using the D&D 3.5 rules, take a young red dragon, CR7. Red dragons are described as preparing multiple strategies ahead of time, and taking great care to avoid damaging their enemy’s items so they can loot them later. This one is no exception.
The dragon lures his enemy to a chosen spot: a beach, at night. With +17 to Bluff, setting up a ruse like this is no problem. Bluff is a class skill for red dragons, and they have a lot of hit dice.
He begins the battle by reading a scroll of resist energy for cold resistance 10, which he can do since he casts spells as a first level sorcerer. It costs 150 gp, but 7th level characters have about 19,000 gp worth of equipment each, so it’s a sound investment. The dragon uses his own spellcasting ability to cast mage armor and resistance, for +4 to AC and a brief +1 to saves before swooping in for the attack.
This is where the beach terrain is important. The dragon swoops in from 150 feet away (30 squares) and uses the Hover feat to make a whirlwind of sand. The sandstorm extinguishes all torches, gives the dragon full concealment if he’s 25 feet away or more, and forces casters to make a Concentration check (DC 16) to cast a spell. The dragon can hover at a height of up to twenty feet, out of the range of melee attackers.
The PCs will have to move into 10 feet range of the dragon to attack without penalty. This means archers can’t make a full attack and spellcasters must move into melee range. A PC at the very edge of the dust cloud must move 45 feet to attack without penalty. Area spells work normally, but the red dragon is immune to the usual fireball and resists the first 10 of a cold based attack before its cold weakness is applied.
Now, lets say we scale this encounter up to a young adult red dragon, CR13. We have even more frustrating tactic to use here. Remember that we’re on a beach.
At Huge size, the dragon qualifies for the Snatch feat, giving him the ability to pick up anyone he hits with a bite or claw, provided he can succeed at a grapple (at a whopping +37). He then flies over the ocean at full fly speed of 150ft and drops the grabbed character into the ocean.
To get back, the dropped character must swim 150 feet. Assuming he passes a Swim check each around (DC 10), the character moves at one-quarter speed: half speed for swimming (even as a full round action), and half that again due to the little-known effect that you move half speed in darkness. The average character will be out of combat for twenty rounds.
This snatch attack assumes the dragon hits with his bite attack and flies off in the same round. If it misses, the dragon continues his full attack (two claws, one tail slap), choosing to grapple with the claws at a -20 penalty to hold without penalty to himself (still grappling at +17). If the target fails to escape, he begins the next round by dropping the target in the ocean as usual.
Once there’s only one character left on the beach, the dragon can do even worse. Hovering at 10 feet, he snatches the target with his bite and flies up diagonally at a 45 degree angle at half speed (the maximum allowed by his fly movement category), moving 35 feet forward and 35 feet up. If the target breaks free on its turn, it falls 45 feet. If not, the dragon flies another 35 feet diagonally up, blasts the target with his breath weapon allowing no save for 10d10 fire damage, then drops him 80 feet for 8d6 falling damage. On average, this is 83 damage in one round.
Japanese publisher Level-5 has announced Crimson Shroud, a Nintendo 3DS game that actually simulates the features of pen and paper RPGs: rolling dice, moving miniatures, and paper maps.
“Now, the die is cast,” reads the Japanese website. “Experience a new sort of roleplaying in a tabletop-style RPG.”
Screenshots and concept art show dungeons built out of Dwarven Forge style terrain pieces. Characters can be seen standing on pedestals like tabletop miniatures. We also see a map in a hand-drawn style.
“As illustrated here, dice will be an essential key item,” reads the caption to a screenshot showing the polyhedral dice familiar to any D&D player: 20, 12, 10, 8, 6 and 4-sided dice. For many Japanese roleplayers, this will be their first encounter with polyhedral dice, which are less common in Japan’s tabletop RPGs (Sword World RPG and Maid RPG both use only six-sided dice, for example). It seems inspired quite directly from modern Dungeons & Dragons, which did see a Japanese release.
Crimson Shroud’s creator is Yasumi Matsuno, famous for his work on video game RPGs including Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre and Vagrant Story. Matsuno says he’s influenced by western games, and joined publisher Level-5 to work on a small-scale project like this where he is able to have complete control over the finished product.
(Thanks to Nintendo DS blog TinyCartridge for the story.)
UX’s most sensational caper (to be revealed so far, at least) was completed in 2006. A cadre spent months infiltrating the Pantheon, the grand structure in Paris that houses the remains of France’s most cherished citizens. Eight restorers built their own secret workshop in a storeroom, which they wired for electricity and Internet access and outfitted with armchairs, tools, a fridge, and a hot plate. During the course of a year, they painstakingly restored the Pantheon’s 19th- century clock, which had not chimed since the 1960s.
It reads like something out of a Dungeons & Dragons adventure. Small groups of brave young men explore the tunnels underneath the city and break into museums to steal valuable works of art. The only difference is that instead of selling the artworks for gold coins, these real-world rogues restore artworks that museums have forgotten.
UX is a kind of adventurers’ guild who specialize in restoring objects of cultural importance. The monsters they fight are incompetent museum security and lazy officials who don’t care about the artworks they protect.
The story provides real-world tested answers to questions of realism in D&D that are normally fobbed off with mundane gameplay-based reasons. Why isn’t every dungeon door locked for security? The game designer says “because lockpicking can be boring”, but now the French urban explorer can tell you “because whoever owns the site now doesn’t expect anyone to penetrate their first layer of security.”
posted Thursday, February 2nd 2012 by Jonathan Drain Fluff/Inspiration
The Machu Picchu Temple of the Sun, an Inca ruin from the 1400s. Its dry stone construction still stands to this day. Photograph released into the public domain by Fabricio Guzmán.
With the recent announcement of Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition, D20 Source is coming out of retirement to respect a roleplaying games tradition that’s older than D&D itself: complaining about the old version of the rules.
Personally, I was a big fan of D&D third edition. It was the first version of D&D that I played a proper campaign, and there was a lot of technical consistency to the rules that I could get a grasp on and create meaningful material with. I even wrote 3e material for some major publications.
Over the years, I began finding imperfections in D&D 3e, as did a lot of long-time 3e players. High-level combat took too long without instant-kill effects. Groups needed a proper mix of class roles to succeed, and so on. When 4e was announced in 2007 I looked forward to seeing those issues addressed.
What let me down most about 4e is that it not only failed to solve the worst problems, it only codified and made them worse, while taking out some of the things I liked the most.
Take solos, for example. In 3e, one of the worst combats I ever DMed was an elder earth elemental versus two PCs, a paladin and a monk. It became what’s been nicknamed “padded sumo”, a fight where both sides have lots of hit points and just keep hitting in a boring battle of attrition. 4e didn’t solve this. It just gave lots of hit points to both PCs and solo creatures.
Slow combat in general was the number one problem that 4e failed to solve for me. I gamed online where the limits of communication slow play more than you’d expect. 4e gave PCs more hit points, more combat options and more things to fight, without any way to compensate for the way this made combat turns take longer. At least low-level 3e combat was quick and decisive!
It’s too early to tell exactly what D&D 5th edition will be, but it’s my hope that it’ll be a game that solves the problems a lot of people discovered with both previous editions, and in doing so, unifies the Dungeons & Dragons playerbase that was fragmented by the release of 4th edition. It’ll be interesting to see what the designers come up with.
After five years and over 500 posts, D20 Source is taking a break. You can still follow @d20source on Twitter for occasional interesting links, retweets, and important announcements.
In the meantime, feel free to peruse the D20 Source archives:
I’d also like to recommend the following RPG blogs. I’ve listed them here by topic; please check them out and subscribe to whichever take your interest.
General D&D: Critical Hits (Dave Chalker, Danny Rupp, The Chatty DM, Chris Sims, Logan Bonner)
No blog post today. It’s Christmas! Spend some time with your loved ones.
If you have no loved ones, buy Eversion on Steam. It’s a deceptively neat platformer, on sale for the next few days at 50% off, making it cheaper than a beer (and lasts longer too). Absolutely nothing to do with Dungeons & Dragons, but I recommend it all the same.
Understanding the Economy of Actions, via Sly Flourish. An in-depth analysis of actions per round in D&D 4E. It discusses the difference between heroic tier and high epic level, and ways for DMs to counter PCs with a ludicrous number of attacks per round.
Uncovered this old post from Penny Arcade, where Gabe shows off his artistic talents by creating elemental planets for use as D&D terrain. The effort that went into these constructions should be an inspiration to every Dungeon Master.
The Executive Barrier, via Kayinworks. The designer of I Wanna Be The Guy discusses reward, skill and difficulty in game design.
89 Colorful Kennings, via Kobold Quarterly. Metaphors from Viking myth. I can’t think of a way to integrate this into a D&D game but it’s interesting nonetheless.
posted Thursday, December 9th 2010 by Jonathan Drain None of the Above
From Rise of the Runelords:
Exceptional Stats (Ex) Karzoug was destined from birth to become one of the greatest wizards of his age. As a result, his ability scores were generated using 32 points, rather than the standard 35-point elite array. Additionally, he has much more gear than standard for an NPC of his level. These modifications increase his total CR by 1.
The real reason for the character’s stats is probably balance, as writers knew as far back as Dungeon’s print run that solo mages in D&D 3.5 are defensively underpowered for their challenge rating. You can see this in Touch of the Abyss (by Wolfgang Baur, Dungeon #117, December 2004), where a wizard is possessed by a malevolent spirit to raise his ability scores and makes especially optimal use of spells and terrain to survive.
What I like about this statblock though is that it explains the character ability with an in-setting context. It evokes the sense of something in-setting, rather than something mechanical.
A movie character might shoot someone because it’s dramatically appropriate at the end of act two of the main plot, but that’s not how the audience is presented with it. They’re engaged in the story and the motivations of the characters and the conflict, not the nuts and bolts. Even if some film student understands a movie on a mechanical level, as a game designer or dungeon master might in his game, he’s also watching on the level of the fiction that everyone else sees.
What makes Dungeons & Dragons engaging, for me, is the connection to a malleable, coherent, fictional world. If you’re just playing like a miniatures skirmish game, then for me, that’s missing the point. Aramil the dwarf isn’t just a collection of fighter feats, and the places he adventures to aren’t just encounter sets. I think the biggest advantage of tabletop RPGs over video games is how you can go beyond the depiction of graphics and experience a world which, although fictional, is coherent and interactive and interesting all the same.
Near the end, there wasn’t any bad roll that couldn’t be boosted up by five points using some combination of forgotten feats, situational bonuses, magic items, or triggered actions. People would say things like “deep rumble strike†and then hit an invisible monster for 130 damage. [...] There wasn’t a way in hell I could tell if they had a real power or were just making up nonsense words and then doing whatever they wanted to do.
I sound like I’m complaining but 3.5 was even worse for me. Chainwielding half-orcs and solid fog spells trivialized every monster I ever threw at them. High level D&D games pre-4e seemed to end up as coin tosses. Heads you kill them all, tails they kill you all. [...] Of course, with 4e, I miss having monsters even potentially that lethal.
State of the Mongoose 2010, via Paranoia blog. While the Paranoia: Troubleshooters core book has sold well, the alternate core books Internal Security and High Programmers have been less successful. The news is excerpted from Mongoose’s 2010 report, a mammoth 10,000 word document of interest to anyone in the RPG industry.
Possibly Intriguing D&D Virtual Table News, via Grognardia. There’s a rumour that D&D’s virtual gametable will support systems other than D&D 4E. Nothing that Maptools and OSU-GT Gametable don’t already do, and I suspect that few oldschool-only players will subscribe to D&D Insider at full price just for the Gametable, but still.
Every story has a protagonist or protagonists. They’re the heroes, the viewpoint characters, the ones we root for–in roleplaying games, these are always the player characters. (It’s possible to have protagonists who are not player characters, but if your player characters are not protagonists there’s a good chance something’s going wrong.) A story also requires, to be interesting, that the protagonists have some sort of opposition or struggle–often in the form of antagonists. Antagonists are the villains, the “bad guys”, or at the very least, the characters who get between the protagonists and their goals. These descriptions can be much more complicated, but for the purposes of the discussion, the definitions above will suffice.
While a lot of the opposition player characters face in a D&D game is short term–monsters who last one single fight, or to the end of a given adventure–sometimes a DM will bring out long-term rivals or create a nemesis, a recurring character who time after time foils or escapes the player characters. This is not a bad thing, nor is it unique to roleplaying games. Comic books and serial stories in just about any medium have had these types of characters since well before D&D. Sherlock Holmes faced off against Professor Moriarty many a time, and the Joker from Batman is at least as iconic as Batman himself. In a roleplaying game, you can use a recurring villain or rival to create a sense of continuity as well as to give the players someone they love to hate.
There’s a complication, though. In fiction, we love to hate the recurring villain on behalf of the characters we’re reading about, but in a roleplaying game, a character who constantly foils the heroes and seemingly escapes their every effort to stop him can quickly become frustrating to the players. Constant escapes or a villain who always gets the better of the player characters regardless of their actions can make the players feel as though they are being shut down, or as though they are ineffective. Always be careful to give the players a chance to defeat the villains, and try not to cross the line between running a character they love to hate and running a character they just plain hate.
Don’t leave the characters in a position where they feel unsatisfied with their inability to overcome a recurring rival or nemesis. This doesn’t mean you need to let them kill off your favourite villains prematurely, but consider that there are other forms of defeat. Remember also that in D&D, death is not necessarily the end–a vile and murderous assassin might be slain by the players only to return a few adventures later as an undead creature. The trick to bringing a character who the PCs kill back is to give it time. Don’t have them immediately return as if nothing is wrong. Even in a case where the recurring nemesis successfully escapes the wrath of the players, take an adventure or three where they don’t show up at all before you bring them back around for another go. Using a recurring villain every adventure can feel like you’re rubbing in the players inability to stop them.
When you do give your characters a chance to finish off one of your recurring villains, though, make it grand, and make it memorable. Let the player characters relish and delight in their foes getting their long-awaited comeuppance. Don’t cheapen it by taking away their chance to avenge themselves for the slights they’ve suffered at the hands of the rival. Not every recurring character needs to be killed to be dealt with, either–some rivals who are not directly opposed or evil, but just keep getting in the way or one-upping the heroes could find themselves humiliated or imprisoned, forced to eat humble pie at the hands of the main characters.
Giving the characters someone to love to hate is great, but in the end, the satisfaction of victory over those special villains is what makes them work. A villain who can’t be defeated is one who provides nothing but frustration, and frustration is a good way to kill the enjoyment of a campaign forever. Don’t just hand over the victory, but don’t deny it forever, either. That’s the trick to handling recurring villains.
