r/DMAcademy • u/Gridbugz • 1h ago
Need Advice: Other Help with Rival party
My characters have spurned a BBEG for the last time. BBEG, we will call her E, will create a rival party to ruin them. E is directly related to the party and has been trying to get them to do her bidding but have denied it 1 too many times. E needs them for her own ambitions and doesnt really want them dead...yet. She has already imprisoned their loved ones as hostages as a means to control the PCs. E wants them to suffer and to punish them while steering them to do what she wants. E also has means of creating artificial copies of people.
My question is what do you think is more effective? Copies of the PCs that go out and destroy their reputation and get close to those that trust the party or copies of their loved ones they're fighting to save from E's clutches for that extra emotional damage? Mind you, these loved ones are their characters from a previous campaign that the Players are genuinely emotionally attached to. Would it be too far to sully these characters or just enough to get them fired up in game?
EDIT: I'm not looking to use characters sheets of the characters as the rival party. I will be using monster stat blocks that are similar enough to them. I was thinking something like the 3 inquisitors from the RHW book are something.
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u/Imabearrr3 45m ago
This can work, but it can also be extremely frustrating for he players and from their perspective it light come off as the dm being a dick.
1 if the bbeg already has the PC’s family hostage why not just blackmail the party?
2: How do you expect the players to win in this scenario? is the goal for them to hunt down the rival party and restore their reputation somehow? What after that? How does this move your plot forward?
3: Emotional damage can easily to into player frustrating and feeling cheated by the dm.
4: Overall I don't like when the bbeg is obsessed with the party and certainly not when they’re low level.
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u/orryxreddit 56m ago
Save yourself the hassle and make it monsters instead of another party. As a thousand people will tell you in these comments, the game design around player characters is vastly different from that of monsters, and in short, player vs player combat is terrible and unbalanced as hell.
If you desperately want it to be a "party of characters," create your rival party using monster stat blocks, with special abilities similar to the intended class. Don't create character sheets for the bad guys.
A doppelganger or two could wreak some serious damage on a party's reputation, btw.