True Villainie

[Matt Gwinn]

I start my new D&D 3E campaign next weekend and I have a pretty interesting .

The main nemesis for the campaign is the Cult of The Dragon which is a fairly psychotic organization that believes the world will one day be ruled by undead dragons.

Since I intend for the villains to be extrememly covert, the players will not meet the head of the cult until the END of the campaign.  As a result, I was thinking about having an additional player play the role of the cult leader outside the actual game.  Here's how it would work.

Step 1) Regular group plays a session.

Step 2) I meet up with head of the cult and find out what he wants his peeps to do in response.

Step 3) Plan the next session accordingly.

I'm thinking that this will add a new dynamic to the game as the villain will:

a) Keep me on my toes by throwing out ideas that I may not have thought of on my own.

b) Be truely untethered in his wrath.  As the GM I really don't want PCs to die, but the villain does.  Perhaps it's my Simy nature, but I like realistic villains.  And this way I don't have to feel guilty when everyone dies :-)

c) Be void of PC information.  I may know as GM that player 1 has a +5 orc slayer, but the villain probably won't and thus his sceems will not be tainted by GM knowledge.

Anyway, I was wondering if any of you had any experience with this type of game dynamic and how it worked for you.

,Matt

[Joe Murphy (Broin)]

I tried something like that, for just a session. It was a supers game, and one character had had a flashback and had become deranged. He'd gone on the run.

Next session, the rest of the PCs are sent into China to recover what might be their lost comrade. He'd become a sort of electrical elemental, and seemed to have decimated a town.  So I set up a map of the town, plopped down the PCs at one end, and every few minutes, I took the 'dragon' aside. In fact, the player only got to see relevant bits of the map, IIRC.

Like you say, it made for quite an interesting session, tactically speaking. He had only vague knowledge of the other characters' capabilities and positions, and the rest of the group could really *believe* that he had strong motivations, and would be difficult to take him down. They were scared of the deranged PC, in fact, as they knew the player was a bastard.

Time-management became difficult. Thankfully, the player was quite good at filling me in in brief bursts, rather than loading me down with complex actions. That shouldn't be such a problem in your game.

In your game, will that player play the cult leader during the final showdown too? Or would that be too confusing?

Joe.

[Matt Gwinn]

In your game, will that player play the cult leader during the final showdown too? Or would that be too confusing?

That's what I was hoping.  It will depend on work scedules and such.

One thing I really wanted to do was have one on one sessions with him between official game sessions, but I'm not sure how that would work out time wise over a simple consultation.

I'm really excited about this campaign becausae I am trying a lot of new things.  I mentioned it in another post, but I will sumarize what I plan here.

I gave the players extra experience and magic items in exchange for writing character backgrounds.  So far it has been incedible the way my players have responed to this.  Some of the backgrounds I recived are quite rich and have provided me with tons of story arcs to play with.

I also plan to implemet a new experience system where players tell me how much experience they want for the next session.  If they want 10,000 XP each, they better hold their asses because a huge shit storm is coming their way and they asked for it.  ONe player responded to this by asking if she could decline XP in exchange for certain magic items.  A player willing to give up experience points for equipment?  It kind of took me by surprise.

I'll update everyone next sunday on how things went.

,Matt