Villians And Experience

[steriaca]

What is your guide in giving experience points to npc villains? I say 1 point per time they show up, +1 if the adventure is involved, +1 if the villian is moderately successful in the adventure (This does not mean defeating the heroes. He gains this point if he is able to do what he sets out to do, up till the heroes show up.)

 

And +1 experience point every three mentions in the news (to simulate the fact that he faces other heroes from time to time...).

 

Villains tend to bank there experience points, cause prison is a long time, and you need something waiting for you when you get out of Stronghold, like a power boost.

[Tech]

I don't bother with giving villains xp. Heroes go on multiple adventures against many different types of foes, whereas a particular villain might show up once in awhile. For comics in general, the villain will stay the same for awhile, if not forever, so there's no need for experience pts for them. When I feel that it's time for a villain upgrade of some sort, I just upgrade the villain. I don't bother thinking, 'Wow, I wish I could give this villain more powers but he doesn't have enough experience pts.'  The GM is not limited to the degree that player characters are. As I like to look at it, the GM is the director of a play and if the play needs more to be successful, the play gets more. I think one of the owners of hero games at some point said "The GM has infinite experience pts." That's how I handle this.

 

A final thought: if you're going to give the the villains xp, why not think about all the other times the villain is doing something but the heroes aren't there? How are you going to handle that amount of off-screen adventuring? That in of itself is another reason I don't give villains xp.

[Cassandra]

As villains are NPC, they can be rebuilt with the same amount of points, but after the first encounter they can have attacks that are specifically geared to the Heroes vulnerabilities.  Furthermore the villains can target the DNPC in order to lure the Heroes into traps.

[steriaca]

The idea for my 'system' is a guide, not set in stone. It appeals to me as a way to keep things 'fare'. You give xp to the players, then you give them to the npcs also.

 

I was thinking about my forever in my mind Rookies villain supplement. And putting guidelines, but not hard and fast rules about villains and xp should be a part of the book.

[BoloOfEarth]

I, on the other hand, always give my villains XP.  It's not based on any formula more complex than "how much XP have the heroes gotten since the last time they fought these guys?".  If any were captured by the heroes and thrown into Stronghold, those individuals only get half as many XP during their incarceration. 

 

Yes, this means I track how many XP are given and who the heroes fought each session.  But it helps keep things semi-balanced.  And the "half points while in prison" does cause a real penalty to those villains who get locked away for a time.

 

True, I could give them as many XP as I want.  But I try not to.  If the New Gods want to have a cadre of well-equipped troops and vehicles that do interesting things (like feed them power in the middle of a fight), well, they pay points for them.  (The only thing I don't do that for is the requisite villain bases that the heroes always learn about and trash, since those are temporary enough to be laughable.)

 

Just last week, I ran an adventure where the Heavy Metals were using a stolen Dyantron to empower disgruntled scientists, intending to build a small superpowered army.  Each member of the villain team had to pony up 5 XP (with the boss lady throwing in 10 XP) to get 8x 150-point Followers (called Reagents).  Had the heroes not taken away the Dynatron, Rhodium and company could later spend a point or two apiece to get 16x, then 32x, then 64x... Sure, technically they could still spend XP and increase their number of Reagents, but now Rhodium is going to have to pay a premium to (and probably do a major favor for) the Dynatron's inventor, whom she had stolen it from in the first place.  Which would most likely then mean an adventure involving the PC heroes.

[Jagged]

Don't you just do what everyone else does and give enough XP to remain a challenge to the players?

 

Can't say I have ever really bothered making sure my villains follow the same creation rules as players. What do they need to do? That costs how much! Okay, GM bonus time :-)

[Lord Liaden]

Bolo, it strikes me that you and Tech are essentially doing the same thing: giving villains sufficient XP to keep them competitive with and challenging to the PCs. You just do it more methodically.

[BoloOfEarth]

Bolo, it strikes me that you and Tech are essentially doing the same thing: giving villains sufficient XP to keep them competitive with and challenging to the PCs. You just do it more methodically.

 

Well, with the caveat that my (admittedly CDO method) provides a semi-tangible benefit to the heroes locking the villains up.  We've all heard players complain when the villains break out of Stronghold, with an undertone of "what's the point of jailing them when they just break out a few months later?".  Over time, the loss of XP can make a difference.

 

Using the New Gods as an example, one of the villains my PCs seem to like trashing is Apollo.  In the past 2.5 years of this campaign, the heroes have fought the New Gods 4 times, and Apollo was captured the first three times.**  With all the time he's spent in stir, he's now built on 52 points less than most of his teammates.  His defenses are lower than the rest of his team... and yes, he's still had to pay the same 15 points toward bases, agents, and vehicles as everybody else.

 

Though in all honesty, I rarely have recurring villains locked away by anybody other than the PC heroes, and a more realistic approach would involve other hero groups or PRIMUS occasionally locking some of them away.  Hmmm... I'll have to think on that.

 

** The only reason he got away this last time is because the only hero fighting Apollo was Shadow Boxer, who is vulnerable to Apollo's light powers.  And even then, Apollo bolted using Megascale Flight with just a handful of STUN left.  I'm pretty sure that, against any of the other PC heroes, Apollo would have gotten trashed pretty soundly.

[mrinku]

I used to assign XP to NPCs but stopped after updating them to 4e. At the end of the day they have what they have at GM fiat.