[X] My Assistant

[Sinboy666]

Long time Shadowrun player, just getting back into 5th ed recently. Im going to be running a campaign in the near future and one of the subplot ideas I had was to have The Unseelie court making a move in Seattle in an effort to eventually takenon Tir Taingaire. Havent had a chance to peak Court of Shadows yet, basically going mainly off my old 2nd and 3rd ed books.
What Id like to do is make a big nasty fae enforcer whod show up from time to time to wreck the players day.
In older eds, we've just used the idea of manifested spirit with some powers swapped, will this work for 5th ed or is there a better option?

[Mantis]

That will still work fine. Haven't looked at Court of Shadows in depth yet either so I don't know if there is a better option in that book but generally, nasty critters from the fae world have been represented by various spirits in the past editions (Great Hunt for example) so that should still work out.

[Glyph]

Big baddies in most iterations of SR work better as behind-the-scenes manipulators, or making hit-and-run attacks. The way the rules mechanics work, a big baddie who has the entire team's firepower focused on him will go down in one round - or if you build him tough enough to survive that, it will be a TPK. I don't know who first came up with the term, but "eggshells with hammers" describe SR's lethality pretty well. It can make tactics important, but it doesn't lend itself well to end-of-level-boss confrontations.

[Gingivitis]

Agreed. A balanced foe, placed in LOS of the PCs is often a dead foe. If you give the foe too much Plot Armor, or too many Escape Hatches though, it could get old fast. A lot of times it's better to build him up slowly before direct confrontation (i.e. 1st run, players hear about him; 2nd run, players see his handywork; 3rd run players glimpse him or witness his methods first hand; 4th run, direct encounter (probably dead after that). Or something like that. That way the PCs will still grow to hate him and it will still mean something when they kill him.

[Sinboy666]

Here is my current for the first part of the run:

The Runners are hired by a local street level fixer whose got a chance to make some big connection. He needs the runners to pick up a big craate from some smugglers and bring it to a seccure warehouse. During the delivery they will be set upon by a go ganger that is Bewitched to be enforcers for this Baddie as well as herself.

I just see the scene where they blow up the go gangers bikes, but as they speed away the Baddie is seen walking out the rubble.

[Gingivitis]

Sounds exciting and cinematic. Just be prepared for the PCs to turn right the fuck around to go geek her instead of delivering the goods.

Crawling out of rubble alive, etc is what a lot of people consider Plot Armor. Don't use it too much because it is powerful; it can both keep a game going (by keeping a villain alive long enough to matter) or it can end a game (by depriving the players of a sense of accomplishment or agency).

Personally, I wouldn't put her in with the gangers. But make the gangers mention her or have clues about her, etc. That's just me.

[Mantis]

Yup. Give the hacker something to do and have a contact number for this person on a ganger commlink (maybe the only contact number or it has been called 20 times in the last hour or something) or someone has a diary entry talking about her. Get the PCs curious and they'll go looking on their own.

[Sinboy666]

My players are all pretty green. Used to DND and the like. Sometime tells me that this will have the desired effect, but all the same thanks.

[psychophipps]

My best advice to make the Recurring Baddy a foil, not a direct threat. Yeah, he's a pain in the PC's collective ass, but he's not out to kill them.

One of my last SR4 group's least-liked, but most loved, continual NPCs was simply known as "Andropov". Enhanced to the gills with deltaware, he was a former Alpha Group soldier that had been caught in a nerve gas cloud that rendered him quadriplegic, blind, deaf, and mute. Given a chance to work for a mysterious corporate (assumed) group, he has all sorts of ridiculously expensive, rule-breaking modifications (that still barely kept him on par with the PCs in raw stat power) paid for in SOTA and "full-retard custom" descriptors.

I had three rules with him:
1) He always did what he was told. The mission comes first.
2) He had to stop the PCs from ruining his own Machiavellian shenanigans, not kill them.
3) He always got away due to the seven Ps (Proper Previous Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance), not "plot armor". He finished more than one session dragging himself home with his lips (or the rough equivalent).

In most cases, he would show up and through his own mechanizations maneuver the PCs into doing his dirty work for him except for a few well-placed kill shots to his real targets. He captured them a few times only to have them "escape" at the right moment, their carnage used as cover while he did his own dirty work, etc. Great fun, the the PCs really hated him for playing them like a drum set despite the complete lack of railroading on my part.

Players, like almost everyone else, will choose a pretty lie over an ugly truth. Use that to get them to do what you want without making it look like you're railroading them.

[Blade]

My experiences with baddies who lasted more than one combat round without plot armor:

- Heavy troll with Pain Editor and adrenalin pump. The runner need to fill both his condition monitors to bring him down. Shouldn't be too much of a problem for a decent team of runners, but if they have to capture him alive, it's getting tricky, since you cannot knock him out.

- Mage with illusions and mind manipulation spell, in a place filled with mirrors and ways for him to see the runners without being seen.

- Celebrity whose public personality was "kind but stupid billionaire's daughter". She was actually quite clever and did some pretty horrible blood magic. But everyone loved her for her work for different charities, and considered her too stupid to be able to do anything like what the PC witnessed. She was powerful enough to get the PC in trouble if they tried anything against her, killing her would lead to a very serious investigation and nobody would ever believe them if they tried to get the truth out there.

- Persons whose goals were aligned with the PCs, or whose death would have bad outcomes (like someone who takes care of many SINless orphans).