The players try to attack your villain when he finally speaks to them

This.

An FBI agent, soldier, detective or whatever is doing a really shitty job if they're not immediately attempting to apprehend or kill their objective if they're standing in front of them.

I have a reputation for tricking the PCs into letting my villains monologue. It's actually pretty funny when the PCs realize that they're just letting the villain talk.

In the campaign I'm in the middle of our DM tried to have a mini-boss tried to monologue, we destroyed him before he finished his first sentence. 133/120 damage in one round, four natural 20s between three players.

I actually did the opposite to my PCs and it drove them fucking nuts.

>set up an encounter like a boss fight
>have the boss not say anything
>he just smiles at them
>dies in silence
>players literally lose their shit, "WHATS WRONG WITH THIS GUY"

>Having a safeguard in place is met with complaints
Ask them this question, "would you expose yourself to your greatest foe without protection"?

>Not describing exactly how outnumbered and outgunned the PCs are
>Not enforcing security protocols and taking their weapons
>Not even HAVING security protocols

Yeah. A lot of PC’s think playing the disaffected badass is fun.

But hey, if they want to turn the game into a strictly tactical exercise, I say give ‘em what they want.

Snipers chugging True Strike potions to hit them from a defensible position at maximum range increments. Enemies who shadow the party’s movements and wait for them to piss off another encounter with the intention of killing the survivors. Invisible Stalkers sneaking into people’s tents and delivering coup de gras, saving the lookout for last.

Oh, that’s not fun? Gee, I never would’ve guessed.

The problem is that the players don't have GM fiat on their side. The BBEG does.

But muh morality

or or OR....

you could stop being such a huge bitch.

That just turns the game into who can minmax the hardest, it doesn't make the players more willing to conform to tropes.

They'll start using alarms and force armour and so on to not in fact get murdered by bitches, then bitch you out for allowing the enemies to know magically what their defenses are so you can bypass it, and then argue incessantly for a week that if the BBEG actually spent the money on hiring wizards capable of summoning invisible stalkers he should be a lot more deadly and wouldn't be able to afford a dread army to begin with.

Yeah, but what's the fun in that?

I'm reminded of that scene in Empire where Han immediately shot at Vader. And how boring it would be if he stopped and let the guy monologue.

It would've been infinitely more boring if Han shot Vader in the eye and ended the entire thing then and there.

If people want to play a tactical campaign then we'll play a tactical campaign.

It'd make sense to hit a party when they're resting or preoccupied with another task when they're either distracted or unable to recharge.

Make 'em feel the heel of the BBEG's boot as he presses down on their neck and makes them suffer for not listening to his speech, that'll learn em.

What would have happened if EVERYONE had started shooting at Vader?
Then all the stormies blasted them all with stun rounds and Vader started monologuing over their stunned bodies?

Then Han, Leia and Chewbacca started all making railroad noises as Vader grows increasingly more irritated until there's a cutaway shot to their players and the GM asking why they're so annoyed and the players complaining that this is a fucking railroad how the fuck did Vader get ahead of them this is bullshit.

>If people want to play a tactical campaign then we'll play a tactical campaign.
Except people want to play a campaign where they have fun, and apparently for OP's players stomping all over the bad guy was fits that criteria.

I wouldn't know; I had my OWN BBEG call up my players over the citywide intercom and monlogue to them over that.

They REALLY wanted to kill that guy. Especially when they realised he wasn't dumb enough to stay in the city with a teleporting monk and flying griffin knight in it.

I wholeheartedly agree to this methodology

>Except people want to play a campaign where they have fun, and apparently for OP's players stomping all over the bad guy was fits that criteria.

Too bad!

The BBEG you killed was a simulacrum and the BBEG and his forces will run you down like the dogs you are until you're begging him to forgive you and let you join his side.

If you don't, he'll just send threat after threat at you until you die!

How's that for a BBEG faggot?

See, it's easy to assume that what the players wanted was to curbstomp someone with an overly high opinion of themselves, but there's this bit:

>They complain about the session after everything is said and done

That suggests to me that they want more mechanical challenges, and given their silence that roleplaying doesn't really concern them much.

I mean, it's a free action. Talking and fighting at the same time is classic.

Manshoon pls.

It's amazing what you can do when you have one person that studied screenwriting dictacting what characters played by talented actors do, instead of four vaguely irritated people trying to interface with a story told by an amateur using a system that dedicates a majority of its wordcount to combat.

This is why no-one really enjoys your game when the BBEG gets there, James, you just make it really hard for him to beat arbitrarily.

We just wanted to go back to the cool NPCs and talking about how to solve the solve the issue with the vampires, not listen to the five pages of speech you have written down behind the GM screen. I mean, we didn't look at them but we can see them from here you know. NO-ONE CARES, the guy is a dick.

Or just deliver his speech from behind a tv screen/remote magic bullshit

>I have a reputation for tricking the PCs into letting my villains monologue. It's actually pretty funny when the PCs realize that they're just letting the villain talk.

How do you do that? Please teach me.

what they don't know is that he has a clone and when he does come back he's never going to shut the fuck up

I assumed the players were complaining about the safeguard.

If you want to get your players to talk it out with your BBEG, get a diplomatic party who want to talk first, kill later.

I did, and then had to throw mindless undead at the party to actually give them something to kill so the two combat monsters had something to do.

Now he's a dick that's about to be shoved up your asshole.

Better bite the pillow.

It sounds like your players don't like roleplaying.

Perhaps you should give them what they want. A series of combat encounters without any of that "banter" or "worldbuilding" or "lore" or "words" or any of that gay shit in between.

They might like it.

cuz as a clone he's lost fidelity

>I got a evil plan!!
>wanna here it?!?

ThatBoss

I like this answer a lot.

Honestly, BBEG's having safeguards hasn't bothered my players in a long time. I find that it isn't so much the fact that the BBEG that seems to bother them (though, of course, they'd prefer the closure), but rather the impression that their fight to the death was just him fucking with them.

Let the BBEG fall and be picked up by a minion with Teleport. Let them see evidence of frantic escape once they pry open the secret door, overturned tables, broken glass from used potions. Let them fuck up some short term goal of the BBEG and take the moral victory.

At the end of the day, the players want to feel like the accomplished something, like they were a *threat* to the BBEG. Give them that.

>mundane
Big bad yells over a sheer cliff 50 feet up and has armor to deflect arrows or bullets from such ranges
Also intercom
>magic
Gm fiat IMPASSIBLE barriers OR MAGICAL SHADOWS OR CLONES OR ANYTHING
>plot driven they must hear the monologue
Have them captured in a railroad sleeping trap
Disarmed and surrounded by goons tied up and suppressed while the night bad talks in a witty, charming, maybe even funny way give him a charisma a big bad should naturally have(bonus points if a DM PC gets murdered for interuppting or being a shit, this makes them hate and fear him more)never force the players to listen to boring shit
Then have big bad leave with a sharp joke before sleep or whatever wears off
Players get to escape dungeon/break free and something happens to even the odds with the goons(hint the mage gets spider senses about a cave in/explosion possibility)

Listen to all of handsome jacks lines, you always enjoy hearing him be a dick, or laugh at his egotistical absurdity.
A grim and boring villain who yaps about impending doom has been done before and they've seen it

intricate, but a clone is a copy unlesss there's some sort of magic jar

clone, the tabletop save game?

Maybe it's just me but that actually sounds kinda fun. D&D: Tacticool Edition. Play it slow and methodical like a SEAL team clearing out a terrorist stronghold.

Coup de grâce

This. Monologues are for people who can't defend their positions. Fight with your words and your weapons.

Players are a distasteful necessity. Ignore them.

You never fudge a dice roll for the PC's?

You never tip them off regarding a trap, ambush, or other bad situation because it makes a better story than just suddenly losing a PC?

PC's have plot protection too, they just take it for granted.

For you, I recommend the wide world of Adversarial GMing, once a staple of game running theory.

It can get pretty bullshit, but as long as you don't have the sort of GM who'll pull something like a Tarrasque out on you as a grudge monster, it can be fun. Heck, that was my formative experience with RPG's.

Yeah, I was too lazy to look it up, couldn't figure out the plural form, and never could be bothered to figure out how to use accents with a keyboard.

You got my meaning though, which was what I was shooting for.

Your players didn't care about the villain.

Your players didn't care about the villain because you never gave them a reason to care. The players were never attached. They don't care about this chucklefuck beyond the dead orcs out in the hallway. This is because you just wanted the villain to monologue and then vanish successfully. You didn't think about what the players might find interesting, or what their characters cared about, or what the players were working towards. You just thought about some grand entrance from your NPCs.

You players didn't care about the villain's speech because they didn't care about the villain.

Next time, try building the villain up. Make it someone the PCs actually care about fighting. Make the villain the mastermind behind the group the PCs were fighting, having just left a day previously or having exchanged letters with the group the PCs just killed. Have the villain motivated towards doing something, with the adventures being geared towards stopping it. Then, when the villain steps into the room and says "YOU! You've been in my way for far too long!" then the PCs and the players will give a shit about this guy, compared to all the other cannon fodder they've fought up to that point.

And don't fucking monologue. If anything, put the boasting rant down into a letter and hand it to the PCs.

>They complain about the session after everything is said and done
Yeah, no shit. If my party ran up across random NPC badguy #257 sitting behind an invulnerable shield and had to listen to a 10-minute speech before yet another dull battle, I would be disappointed with the session as well.

Here's a trick that usually works at least once.

When the players bust in, have the bad guy greet them nonchalantly. I've had some murderhobo-y groups and they usually stop dead when the villain looks at them and says "Oh, hello". In the ensuing dialogue have the villain talk a little longer each time until someone figures out "Holy crap, we're letting the villain monologue!"

Although I use that sparingly. My villains tend to feel that if they are in contact with the heroes at all then their plans have gone tits-up and its time to escape.

My party once was fighting a mummified lich BBEG, because the lich was abducting local peasants. Whole villages and towns gone completely.
After clearing few undead servants and traps The Party strolls in the sanctum to see bright tapestries, beautiful paintings and the lich having dinner with the village elders. Lich invites the party to eat.

Party of course has none of that and decides to attack the lich, but misses the last trap door in ceiling (spectacularly failed roll to notice stuff). Lich annoyed at the party snaps his mummified fingers and trapdoor in ceiling dropping a lot of bones on the players. Bones then start forming skeletons to basically tar pit the players.

As the players are figting the skeletons (they were hellbent on destroying them, they could have pushed through) Lich politely guides his Elder quests away and leaves the party in the sanctum.

Party follows the lich quickly and stumbles upon huge cavern full of abductees in makeshift tent town. The lich greets them again, but the party still attacks him, beating the lich down and destroying the body. After lich was destroyed one of the elders runs to the party and is like "what in the gods names did you do! He saved our lives!" while pointing at cavern full of people.

I ended the session here and left players baffled. Next session party has to manually resurrect the lich due to automatic resurrection not working due to reasons.

Why have the villain monologue BEFORE fighting the players, when he can monologue WHILE fighting the players: youtube.com/watch?v=LmWQd8zhEg4

storytelling is tricky, and a lot of the responses you're getting are hitting the nail on the head. Theres a chance that you're playing with morons who just want to hack at things, or (more likely) the story wasn't well written in the sense that the players (the audience) isn't interested in their villain. The latter is more evident since they all complained about the session after it was done.

Learn to make a compelling villain and also be prepared for confrontations where you really aren't in control when you needed to be. Not sure about the situation but ask yourself if it's even necessary for the villain to be there, and if so, think about what the point is for them to be there. Good bad guys are always prepared. Imagine if in The Dark Knight, Joker walked into that cabal meeting without his grenade vest, smack talked and then just got beaten in the head and subsequently killed in the first half hour of the movie.

I circumvented this issue by having the bbeg comment on how shitty a job they were trying to do killing him in combat before he got overwhelmed.

This is what most people go for, have him speak during each of their turns, and each of his turns.

A little story time related to using monologuing to help the party.
>Visiting hometown with sig. other
>invited to 5e game.
>DM told me she needed two NPC's
>same level as the party
>The trick being that we would turn on them after the first few session hours
>Heralded as return of beloved player
>7 party members, two of us
>I'm a cultist lady
>Develop plan, lure one of them off, and separate the remaining 5
>Fully equipped to kill entire party, but DM said to leave them alive
>Begin insane monologue
>One sentence in before attacked by warlock
>Initiative
>Other party members use metagame to rush towards my point in the woods
>Spend another turn monologuing instead of casting spells
>Do it again, then begin casting
>With my bodyguard, get 5 of their 7 unconcious, myself unconcious
>fighter bodyguard: "The both of you could kill me, but I would slay at least one of the wounded before you did. Let me leave."
>Party whines about the monologuing afterwards
>DM thanks me for avoiding the TPK

Don't reveal stuff about the BBEG in the final fucking battle. You had a whole session, maybe several, to tell the players pretty much everything you could say in a final monologue.

I try not to fudge dice, but I can totally see why people do it. But what I'm saying is that PCs don't have nearly as much plot protection as any of the GM's NPCs. Players can't just say "Oh, I have an unbreakable forcefield" whenever they're in danger. But the BBEG can totally have that if the GM declares that they do. It's an entirely different level of plot protection which the PCs don't and can't have access to.

Mages have tons of spells that effectively work as an unbreakable shield.

Granted, most of the good ones are higher leveled spells but they do exist.

I hate to say this because it makes me sound like a gigantic faggot, but that all depends on the system/setting. Certain RPGs don't have that kind of magic, or magic at all.

FUCK YOUR MORALITY WE ARE CRASHING THIS PLANE WITH NO SURVIVORS

Even then, there are also settings that have have a technological equivalent to an "unbreakable shield."

In modern times, it could be bulletproof glass, in a sci-fi setting, there might be shields that produce a force field to it, in a prehistoric setting it might be something like stone or metal or something.

There's always something that's practically indestructible by anything less than masterwork quality weaponry, it just depends on whether or not the game actually bothered to show it within the rules.

You could do that, but at some point you have to consider how much things are worth and if a villain is likely to decide that the specific things you point out are cost-effective. That said, Tucker's Kobolds is pretty ancient, and I see your overall point. I think a lot of people who game nowadays would prefer this. A lot of people I've gamed with came into the game with very much an 'enemies are for killing' tactical mindset, rather than the sort of Errol Flynn talkie-hero that's more common among gamers who started a generation ago. As a DM I obliged them, and we all had fun with it. With the right group, and it sounds like there's a chance this group is the right group, that playstyle is actually a lot of fun. You shouldn't knock it so readily.

This. Fuck yeah.

>First thing PCs do is hit villain with a silence spell right as they find him.
>They get good rolls and he dies rather quickly.
>They complain he didn't monologue.

>ever letting your pcs near a bbeg

Talking is a free action. If you need your villain to monologue, have them shout it while they fight. Just keep each segment short-ish.

Yeah, i gotta agree with this notion.
In fact,

>creating a bbeg stupid enough to let the players get close to him
>crying when he doesn't get to tell them his plans like an idiot

Last campaign I ran the players decided to ignore a villain's monologue, broadcast over a radio.

They never bothered to check if the NPC with them was listening, it turned out he was, and the villain was actively trying to recruit him.

>Like who wouldn't try and kill the boss?
;_;

>Heh yeah, some PCs like to have fun.
>Teach them that they should be making sure you have fun first by being a massive faggot until they stop

>players literally lose their shit
>"Oh no where's my shit at"

discord.gg/0Myqrv82v5X4bkfe if link doesnt work then use a proxy and it should

I certainly hope that you described that he died with a huge smile on his face, too.

Sanctuary spell.