Dark lord antagonist has the power to personally wipe out the heroes with complete ease

>dark lord antagonist has the power to personally wipe out the heroes with complete ease
>instead sends weaker minions after them so they become stronger until they figure out a convenient plot device that will allow them to defeat the dark lord
>dark lord is shocked that his tactic of sending free xp at them failed and he's defeated

Why do the big bad guys always do this?

because the unneccesarily powerful bad dude represents the mindless forces of evil.

It makes more sense to have complex factions than a single person behind bad stuff, but dnd playyers have tiny cervixes which can't fit big enough thoughts to comprehend bad things NOT being the plan and aim of a single, hampstermind supervillian.

Usually XP isn't a thing in the setting or is exclusive to the PCs and the dark lord doesn't have acess to that meta-knowledge.

Your party starts at a tavern. The evil overlord portents his demise at the hands of a promising band of adventurers, and thus destroys the tavern and everyone in it. Game over, see you guys next week.

It's an easy and convenient way to structure a campaign

Also, up to a point it makes sense. Would you send the SEALs to deal with a minor biker gang?

I think the general idea is the Dark Lord is restrained, distracted, or otherwise indisposed and cannot personally find and kill the hero(es). That was the gist of it in LotR: Sauron was busy with his wars and he knew the Ring would find it's way to him eventually. Of course, the servants he dispatched after it were leagues ahead of just about anyone he expected them to fight.

There are also inversions of this. Remember the entire plot of Empire Strikes back was the Dark Lord chasing the hero, then setting a trap for him when he slipped through his black-gloved fingers.

Because xp mechanics don't usually exist in a narrative sense.

>Would you send the SEALs to deal with a minor biker gang?
more like
>would you send a minor biker gang to deal with the SEALs?

i mean this jokingly but also somewhat seriously. the strength of the hobbits was in sneaking over to mordor. all the ringwraiths could do was ride around menacingly and occasionally threaten them. the skills of the hobbits were more suited to their task than the ringwraiths' skills to theirs, though.

Sauron knew virtually nothing of Hobbits though.

Big Bad longs for the sweet embrace of death.

Sauron subverted it because he was indisposed. Without the Ring he could barely even take physical form. That's why there's tension because it's made perfectly clear that if Sauron got the Ring he could and would rapidly come lay the West's ass out with extreme prejudice.

Problem is that a lot of other fantasy fiction and campaigns have an evil guy perfectly capable of hunting down and killing the players if they piss him off, but he never does and only sends cannon fodder or at most boss-tier minions after them, even after he realizes the PCs and/or their allies threaten his existence.

This is why I love Darth Vader as a villain. He's completely proactive and involved. When Luke shows up, he either goes right after him or starts chomping at the bit when he can't.

Darth Vader is a really nice exception, while the Emperor for all his trickery and power blunders right into it because of how much he underestimates his enemies. He knows the whole Rebellion will be at Endor, and out of a fleet of 15,000 he brings 20 ships and a tiny garrison. He knows he could get Luke and end it quick, but he allocates barely anything to Vader to help him out.

XP for killing enemies is a stupid concept and ruined DnD, that's why.

>out of a fleet of 15,000 he brings 20 ships and a tiny garrison.

Bear in mind the movies never actually establish the size of the fleet. I always got the sense the EU assumed the Empire was far, far larger than George and his writing team actually intended.

>ruined DnD
>was a planned concept from the beginning

what did he mean by this?

>be super powerful lich
>some faggots break into my lair
>im not gonna get off my lazy ass to do such menial work that's what minions are for
>well shit they killed my weak ass minions
>guess i have to do it myself

Did you originally get XP from acquiring treasure in the first few editions?

As far back as I can remember XP for killing monsters was a thing except for first ed., but it was always planned and was an optional feature before being made official. That's still a good 30+ years of XP for killing shit.

Obviously the party carries the one thing that can utterly destroy the villain. He's just a but too afraid of oblivion to try fighting them personally, at least up until he has no other option.

So why doesn't the party just make a beeline for the villain then?

I feel like we're now dealing with an inverse situation from what the OP describes.

Frodo technically fails on his task, though. The ring is destroyed by dumb luck/implied divine intervention. And he almost dies to a ringwraith near the beginning, then spends something like the last book and a half on the brink of death. He is also captured and tortured when he actually gets into Mordor, only getting out because they don't really know who he is, and the whole experience of bearing the ring damages his soul so badly the only cure is for him to spend his last years on the Undying Lands.

Villains don't always have to be ancient dark lords or powerful liches. Some villains can be weak but have the money and power to throw hordes of underlings at the enemy they have no chance of beating on their own.

Others can just be cowards or afraid. Back to Tolkien, the only reason Morgoth doesn't come demolish everyone's shit early on is because he's mortal unlike the other Valar. He's stronger than everyone else except God, but he's so afraid of the off chance that he might die that he never wants to risk it.

Well in my game so far it works pretty well. BBEG can't leave his domain without being weakened, also its no guarantee COULD beat the pcs if he just decided to take them on.

Who said the party know that they even have the item?

Hint: It's Friendship.

user, very few people think with their cervix, and those who do are complete sluts. One of them is also my best friend and favorite fuck-buddy.

>>dark lord antagonist
Ugh.

Okay guys, let's start the new campaign.
Before you can do anything, the bad guy teleports in and casts circle of death, killing all of you instantly.
Okay good game, see you next week.

I'd make it into a test, assuming the dark lord is already in power. Everything he does is to test the strength of the populace, and to find those worthy that he could use. The PCs confront him, think they're hot shit, and are given a deal.

I'd make the lord ridiculously OP(or at the time anyway). If D&D, have one of my players roll a save. If they fail: they die. If they succeed: they die since the attack does so much damage. He's revived and a deal is struck that plays to their inherent desires of hopefully self preservation: I require a thing to fully ascend and become one with the gods, and you're going to get it for me. They agree, get thing, harder than anything they have done before, but now have a choice of their own without lord intervention.

Will they use thing to become strong like him? Or give him thing. If they use thing then final boss battle ensues.

your taste is wrong

it reminds me of the lord of the rings text game where if you wait for too long or put on the ring the nazgul immediately show up and kill you and it's game over at the very beginning

The Dark Lord is busy.

Can you imagine the amount of work he has to put into maintaining his evil empire. Its not like the empire works itself.

He has to balance gold budgets, approve doomsday weapon projects, schedule village pillaging, calculate solar eclipses and other magical alignments, pay his mercenaries, subdue monsters for evil familiars, job and hierarchy delegation, coordinate offensive and defensive evil military operations, analyze scout intelligence, and many many other mundane thing that are need to keep an evil empire running.

Even then he cant work all the time he still has to take time to sleep, eat, and upkeep his hobbies like weapon collecting and learning the dark arts.

He has many more things than I can list right now than a renegade trio of a barbarian, wizard, and a thief causing mischief and making hisbother duties even more difficult.

Oh great the heros destroyed his giant energy absorbing crystal. He need to replace that. Oh great the heros killed this tax collecting dark knight. He now has to train a new one in swordplay, dark magic, and tax code. Oh great the heros freed a camp of slaves now he has a labor and coal shortage.

Theres more to his life than siting on a throne looking into a crystal ball and laughing maniacally while rubbing his hands.

Maybe the the villain could still probably murder them to death and the object doesn't especially protect them from him. He doesn't want to risk them getting a lucky shot in and ruining his immortality, but they would probably be unwise going for said shot without a lot of preparation.

BBEG!
BBEG!
BBEG!
...there, he's been banished. Back to your discussion, anons.

Cant be bothered/blinded by arrogance.

I want you to run a game. The baddies are the Illuminati. Now I want you to make them properly competent. As competent as you'd need to be to secretly control the world's governments.

One of 2 things will happen.
1)The game will never be about the Illuminati, and they may as well not exist due to competently staying hidden.
2)Players stumble somewhere they aren't supposed to be, and don't wake up the next morning.

Boy that sure was fun.

I feel like there's a (probably not Veeky Forums) game about being The Dark Lord's assistant, and it gets harder as the heroes get more powerful and are capable of taking out bigger targets.

>One week ago the heroes destroy the backup power source for the doomsday device
>Yesterday they killed the General of Warfare.
>"Well assistant? Can we manage without a warfare general for a while while I finish fixing the backup power supply, or should I put that on hold to train up a new general?"

I remember the old monster manuals having xp in them, but it was usually a pittance compared to phat loot.

I design my campaigns in 3 acts.
The first one are when the players discover the world, they get invested, they build a reputation for clearing out the mundane shit. SUch as winning gladiator fights, going on treasure hunts, stopping a political plot. Basically, heroic stuff. But i hint to there being a larger menace at work, but there's nothing they can do about it, because there are no signs it happening now. Its nowhere near them, geographically speaking and they have their own shit going on.

Act 2 is when the shit starts happening. This act is basically them deciding on how to counter the threat. They grow immensly in power, now being challenged in their own right. They have to figure out how to best apply their powers, focus and goals.

The third act begins when the antagonist finds out they are a threat and the dragons, demons and the kill squads are sent out to target them specifically. Now there is no rest. You push on to the tasks end. No time for hugs, moral suppport or supply runs. The big bad wants you gone and will use his entire arsenal in doing so.

Currently they are being hunted by agreat wyrm, having an entire army charging at them and the tower of all future knowledge is being besiged by the BBEG at the bloody moment. They knew what they were getting into.

>>out of a fleet of 15,000 he brings 20 ships and a tiny garrison.
>Bear in mind the movies never actually establish the size of the fleet. I always got the sense the EU assumed the Empire was far, far larger than George and his writing team actually intended.
You can't fucking call an empire the galactic empire and not have a fleet that outnumbers a rebellion that's based out of one moon.
Though, I would assume that if they pulled all of the ships there would be long periods of time when some planets were left undefended risking more uprisings.
Plus maybe thats were all that were in range?

The villain lets the heroes go at first, because they're small enough fish to manipulate into helping even when they try to work against you. And once you know them better, they become easier to manipulate, and instead of trying to manipulate someone already powerful, why not guide them to more power since they're already so good at being your (unknowing) pawns?

The end result being that you can't control ALL information flow, and eventually they figure out that the invisible hand of coincidence has really been the villain all along, by which point they're powerful enough to pose a threat.

The illuminati idea is actually even easier, since the illuminati is rarely seen as just one person and more of a council. What happens when they don't agree? What happens when one person thinks "we can manipulate them into one more job" while another thinks "we need to deal with them NOW"? Suddenly the heroes become a topic of debate for the "villanous council", and come last in the order of business for the meetings, because otherwise they wouldn't hit the rest of the important points.

Turns out? The PCs? They're Team C. The come-latelys. There's already paragons three times their level carving up the big bad and his forces. You're peanuts. Shit. Worth only the trash mobs.

...which you slowly and silently grow powerful on, until you shock the Dark Lord by even showing up and then tearing his spine out from his mouth after he's already wasted Team A, B, and Z.

The better way to put the example:

Do you send some SEALS to deal with some low power bad guys, or do you use a nuke to hit that compound?

A couple of limitations come to mind for the super baddy:
The bad guy may have ultimate power, but operate under restrictions. The blow back to using too much power may not be worth what he sees as the benefit.

The bad guy may have ultimate power, but he may not be able to simply use it everyplace at all times. In our example above, sure we could drop in a division of airborne if needed. But we can't do that all over the world all at one time.

Both of those allow the bad guy to have 'ultimate' power in relation to the PC at the beginning of the game, but not crush them right out.

In OP's example, maybe the Dark Lord could personally take out the PC. But that doesn't mean he would want to expose himself to other forces of good/evil by leaving his base for such a small payoff as wacking guys in a tavern.

>villain personally hunting every adventurer on the continent
>no time to actually do anything meaningful
>has existential crisis
>goes back to lair and eats Ben and Jerry's for the next six months
>henchmen convince him to see therapist
>flash forward three years
>villain is now a zumba instructor with a smoothie addiction

Sorting Algorithm of Evil.

This.

BBEGs usually can't be asked to take out the trash themselves or clean up the laboratory after an experiment.

ZERO reason to think the BBEG knows about the PCs or their significance
ZERO reason to think the whole XP thing is a fundamental constant of the setting
ZERO reason to think most campaigns will feature "a convenient plot device that will allow them to defeat the dark lord" (99% of the time, the BBEG is just, ya know, fought)

>always

I assume you mean virtually never, since this is a mix of movie nonsense + RPG mechanics that don't frequently get combined.

I like your ideas but,

>If they fail: they die. If they succeed: they die since the attack does so much damage

I think this is a bit disingenuous. It breaks the immersion of the game too much to just have arbitrary shit like this, and the players will catch on.
At least give them more an illusion of choice, for example: if they fail they die, are revived and take the deal. if they succeed they are brought a hair's breath from death, 1 hit point. The dark lord then plays it off as another test, and commends them on withstanding their attack, at which point they take the deal.

>The evil overlord portents his demise at the hands of a promising band of adventurers, and thus destroys the tavern and everyone in it

Isn't this practically how Dragonlance starts?

My big bad did it because he's secretly a Zoom tier psycho and does horrific things literally for the purpose of creating great hero's, reasoning eventually someone will be great enough and pure enough to destroy him will protect the world for ages to come.

This is why he plays by tropes, this is why he's needlessly cruel to his followers (to punish them for their moral failings), this is why he rarely kills 'true' innocents. He's a completely insane former paladin who was afflicted by a curse of alignment change

Very little (if any) of the math in the actual game is directly part of the setting. Plenty of it only exists as a gameplay mechanic to create fun and (unless it's D&D) balance in characters, and narratively makes little to no sense. Many times the only reason the dark lord in an RPG storyline is the strongest is because it makes sense from a game perspective to have the hardest boss be the last.

Think about it. What world leader in the real world is made that way exclusively because he's the best in combat? Even barbaric tribes and cultures that fellated warriors on principle didn't do this. Your best warriors are out fighting or teaching the new batch how to fight. Putting them on a throne and asking them political questions gets you nowhere.

A realistic game (if we were to abandon fun entirely) would probably have whoever is actually in charge of this whole thing be pretty mediocre by the time the PCs get to them. Instead, he's got amazing powers because then PCs can fight a fun challenging enemy at the end and won't feel bad for stomping some 90 lbs old man while he shits himself.

PCs are just one out of 1000 minor threats to BBEG. He is too busy dealing with more powerful enemies like gods and ancient dragons while leaving local minor resistance to minions.

Phase 1
>players are unknown to the BBEG, and possibly vice versa
>any encounter with the BBEG's forces is either on the PC's inititative, or purely coincidental

Phase 2
>players are recognised as a nuisance
>BBEG's forces will attack the PC's on sight

Phase 3
>players are recognised as a threat
>BBEG sends out hunting parties to deal with the PCs, as the BBEG himself is busy fighting other, stronger, adventurers / factions or preparing some kind of scheme (gathering material for a ritual)

Phase 4
>players are recognised as the de facto existential threat to the BBEG and possibly his faction
>BBEG is likely to either prepare for the PC's assault, or lead an attack against them himself

>kill BBEG
>his organization was killing horrible monsters to keep them from interfering with plans, suppressing various cults to ensure people followed him instead, kept scores of bandits on indirect payroll to keep things busy for the king's investigators, and ran several large criminal organizations to keep their funding up
>without the BBEG and his league of supervillains, a massive power vacuum emerges
>gang wars in the streets
>bandits who are now more hungry and broke get worse
>monsters stop being held back at the edge of the nation
>doomsday cults are popping up like weeds
>the legendary heroes are dead or have flown off with the lion's share of the nation's riches never to be seen again, further demolishing the economy as a major recession hits
>the threat of civil war looms over the countryside
RPG hook acquired.

>Hero has been bred and trained to do one thing, their power lies in purity of resolve.
>They fail to do the one thing due to trickery
>Dark Lord sends weaker minions at them so they grow old and experienced. As they, having faced countless challenges, become clever and able to play the dark lord's games, so does their resolve to prevail dull at first, their tactics practiced less direct and ultimately weaker head on, thinking out of the box until they themselves become as morally relativist as the villian.

>Face countless of wanna-be heroes and resistance cells
>Sure, one of them is probably the Chosen of the gods, but you have no way of knowing it and the other 99% will go down like fodder
>There is only one of you, and you have shit you'd rather be doing
>Send your minions to have a 99% effectiveness rate on your foes
>By the time one survives and shows himself to be a actual threat, now it'd be a productive use of your time to go kill him in person

All villains are attempting to run the above gambit since they can't just go around personally doing all the fighting themselves, like, they want to do other shit too. It's just that often times they wait too long and fail the gambit.

That's why you have the concept of a Dragon, user. The BBEG's fiercely loyal first commander is the fight in every game in which the party is in over their heads and all the bets are off.

The hero confronting the villian himself, then, should be a mental contest of slippery trickery and fortituous will, as their ideals clash.

PCs took matters in their hands. 5 years later BBEG's rule is remembered as good old times...

Because if the BBEG personally shows up, he'll just manage to kill the heroes' mentor while the rest escape and swear revenge.

>he doesn't know xp was linked to gold in the beginning

]Is it worth the thigh cramps? Because I have to wonder...
Exactly. The villain has a lot of shit to worry about, and every group of murderhobos isn't always worth the time for spies to run down, watch, capture, and interview. Just do it the easy way: coopt via a steady paycheck and benefits.
And now I need this game.

XP from killing enemies was in from the beginning, and its ambiguous whether you should exactly get full XP for unguarded treasure in all TSR editions -- you'll notice that you get reduced XP for a too easy fight (yes, old school had encounter balancing guidelines), and it seems quite possible that you're intended to get less XP from unguarded gold in OD&D and possibly other editions (sort of hard to tell).

There is an example of PCs getting reduced gold XP due to a too easy encounter in OD&D, in any case.

The bbeg isn't concerned with any little band of adventurers, he has his own objectives that require his full attention and powers. He sends some minions because he doesn't realize which band of adventurers will become strong enough to kill him. He can't expend his power on weak people, he supposes that his henchman, trained to do his bidding, will be enough. It's a reasonable thinking, even though it puts him at risk.

This only happens in my campaigns when the PCs run into the Dark Lord's flunkies who are in the process of doing some sort of job.

Once my Dark Lord-equivalents realize the player characters' power, he starts making alliances with other dark lords to create the strongest kill teams they can bring together.
Often, my player characters have been completely outmatched by these and have needed to actively avoid them (usually while seeking out powerful treasures from mission rewards or raiding ancient tombs and the like.)

If the kill teams don't work, the dark lord gets paranoid and goes into hiding, filling up their lair with insidious traps and as many minions as they can muster.

I've done this in two campaigns now. Works every time (unless your player characters mistakenly think they can kill everything you send at them, and never have to flee.) Exciting every time. Better yet, it makes sense.

Stop playing your evil overlords like shitty saturday morning cartoon villains.

Sure. The first time maybe.

But who's to say the dark lord even has any knowledge of who the "heroes" are. If they lay waste to his minions without leaving witnesses, how does he even know there's just one group growing increasingly powerful?

Yes, contrived stories are retarded, but usually an evil conqueror will have more to worry about than just that one tiny group.

You make enormous leaps of logic in this post, and if you think you're being clever you should frankly be embarrassed with how easily you manage to yourself of your own bullshit.

You think there's only one plucky band of heroes planning to take down the Dark Lord? There's probably dozens of mixed-species groups banding together in taverns every day, going out on adventures. Some are going to get bored and go abuse Wall of Iron to make a fortune in the weapons trade, some are going to pursue other goals like legalizing gay marriage, some are going to starve to death out in the woods because they put the Barbarian in charge of the map. If you go personally wipe out each of them, how are you ever going to get any Dark Lording done?

Rumors and news spread freely from mouth to mouth in most medieval-equivalent settings. The reason he knows is because people are talking about it on every street corner, in every tavern, at court, at the breakfast table, at the cobbler's...

Why even waste your time typing if you're gonna make the bait this obvious?

Kinda circular reasoning, don'cha think? The whole point of killing them before they become great heroes of legend is... killing them before they become great heroes of legend.

>The reason he knows is because people are talking about it on every street corner, in every tavern, at court, at the breakfast table, at the cobbler's...

By this time, its way way WAY fucking too late to cheap shot them, and they're probably already ready to take him down.

Doesn't look like bait to me. The idea that the PCs are the Chosen Ones of Legend is common for vidyas, books and fiction, and ultra, crazy, uber rare for actual PnP RPGs.

They're usually cut from sterner stuff (though this is not universal), but in his quest to be clever the OP creates a hodge podge of tropes that aren't usually combined.

Different bait for different fish, user. I like to catch smarmy half-wits, and it looks like they're biting today.

I'm not even talking about Samurai Jack. It's been done many times before. While it looks postmodern and subversive, it's an old fairy tale story, the very one about fruit of knowledge.

There is power in focus and knowledge confuses the acts of body and disconnects the mind from nature.

The world is complicated. A childish hero can only exist as a child. Merely learning too much can corrupt. To a child, a ture adult is a monster, and in many ways, an adult will never be as great as a child.

No, my point was not that they were of legendary status and therefore everyone would be talking about their deeds.

My point was that everyone would be talking about their deeds even early in their careers, because that's what medieval people did.

The world was small, there wasn't much to do, and the spreading of news about everything was everyone's number one hobby.

Killing band upon band of monsters does not impart on you gnosis, or any higher knowledge or greater insight or philosophies about the workings of the universe. If anything, it would result in stagnation toward the opposite.

But I have no desire to discuss this with you; you're clearly a walking parody of "confidently thinks he's smarter than he is" and it's absolutely insufferable.

I'll take symbolism for 500

>My point was that everyone would be talking about their deeds even early in their careers, because that's what medieval people did.

Well yeah, the BBEG hearing tales of garden variety nobodies doing kinda meh-ish things is not going to be reason to go slaughter them.

"Sire! There's some guys in a town somewhere!"
"WHAT? TELL ME MORE!"
"A tavern had some rats in it, and they defeated them all by themselves!"
"How could this be? Surely, this band of totally irrelevant nobodies must be the guys who will inevitably destroy me! Time to send my most powerful minions to destroy them!"
"Brilliant as always, my lord!"

It's all part of The Code.

Are you new to the Dark Lording business?

FUCK THE CODE

My next campaign is going to start with the villain using a spell to "destroy" the party that was prophecized to defeat him.
Little did he know the spell's actual function was to FLING THE FOOLISH HEROES INTO THE FUTURE WHERE HIS EVIL IS LAW

The Code give but also The Code takes away. If you abandon The Code it will claim you.

Let's use Aku for example since that show is out again.
He is the manifestation of all evil and is almost killed in their final battle. Instead of risking dying again, he tosses the Samurai into the future where Aku has already won.
And instead of continuing to fight the Samurai, Aku decides to wait until the Samurai dies while throwing countless minions to delay him.
And similar to this post. Aku has reached:
Phase 5
>The BBEG is scared shitless and goes into hiding after failing way too many times, even though the players he's fighting are considerably weaker than he is.

It's a numbers game. The dark overlord isn't going to go around personally dealing with every rat-catcher with enough silver to buy a sword. That's what his underlings are for. Once the party becomes a bigger threat, then he has to start actively trying to stop them.

Vader was an exception, because Luke and the gang got tangled up in galactic-scale events by accidentally acquiring the Death Star plans. Vader didn't give a shit about Luke personally until he realized he was force-sensitive.

If Luke wasn't a Jedi and never got tangled up in the Empire's business, and just one day said "I'm going to kill things, get XP, and eventually kill the Emperor!", of course Vader wouldn't have given a shit about him at first.

You have to be over 18 to post on this board.

Well, yeah.
There's a reason the older, code-respecting villains get to slink away to try again later, while the new 'fuck the code' guys tend to get overly-descriptive gruesome deaths, usually with some reminder that their bowels loosen up after death because that's always clever when a writer does that.

>Main villain just wants to die
>He intentionally lets the good slip through his fingers so they might one day surpass him
>Many have tried before, but all of them failed, leaving the main villain in deep depression after realizing that there was nothing in this world to achieve and no will ever be able to stand toe to toe with him

They only become heroes by fighting the minions.

Before that, they're just clueless idiots who've somehow managed to stumble onto the plot.

I've been posting here for nine years. It's not my fault user does not know or understand one fairly common way to subvert a story archetype, which is what the thread is all about.

It's not worth his time when they're weak, and it's too late when they get there.

>didn't give a shit about Luke personally until he realized he was force-sensitive.

No, he started caring when he realized Luke was his son. Which he implicitly did the moment he found out the rebels had a guy named Commander Skywalker.

>"First of all, what the fuck is an exp?"
>"Second, if I were to send my stronger warriors after every single peasant farm boy trying to overthrow me, that would leave both my cities and my evil lair completely undefended from any real threats like invading armies or destined heroes."

>Party uses McGuffin to kill the BBEG and save the world, taking a breather in the dark throne room.
>Villain suddenly sits up, ancient magical sword still embedded in his chest, smiling and laughing
>"Haha guys, that was awesome! Like, holy shit you really did it!"
>Reveals that the entire adventure has been a ruse.
>Every quest was staged
>Everyone whoever interacted with them was either a paid actor or a clever illusion
>Every monster they killed was made of paper mache animated by magic
>The town that the villain burned down was constructed for that very purpose. Every building they didn't go into was empty aside from some gasoline
>Even the Blade of Darkness Slaying was made by him to look flashy and do cool shit
>Promises to do something even bigger next year.

And nobody in any branch or the Imperial Intelligence Service or the military thought on the lines of

"Hey, this rebel has the same last name as the Boss and they are both Space Wizards. Is there a connection?"

People besides the Emperor and Vader who live in the Empire and know Vader used to be Skywalker:
And that's it.

Kinda want to play that...

You'd never know you were playing it until the very end, and even then nothing the BBEG says can be confirmed.

WHAT SOMEONE HAS KILLED THOSE 3 ABOUT 27 STEPS BELOW ME IN THIS PIRAMID SHEME I HAVE BASED MY OPERATIONS ON HAS GOTTEN DEFEATED BY A GROUP UPSTART PEASANTS THAT WHERE HIRED BY A LOCAL VENDOR THAT THEY TRIED TO BLACKMAIL?
GATHER THE MEN , HAND ME MY SWORD OF UNENDING MISERY AND ARMOR OF the LOST DEEPS MIMSY I SHALL DEAL WITH THIS PERSONALLY

By the start of Empire, only two people know Vader is Anakin.

One is dead, the other is living in a swamp.

>BBEG is actually bleeding everywhere
>His balance is off as he tries to seat in the throne
>"Hahaha! I actually got you this time! But now it's the time you to leave [*blood comes out of his mouth*]"

Because xp isn't a thing in-universe, same goes for gameplay mechanics. TTRPG isn't an isekai anime.