Archie Sonic campaign

JUST KIDDING THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ENOUGH SHRAPNEL

WE NEED MORE

Have you tried grabbing rings and jumping on him?

A different question.
How can a GM originally justify, without becoming too nonsensical or frustrating the player's efforts, the main villain escaping time and time again?
Not including Shane's overexaggerated paranoia, of course.

In D&D, the Clone spell can be cast on other people.
A smart villain will avoid dying at all costs, but if they are crafty and/or have the right friends, death is not the end.

In almost any setting you can make this work, too. If the players don't see a body, take it home and dismember it themselves, the villain might not be dead.

Good luck hitting him.

>original
>not frustrating
>yeah use clones
Did you even read?

Does he know where he's going to land? If not he can end up landing on Eggman's front lawn.

In D&D (and similar settings) you have Clone, Simulacrum, Astral projection, Reincarnation, Resurrection, various flavors of lichdom, Contingency Teleport, and potentially Plane Shift from the afterlife as options for a magic user (or anybody with a magic user on payroll) to pull a Doombot, alongside the myriad mundane means of escape like secret doors, grappling hooks, jumping aboard ship, or just running really damn fast. The key is picking which method best suits the situation and the villain's means. Obviously if the mob boss in a gritty campaign escapes via teleport it's going to raise eyebrows, but some pocket sand, disposable mooks, and a hidden passageway are basically expected.

If the villain coming back via clone isn't a stunning upset and surprise, you didn't make your villain interesting enough in the first place.

If you kill the villain and go 'ta-da i'm not really dead' you're probably upsetting, but not in the way you think.
Cloning can be done right, I'll give you that, but it's in no way original. And gets stale pretty fast.

I don't mean to do it constantly. I mean that if the players luck out and your villain's first escape plan or two don't go as planned and they get slaughtered, the party can just find that their schemes are still chugging along fine without them. After some time and hinting, they realize the villain somehow survived even though they killed them personally.

>potentially Plane Shift from the afterlife as options for a magic user

Actually not an option, surprisingly. When you die, you don't get to take your stuff with you, even when you're going to one of the Good-aligned paradise kinds of afterlife. In Hell, you're slapped in a horrifyingly weak and useless shell and left on the beaches of the River Styx, where bearded devils are on forking duty. This involves spearing these shells and dunking them in the River Styx to wipe their memories and make them a blank slate, which can be tortured for power to continue the Blood War.

Also, the Plane Shift spell itself requires what I vaguely recall to be a planar tuning fork, which isn't subject to the Eschew Materials feat because it's an arcane focus and not a material component.

Astral Projection, however, does have material components, but it's not applicable here because it costs something like a thousand gold pieces.

With some other spell, like Gate, I believe that the ruler of an afterlife can intervene and prevent people from completing such spells, but I've never had such a burning need to cast one of the other planar travel spells while actually having the ability to cast it, so maybe I'm wrong on that front.

I'm sorry. This is the first time my stupid knowledge of 3.x's planar shitshow has come up in months.

NAYRT but that sounds a bit railroady and quantum ogrey if the villain was so vital to the campaign that you need to bullshit him back to life, but he was also weak or dumb enough that the party killed him with some luck