Recurring villains

Scott misses the point of this earlier post. It's not the recurrence of villains that's annoying, it's the "no chance of cornering or defeating" part.

We had a hobgoblin that Barik freaked out by "coming back from the dead" with healing potions. He ran off, and we ended up meeting him later and wiping the floor with him. Nobody complained about him, and not just because he was relatively easy to defeat the second time around.

The issue was, when we fought him originally, it certainly seemed like (a) it could've gone the other way in our first encounter, but even more importantly (b) it wasn't a priority to us whether he ran off to face us later or not -- we had other fish to fry.

Either one of these elements is sufficient for a recurring villain to be appealing to both players and DMs (and movie audiences). Specifically, (a) gives the players the impression that the encounter didn't have a foregone outcome, and we hate to be run on rails: some of the best "recurring villains" are completely organic -- they just happened not to die in the first encounter. I say (b) is more important because it establishes what sort of encounter we're having, and some useful hint of that is critical in every encounter.

Players want to have some sense of what sort of encounter they're having, so that they can behave appropriately. (Characters in movies don't have this problem). If you run into Darth Vader in the opening scene, you know that you should probably keep your head down and your mouth shut -- this is a bad guy you're developing a hate for now, but that you aren't really expected to confront until later on. If you run into an opponent whose roughly at your level, and there isn't some ongoing plot effect (like you have to kill everyone who might report your existence, for example), then the encounter can resolve in dozens of acceptable ways: you can defeat and kill them, defeat them but they turn tail and run off, capture them, reach some sort of standoff, get captured by them (and manage to escape later), get beaten by them and you run off, etc. In many of those results, both parties survive, and might run into each other again, and that'd be the kind of recurring villain that can have lots of development and dynamic relationship if they keep surviving, or just provide a little thematic consistency if they only last two encounters.

(A somewhat rare possibility is the recurrent thorn in your side who's unquestionably weaker than you: an enemy who surrendered and you let live, for example, who you then keep running into in circumstances where they can continue to annoy but not really harm the party, and it's never convenient enough or necessary enough to eliminate them. A rather funny example would be if Scott's lovely backstory of an orc grunt had a happier ending where he ran away, and the audience got to hear about this guy who happens to be in every orc horde the party ever fights, and haplessly manages to survive several times.)

I'm not sure if Jacob correctly interpreted John's original comment: I thought he meant that right now, in this fight, we've got multiple enemies who, having given annoying speeches and fired off magic attacks at us, smirk and "just vanish". I certainly find that annoying. Even the orcs I know wouldn't follow someone like that -- it's cowardly, leaving their underlings to face the mean PCs, and just because they're fodder doesn't mean they want to be treated like it. :)

Similarly, the most annoying sort of recurring villain is one that seems very much scripted to be a recurring villain from the beginning. There's an encounter, and, contrary to player expectations, things play out in a way that seems helpful to the DM's plot, and impervious to player attempts to derail it.

Anyone who tells you...

that Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" series isn't top-notch fantasy is an idiot.

Okay, I haven't read the whole thing (I'm partway through book 2, "The Subtle Knife"). But it's awesome. It transcends subgenre. Which might sound stupid, but lemme finish. It's not an alternate history story, quite; it's got a lot of parallel worlds, but that's only incidental to the first book, and there's more to it than that. It genuinely blends fantasy and science fiction (specifically, a fantastic description of dark matter). It's a child-heroine fantasy too, complete with absent/evil parent issues, and oh, did I mention it's also a sequel to Paradise Lost? And just for flavah, it's got a cowboy air balloonist. And talking polar bears!

Tolkien. Lewis. Pullman. Not a stretch.