Bestiary of Badassery: Tick-tick-tick-tick...

If you want to explore new design space, break a rule. Not all of the rules, just a single rule. When Wizards of the Coast wanted to bust into psionics, they broke one of the rules of their design and gave psychic characters Power Points instead of Encounter Powers. Today, I'm going to play around with turn structure with a bad guy.

In specific, I think this bad girl is going to act at each player's initiative -1. So if you have a party of four guys, this girl gets four turns to act. To balance this, her attacks are going to be more annoying than painful; she's going to be a melee controller with a lot of status effects. Mobile, super-fast, and escapey, but not very strong. I’m imagining her as something sort of like Nightcrawler was from X-men II, where he’d bamf in and kick some ass, but he wasn’t exactly breaking bones.
I like this picture for a few reasons. One, there’s been a lot of talk about depictions of women in gaming over the interwebs the last little bit, and it took me a good long time to find a picture of a woman dressed like she was ready to fuck somebody up without having to fuck somebody first. Second, she looks fresh-faced, like a new recruit to whatever Final Fantasy military she’s joining, which belies her ridiculous time-mages-fuck-with-your-life power-level. I gave her the Elite keyword and set the experience higher just because of her action economy; her hit points and defenses are still pretty low, but given half the chance she is going to fuck with an entire party’s world. Two of these could very well look like a total party kill.
 
I'm going to start with a phase spider base. At level eight, the phase spider can move, climb and teleport six squares, has one solid at-will attack, a decent long-range recharge and a triggered teleport that gets really annoying for the  melee characters. Also, it has a solid stealth modifier.

Our baddie's attack isn't going to slow her opponents. That just seems mean, given that this girl is acting as many times as the entire group of good guys. Instead, I'm thinking a two-square push will increase her mobility, keep the melee characters off her for a bit, and make her ranged attacks all the more terrifying. We're going to take the damage bonus off, though, making it an unmodified d8+0. We're also going to take off the possibility of unconsciousness, because being unconscious fucking blows.

Her triggered action is going to reflect her time-manipulation abilities even further. Rather than just teleporting across the board whenever anyone gets close to her, whenever someone misses her with an attack, the attacker is moved to the bottom of the initiative. To even out what could be a horrible stacking of turns against the player characters, she's going to have some pretty low non-armor defenses and average armor.

I think I may actually stat this girl up to level 16 and use her to hunt down my player characters this week.

Phase Huntress		Level 8 Elite Skirmisher
Medium shadow humanoid (human)		XP 700
HP 87; Bloodied 44 AC 22; Fortitude 16; Reflex 18; Will 18 Speed 6, teleport 6		Initiative +11 Perception +7 Tremorsense 10
Traits
Terrifying Speed
The phase huntress rolls initiative once for each opponent she faces. She gets a full set of actions on each of her turns.
Standard Actions
m Frightening Strike (poison, sleep) • At-Will
Attack: +13 vs. AC
Hit: 1d8 + 1 damage, and the target is pushed two squares.
M Ethereal Strike (teleportation) • Recharge
Effect: The phase huntress teleports 10 squares and makes a Frightening Strike attack.
Triggered Actions
M Temporal Disruption (temporal) • At-Will
Attack (Immediate Interrupt): Targets the triggering enemy; +11 vs. Will
Hit: The target's initiative is reduced to 1. At the beginning of the next round, the target is moved to the last place in the initiative order.
Skills Stealth +14
Str 17 (+7)	Dex 20 (+9)		Wis 17 (+7)
Con 15 (+6)	Int 5 (+1)		Cha 10 (+4)
Alignment unaligned     Languages Common
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