Your Gothic Horror campaign is nearing the climax. The players have tracked the Evil Boss to his lair and are planning their assault. For reasons of setting the Evil Boss is much more challenging at night, not to mention the powers he utilizes have maximum theatrical impact and cool factor at night as well. This is the final climax, the big show. Think stormclouds blowing over the moon and distant thunder, a strong wind whipping the trees and inky blackness veiling all,  but.....


The players decided (perhaps wisely) to get an early start and attack during the day.


Smart move surely, but... well it sure puts a dampner on the scene don't you think?


As a GM do you go along and make 'realistic' changes to the Boss's defenses based on daylight, creating a pretty unconventional final battle. Or do you implement some delaying tactic to hinder the players until night falls? If you do this, is it fair? What if they refuse to assault, turning around and leaving rather than brave the evil one on his own turf?

Is it proper to simply tell the players that this is the big show in the campaign. Part of the fun is enduring the dramatic, scary, conditions and surviving them. Sure, its reasonable to assume intelligent people might figure a way to avoid them but what fun is that? How many movies would have been ruined if the heroes had acted intelligently?

My players (in just this situation) agreed, what the night assault lacked in strategic wisdom more than made up for in genre-specific drama ... afterall, we are playing Gothic Horror here.

The game went great but I'm betting some of you will have counter opinions.

Depends. I don't play my Boss NPC's stupid. Do they know about the PC's? Why would they even be there knowing the PC's were going to obviously gank them at their weakest? You're misleading yourself by asking "what is fair" by saying outright - how do I make something fair unfair to my PC's without it looking unfair?

It seems to me that the players can't really do *anything* to get the jump on this Boss, if I'm reading your post right. Your'e saying *nothing* they do will give them a deservedly easy win for being clever (assuming it is in fact a good strategy).

If the players don't care. Well there you go. Nothing matters. My players tend to be overly strategic in the Boss-killing. They like it as clean as possible. Yours may like charging headlong into darkness. They would probably find all my games "Gothic Horror" by my standards as they would likely die horrible meaningless deaths doing that repeatedly. The real question is: why is this "fun" if the point seems to appease your sense of "fun" over what the players might think is "fun" for them by playing smart? Your answer is simple: whichever is more important to you.

TL/DR - Is it fun for the PC's to never have a chance at being clever?

edit: I should also add: I never tell my players anything about "where we're at in an adventure." Like "Okay guys, this is the big showdown. Now I'm going to do some scary dramatic shit. Get ready!" - if my players aren't already aware of this stuff by the time they encounter "the Boss", then I've been failing my job.

Why is there SUNLIGHT in a Gothic setting?? Where's the gloomy cloud cover?  The sudden downpours?

It's an easy problem to solve, have storm clouds roll in as they approach the keep.  Suddenly, it's dark.

Watch the first Hammer Dracula movie. Half that big end fight takes place in the morning/daytime. But Drac has prepped the location so theres a running battle through the place and he nearly wins because hes not weakened at all. ( or if he is hes still beating the heck out of Van Helsing.

So the PCs get there early. Is that necessarily a good thing? What might be there during the day that isnt there during the night? Or what automated hinderances are set during the day?

Absolutely but I'm betting many here would declare that just as manipulative.

Use weather.
You can deprive the players of daylight with overcast, rain, snow, or fog.

*edit*
Swarms of locusts would work as well, for a more biblical feel.

Alternatively, if this particular fight is a really big deal, then you can set the fight during a solar eclipse!

LAME!!

There needs to be in-game in-setting in-genre justification. If you need the PCs to be there at night, then for whatever reason that makes sense, they need to be there at night.

What reasons make sense?
The ritual can only be done as the sun sets!
The holy sword only works in the light of the moon!
We can't kill her in human form, only once she become a werewolf!
The castle is ethereal in daylight!
etc...

I run Chill and CoC and my players want genre tropes AND the feeling their choices are meaningful. If I need an in-media res event, then that's how I start the adventure. If I want one in the middle of an adventure, that's what dream sequences are for.

I don't dookie ex machina against my players just to fit my narrative.

I think placing the GM's aesthetic preferences over the player agency is counter-productive.

If the players a choosing to approach the problem as a military op, focusing on results rather than drama that's their choice. What I might do is say if I feel we are straying way off genre is to address this ooc and say "Guys, broad daylight assault? Not very gothic horror is it?" but ultimately the choice must be theirs. If they respond "Screw gothic horror, the monster dies today" so be it.

I run a lot of superhero games which are also steeped in genre conventions with players who by and large want to experience these conventions so it's unusual for the players to choose the less efficient/more dramatic actions for their characters. It can happen that in the heat of the moment the desire to "win the game" can take over, hence the sort of reminder I mention above might be useful. But I would never force this on them.

I assume you know your players best. I wouldn't have a problem  being told that the cool stuff is at night. I also wouldn't  mind if unbeknownst ownst to me changes to the planned adventure were made as long as they made sense from what has happened. It does take away from being clever, but in this case attacking during the day is hardly an innovative   revelation (and hasn't that happened a bunch of times in movies?).  It would be anticlimactic, if I was playing  that game, and it was so easily over.

I think the important  thing for me would  be that the changes you made were not obviously scrambled on the fly to thwart us. They would need to follow logically from how the big bad is and from game events. it would need to be established that the big bad saw this coming because of some game event the pcs were involed in or aware of. Or it would need to feel like these changes were not changes at all,  but part of the world all along.

Maybe look to change the things you have not established as being dependent on the night during the game, or it'll feel cheap.

What Spinachcat said.

A few more ideas:
Set your adventures in an arid desert, and use rules for heat stroke.
Set your adventures during Winter, so there are fewer daylight hours.
Set your adventures in Antarctica, so that night time lasts for months.
Set your adventures in the Night Lands.

Underground!

Quote from: One Horse Town;935001What Spinachcat said.

This!

Quote from: Tod13;935009This!

THAT!

Quote from: tenbones;935026THAT!

The Other!

Seriously though, Agency and Choice are Uber Alles, Super Omnes, Imprimis, etc. Above.Fucking.All.

However, being a BBEG who has an obvious weakness, he probably has way to mitigate that weakness.
So, you can do both.  You can respect player choice and have a smart BBEG.  Sure it might be dramatic to face the villain where the deck is completely stacked in his favor...but if the players choose to stack the deck in their favor, then let them make the attempt.

The key is stopping them with the Villain, not stopping them with your GM fiat powers.

If the Villain has the means to detect, prevent or mitigate the player's plan, then let the Villain attempt to do so.
Just because the players want him in sun doesn't mean he is, just because he wants to be in total darkness doesn't mean he is.

Use the rules of the setting and the game to judge, and judge fairly, without putting your extremely heavy narrative thumb on the scale.