Ok reading another thread I saw that some people are worried about using Dresdenverse book characters in their games due to PC's habits of killing stuff and thought a thread where we offer GMing advice such as tips on how to avoid pitfalls like PC's killing your Big Bad.

Here's some of my tips on making bad guys tough and making encounters challenging.

Firstly, if your PC's breeze through an encounter easily have contingencies planned to make it more difficult before you begin the session. These can be something as simple as "the buildings on fire and it's not even your fault!" or something more complex.

Eg. The encounter was set as an attack by the White Court on the players. The PC's go in guns blazing and you realise that you made the whampires too weak and the PC's will breeze through the encounter. That's ok, you have a Black Court hit squad ready to rumble and starting round 2 you have them intervene. The whampires call for a temporary truce with the players while both groups deal with their mutual enemy.

Secondly, have the NPC's act like PC's. Basically play them as smart as you can. Generic bad guys fighting to the death become like speed bumps for players, a temporary inconvenience that is immediately forgotten. I'll write up some advice on this in another post.

Next, you might have noticed Jim sets buildings on fire a lot in his novels. That's simply because it's a writers easiest form of escalation of a scene and pretty much every writer does it because it works. It doesn't need to be fire, just any other form of environmental danger that draws an instinctive fear response. Loose, sparking electrical cables, heights, spiders, corpses etc. etc. can be used to equal effect. It's not just authors, think any Hollywood blockbuster and you'll realise the dramatic scenes always combine environmental challenges as well as bad guys. What works for them works for GM's too.

Fighting Marcones goon squad might be humdrum, fighting them off while one of the party members climbs out on a steel girder above a hundred foot drop to rescue their client from plummeting to their death is memorable. By simply adding environmental dangers to an encounter you can remove the need for a direct confrontation with the Big Bad and make what would normally be a speedbump encounter into a tension filled scene.

Finally the simplest form of preventing players going too far off book is to enforce the logical penalties of their actions. Obviously breaking one of the Laws has an in game effect. But if your players decide to kill the local representative of the Red Court while visiting their place as an emissary of the White Council and wreck the joint.... start a war between the two factions that leads to thousands of deaths and make sure that NPC's everywhere let the Players know it's all their fault. Have their friends and contacts suffer as a result and then treat the players accordingly. Have the police investigate them at inopportune times and bring them in for questioning when they are just about to solve some mystery or prevent some evildoing. The Players will think twice about doing that sort of thing in future.