Boss Fights

Personally I don't really care for spending an hour smacking 1 dude with a bunch of health. I prefer a more interesting fight, even if it makes it very videogamey. I.E. I ran a Dark Heresy one-off once where I had the players fight a Rogue Arbites and the gimmick there was that whenever he missed a swing of his Shockmaul he would tear a hole in the fairly sized wooden walkway upon which the fight took place, combined with a slow movement speed and an irrational amount of health & strength-the amount of places to stand slowly dwindled away, fighting next to a hole incurred penalties to movement and the chance to fall an unknown distance onto the beach below. (It ultimately was around 10-15 Feet so they were never in danger of being insta-killed) But it did help keep tension amidst the usual jolly nonsense and joking around. What about you fellas? Any cool fights or ideas for fights to share?

One of the players was a merchant, and had a zeppelin... They were faced with a big cyclop giant, Shadow of the Colossus style. The creature had simply an overwhelming amount of HP, so that they simply had to find unusual ways to damage him... It would be simply impossible to kill him with normal attacks. If you fell, you would probably be faced with certain death... They attacked his eye with arrows, and then one of the players ran through his arms and blinded him with his sword... The fight ended after the player jumped into his mouth and stabbed him with two swords, climbing with his swords inside his throat and dealing a finishing blow... Later they had to open the body to remove the almost dead PC from inside the monster's throat... '-' (one of our first RPGs, and we played a lot of Shadow of the Colossus back then)

My bosses tend to be relatively easy to kill, often on par with their own subordinates, but clever, devious and generally quite rude. In short, they're hard to catch up to, often prepare traps, have escape plans and more than a few handfuls of sand to throw in your eyes. The only "high HP" boss I've had in the last year, well, the players ran into him with a truck to force him into a blue wall of quite lethal energies (a tear in the universe, sort of, MtA is a crazy game, just saying) And yes, before anyone asks, being forced into a wall that tears even space apart did insta-kill even the high HP boss, it took them ages to get him in there though. :)

Gimmicks can be fun, if they're done well. I remember one encounter in a D&D game: we came upon a room full of skeletons around a fire. the previous room had had a large pit trap in it, so we lured the skeletons away from their fire (surprisingly difficult, apparently, as these were some pretty chill skeletons), and then I began using some forced movement powers from across the pit to pull the skeletons towards me... and into the pit. That tactic cut their numbers by about one third, but the interesting thing was that the skeletons immediately fell apart and turned to dust once they'd fallen, before they even took any falling damage. So, we get to the meat of the fight, and the Dragonborn uses her fire breath attack on the group. Which gets sucked up into the fire the skeletons were sitting around. That got our attention, moreso when "bonefire" was added to the turn tracker! When the bonefire's turn came up, that breath attack came back at us. Ouch. A couple of times during the fight, a single skeleton would go down, and another skeleton would turn to dust, simultaneously healing the bonefire. We couldn't quite figure out what was going on, so we simply pushed onwards; we had one character hit dying levels twice and another character went down once, but both were able to be rescued. In the end, it turned out that the bonefire was designed such that the skeletons formed chains to act as its arms; the skeletons had to have a continuous chain linking them back to the bonefire in order to survive, or they'd get reabsorbed and heal the fire. Thus, when a skeleton fell 2 squares, it crumbled. When a skeleton adjacent to the fire died, the next skeleton over would crumble. A cool mechanic, but it was not delivered particularly well by the GM, and we didn't understand what was happening until after we brute-forced it and he explained the encounter to us. (The bonefire also could reflect AoE fire attacks, hence the effect on the Dragonborn's power.) I think that particular Creature The GM Made Up Himself™ could be fun and interesting, but I don't think our GM handled it well. If you have to explain the joke, it's not a very good joke.

It's my feeling that gimmicks in final battles can sometimes backfire on you unless you design them yourself. As they have done on me when I run prefab stuff. Which is fine if somewhat anticlimactic. But to really pull it off, you have to design the boss as a detailed NPC and really think about what sort of tactics and tricks they'd use and then pull no punches. Make it fair but make it hurt. Make it suck up a lot of party resources. If you do that the boss' health or hitpoints aren't that central. But that requires a lot of thought and maybe you're pressed for time. So instead what I often do in a final boss fight is just confront the players with some kind of creature they've never met before and which is not in any manual I know they have. This keeps them guessing and makes them play the fight conservatively, using stuff that may not be necessary.

I always create my bosses... Using monsters from manual as bosses is never a good idea, SPECIALLY at roll20, where players have the internet right at hand to search for any boss similar to that... If you REALLY need to pick some boss, mix something. Get the appearance of a boss with stats and skills from another boss, and, if possible, don't use them as they are intended (it's a fire breath? Make it an acid breath or darkness breath - with same damage and effects... but the players will never correlate both informations) So, you want to pick a big Fire Elemental? Ok, don't make it a fire elemental... Make it an empty armour, that in fact is a Shadow Elemental. Players take corrupting damage from touch and attacks, instead of fire damage... And are corrupted for some time (set in fire). Appearently, water or holy magic dispels the corruption (you had to concede the holy magic, anyway). Any flaming attack is now considered shadows crawling onto the players - same effects and damage as the Fire Elemental, but they'll never find that "Empy Armor Shadow Elemental" in any manual, no matter how hard they search for it... You can/must adapt some small things though (change water weakness to holy/light, for example...). If you're going to change, always think twice about it, if changing won't make it too hard or too easy (water can be easy to come by against the fire elemental... you won't find holy water and priests so easily - unless you have a priest/cleric in the party, then the holy dispell and weakness will make the fight too easy)

One easy fix for Boss Battles is taking advantage of the Action Economy. Add a bunch of minions to bog down movement and weakly slap at your players. Make sure your Boss can go more than once and ignore things like dazings, stuns, etc, anything that limits actions.

If we're talking D&D 4e, use only elites and solos that came out with the MM3 and any source that followed. Anything before that is pretty much a waste of time. They'll be locked down and beaten into submission pretty handily. In fact, use only post-MM3 monsters at all, if you ask me. If you really want to increase the challenge, have the "boss" pursue a goal other than killing the PCs. Maybe he's trying to perform a ritual or finish work on the moon laser so he can fire it off and destroy the kingdom. Set a time limit or number of actions required of the "boss" to accomplish this goal, inform the players of this, and then kick off the scene. I'm a fan of what I call the "three strikes" method: If the "boss" ends a combat round adjacent to a particular terrain feature (or other creature of note, like a sacrifice), then a "strike" is accrued. Three strikes and the villain achieves his goal. In many cases, that means the scene is over. The PCs have lost, but they didn't necessarily die. The villain makes the world a little bit worse (or much worse, depending on the stakes). Now the PCs have to deal with it in future adventures. Do this, and the players will have to pull out all the stops to disrupt the villain's plans and it won't be your usual clump-n-smack in the center of the map. It will be dynamic and change up as you play in a cinematic fashion. Add some skill challenges, too. Minions are an excellent way to keep a "boss" alive. Got a save ends effect on the villain? Send minions in to make Heal checks to grant saves (DC 15). Have them Aid Attack so that the villain busts off his hardest hitting effect with up to a +8 bonus to hit. Have them Aid Defense when the nova striker is coming in to delivery his payload for up to a +8 to defense. Have them undo what the PCs are doing to prevent the villain's goal. (Rogue just disabled a trap? Have them make a check to re-enable it.) They should be distracting and hindering, or aiding the villain, not trying to get their abysmal damage in. If the map is big, minions with slow, immobilize, grab, restrain are all excellent. As far as trying to obfuscate a monster's stat block, I see no need. If it's well-designed and you're using alternate goals, it will be challenging even if the player has the entire stat block in front of him. I'm very transparent as a DM compared to what I see others doing and people always say my encounters are very challenging. It's not because I try to prevent "metagaming." It's because I think about the scene rather than the fight.

Headhunter Jones man of the hour

Thanks for the kind words. I don't like calling them "boss fights," but scenes involving dastardly villains are my specialty! I'm happy to help anyone build a compelling scene for their upcoming adventure climax.

Yea, I also always create my own "bosses". Actually I do for most monsters I use. For the boss encounters themselves though, I try not to just make it about beating on the villain himself but about the settings and/or the resources he has. Usually, for setting, I'll try to have a very detailed battleground, with a lot of things potentially happening and lots of player options. If the boss fight is meant to be climatic, then I want crazy shit to happen everywhere. For resources, it depends on the villain. That can range from tons of minions potentially harassing the PCs, magical trinkets, even god interventions and whatnot. But you asked for ideas, here's what I call "pulling an Indiana Jones" :) 1) Have the PCs go through some kind of crazy gauntlet run to reach the villain. Maybe bash through tons of minions, avoid a trapped maze with time pressure, building on fire about to crumble, anything that puts tension, time limit and really push players to go beyond what they think they can do. Go crazy but keep the villain out of it all completely for now. Making time important is good here usually because that unsettles the "routine" players tend to get into during combats and other encounters. 2) Finally the PCs reach the villain, probably wounded, out of resources, and worried to death because they now need to fight that big bad. It's mano a mano, Party VS the Big Bad. Game on, let's do this! He's bathed in deathly power, maybe he just finished that crazy ritual, glowing with necrotic magic, resplendent in his villainy.... ...and then the PCs one-hit kill him, first attack of the first PC cuts him right down the middle....he stumbles..."but...how..." and dies... Then you just find whatever reason you want (maybe the whole process drained him, maybe he did it wrong, maybe the demon he kept under control to do his bidding finally decided to end this, maybe one of his apprentices betrayed him and poisoned him a couple days ago, whatever!). That's what I call an "Indiana Jones" (big dude waving crazy sword around, killed nonchalantly with a gun shot). Of course, you can only pull that one ONCE per group of players but if done right, it's gonna be a moment they'll remember for a long time :)

That's a really fun and great idea, G. Thanks for sharing that! ^^

Just thought I'd share an article I found quite useful for Boss fights. It's a pretty good example (using Dungeon World but it can be used in other games as inspiration I think): <a href="http://www.latorra.org/2012/05/15/a-16-hp-dragon/" rel="nofollow">http://www.latorra.org/2012/05/15/a-16-hp-dragon/</a>