Best Laid Plans
Not long ago, my neighborhood band of merry murder hobos were plumbing the depths of the local dungeon when they stumbled upon the trail of a lich. They were appropriately frightened and impressed, as well they should be. I was the GM in this scenario, and I knew what they were up against. This lich was all kinds of evil. It was super intelligent. It was a powerful caster with minions out the wazoo, and there was a very real chance that the encounter would turn into a TPK.
Fortunately for my PCs, they were both clever and lucky. They managed to recruit a number of powerful allies before taking on the lich. They used divination magic to find the location of Big, Mean, and Gruesome as well as his phylactery. They avoided the minions, went straight to the lich’s door, and cast silence on the rogue before she picked the lock. That translated into a surprise round. The cavalier set up for the charge, then one-hit-killed my monster before it even got an action. There was much rejoicing.
Ecstatic about the success of my players, I told the story to some of my non-gamer friends. It’s their response that I really want to talk about. “They just killed the thing?” they said. “Well that’s kind of lame.”
And if I was describing a book or a movie or some other form of fiction, I think they’d have a point. “The heroes do everything right and then win” isn’t much of a story. And as GMs, I think it’s all too easy to get caught up in that mindset. The sense that, “This is a boss fight! It’s supposed to be an epic combat!” can be overwhelming. Suppose I’d fudged my lich’s initiative roll. Suppose it was facing that door so that there wasn’t a surprise round. It could have teleported behind its minions and cast spells from a distance. The PCs might have had to charge a whole army. Epic combat! Satisfying conclusion! Explosions!
But sometimes, you’ve got to abandon the idea of “how the combat is supposed to go.” It’s a game that we play, not just a story that we tell. And if we truly believe that RPGs are great because “anything can happen,” then there ought to be a chance for anything to happen. That includes one shot kills on the boss.
Question of the day then: Have you ever had a “boss encounter” turn into a cakewalk? What happened? Let’s hear your story in the comments!
EARN BONUS LOOT! Check out the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. We’ve got a sketch feed full of Laurel’s original concept art. We’ve got early access to comics. There’s physical schwag, personalized art, and a monthly vote to see which class gets featured in the comic next. And perhaps my personal favorite, we’ve been hard at work bringing a bimonthly NSFW Handbook of Erotic Fantasy comic to the world! So come one come all. Hurry while supplies of hot elf chicks lasts!
LMoP has such a scenario (no spoilers.) I was a bit disappointed when I ran it, because I was looking forward to running a more epic fight, but there turned out to be plenty of other interesting intrigue in the dungeon. They also forgot to tie up the boss (which they had knocked out), which caused more trouble for them down the line.
I actually had a player death once because they didn’t double-check the body. It was an epic duel with a troll war leader, and it “ended” when the duelist in question shoved the troll into a bonfire. Cue looks of surprise and dismay when he stood up out of the fire. Dude had fire/acid resistant armor. The rest of the party had to avenge the slain duelist. Sad times.
The ol’ Resistant troll, gets ’em every time. I’ve fallen for it several times, personally. =)
Had a minor low-level boss set up and ready to go, when one of the players says “I cast Sleep” and drops him. They waltzed up and coup-de-gras’d him. I was not happy, but I got over it and had to accept that not everything would go how I expected it. It was rather clever of them and funny to have this boss acting all arrogant and then just drop after a failed save.
That’s the bell curve of the CR system at work. The encounter ought to be about so difficult ON AVERAGE. Individual encounters will vary wildly.
In my mind, the corollary of the easy boss fight is the insanely powerful minion. My group still talks about the invincible goblin that only had 1 hp left.
Our group loves making parties of rogues. Half the fun for them is planning and executing the assassination of big bosses, and I make sure the boss has plenty of obstacles the players have to scout and overcome. THATS the boss battle, not actually fighting the guy.
More liches and evil wizards than I can count have died while brushing their teeth.
The old “sovereign glue on the toilet seat” kill, eh?
Reminds me of a story (not my group) where the DM set up a beholder encounter with the party. The party dragon sorcerer promptly got his wings out and flew out of the anti-magic cone, so the beholder swung around to keep him anti-magiced. Cue the now free druid hitting the beholder with feeblemind, leaving it only able to bite people. DM wasn’t happy, ended up treating the beholder like a CR 2 monster for giving out xp.
My group also has a rather bitter experience with a cakewalk boss. We were raiding an illithid stronghold, had two encounters while breaking in (including that one with the quad invisible floating illithids) and finally had a showdown with the Elder Brain. Some lucky saves and typical PC shenanigans later (including the monk getting polymorphed into a brontasaurus and dropping directly on the it) and the Elder Brain went down pretty easily. Of course, the BBEG can’t go out like a chump, so then it turns out the Elder Brain was actually a pawn to a six armed mindflayer monk who had several crystals arpund his head that let him fully regain his health several times. And he attacked us immediately after we downed the Elder Brain. This was our 4th encounter of the day with no rests, we were all running on fumes, and now we had to deal with the “real” BBEG who was only now being mentioned. Only thing that saved us was our druid using a wish he’d gotten from a Deck of Many Things to basically wish they guy out of existence, which was pretty awesome.
Overall that campaign was awesome with lots of fun and memorable moments, but that ending really left a bad taste in my mouth. It’s kinda sad how a bad last session can cast a shadow over the entire game, even if all the rest was incredible.
*pushes up glasses*
Well technically, since the eye rays and anti-magic cone are Supernatural abilities, I believe they would not have fallen under the purview of feeblemind, which states, “The affected creature is unable to use Intelligence- or Charisma-based skills, cast spells, understand language, or communicate coherently.”
Too bad about the monk boss though. I’m all for having extra baddies waiting in the wings in case your need to ramp difficulty mid-combat, but if it’s the big bad you’ve gotta throw some foreshadowing.
It sounds to me like the DM got butt hurt his BBEG went down so fast, & made some bullshit monster up on the spot to kill the party.
Yeah, if I was a betting man I’d say that’s spot-on. Sounds like a the same deal as in my, “Ummm… You deal it a grievous wound. The Demon Lord flees” example:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/boss-monster
Players have a keen sense for bullshit, and they won’t hesitate to point it out when it rears its stinky head.
IIRC canonically “the demon lord flees” is, in D&D anyway, effectively what officially happens even if it’s actually killed, save for under very specific circumstances; it gets banished back to the abyss and eventually re-forms
In 4e I managed to open a boss fight with a crit on a daily power, one-sohtting it. It happened again in the next boss fight, again killing the boss instantly. The third time it happened the DM said, “no, he pulls a minion in the way”. I don’t blame him.
And yes the d20 was fair.
lol. You’d think the dude would learn to give his bosses some mirror images or something.
I hear ya though. If the dice are getting in the way of a good time, then I can understand fudging the rules in favor of the moment. Still, I imagine that it could have made for a pretty amusing “no shit, there I was” story if he’d let it happen.
“And the third time guys… Oh my god, you should have seen his face. Dude must have taken a level in barbarian, because the rage wafting off of my DM etc. etc.”
My character was a kobold gunslinger, dual-wielding revolvers with cartridge ammunition. He had at one point been his (The Blacktooth) clan’s shaman, but a dragon had moved into the floating mountain he and his clan shared with another clan (The Coalsnout,) and the dragon enslaved the Coalsnout clan and sent them to attack the Blacktooth clan while my character and a lot of the stronger members of the clan were on an extended mining trip. They returned to find their clan slaughtered and left to rot.
When the other survivors elected to attack the Coalsnout clan in a suicidal move, my character said no, and ran away. He gave up spirituality and became a gunslinger for hire.
Eventually, the DM had my kobold get a letter from his mother that she was in a nearby city and needed to talk. He thought his mother had died in the attack, so he went in wary. Turns out the dragon, and the Coalsnout clan, had relocated to the ruins beneath a huge city. The entire situation was because the dragon had divined and knew that in the mountain the kobolds lived there was a massive flawless diamond, and it wanted to use it as a phylactery and become a dracolich. What it DIDN’T know what was the diamond had been intentionally hidden within the mountain by my character’s family because the spirits told them it was a cursed object – and my character’s mother had brought the diamond with her to the ruins and hidden it there.
Since this is dragging, short version from here: My kobold finds the diamond. Hides it. And goes out to meet the dragon for the boss fight. My kobold is paranoid. He hates dragons. He has a dragonfoe amulet. His guns are enchanted against dragons. When the dragon finally crashes the party…
My TWF revolver-wielding kobold (With admittedly some help from the party, though not as much as you’d think,) drops the dragon within three rounds.
And because it’s a freak of nature with regenerative properties that could put Wolverine to shame, my kobold then spent all 30+ of his remaining cartridge rounds turning the corpse’s head into a smear on the floor that, at best, had the consistency of thin salsa, which the DM later admitted swayed him away from re-using that particular dragon as a recurring villain for ideas he’d had.
Insofar as there’s a wall of text telling the story, and insofar as it ends in the phrase “thin salsa,” I’m guessing this encounter wasn’t a huge disappointment for you.
Hah, I mean it was a decisive victory for my kobold, which he needed to move on.
But I’ve always wished there was a bigger, more impressive fight to mark the victory – I didn’t feel robbed or anything, I just felt bad. Our DM had clearly intended the encounter to take a lot longer than it did.
Hey, longtime reader, first time commenting. I had my first BBEG go down to a pair of failed saves from a phantasm killer spell. It felt a little anti-climactic to me, as the GM, but the players still talk about how ‘epic’ it was three years later.
Well then welcome aboard, Murray! Happy to have ya. 😀
This whole “easy boss fight” thing is a tough pill for GMs to swallow, no doubt. Your comment actually reminded me that I’d already talked about this topic way back here:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/boss-monster
That feeling of anticlimax sucks the big one, but I think that players getting to feel like legends is important, you know? My charge/smite/challenge cavalier sure had a big smile after that lich fight.
BTW, what was the BBEG in questions? Dragon? Evil Wizard? Dire Flumph?
There was once a samurai who basically only rolled 20s. The dice were not loaded. I checked by getting 1s and 8s. He jumped from level 1 to level 18 in about 1 month. In that time he killed several hordes of Spirit devils, several undead, one ooze, a room of animated items, one dark wizard, one dragon, one titan, an army of outsiders, and one 21st level Spirit Devil Cleric.
I heard of him! He got picked up by Adult Swim for new season, right?
In Exalted, our mixed circle was sneaking onto a floating citadel in order to defeat the Abyssal threatening the countryside from said city. My PC was absent for plot reasons, so I’d taken control of a tagalong Lunar NPC, a scholar who up until this point had been pretty much useless.
Useless, that is, until we snuck into the command citadel to battle the boss. I had one spell to play with, Mists of Eventide. One casting, and the boss failed his resistance roll and fell asleep. The rest of the Circle wiped out his bodyguards, and the climactic battle was over before it began.
Except it didn’t end there. When my actual PC arrived, it prompted a debate over the fate of our new prisoner. This grew heated, and when I moved to execute the Abyssal, another PC drew his blade and suddenly we had a proper battle to fight after all!
Seeing her friends fighting caused the NPC who had inadvertently started this whole mess to limit break and collapse to the floor weeping, which in turn caused another PC, our Night Caste, to limit break as well and intervene in the duel. Both duelists stormed off in a huff (marking the beginning of a long and bitter feud), leaving the Night Caste alone with an unconscious prisoner and a hysterically weeping Lunar. After a long internal monologue, she finally decided to execute the Abyssal.
Still, don’t feel too bad for the villain. He might have gone down in one shot, but he damn near caused a TPK in his sleep!
“You fools! This isn’t even my final form!”
*rips off Abyssal mask, reveals a plot device beneath*
Oh wow… which time? I have a DM who often has bad luck with his boss encounters. Here are just two of the times.
Like the time we played Black Crusade and killed the endgame BBEG kill himself when he rolled 100 on the Perils of the Warp table (i.e. annihilating himself). To salvage the situation a Great Unclean One showed up instead, which was basically killed in one round by my (slightly modified) Greater Minion of Chaos. The DM almost table flipped and quit the campaign over that one.
More recently, as a group of five level 12 characters in 5E we killed a CR 20 bug monster thing while beating off her 4-5 minions who were probably higher level than us. He got very sad when the Wizard disintegrated the body before one of the evil paladins or clerics could heal her back up. This was done in roughly 5 rounds before we managed to teleport out.
That poor DM! Have you no heart? All that time and effort wasted, and for what? So a few pitiful PCs could have fun and feel like heroes? For shame! 😛
Yup. In Castle Falkentstein. We’re in Imperial China, investigating the kidnapping of a daughter of the emperor. We even have a scroll with the personal seal of the emperor, telling us that we will get any and all help from his civil servants and assorted other underlings. We finally track her down to this mysterious buildding. So we go in, disarm, aviod, or survive all the traps, and we come to this underground room, crawling with minions, and the Big Bad on the other site, with the daughter. We all prepare for the fight of our lives, when one of us remembers the scroll with the imperial seal. As is is sort-of-historical, in imperial china you had to kow-tow for the seal of the emperor, as that was seen as a manifestation of his majesty. To ignore that would be a death sentence. So this guy rolls open the scroll, and bellow: kneel before the seal of the emperor of heaven! And all but one of the enemy present kneel. The Big Bad, knowing that he would die anyway, is the only one attacking us, and as it is now 5 against 1 instead of against 15, that was a short fight….
You ever try out Bloodbourne? There’s a fight near the beginning that kicked my ass harder than any other boss fight of my life:
Father Gascoigne
If you look at 0:19 in that video, you can see the player fiddling with a tiny music box that temporarily stuns the boss. It’s a clever strat that rewards you for exploration. I, however, did not know about the tiny music box. I must have fought that dude 40 times before I broke through.
Lesson learned. Remembering key items is freaking important, both in video games and pen and paper.
Pathfinder game. Gillman Fighter and a Tiefling Bard on a beach, vs an aboleth. To be frank, we were high enough level to not be in too much danger, but it was still two inexperienced players with very few ranged options against an aboleth. So we were nervous.
Until the Bard casts hydrophobia. And the aboleth fails its save. Then it was a hilarious amount of stabbing from a fighter hopped up on mutagen. (Thank you Mutation Warrior archetype)
Clubbing fish until XP come out. Love it!
There was one time we fought a necromancer once. The DM was a huge fan of her. Spent a while making her. He had her in this alcove with several undead minions guarding her in a room with one entrance. So that when we kicked in that door, she’d be waiting for us.
We walked around the side of the mansion and pulled her out through a window and punched her in the face until she went unconscious and arrested her without killing her.
While we WERE told to take her alive, the DM was setting it up so we would HAVE to kill her, and it would cause some friction in the order we were with. But we did the job flawlessly, because we’re the best cops.
D&D 3.5, homebrew campaign in a homebrew setting. One of the side-villains was these ‘Radiant’ energy beings who could possess living creatures granting them various powers (idea I got from a template in a Dragon magazine). They created a rip in reality into their dimension and the party head out to close it, but find it’s defended by a Radiant Beholder! Some shenanigans involving summoned monsters and prismatic walls occur, until the Rogue gets off a critical hit on the Beholder and with variant massive damage rules in effect, the creature I spent hours crafting goes down to a natural 1 saving throw. I wasn’t that upset, because it was still an epic encounter with lots of memorable moments. Also one of the PCs got insta-killed by that rule later on so I didn’t feel cheated…
Good on ya for letting the beholder die! I don’t know if you saw the story over here…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/boss-monster
…but the alternative is to listen to grumbling for years on end.
I was GMing a Pathfinder game. It was a mid-boss, not an end one, but it was a small White Dragon. Not a big one, but appropriate for the level of the players. It was third in the initiative order, with the Paladin and Rogue going before it. They did fair damage, then it was it’s turn. It has 4 attacks, so I start with the easy one, a claw.
Natural 1. And our house rule was, a Nat 1 ends your attacks. Then, before it had another turn, the party totally killed it. They had more difficulty getting back down the tower, and with the guards at the bottom, than they had with the Dragon!
I love it when GMs don’t cheat their rolls to save or cheat on their encounters in order to have the railroaded “epic encounter”: if the players use their resources in a brilliant way and the dice play along, then they should succeed.
In my first tabletop game of Mutants and Masterminds, I played a strongman (not!Hulk) who confronted a big bad witch with the party in an undergound, magical country: through RNGesus’ blessing, I crit her and she rolled terribly on her toughness which meant the moment I punched her it was lights out for her.
Of course, after she was restrained, the group partied with the people they’d rescued and the witch escaped custody. The next session we had another confrontation with the witch as she tried to ready a doomsday weapon and this time, she rolled a better initiative: remembering how my PC took her out, she sent a mindblast his way, rolled well, while my PC botched his toughness save and was KO’d immediately. It was swift karmic balance. And I had fun, despite having to take a backseat and let my partners handle this one without me.
The way I see it, it’s perfectly fine for the “boss fight” to play out quickly in any medium, if it’s set up right. The lazy example is One-Punch Man, and using those fights for anticlimactic comedy is hence the obvious example.
Less obviously, executing the plan which makes said fight a cakewalk can also be a good climax, especially if it’s clear that the protagonists are doomed if they screw up, raising the stakes to be equal to any fight scene.
Also, while playing Rise of the Runelords, an alchemist blew up an ancient eldritch servant of Lamashtu in his first fight, shocking everyone at the table.