Boss Monster
As a GM, it is your job to lose. You’re there to offer adversity and to provide a challenge, but ultimately you’ve got to concede defeat to the mighty PCs. This can be a tough pill to swallow, especially when the players start talking smack.
“Awww…did a widdle orc sergeant wanna sound the alarm? I bet he wanted all his blood inside his body too. Huehuehue.”
While obnoxious, it’s pretty easy to let that mess roll off your shoulders when it’s a random encounter or an evil lieutenant. But when you design a boss monster, give him a back story, put everything you’ve got into making the encounter memorable, and then watch as the party face-stomps the poor schlub, you’ve got a call to make. Do you let the party get away with the win, bring in the villain’s escape kit, or simply add another 50 hit points to the big bad?
My thinking on the subject has been shaped by a couple of old school gamers in my group. They tell the story of a homebrew campaign in the world of Hârn. The homebrew bit involved exploding dice, and their ridiculously complicated crit charts involved that most dreaded of all random results: insta-death. So when they get to the campaign’s villain and wade into combat, it should go without saying that they immediately roll a 4 on a d4. Followed by another. Followed by another. Followed by another. And when the crit chart comes up with the inevitable “it’s dead, Jim,” gamer legend tells of the greatest travesty of the age.
“Ummm… You deal it a grievous wound. The Demon Lord flees.”
I’m not going to call out my fellow GMs for throwing a few extra hp onto their boss monsters. I’m not going to claim that giving this legendary thing one last action before it succumbs can never make for a more satisfying encounter. But if you choose to go that route, you better make damn sure your players don’t catch you in the act. Because the players in that long-ago basement of 198X could see the crit charts, and they knew that they’d been robbed of glory. That injustice still echoes down through the ages (especially after they’ve had a few beers).
How about the rest of you guys? How do you go about making sure your boss monsters provide a suitably epic challenge? And (for poor Fighter’s sake) if you find that you’ve made your encounter that little bit too hard, how do you scale it back? Do you?
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I try to make the BBEG’s minions a sizeable part of the challenge. That way, if things are going badly, reinforcements arrive. If things are going poorly, some of the minions flee/leave/are distracted by something.
Funny enough, we’ve had two PC deaths this campaign. The first was to a Green Dragon (who was a total dick) so that makes sense, but the other was to a random hobgoblin, some bad death saves, and a Barbarian taking a big risk on an unidentified potion that did not pay off at all.
Minions are a big deal. Solo boss monsters tend to get their lunch eaten because of the action economy. That’s why I’m a fan of 5e’s lair actions and legendary actions (though I haven’t seen them in action yet).
They work pretty well, but you’ll probably still find them getting their asses kicked if the party is allowed to just wail on them for a few rounds.
That’s the reason why the Green Dragon was the best fight we had so far; he didn’t give them the chance.
– He lured them into Dragon Breath formation to start the fight, hitting 3/4 of them.
– He denied the Barbarian and Paladin their preferred melee fight.
– He mercilessly targeted the weaker elements of the group, including the Wizard’s Familiar and the Cleric.
– He kited the group, sometimes using terrain to the advantage.
When the party surrounded him though, it only took a round or two before his health was depleted to the point where it fled.
There’s a reason that the M:tG folks like to call their dragons hellkites: http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Search/Default.aspx?name=+%5BHellkite%5D
Oh, and that DM in the 80s missed an opportunity. When your players slay the big fish too easily, that’s when you summon bigger fish. =)
“Oh no! It’s Orcus’s twin brother, Schmorkus! He’s the REALLY evil one!”
Grendel’s mother, anyone?
Old tropes be old…
The Beowulf poet was a hack. Yeah, I said it! Now Snorri Sturluson… There was a writer’s writer!
I like to custom build BBEGs that can counter some of the more brutal things players may have gotten their hands on, or have other counters that make them weird, but I always want to keep a strategy for beating the thing in mind. It is more than a collection of stats on paper. But some examples:
A Pyroclastic Dragon that was flying around breathing on the party, then swooping and doing strikes to wear them down, as they hurt it, it would eventually land and attack for a round, then take back to wing or something. Akin to how the dragons in Skyrim fight.
I also created a Treant Druid with lots of HD/levels. It was immune to wounding as far as I was concerned, and specifically cast spells on itself once/day to be immune to fire. So you could take it down, but it involved dancing in and out. I built terrain to give the party an advantage if they got behind heavy bars and whatnot so that it couldn’t easily get to them. And again, would give it a personality so that it wouldn’t just roflstomp face or know their every trick.
Finally I use terrain sometimes instead of minions to give the party a fight. This can dramatically alter a fight and make it memorable. I had a party of decent level PCs fighting 2-3 Shadow Mastiffs. Per CR rules, they way outclassed these things, but they were fighting in a ruined dwarven city where there was an intersection of the plane of shadow and the material plane. So PCs would sometimes phase in and out depending where they stepped on the battle field, and these couple of mastiffs just kept leaping in and out of the shadow plane and messing with them. Raised the challenge quite a bit and forced them to think so it wasn’t just a dice roll off.
I dig that shadow mastiff concept. Did you actually designate which squares were shadow and which were material on the GM-only version of the map?
I did indeed. Some of the party had gotten smart too through some of the exploration before they were attacked and started marking the ground with chalk. This party had gotten used to me a bit and had learned that it was a good idea to have things ready to face the environment. Some of the same players had faced off against a group of minions with harpoons, in a crevasse of a glacier that was starting to melt. Every round there was a chance that giant slabs of ice would fall on them, so they were having to make reflex saves and generally look for cover, and had to be careful about slip-sliding on the ice and falling into the crevasse. All in all raised the risk to the party quite a bit without making the NPCs able to one-shot the PCs. It also benefited players that wanted to have higher skill checks, or take utilitarian spells rather than the usual “just hit them harder” spells.
I love encounters that mix skill challenges and combat. One of my favorites involved a treacherous hillside and a pteranodon attack. The paladin wound up surfing a chunk of log down the hillside while the sorcerer + magic missile did a passable impersonation of the red baron.
My BBEG that my players will end up facing at the end of my campaign is a Mind Flayer Lich. Imagine: a CR 22 undead Mind Flayer with access to lvl 9 Wizard spells. And able to suck out your brains.
…yeah. Squidbilly is gonna get me punched.
So does a lich mind flayer still need to eat brains for sustenance, or is it just for the flavor at that point?
According to Volos, it’s an attack. If this drops the target to 0 HP, it kills the target by extracting & eating the brain.
Well yes, but why eat the brain? Assuming that its digestive system in mummified and non-functional, you’d think that all that fatty brain tissue would lead to undead indigestion.
I just bullshit it. If I make a boss now, it dies when I feel the fight has been adequate.
I’ve gone that route once or twice in my day. I felt unaccountably guilty though. I mean yeah it was my game, but depending on your point of you I might have been a dirty cheater.
Did you ever have to deal with that feeling?
I do sometimes let my villains get last words in. In one humorous adventure, the BBEG was an evil real estate agent (long story). The party arrowed her to a wall. Her last words were, “It’s … still … a good time … to … buy!!”
I want to believe you were playing my module:
http://adventureaweek.com/shop/pathfinder/pathfinder-fantasy-grounds/fgb20-rent-lease-conquest/?doing_wp_cron=1504811529.7715039253234863281250
Since that is decidedly unlikely, I gotta ask: Why were your dudes fighting a real estate agent?
Well, one of the tropes in Pendragon is that there are certain tasks you, as players, are not meant to do. They are either way above your head, or meant for “the best knight in the world”, which does not happen to be you. Sometimes new players have trouble coming to grips with that, especially if they have played D&Dish games before, in which huge odds against are a challenge, not a death trap. And they then also find out why it is a good thing to have a wife and kids, or other family, as their next character preferably should be the son (or daughter) of the character that was just killed.
Although I remember one time the group had just brought down a dragon, in a spectacular fight, and the character with the highest glory was invited to deliver the killing blow (the beast already being unconscious), as this is the honourable thing to do. However, through a series of bad die rolls, and the regeneration of the dragon, it took him at least six tries before the beast was truly dead.
No “take 20” kind of rule in Pendragon?
My father-in-law is a big history buff, so I’m surprised that this game has never come up in that group. Is there a best “introduction to” kind of resource that you could recommend?
Not that I’m aware of. Although it is not a very difficult system, basically the BRP\RQ\CoC D100 system, divided by 5, so it’s A D20 system. And you can then pbuy the most amazing campaign book ever. The Great Pendragon Campaign. Every year from the defeat of Vortigern and the conceiving of Arthur, till after the Battle of Camlann, with Arthur, Gawain and Mordred dead, and Guinevere and Lancelot in a convent. That is also why you have to have a family, and kids and even grandkids, because the whole campaign spans at least three generations. And is based on Mallory, and several other medieval Arthurian works. So you can be part of, or witness to the whole of the saga.
I’ve actually got an Arthurian professor that would get a kick out of this. I might have to link her something.
Here is the website of the author Greg Stafford, who has quite a lot of historical references on his site:
http://www.gspendragon.com/
And it’s all on DriveThruRPG:
http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/165085/King-Arthur-Pendragon-Edition-52
http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/12405/The-Great-Pendragon-Campaign?term=pendragon+campai&test_epoch=0&it=1
Just a few nights ago the DM had us (party of 4 level 6 characters) up against 28 scarecrows. All well and good, we took them out. Until he decided on the fly to add TWELVE MORE to the encounter, and a wraith. Was a near TPK until he let the cleric cast mass healing word with all of the inspiration dice from the two bards (4d6, 4d8)
Now see, I think it’s a good technique for a DM to hold a couple of waves of reinforcements in reserve. You can unleash them or not depending on how the fight goes. But the whole point is to use them as a pressure valve, not to steamroll the party. Six scarecrows and a shadow next time!
I was running an encounter with some giant spiders in an ettercap-infested part of a forest (this is after the incident with the water elemental). I figured I’d make this particular encounter a little more interesting than just “lots of spiders,” plus it was a good chance to give the ranger an opportunity to pick up some better gear.
Now, this particular forest had originally been populated by some elven communities before a volcanic eruption several decades ago destroyed a bunch of the surrounding area, so I figured what better way to make a cool mid-boss type enemy than an undead elf that still retained some of its old talents as a beastmaster ranger? So, the party is sneaking through this web-coated area of the forest when they get spotted by this band of giant spiders, upon one of which is riding this skeletal figure holding a longbow that shimmers oddly despite there being little light making it through the canopy. Battle ensues, and the skeleton points towards the ranger and clatters its jaw ominously; I inform the ranger that he is able to recognize this as a Hunter’s Mark spell.
Then, in the space of a round, the skeleton’s mount gets killed, he flubs his “don’t get stuck in the ever-present cobwebs” roll, misses twice, and then gets unceremoniously blown up by the druid’s Erupting Earth spell.
Ah, well. At least the ranger was happy he got his shiny new magic longbow, and I had fun throwing some phase spiders at them later.
Sometimes Inidana Jones just shoots your master swordsman. And that’s ok.
Besides, you got to make the dramatic intro, and that’s more than most monsters get.
I remember when my group’s benevolent munchkin* introduced his alchemist to the Rise of the Runelords campaign we were playing when a near-TPK happened. The first real fight they got into was with Black Magga, an eldritch spawn of the goddess of monsters. The adventure expected the players to fight it a bit before it swam off, but since they wanted to give the players a chance, they ruled that it was damaged by the collapsed dam that brought her into town.
The alchemist didn’t know that, so he nova’d it, blowing the monster to smithereens. It was as much a surprise to the player as it was to me. Hell of an introduction to what a pissed-off alchemist can do, though.
*Whom I have called Gordian in past comments