Solo Boss Monster
I’ll never forget the Level 2 boss of my old megadungeon. He was this awful vulture creature, and it was his job to guard the dungeon maguffin at the end of this magical waterway. I made sure to play up the creepy sounds effects issuing from his tunnel lair. The boss had this badass stunning screech ability, and I wanted to convey how big a deal challenging him would. I’d done the research on all his nifty boss abilities, you see. I knew in my neophyte gamer heart that it would be a tough fight. In addition to the screech, he could protect himself by hovering in place, kicking up blinding rocks and dust. There were special fly-by attacks. Grapples. Swallow Whole rules that I had to learn. And of course there was a massive bonus to hit for all of the above. It was going to be a bloodbath!
I didn’t know how right I was.
My players had been suitably impressed impressed by all the foreshadowing. They strategized. They took the time to buff up. And when it finally came time to roll Initiative, my big bad buzzard was dead in before it got its first turn. This is, I think, a lesson that all GMs pick up early in their careers.
When it comes time to pit your party against a scary boss monster, new GMs will often look at the Challenge Rating and say to themselves, “Here is a hard encounter. The rules specify that this is a hard encounter, verging on deadly. Surely this will be a battle for the ages!” But when the inevitable happens, it can be tough to understand why.
So for today’s discussion, why don’t we trade tales of “the time my solo monster got smoked?” Where were you when you first learned that action economy is a thing? And now that you’re a more experienced gamer, how do you like to mitigate it for solo encounter design? Do you take Magus’s advice and bring in the minions? Do you follow the 5e playbook with lair actions and legendary actions? Or do you make like an ettin and give solo boss monsters multiple full turns? Whatever your take on standalone battles, tell us your tale down in the comments!
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D&D 4e skirted around the action economy issue by giving “solo” ranked enemies ways to abuse it.
Minor action attacks, triggered attacks when bloodied, attacks that instead penalize the PC team’s action economy, repeatable AoE etc.
I always appreciate 4e for this. It’s the one edition that seemed to acknowledge it was a tactical game first.
Magus sure keeps encountering/trouncing giants a lot.
Coincidence or plot point? YOU BE THE JUDGE!
Level 7 party of 6 smoked my CR 17ish homebrew fire giant lord in 1.5 turns (D&D 5e). Lots of crits (and crit smites) from the party’s side because the universe hates me, while the giant’s legendary spellcasting actions and other legendary saving throw actions were negated by the paladins (specifically the Ancients one – I rolled 38 for the giant’s fireball, and most characters ended up taking a grand total of 9 damage from it). The giant’s 25 AC didn’t matter because crits.
Lessons learned:
* Monsters have 3 legendary actions because WotC assumed 4-player parties, and in that case the 3 legendary actions balance out the action economy. For bigger parties, give them partySize-1 legendary actions instead.
* Don’t let them take a long rest before a boss fight. (It was an honor duel, and they baited the giant into letting them take the rest by appealing to his sense of honor, so that was actually clever of them. But if I’m ever setting them up against another honorable boss, I’ll take a page from the book of Klingons: “There’s nothing more honorable than victory.”)
* Just double the HP of the monsters. The HPs according to the DMG’s CR guide are a fucking joke. Especially if you have a bigger party.
* If you have paladins in the party, boost the saving throw abilities’ DC by at least 3. If you want to use / homebrew a monster that relies on saving throws for damage instead of attack rolls, use one that is 3-4 CRs higher than you’d use normally. Will this negate all positioning strategies except “huddle with the paladin”? Yes. But that’s on WotC for breaking the game with their stupid aura of protection.
* If you have an Ancients paladin in the party, just forget spellcasting enemies, or use spellcasters with control / buff-debuff spells instead of damage-dealing spells. Again, that’s on WotC. (You can also use the whole “oh, it’s not a spell, it’s an innate magical ability” bullshit that WotC’s books use to negate this, though that works better for nonhumanoid creatures. For humanoids it’s a little less plausible that this random guy just happens to have an innate magical ability that just happens to replicate Burning Hands without actually casting Burning Hands.)
* Monster AC is meaningless if the universe hates you. I should at least give them adamantine armor next time.
* Paladins in 5e are completely broken.
So if I’m reading this correctly, you are… checking my notes… A big fan of Aura of Protection?
Yes, it’s a perfectly balanced class feature that doesn’t break 5e’s design philosophy at all, doesn’t make parties that have at least a semi-optimized paladin in them much more powerful than equally-optimized parties without paladins, and doesn’t force DMs to balance their encounters around the specific party composition instead of a general party of a given size and level.
But just think of all the tactical formations you can use!
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/aura-of-personal-space
“Paladins in 5e are completely broken.”
The issue is thinking that it’s just paladins. 5e is filled to the brim with shallow ideas, retcons, broken rules and abilities, etc while also being too complex to be rules light. If you want balance (and also more involved character building), play Pathfinder 2e. If you want simple rules (at least for combat), pick up a story game or something from the OSR depending on preference.
Yes, I know that there are probably more broken classes (especially once the party reaches tier 4) but the usual party I DM for has three paladins. So I’m mostly familiar with how absolutely, insanely broken paladins are compared to rangers and martials. They are _the_ best tank, _the_ best healer (unlike casters with healing spells, their healing power doesn’t compete with their damaging abilities for the same resource and doesn’t need dice rolls), smites are _the_ most reliable way to convert spell slots to single-target damage (especially if the paladin in question is saving them for crits), they have the CHA to ace social encounters (the bard is better with expertise, but the bard’s player is fairly new), and they provide insane no-resource buffs to themselves and the party. They might suck at range, but many of them have spells to compensate for that (misty step and moonbeam are the main suspects) plus STR-based thrown weapons.
And then some brainiac at WotC decided to give them Harness Divine Power too, because it wasn’t hard enough as it is to wear down their resources. Hell, they get 3 uses of it earlier than the cleric.
I also play Pathfinder with a different party as a player, and funnily enough, I play a champion (liberator). And in that game, champions aren’t broken; in combat I’m an AC-tank, and outside combat I’m a diplomat (though that’s more because of my skill point allocation). I don’t outdamage the fighter, I don’t outheal the healer, the only buff I can provide to other party members (at least at my level) costs me my reaction which leaves me unable to shield block, and I’m useless at range. Which is good, because this way I can protect the squishy gunslinger who deals insane ranged damage and the cleric who buffs us, take the hits instead of the fighter who isn’t using a shield, and set up the rogue’s sneak attack or get them out of the enemies’ melee range. Sometimes it’s refreshing to play a balanced game.
A few thoughts…
I rarely do a genuinely solo boss fight — they’ll usually have some kind of ablative minions for the PCs to get through first. They might be weak enough that the wizard can swat them in a single round, but they ensure the PCs can’t focus their attention on the boss for that critical first round.
The boss will not be an unmodified creature of its type, straight from the monster manual — it will be customised enough that the PCs can’t plan for *everything* it can throw at them. Give them some unusual spells or magic items, swap one of their signature strengths or weaknesses for something else, etc.
It won’t be playing fair. Given the opportunity, it will have set up defenses, and prepared some tricks to obstruct and distract and separate the PCS, and continue to use them during the fight… traps, grease spells, blade barriers and walls of fire, etc. This is the kind of thing which lair actions are good at modelling… things that probably won’t kill the PCs, but will give them disadvantage, or force them to spend their own actions unproductively.
I think that’s the key. When you first come to this hobby, it’s easy to look at CR and think, “Oh, well this will be perfect for my party!” But the trick is to know your party and adjust accordingly. Because the baseline of generic fighter/wizard/cleric/thief is a long way from universal. Monsters ought to be as well, and that comes down to DM tinkering.
I played with a group of new players, who ran into a bearded devil (CR 3), at level 1. The module suggested that the heroes negotiate, and of course they wanted to attack. Them being new players, I talked them out of it, suggesting this would be a TPK. So at the end of the session a player suggested to see how the fight would work out. And as you can imagine, the devil never got to its first turn.
Clearly, module writers are not immune to over-hyping solo monsters.
I think even an experienced DM and a situational encounter can still end up giving too hard or too easy a fight.
The biggest hurdle to overcome is not just experience and party size (our group is 7 players PLUS our DM), but also it is tactical decisions and dice rolls.
This group I am currently a part of has been running mostly just from the book adventures the last couple campaigns. It has been great as most of us have not played these adventures we are running and so to us they are a new experience. Running a large group is also a new experience for our DM and after our last campaign of ups and downs, he decided to do something simple based on how we face things on a tactical level and not just the size of our group. He told us flat out that he has been doubling every encounter in the book this time.
Honestly, the fights have been no more difficult than some of the ones he set up last campaign, but they have also not been cake walks, and our own tactics as a group have only gotten better given a few of the scenarios we have encountered (most recently a well used Sleet Storm on a group of so many foes we couldn’t count them, but we all found a new respect for the dangers of a sleet storm on the unprepared!)
I think that every table will always find a struggle in giving “equal challenge” to every fight, but honestly, just accept that all fights are not equal and move on to the next. Sometimes a fight is unexpectedly easy, other times it is a brutal death match that the party might need to think about running from, and either way, it sort of replicates a real conflict. Sometimes that foe just underestimated you and sometimes they get to laugh maniacally as you run and they say “Next time He-Man!” but have the upper hand this time!
Sound advice for encounters in general:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/bell-curve-losses
But I think there’s something about solo fights that make them especially prone to, “That was way easier than I thought it would be.” Zeroing in on that, and providing suitable adjustments, it its own set of challenges.
Solo bosses always need some kind over the top factor. Preferably one in the rules.
Past favorites: a 3e monk mummy with improved disarm & trip who would also throw the PC’s weapon into a 50ft deep pit. Then it stunned the wizard and threw him in the pit. Did I mention the antimagic field at the bottom of the pit? Bunch of 18th level PCs had a brutal afternoon.
There was a dragon that had a cloud lair. I want to say Permanent Solid Fog or something similar. Except with many, many 10ft gaps fully obscured by the dense cloud/fog. And that dense fog stretched for a thousand feet in all directions so all those simple and spells just blew in new fog. And of course dragons are a-ok in fog. They thought it was a white dragon, turned out to be a gem dragon, one with a “push” breath weapon. Used after dispel magic, it dropped screaming PCs thousands of feet. Plenty of time to save them…if you split the party.
At lower levels it was more a mix of just raw brutality. Something that could kill a caster in 1 round so the wizard’s kept distance, then making sure to break line of sight a lot so the casters were either in reach or unable to act. Dense forests, twisted caverns with short sight lines, etc. Good for rogues to shine from time to time)
I am amused that your top two examples are “throw ’em in the pit!” On a practical level, that amounts to taking “turns” away from the party. But this strategy tends to be more fun than a straigh up stun effect as they still have to work actively to solve the problem rather than simply tuning out and waiting for the effect to end.
It is a challenge to overcome rather than a save to make.
* The fly spell can protect one PC.
* A Wall of Stone/Ice/Force can protect multiple PCs.
* The paladin may be riding a pegasus.
* the melees can switch to ranged weapons
Other variants to “throw them in the pit” are:
* giants using golf clubs: targets are thrown 20ft and unless they make an Acrobatics (hard) check they are prone. After spending half move to stand up, probably can’t make it back to fight.
* hagfish slime – monster creates difficult terrain around itself that also imposes penalty on Dex checks & saves and requires an Acrobatics (medium) check at the end of each round to remain standing. Slime persists on creatures’ feet until end of round after they leave the slime.
* Miasma – similar to some undead, has a disgusting smell. Creatures in miasma must make CON save (funny) or be poisoned. Creatures who fail cannot cast spells with verbal components.
* webbing/glue/blobs – monster can project a clinging mass at PCs that can stick them to the ground. On a hit the PC needs to Dex save to avoid getting stuck to ground. Str check to detach from ground but mass remains stuck to PC. Reduce speed by 5ft, penalty to Dex saves, penalty to AC. (On a crit attack roll and a failed save, the blob glues a PC’s weapon/focus to themselves/wall or covers their spell component pouch/quiver)
Yeah, the action economy is a cruel mistress. In 5e, Lair and Legendary actions are a cool idea to combat this, but I’ve been told by GMs that have actually used them that it’s still not enough to even the odds.
A system I’d love to run a campaign for, Gubat Banwa, flips things the action economy on its head a bit. Instead of each character getting an equal number of actions, each *team* gets an equal number of actions, so if you’ve got 5 PCs and there’s one boss, he gets to go 5 times to each of your party’s once. In D&D, this would potentially be a brutal load on the DM, but Gubat Banwa alleviates this by letting you determine the NPCs’ actions randomly, rolling on a chart that each monster has in their statblock.
Is the AI for NPCs an optional system? I imagine it could be frustrating as a GM to have a cool idea for a monster action only to be told it does something else that turn.
Yeah, you can always dictate their actions yourself, the action chart is just to streamline things.
I’ve definitely been gamesmaster long enough to know better, but my villains still get rountinely trounced by unstoppable PCs. My group is currently playing a superhero RPG, and my introductory prologue fight with a max level villain was quickly ended in a round and half by the prologue Avengers. Even now, twelve sessions later, I still have to remind myself not to let my bad guys get within range of multiple PCs without henchmen or backup of some sort. This last session I had to invent a whole circus of henches to back up a normally solo-flying baddie.
Weird how we all know the baseline strategy of minis games is, “Get as many of your guys on as few of their guys as possible.” But when it comes to RPGs, our brains are steeped in pop culture combats where sentai teams fight single monsters. So easy to forget that there’s still a tactical minis game buried under the narrative.
Classic from one of ours.
Our DM had been setting up this custom world where people get sucked in through teleportation mishaps and then could never leave. Set the BBEG up, made sure he was suitably forewarned in the “You’re low level, he’s not, don’t mess with him” stuff. Well, few levels go by, we get a new player that sees how we’re all on edge with this guy, and… picks a fight with him. We’re all in panic mode. The cleric tries a hail mary Banishment. “Ha, you’re trying to Banish him, a Paladin? Good luck, this guy can pass that on anything but a 2. Here, I’ll roll out in the open so you know there’s no tricks to this.” Three guesses what he rolled.
POOF! And by his own setup, once he was outside the realm, he couldn’t intentionally come back in.
Was supposed to be the “redeem him to fight his boss” thing, but nooooooooope. Poof. First round, before he could act. It has been my wife’s crowning moment of awesome AND her first total plot derailment on a DM. “Don’t make me Banish you” has become her catchphrase.
I think maybe there’s a reason you get legendary resistances on big bosses, lol.
How did you go about salvaging the storyline?
My go-to tactic when running 3.X adventures has been to intentionally misuse the D20 Hypertext encounter calculator– I set the level indicator to “overpowering” and then take it back by only one peg to “nigh impossible.” This usually serves me well and gives the PCs a win with some tense moments, with a few notable exceptions:
a) The one “hmm? What? I dunno, I shoot an arrow at it, I guess” player who suddenly wakes up, looks at her character sheet, and uses that item that had vanished into her inventory so long ago that even the DM had forgotten it and never calculated its effect on the encounter.
b) Summoner PCs who’ve suddenly taken a level in logistics and swarm the BBEG with enough adds that his multi-attacks are absorbed like gravy at a bottomless-biscuit buffet.
c)Initiative. A terrifying alpha-strike and well-thought-out battle strategy are often useless if the homebrew battle-dancer octopus monk rolls a NAT 1 for the turn order.
lol summoners
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/martial-caster-disparity
Is that encounter calculator strat strictly for solo monsters, or do you find yourself using it for most difficult fights?
It’s especially handy for mixed groups: the boss and a few additional mooks, minions + lieutenants + mini-boss, etc. I often find myself dialing back the adds one little kobold or skeleton at a time until the algorithm says the PCs have a fighting chance. (Even then, sometimes it’s a crapshoot.)
Running a high level evil (25+) campaign, four characters. The group had spied a group of three adult Titans across the valley on the opposite mountainside and “shadow walked” over behind them. Only took two rounds and they wiped them out. One free round with surprise and they all got initiative the second round. And yes, they had the items and spells to do the damage, but it was a festival of max damages and using spells the titans were susceptible to…and the biggest one fell off the mountain during the first round, but I don’t want to go there.
Fell of a mountain? Heh. Nice to see that sufficient teamwork + epic levels keeps the dream alive:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/adventurers-be-trippin
Pathfinder 2E is pretty good about solo bosses!
…possibly a little *too* good at times! Severe or Extreme bosses are inherently pretty scary because the numbers scale so hard per level, so it can be tough just to affect the damn things unless your party’s buff/debuff game is on point and they can glean some data on weakpoints in their saves, and they tend to have access to better action economy and stronger abilities than monsters in your weight class. So sometimes it’s just a missfest where someone or several someones are getting crit for most or even all of their HP every round.
The game itself (and a lot of the community) recommends not throwing Extreme encounters at a low-level party in general, and solo bosses are probably the hardest thing to deal with early on. That flips on its head in the endgame when the party’s a lot more jacked, and all of those former bosses are now *mooks* that are still pretty scary and very beefy in numbers — by then you’ve probably learned how to deal with a powerful boss a little easier, in contrast.
Yeah, the explicit advice of PF2 is to try to have about as many enemies as PCs, so everyone has something to do.
It should also be noted that the biggest risk of high level creatures against low level characters is the critical chance. You can pit a level 3 ogre warrior against a level 1 party, but someone’s going to get critted and it’s going to drop them instantly. Solo bosses are just very close and swingy and scary. Which can be cool! But it’s a sometimes food.
Low-level parties are just so easy to oopst-you’re-dead. When you’re running on only a handful of hp, you simply don’t have the resources to absorb swingy crits.
Zapp Brannigan would be a total tactical genius in a D&D setting.
“I set wave after wave of summons until their turns were exhausted. And their chess game came down like a house of cards!”
Natural born summoner.
I remember having to tell the fellow I brought in to help with encounters “no, you can’t put your enemies in formation. That’s how you get them killed way too quickly.”
(This game does a lot of funky things with range and spacing.)
Yes, it’s like you need to assume modern weaponry in a lot of cases. You don’t see units of infantry standing shoulder to shoulder firing M16s at units of infantry standing shoulder to shoulder firing AK47s.
True, EXCEPT when you have an “aura” character at the heart of the unit providing some kind of buff. As long as that buff nets out to a positive compared to the most common incoming attacks, units can then form up.
3e bards, 5e paladins & clerics, and wizards from time to time can all make a formation effective.
Formation fighting works until it doesn’t. In terms of minis games, it was a trip for me to move from Mordheim to Necromunda. The former has barely any AoE weapons, while the latter is lousy with the things. Suddenly, the tried and true “stand together in a bunch and then charge as one” strategy was out the window!
Thought that Melange was the Spice of life 😛
Oh, well, as the Baron Harkonnen said: “The boss battles must flow… so roll for initiative” XD
Melange is the Spice of Dune.
More D&Derivatives should take a page from old JRPG bosses (or Fear and Hunger) and break up the boss monster into multiple discrete entities. The kraken’s eight tentacles each have their own turn, you can choose to target the marilith’s lashing tail or its slashing swords, you need to break the dragon tank’s head to stop it from repairing all the damage you do.
You’ll see some editions get cute with hydras or ettins or other multi-headed monsters, but those are almost always the exception rather than the rule.
I solved (for me) the discrepancy between narration and math by rigging the randomness of the dice. For boss monsters I aim for them to have an easy time hitting (6+ on the d20) and a hard time being hit (16+ on the d20). If the math doesn’t line up to that then I can either shift the narration or adjust the math. I am also not afraid of adjusting player math (sickened, shaken, ability damage, etc…) on the player side of things to get the math closer to the narrative ideals. Meanwhile providing players the opportunity (and consumables) to shift the math in their favor if they plan, strategize and use their abilities wisely.
What does the rigging look like? Are you actually adjusting stat blocks, or do you just straight up change your numbers on the fly?
When I first ran a pathfinder 1e campaign, I gave the final boss a cool 2000 hit points, as opposed to their as-written roughly 240. I wanted a more drawn out battle that would give the pcs time for a back and forth with the final boss.
They died on round 2. The party’s monk singlehandedly output 1k damage in 2 rounds.
I’ve had less problems with insane party damage output since switching to pf2e, but I’ve found a solid way for keeping bosses threatening while also keeping PCs engaged is to remove things like crit immunity / precision immunity, but giving them a comensurate amount of hp to compensate. I’ve found bosses that just directly turn off party abilities tend to be both unfun to run and to fight against. (Looking at you, 3.5 / pf1e Golems, and your blanket immunity to most magic- and ESPECIALLY YOU, OOZES.)
EG, Crit Immunity removal I generally consider worth an extra ~40% on the boss’s max hp.
On top of that, I do think Lair Actions and legendary actions are some of 5e’s strongest points and I 100% use the concept for major bosses in other systems. fighting a legendary / mythical creature on its own home turf, you should absolutely be fighting the terrain and the lair as much as the monster.
Hear hear! There’s nothing quite so discouraging as discovering that your vorpal sword does functionally nothing.
I don’t run into this problem too much, I suspect because my instinct is for mixed enemy groups and squads rather than true solo foes. I recently ran two different solo bosses (one from a book, one I made myself). Both of them turned out alright, though they had heavy defensive buffs.
The book one was a Cleric who started with Invisibility active and threw down a Summon spell before revealing himself with his first attack and some quickened offensive spells. I think he lasted about a round before his health got low enough that he teleported to another room to let his health regenerate. The players realized what was going on and dashed through the rest of the dungeon (fortunately, they had previously aggro’d most of the enemies who would otherwise be there) and found him before he was back to full HP. By this point, he had spent literally all of his 6th and 5th level spell slots and was down to 4th-level spells when the party finally got a bead on him and splatted him in a round. Technically, they brought him to low health in a single round twice, but he had enough tricks to make it feel like work, which got the intended effect.
The boss I made myself was a wizard who popped up while the PCs were riding a tram car to another spot in the dungeon. He had flight, Mirror Image and Displacement protecting him, and his main attack was using Telekinesis to yank people off of the speeding train. Since the party was essentially limited to ranged attacks, a lot of them got eaten up by the defensive spells. The players did get frustrated, but it was frustration at the villain, not me – made worse when he was defeated and they realized it was a projection from his Shadow Plane hideout, meaning they’ll have to fight him again. (Next time, he’ll use Greater Invisibility instead.)
Obviously, these were both spellcasters, but I think the key to a decent solo boss fight is presentation and letting the boss get the first move through surprise or whatever. Many of my PF1e fights only last a round or two, but a round can take a while in real life, and if something interesting happened and it doesn’t feel like the boss never got to act, it’ll feel appropriately dramatic.
There’s a lot to be said for letting your bosses fight dirty.
That lich you just turned into a smoking crater before he got off his throne? That was his decoy. The real lich is in his adamantine panic room with a martini, casting spells remotely and setting off death traps. You can break into it with the firepower you have in a few rounds… once your figure out where it is.
Bosses don’t have to be tactical geniuses to justify this, either. One big-stupid-monster miniboss I ran recently had a couple packmates, but also won a couple extra rounds just by grabbing one of the adorable critters the party was trying to save, requiring a slightly more nuanced approach to the pulping.
I don’t know about *first* but a rather recent hilarious example was the time the gm threw an adult white dragon at a party of level 9’s and was foolish enough to give us like half a day’s prep time. When the party was already pissed off at the dragon attacking their favourite npc.
A Conjure Barrage of thermite via flying dwarf artificer, a paladin crit with ALL of the smite, a nasty blight spell, and a particularly aggressive freshly-awakened tree later, and the dragon was very dead before half the initiative was over.
The Dm’s response? “Alright, next time I throw a dragon at you it’s gonna be Ancient” (we had previously killed a young red dragon in a similarly hilarious manner two combats earlier)