The Hardest Encounters
What’s that you say? We just took our old comics about aquatic combat and grappling and smashed them together? Well yeah. But then again, that’s exactly what games do.
Maybe it’s just on my mind because of my recent Spider-Man playthrough, what with its beat-em-up skill tree unlocking new moves every other level, but it seems to me that gaming is a learn-as-you-go prospect. We’re used to thinking about this concept as players: planning out character progression and waiting for our builds to “turn on” at Xth level. But I think that learning to GM works on the same principle.
You ever notice how a lot of modules like to start out with carnival games? The idea is to give first-time players (and GMs!) a chance to get used to skill checks and DCs in a low-stakes environment. Same deal with the all-important first combat encounter. Even when it’s a bog-standard goblin attack, there are a number of core mechanics to contend with. The basics of initiative, to-hit rolls, and damage are all in there. Depending on the setup there might be a surprise round. You might bring flanking into play. One plucky goblin might even set off some fireworks by accident, giving the team a taste of Reflex saves.
In the next couple of encounters, you add more and more complexity. Venomous critters appear. The orc shaman starts casting spells. Lair actions crop up when you finally meet that baby dragon at the end of the baby dungeon. It’s all cumulative, and it’s all meant to help prepare you for the actual end-boss of GMing: running high-level combat. These are the hardest encounters in the game, chock-full of dudes like today’s kraken that combine various subsystems into a single experience. They’re all about slinging spells while doing fly-by attacks. Using invisibility and level drain in the same round. Forcing you to contend with their fear aura and spell resistance before summoning fiendish anacondas that grab and constrict your silenced wizard.
You can try and study up ahead of time, and you probably should. But in the same way that you don’t introduce D&D to people by starting at 20th level, you probably don’t want to begin DMing with the CR 20+ part of the bestiary. In my experience, learning as you go is the most effective approach, picking up new rules and new tactics as you play.
So what do you say, kids? What’s the most mechanically complex encounter you’ve run? Were you its equal, or did you find yourself overwhelmed by all the rules and options? Tell us your best tales of high level fightin’ down in the comments!
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It wasn’t complex, but it definitely matches the pic. We were on a ship and were being attacked by a megalodon. Fighter grabs a cannon, lifts it up so he can aim, and fires. The failed Ref saves knocks him and the cannon into the water. Where he was promptly swallowed whole. Luckily we killed the thing and pulled him out before he could suffocate.
About a month later, we were on another ship and attacked by a kraken. Fighter, who’s known for missing a lot, crits and does so much damage that the tentacle is just deleted from ever existing in the first place. The kraken doesn’t like that and decides to grab and eat him.
Fighter flat out refused to get on boats for the rest of the campaign.
I know that feel. In my game it was a giant crab. The players looked down from the side of their boat like, “I’m not getting in there. There’s rules in there!”
I played a 5E game over a week-long summer camp last year where we started the first session at level 1 and started the last session at level 20. I had just come home from a con with a freshly painted mini from the paint-and-take table, so I decided to play a Paladin of the 5E god of war so I could show off my mini (even though we were just playing theater of the mind.) After a fairly complicated series of story events that involved the whole party being forcibly alignment changed (and technically bringing me out of alignment with my deity, although the DM let me keep my class features for simplicity’s sake, we got to a big final battle on the last day. I don’t remember exactly what was there, but it was a lot of really high-level stuff. The only things that are really relevant were the BBEG (some kind of immortal shapeshifting wizard) and a pair of liches.
This camp has campers between the ages of 10 and 21. Although the staff leading the D&D class split us up into groups based on our experience with D&D that were basically drawn along age lines, I was still one of the oldest campers in the more experienced group at 20. Since the holy classes are kind of naturally geared toward dealing with undead anyway, I decided to let some of the younger players have the glory of dealing with the BBEG while I fought with the liches. I opened up with a casting of Banishment on one of the liches, followed by a Magic Circle Against Evil turned inward around the remaining lich and the square that the Banished lich had vanished from to essentially neutralize the threat. After I cast the Magic Circle, one of the liches cast some kind of mind-affecting spell on me. I forget exactly what, but I froze.
5E isn’t my home system. I’m a Pathfinder player. I had read through my level 20 Paladin class features, but it’s hard to remember them all at once. What I did remember seeing was an effect that gives me protection from fear effects. I ended up finding the particular feature and the DM said that I would still have to roll the save since I was a Paladin without a god, but I would do so with advantage. I passed the roll and we eventually forced the BBEG to retreat, and I didn’t really think much about it after that.
However, thinking about the game the next week, I realized that I had not one, not two, but three different effects that should have stopped the lich from casting on me. The first was the aforementioned Paladin class feature that gives blanket fear immunity. The second was a different Paladin class feature that gives me the constant effect of Protection from Evil, which prevents evil creatures from using mind-affecting effects on me. The third was the inverted Magic Circle Against Evil I had cast around the liches, which prevents spells cast by evil creatures within from affecting creatures outside the circle.
It wasn’t a big deal or anything, I just thought it was kind of weird how many layers of protection I had against this one specific scenario. The roll didn’t really matter because I easily passed the save with advantage, but I’m curious if I would have had to roll at all if I had remembered all those stacking layers of safety.
Sounds like a story moment. GM wanted to drive home the alignment shift, but was being selective about enforcing it. Of course you shouldn’t have been affected. But then again, you shouldn’t have had your paladin powers either.
When it’s that homebrew, all you can do is shrug and go with the GM’s call.
Thing is, in 5e, paladins are defined by their oaths, not their gods. Paladins technically don’t even need a god at all, as long as they hold true to the oaths. To me, this came across more like; “you just single-handedly neutralized half of my field, this boss encounter is going to be trivialized if I don’t find a way to get rid of your paladin”
Of course Magic Circle also has a casting time of 1 minute, so that’s 10 rounds the remaining Lich should have been able to wail on the Paladin, and that’s not even getting into the never-enforced rule that casting a spell longer than an action requires concentration even if the spell itself doesn’t normally, thus BOTH Liches would have been back and capable of wailing on him, (and/or leaving) while he tried to finish up the magic circle.
Probably the most mechanically complex encounter I’ve ever run was one of the final encounters of my recent 5e campaign. The fight occurred in a room where the opposition could mess with the effects of magic. nothing as ‘simple’ as shutting all magic down though. They could make parts of the room essential impassible for magic (any effects cast through it would take effect at the edge, any effects cast from within would take effects on the caster, or they could do the opposite (spells would ignore the space they’d travel through that section), which would make spells go wide unless the players knew and could correct their targeting.
They could make sections of the room dampen or strengthen magic (forcing under or overcasting), or cause a random equivalent spell instead of the intended effect. I think they could also mess with the damage types or size of the spell and whatever.
All effects are fairly straightforward for buffs, debuffs and blasting, but it becomes tricky once wall-spells going through multiple different section came into play, or ongoing effects like bigby’s hand.
Also, all players in this party where casters of some sort, so the chaos that happened as they tried to figure out the various effects while fighting was glorious.
I’d love to see the full rules for that encounter. Sounds wild. Like… What is the opposite of a wall?
I’ve looked for the detailed notes for that encounter but I can’t find them now. That’s probably an artifact of the fact that I’d often do the last bit of preparation for my group while the dishes where being done by my players, so stuff like this could end up in a temporary spreadsheet and then not saved.
It definitely required some on-the-spot judgements when odd interactions occurred, such as when a wall of stone spell was cast straddling a ‘spell effects become larger’ and ‘spell effects becomes smaller’ zone. I ended up ruling that the effects would go on the individual sections, so the caster declared how many sections went in both zones for their planed shape, and then they had to adjust for the fact that in one zone the sections where twice as long, and in the other half as long.
For cases in which a player got a random spell instead of the intended I used the table from the ‘school of invention’ UA (https://media.wizards.com/2018/dnd/downloads/UA-3Subclasses0108.pdf), and gave the player a save on their casting stat to see if they could determine the change well enough to be able to re-target their spells.
Between Pathfinder 2E (I don’t know the details, but by all accounts it’s not a byzantine mess of un-intuitive rules held over from 3X. By all accounts it’s basically 60% D&D 4E, 30% its own original thing, and 10% stuff held over from 1E) and 5E (Grappling is one opposed skill check. Underwater combat is disadvantage with certain weapons and half-movement unless you have a swim-speed. Beyond that there’s just the holding-breath rules) is this joke still topical?
There are some games that aren’t D&D:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GrapplingWithGrapplingRules
Pathfinder being fixated on Carnivals games you say? How about entire APs/modules being entirely about carnivals?
https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Carnival_of_Tears
https://youtu.be/bkIr4jwRfPc
Is thwarting a dinosaur invasion a typical carnival game? I may need to go to more carnivals….
😛
Well you run your own carnival, so everything you do is technically a carnival game! Also you beat up a mean pusssycat’s carnival.
https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/File:Legacy_of_the_Lost_God.jpg
I’d be mean too if you beat up my carefully orchestrated dinosaur invasion.
Pathfinder APs love fairs, dinosaurs or dragons as midbosses, at least one evil politician and evil females with redemption options. I like the APs but there are some trendlines.
Mechanically complex…? Probably the corrupted priest.
I had decided to run an MMO-style raid boss fight with a dose of Zelda ‘three hits and he’s gone’. The trick was that he was hiding behind a circular, cascading wall of force which the players would have to disable to land a hit while dealing with indestructible mooks and revolving floor effects.
But as we’ve discussed before, always build multiple ways for the players to beat an encounter… and one of them realized that walls of force constantly streaming DOWN could maybe have some interplay indestructible objects, like the swords the indestructible mooks were using.
There were some rolls and what I like to call ‘Vorpal Tiddlywinks’ ensued.
A what now?
I think they mean either a cone-shaped, or a hemisphere-shaped wall of force. Or a waterfall full of forcewalls.
A waterfall of force fields that start at the top of a tower and fall down, over and over, forever.
One of the players jammed one of the indestructible blades between one of the falling walls and the equally non-destructible floor. It had to go SOMEWHERE, so I asked them high, low, or mid. They called mid, I think I rolled a 55 on D100, so that was pretty much in their favor.
Not the priests so much.
And so the sword tiddly-winked up to hit the bad guy? That’s one way to stab a monster I guess, lol.
Mechanically, my group has had some good and bad experiences with ship combat in Starfinder. The first fight we had, part of a oneshot adventure, went fairly smoothly. The other fight, which was also the climax, was absolutely horrid – we were a lvl1 crew that was forced to use a tier3 ship. Even though our ship was technically better than the opponents, that meant squat when every single DC was higher than it should be (as it works off ship tier, meaning we sucked at the checks for being lower level, and gets increasingly impossible the bigger the ship was, unless errata’d or fixed). resulting in us failing most of the ship combat roles. Even having module-granted special advantages did squat to help us as we kept taking hits and the enemy just trolled us by hiding in our blindspots and dodging our missiles (which we had limited amount of). DM ended up giving us a mercy victory because what we hoped would be a quick fight dragged on way past our usual stopping time. We now know to NEVER take a ship that’s not our tier. The DCs grow faster than the PC’s skill check bonuses do!
IMHO, the toughest thing about that system is re-learning it every time. Because it’s a “once every five sessions” sort of thing, starship combat never quite becomes second nature.
Our group is no longer willing to do ‘siege’ scenarios after a particularly annoying bout of combat in an AP, where we defended a three-story manor from cultists.
Even though we trapped a majority of the manor in advance (explosive runes, sepia snake sigils, alarms, arcane locks, etc), there was just too much chaos and splitting of the party, as we had to defend three stories of a manor against multiple waves of nasty humanoids and Qlippoths. We started at the top floor, only to realize the bottom floor (with NPCs) was getting assaulted. Our flyer witch was on the roof, and she had to fight solo against a minor Qlippoth. Our main fighter remained on the top floor as defense whilst the casters helped the guard NPCs downstairs. Then one of the Qlippoths found a secret door to the third floor and almost killed the fighter (I had to rush to rescue them). And THEN the second floor got invaded as well, though this was easily dealt with as the first and third floor were mopped up, and they kept hitting the traps we set up.
It made us dislike siege scenarios entirely – it’s one thing to dungeon delve in a bottle neck or a tricky terrain. It’s another to defend three levels worth of ‘dungeon’ against enemies coming from every side, forcing to split the party to do anything or hoping that the whole group can manage one side fast enough before the other invading sides achieve their goals or flank us. It’s the main reason (along with our DM not liking evil PC games) why we’re never going to play Way of the Wicked (which has an even BIGGER dungeon to defend, with way less resources to defend it at your disposal to boot).
That sounds like fun to me. Sure, you need to balance the besieging enemies with the assumption that each group of enemies will be fighting a single PC, and the place you’re defending needs to be designed for that and not for a dungeon crawl, but it still sounds fun.
DM needs to put a LOT of work into balancing it. Some groups aren’t blessed with the ability to trap their defended position or lack magic to put anything of the kind. And your group needs to be able to not only split up, but still communicate or get back to each other if the dice go poorly. And you can’t rely on NPCs most of the time.
My solution was straight up role reversal of players and GMs:
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/137321/B20-For-Rent-Lease-or-Conquest
How does that work, machanically/in practice? Does the DM have to control 4+ ‘adventurers’ whilst the players communally DM / have each their room that they DM, or…? It seems like it might be tricky for the DM to run a full party like PCs, or for the PCs to DM together properly (or wait on each other/take turns). And presumably they still have their PCs to play?
Modular rooms, monsters, and traps. The adventure is Home Alone style, and calls for the GM to try and take the house in waves.
Wow, Thief and Cleric hit the unholy quadrinity of clunky rules. Weather rules (storm/hurricane, which messes with the casters), naval combat rules (due to being on a ship with hp before it breaks and sinks), aquatic combat rules and grapple rules. Not to mention difficult terrain and skill checks from the ship breaking apart under them
You mean the ‘damaging objects’ rules? 😛
Alternative title for this strip, courtesy of the Spoony One: NEVER GET ON THE F***ING BOAT!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdM4QTuE3hc
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/409/340/380.png
The other week, my brother ran a game which tried basically that, with half a dozen inexperienced players and two experienced players (myself included). I’m not sure whose idea it was, but…it was kind of a mess. I zoned out during the first combat, just from the sheer lethargy of combat, and the massive exposition dump immediately after didn’t help. I wound up leaving the game shortly thereafter.
Apparently he worked in details from everyone’s backstory into the one-shot, which is almost as impressive as getting through a 20th-level one-shot with inexperienced players in one night.
The second time I played as an adult, I had to get some help from friends to roll up an epic-level psionic fist. I lasted about three sessions before I gave it up as a bad job.
Wow Laurel did a really good job on this. I almost want this as just the image with now text or banner so I can use it as a wall paper.
I wish we had a working printer. I kind of want to put this one on the fridge for her.
Theif’s like “No! It’s got too many rules!” and Cleric’s like “I AM the rules!”
+275 XP to the first person to draw fan art of Cleric as Judge Dredd.
Lets just say that I was overjoyed how the 2nd edition of Pathfinder simplified grapple into just being a condition that was applied for a round. In first edition, I actually carried a flowchart for the grapple rules in the same folder as my character sheet and other reference material.
While not necessarily the most complex, the most annoying in my group tends to be anytime flying enemies come around, especially if the party also has flight access. Trying to represent 3D combat on a 2D grid gets very messy, and I don’t think we’ve ever properly run all the rules related to physical flight (as opposed to magical flight, which ignores most of those rules).
My biggest complain with PF1e flight is the lack of consequences for a failed check. I mean… I guess you don’t get to “hover” and are required to move a minimum distance…? Bah.
Social combat on a tea party inside an ice volcano while a Hekatónkheires makes juggles 😀
A part of our DM died that day 🙂
Stealth volleyball with a bomb in the ear canal of a behemoth-sized elder lunar mandrill.
That was the day I fell in love with Exalted.
That is the good thing abut Exalted, anything you propose may sound silly, imposible or overly complicated and unnecessary… until you do them and found how awesome they are 😀
I find that no matter how mechanically complex I attempt to make an encounter, my players are the equivalent of putting a dire gorilla in a china shop
At one point, I had an undead called a Herecite controlling three fallen paladins. The paladins had been controlled, but the control could be broken by dispelling it or by cutting the herecite off from her magic.
Or, my party’s inquisitor could Dimension Door to her, use his dimensional dervish feat to full attack coming out of a dimension door, and overkill her by 300 because all three of his attacks crit.
The final boss of that campaign also got nope’d by my players but that was a combined effort between the Inquisitor, the Vigilante, and the Monk, who all combined dealt 2000 damage in two rounds. So much for the plans with that boss.
I think I may have a comic for this:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-right-tools
Welcome to Starfinder Ship combat. (Let alone the design of a ship. The party doesnt even bother trying anymore to design one, just lets me do that as party mechanic.)
Where for each ship, you have the roles of Engineer, Pilot, Science Officer, Captain and Gunner.
Each role has slow, but expanding options that happen in fight.
It goes in role of
Engineer (Boosting, repairing, or salvaging.)
Piloting, where the higher roll goes last to position. (Alongside turn radius, speed minimums, and about 7 manuevers to start out with.)
Sci Officer (Attacking with ecm, hacking, stopping hacks, and general others)
Captains (Situational buffs and debuffs, you put your social face here.)
And then Gunners, (Shooting, quadrant work, anti-missile defenses)
And each round you’ll do this, delivering damage to shields, hull, and other matters with a variety of weapons, rules for them, specials, and others, from the smallest of flight craft to mighty super fortresses, alongside ruls for orbital bombardment, or even nuking godzilla with a ship.
It’s a good 120+ page section on how to do this bit of combat. And just recently dropped a nearly 250 page addition on more stuff.
It’s easy once it clicks, but dang if you have to have a good mind to get it to. Because its like trying to learn a new language where nothing makes sense.
We’re on Book 4 of Dead Suns right now, playing every other week or so. It still hasn’t clicked. :/
Good luck sir! (And party too.) I tend to be more the ref for the gm with that than he is on that. And the latest book lets you do some very very bad things to ships.
I wish I had a cheat sheet that worked. But there isn’t one, not with the way of it. As best most do, index cards for actions, like firing off a power or action, because searching through books for items disassociates the retention very badly as I personally found.
We use some role/action cards on imgur and a visual shower or pilot moves in the roll20 journal. It also seems to be a good idea (according to glass cannon crew) to not harass the pilot or otherwise backseat them. Just tell them ‘its up to you’ and let them do their thing.
There is no encounter that cannot be matched by the mighty grapplemancer! What ho, this mighty elven muscle wizard with his trusty octopus familiar can put just about anything into a headlock and make it cry uncle before supper!
Sorry, I saw a giant octopus and I couldn’t help but feel nostalgic for my favorite stupid wizard build…
Did a one-shot 5e game recently. It was a doggos game. Check out ‘grabbing bite’ on page 11:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56728f72a128e6b1e548ec55/t/5ca1d631c83025bf8a26e1cd/1554110019688/D%26D-Rules-Companion+%281%29.pdf
It’s good to be a grapplemancer. 😀
Hmmmm, the most complex encounter I’ve ever run was putting the PCs in the middle of two giant magical ant colonies fighting… specifically in the boss fight against one of the queens after they’d picked a side.
There were swarms, difficult terrain, damageable/alterable terrain, various amounts of lighting, monster specific abilities, monster abilities that were similar to spells (including buffs and debuffs to be remembered), various resistances, swarms, a 4×6 square slow moving queen that had to manage to stay a threat (not that it did a very good job aside from being so hard to kill they couldn’t ignore the rest of the foes to try and get the job done quickly), and just…. tons of enemies…and allies to keep track of. I think it was something like 80 creatures I was properly keeping track of and four tunnels of “shorthand” back and forth to see which side was making progress every round.
And of course all the stuff the PCs were doing too.
How many sessions did the combat take?
Did you resort to making “battle line roles” to see how well each front was doing, or did you actually play out the turns of each creature in full?
Well, like pretty much everything else I’ve done in the last 10+ years it was a play by post game. It sure did take a good while. But my players for that game were so slow that the thing that took the most irl time was waiting on them to post, not the combat.
As for the creatures actually on the field of battle I properly rolled for each and every one. But I did do “battle line” type rolls for the tunnels.
Fighting monsters in water… Lovely. The worst I’ve heard of is probably a vampiric giant octopus in an underground lake.
As a rule, I try to avoid it like the plague and generally my DMs/GMs have been accommodating so long as it’s not in the adventure path etc. since it’s not picnic for them either and they don’t want to kill us all by accident. 5e I’ve found to be FAR more forgiving than Pathfinder (unsurprisingly) in how deadly it can be, but neither one are situations that I actively seek out in game play.
Just has my megadungeon players fight a kraken lich in PF1e. When grappling is afoot, bard’s escape saves lives:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/b/bard-s-escape/
Speaking about Pathfinder and baby dragons at the end of baby dungeons… the Pathfinder Beginner Box has a great steady ramping of difficulty through the whole dungeon, but then there’s the encounter with the Reefclaw near the lake with an island. It’s well-thought out. There is a column nearby, which, after proper ritual, grants one of the players water-breathing. The lurking Reefclaw is supposed to grapple and drag one of the adventurers into the water. I assumed the authors wanted the novice DM to target the water breathing player to grant a team a taste of what’s aquatic combat is like…
but we were all novices and had a fighting-oriented team. Needless to say, we couldn’t fathom what to do with the column. I failed at deciphering the helper hieroglyphics on the wall. Our Fighter, seeing a glint of gold from the island, decided to swim over on his own right away. Our second Fighter, not to be outdone by a HUMAN of all things, rushed after, sinking underwater like a well-oiled dwarven anchor. The Reefclaw managed to ambush and grapple our thief, steadily dragging him through the mud. Less than a RL minute and the whole situation turned sour.
In a moment of inspiration, I made a lasso with a rope I had attached to the belt. Our dwarven marine had distracted the Reefclaw (it still refused to let of poor Thief) by hitting it with fists underwater, while I managed to tie the rope to the column and — in the greatest display of skill I ever produce that campaign — throw the lasso on Thief’s neck!
The whole situation was hilarious as hell, but we got a taste of grappling, swimming (sinking), combat maneuvers, various skill and stat checks — and suffocating, all during the single encounter. Our DM called a break, as the players were hysterical and he needed to figure out how exactly all of this would resolve.
lol. I’m sure your thief appreciated it. Once he could breathe again anyway.
When you say that the situation ‘turned sour’ though, do you mean that the characters were in trouble, or that the players had grown frustrated? And if the latter, how did the table turn its mood around to hilarity and hijinks?
It’s a bit of both. The characters were definitely in trouble, and we were unfamiliar with the whole set of rules in place, thus figuring out what happens took longer than usual, leading to irritation.
I think the key was taking a step back. I recall going “can’t be reasonably sure if my actions are benefiticial, might as well try something interesting”. Oh, and also, that break sure helped too. A warm cup of coffee \ tea lightens the mood.
On subject of breaks: once we had a DM who had magically divided the party to test our souls (alignment) through our actions in the presence of divinity; He asked the players to give privacy and interviewed one-by-one. We went to the kitchen and enjoyed the coffee-break. IRL this was done in the middle of the session and it took him roughly 10 minutes per player, so on average we got a half a hour break. (Then he himself took a short one). We returned refreshed and consequently immersed more than ever — while the DM was absent we exchanged stories about our experiences with the divine.
Now that I think about it, it was a really thoughtful move on his part.
Hmmm… The utility of taking breaks… There might be a comic in that somewhere.
Due to now being quite high level with a focus on Npcs over monsters (rocket tag, anyone?), primarily political and heavily focussed on schemes and traps when fights do occur, I’ve not had many super-complex fights in terms of the systems as opposed to the planning. In order, though, they’d probably be:
3. Running the end of my “alternative” Curse of Strahd. The 8 pcs, along with their army of peasants, witch-hunter strike team, pair of magical animated bombers and giant attack golem, duel a grand total of five ancient vampire lords (all with very different powers) plus summoned and animated minions through the corridors of Castle Ravenloft in order to destroy their hidden coffins and stop their ritual which would destroy the demiplane of Ravenloft, transport them to the material and allow their collective sire to ascend to Godhood. I altered the module a bit…
2. The massive set-piece encounter with an atropal scion and a djinni necromancer ( plus their pet arcane superweapon to be destroyed) on walkways above a pit of lava. Limited movement, friendly and enemy NPCs, movement effects, two seperate auras in different battlefield sections and an objective seperate from “just kill everything,” plus I actually built the board and it got even more complex in the process… good fun.
1. Both of those were at lower levels, but the high-level winner has to be, very simply, the duel between a Mystic 8/Monk 8/Rogue 8 and a Lv. 20 necromancer inside a wild magic zone with a sphere of annihilation. Need I say more?
0. Not a battle I ran for my pcs, but one I ran to establish background events when a certain situation came to pass in-game. 10 deities using converted 3.5 rules, all between DR 10 and 18, versus a god-killing titan and it’s DR 15 divine boss.
It took most of a weekend to run, but damn, was it worth it.
This hits home with me. We’re at level APL 17 in my PF1e megadungeon, and the big bads usually have class levels. The amount of spell-like abilities gets nuts in a hurry, especially when only 4-5 of them are actually relevant.
That’s why I love seeing high level antagonists with clear “tactics” text. Knowing that they buff in a particular order and try to do XYZ specific actions takes a lot of the cognitive load off of a GM.
Absolutely! Early on, I encountered a lot of issues with just forgetting some of the options open to casters and other things with weird abilities – I’m pleased to say that I’ve got a lot better at that over the years, but some of the epic-level characters and deities still require a good few hours of planning for optimal usage.
I think the most mechanically complex fight I have run was a boss fight against a Kimbery focused infernal in Exalted 2e.
It involved him (transformed into a demon kraken with his Shintai powers) and some minions (both some lintha pirate mooks, some stronger pirate with a few charms and some actual demons with their own stuff) a manse with an important mac-guffin inside and it’s defenses (and a split up PC group to get the macguffin before it was too late, including some holes where the kraken could attack some places but not others).
The Infernal had tentacles to punch and clinch with, counterattacks by way of splashing acid blood based on the presoak damage of attacks that hit him, high movement by ducking into the water in the maelstrom surrounding the battlefield, poison, limited self healing in certain circumstances in addition to the normal infernal thing of funky excellencies that could be used in some circumstances but not others (and also a lot of health levels and a high soak).
I had a great time with it, and so did my players and I only have one regret.
At the end of the battle 2 off our 4 pc’s where down (the main fighter was one of them even) and the Infernal decided to run away due to being too worn down, but sadly my group thought I was just being a softie ST and having him run away to prevent a TPK, so they didn’t quite feel they had earned the win.
The problem was that no, he really was down to his last few health levels, and it had turned out over the last few rounds that the fighting style of their Talky-face Zenith who normally was the worst of them at fighting was really really good at dealing with him. He 1) had a high minimum damage post soak which gave him a good steady damage each turn but didn’t have the pre-soak damage to make the acid counter attack really dangerous, 2) gave penalties that made it very hard for the Infernal to actually hit him by default, and 3) was almost frustratingly good at stunting his actions in such a way that the Infernal couldn’t use his damn excellency (entirely by accident I’m pretty sure) which combined with the penalties made it practically impossible for him to get hit.
The infernal ran away because over the last several rounds he had lost 10 health levels without ever laying as much as a scratch on the zenith and he knew that even without the other solar rejoining the fight he would have died if he had stayed.
Did you ever wind up giving your party a behind-the-scenes peek? When my players are baffled by monsters, I will occasionally pull back the curtain after a session is over.
Yeah, I did, through mostly once the campaign was over the infernal could have been a recurring villain since he got away and I didn’t want to reveal all his tricks yet. As it turned out one of the players later approached him and made a deal to turn him into an uneasy alliance against a greater threat so round two never really materialized, but hindsight is 20/20 as the saying goes.
Recurring villains are tough like that. Sounds like you did what you could in a tough situation. The only thing I could think to say is to make sure you’re describing the battle damage as the fight drags on. That way it’s more believable when the villain finally retreats. Even there though, it can be tough for players to determine game mechanics beneath the layers of flavorful description.
Shrug.
Yeah, and I don’t think that it helped that in the moment the important bit to get across in the description of him getting hurt was often the spurt of acid blood and now you the PC have to/want to come up with a stunt for how you defend yourself! Danger! Excitement!
Overpowered monster? Over-complex rules? These are the moments Cleric lives for.
Truly, his time has come.
Not related to today’s cpmic specifically, but have you considered doing a comic about the combat grid and COVID-19, and how it’s like the characters are social distancing because they’re always 5 feet apart
And into the “ideas” pile it goes!
It’s not “social distancing”, it’s “staying out of melee range”.