Why Is It So Difficult to Make Boss Encounters Land Well With Players? | Dungeons and Dragons 5e
Vložit
- čas přidán 28. 07. 2024
- How do you make your boss encounters actually hit home with your players? Well, join us today as we discuss!
WATCH NEXT:
TTRPG Deep Dives: • TTRPG Deep Dives
Player Character Inspiration: • Player Character Inspi...
//TOOLS & PRODUCTS I USE IN MY GAMES:
○ High Quality Customizable Colored Miniatures (HeroForge): www.heroforge.com/tap/?ref=pl...
○ 3D Printed Customized Minatures for Tabletop Simulator Integration (Eldritch Foundry): eldritch-foundry.com/?stage=0
○ High Quality Sharp Edge Dice (Only Crits): www.onlycrits.com/?sca_ref=13...
○ Battle Maps, Dice Trays, and More! (Yarro Studios, Use Coupon Code PLAYYOURROLE335 for 20% Off!): yarrostudios.com/?ref=sdxxeue97w
//TOOLS & SERVICES I USE FOR VIDEOS:
○ Where I find my music (Epidemic) - www.epidemicsound.com/referra...
○ Content Analyzation and SEO Research Tool I Use (TubeBuddy)- www.tubebuddy.com/PYRole
For Business Inquiries: businessinquiries@playyourrole.net
TIMESTAMPS:
Come support my business:
Patreon: / playyourrole
PYR Ambience: / @pyrambience6931
TikTok: / play_your_role
Instagram: / roleyourplay
Twitter: / playyourrole3
** ABOUT ME **
Hello! My name is Jay, and I am a long-time veteran of storytelling and a semi-seasoned DM! I began playing Dungeons and Dragons roughly 5 years ago and began my first ever game as the DM. I figured things out by watching online games and fumbling my way through the rules, and never looked back! I've fallen in love with TTRPG's in general and want to share my experience and thoughts with the world and community I love so much. I currently DM two separate games regularly, and continue to learn every day.
** ABOUT THE CHANNEL **
Play Your Role is a project with the intention of helping inspire and coach players and DM’s alike to add story beats and dramatic moments into their games through basic writing concepts, interesting player character inspirations, and discussions on how to effectively roleplay in a way that helps (not hinders) everyone else's roleplay at the table!
TOPICS IN THIS VIDEO
• Dungeons and Dragons
•
• Tabletop Roleplay
•
• DND5e
•
• DND
•
• TTRPG
•
• Roleplay Games
HASHTAGS
#DungeonsAndDragons
#TTRPG
#DND
#DND5e
DISCLAIMER: Links included in this description might be affiliate links. If you purchase a product or service with the links that I provide I may receive a small commission. There is no additional charge to you! Thank you for supporting my channel so I can continue to provide you with free content each week!
5th edition,character creation,d&d 5th edition,dungeon & dragons,dungeon master,dungeons & dragons,dungeons and dragons,dungeons and dragons for beginners,how to,how to gm,how to pc,how to player character,player character,player character inspiration,player character inspritation,role playing,tabletop games,tabletop roleplaying,tabletop rpg,dnd character creation
What I have seen online and in person to improve the baddies:
First, integrate them into the world/session. Don’t just drop a stat block into a room. If there’s a dragon, have the dragon scorch towns, steal livestock, there are bones littered around the entrance which snap when stepped on…
Second, don’t have a straightforward battle. Lairs exist for a reason. Traps exist for cautious crime bosses. Cults can have temples with trials of worthiness, a ritual can have crystals that need to be destroyed…
Edit: Glad to see we were on the same page!
Yes!!! The boss MUST feel like they have a reason to be there other than just something to kill
@@PlayYourRole Oh, and for the trope of “more details means they’re more important,” I’m going to roll stealth for every character and change the description appropriately.
Captain of the guards in full plate (disadvantage), get a 4: describe his battered armor, stubble from his recent return from the battlefield, how he barks orders…
The shrewd merchant who rolls a 18: you see a guy in a cloak with a large bag.
@@LocalMaple ohhhh that's a good idea. I might have to steal that
That's all well and good, but i urge you to think of the oh so many bosses we've had in videogames where they just showed up and provided us an epic time.
It definetly isn't the only way to make bosses interesting
@@rafaelcastor2089 good point. You can have important narrative bosses, but you can also have just...powerful people/creatures in the world.
Imagine exploring a seemingly normal cave and randomly stumbling into a sleeping young or adult dragon. Imagine the fear in your players' eyes 😈
This happened to me recently. The players rolled critical hit after critical hit. Their dice was on fire!
It happens! It's crazy when it does tbh
Fudge dice, add health, give more actions 🤷♂️
Try water to put the fire out.
(I hope, no one got burned)
@@mrosskne I've been a DM. Sometimes it is beneficial to add health/give actions. I never fudge dice but adding an extra 100HP because my PC wiped 300hp in 2 turns has happened before or at half health give the boss 1 more attack or they start to reckless. It works as long as you are a good DM.
@@mrosskne lol sorry bud, I’m the forever DM in my group, and not by choice.
One simple thing I do to rise the stakes during boss fights :
In most battles, whenever a PC is down at 0, rolling death saves, enemies will only try to hit him if they don't have an other hostile creature at immediate range. The reasoning is simple : from the bad guys perspective, it's better to take down those who are still fighting rather than finish someone who is already out of the fight.
But during boss fights, recurring enemies which the party has a personal grip with, I considere that those villains are trying to straight out kill the PCs. So they will attack unconcious characters if they're able to, unless they have something more usefull to do.
Therefore, the boss fight has more stakes and a higher difficulty. It is way more likely for a PC to die in one of those encounters rather than against a pack of Kobolds.
This is a great point! If things are personal, the boss will MAKE it personal
@@mrosskne Yeah that negativity doesn't fly here. Next time, please try and find a way to boost your own ego without needing to stoop so low as to throw out baseless accusations for no other reason then to wank yourself off. Keeping this here as a perfect example of what not to do when you need to learn to love yourself. Please, everyone, remember that in order to improve yourselves others are NOT a factor. You can't make yourself happier by bringing down others.
@@PlayYourRole Thanks for your response and for defending me :).
And Mike, I'm always down for some constructive critisisme, if you care to elaborate. What makes me a terrible DM in the method I described ?
@@trebmal587 Just a comment on the going for the kill piece, this works well for intelligent devils and demons as well. They've fought a blood war since time immemorial against immortal enemies. The wiki even says that their tactics each include specifically targeting downed enemies. Just make sure your PC's have a chance to learn this. It will make them far more cautious and aware of the stakes when a devil or demon pops in.
@@trebmal587 perhaps to ensure not to stress your players by having someone targeting them while they're down? No one wants to permanently die. So, I'd say it's quite a balancing act.
My favorite I have come up with thus far was a fledgling eldritch horror who was using one of the party members to materialize itself. So after they fought through a bunch of cultists and interrupted the process, they had to contend with this half-formed monstrosity that was slowly dying. It was segmented into 4 parts: 1. its main body was invulnerable, could only move 5 feet, always moved last, and instakilled anyone whos space it move onto but it eventually died in around 10 rounds of combat, 2. two long arms with average initiative that attempted to grappled a person each and move them close to the main body, and 3. a head like appendage that had high initiative and could cast crowd control spells. The catch was that every time they killed a hand or the head the main body loss 1 round to its timed life and then it regenerated at the end of the round. It was a lot of fun to run and it was the perfect amount of imminent danger but the players were in control the whole time.
We're definitely a long way from this, but in my campaign they've started in a very large bowl like valley. On one end is The Spire (standard world tree, but the PCs will come to learn that The Spire was a goddess that became the big tree to contain an evil God of winter and decay in either his realm or the underdark or just under the tree. One of the NPCs thats been with the party since the start got impatient with the caution of some of the PCs and picked up a spear of this Evil God in a corrupted and ruined mage tower. The party knows it's magic, but they don't really know its connection to this God they only know of due to hearing his name in one of their dreams the night before the entered the tower. The Spear should represent this God and his respective powers, so the NPC is going to slowly fall to his influence and gather others to use a spell that will amplify the spears power enough to fell the Spire and free him. I have an idea of how this fight would go, but so much could change before then. And idk what I'll do if they don't stop him or whoever falls to the influence. There's more context and info to add but I've already wrote an essay so I'll leave it here. This is my first campaign so I'm very open to any cool ideas
I really like the idea of a demonic spear corrupting the character. It could get stronger and affect the whole party overtime, and the spear could try to make illusions that dissuade then from their way, ultimately making them fall in a great illusion to break the Spire thinking they are breaking the antagonist. You could ramp up the difficulty of breaking the small illusions of the Spear's malice based on the time they are exposed by it. And the owner of the spear could have really really good benefits from it that didn't felt cheating, like idk, the spear could grant more AC for the party, or a blessing, or it could affect enemies in a way they players don't notice that the spear that is causing the effect. If the players quickly understand the problem, you could amplify the story, having another demonic weapons scattered that would influence other adventurers the same way it did to the group.
@@018FLP honestly those are some really really great ideas. I think I'm gonna try and work them in somehow!
This is honestly where I struggle the hardest as a DM. I want a winable fight, but I want there to be a struggle. And I don't think I'm quitevas proficient in tactics to make some baddies really shine (in video games, I'm a button masher). I love your concept of not giving Tiamat HP, but just needing enoughdamage per round to push her back. I do love giving combat something else other than 'kill bad guy' as a goal. Especially sine my group isn't as big into straight up combat as we are RP. We did recently have a weird and wacky fight where the bard animated a stature and a small broken tower to fight a huge metal golem. Some NPCs started placing bets as to who would win. Lol. And my friend will still talk about how cool the fight against Strahd was.
@@mrosskne maybe because they're the best things to use for adrenaline filled set pieces? Also, never underestimate a good puzzle boss OP.
DND idea: The players stay overnight at a village/city which has the classic crime purge once per year at night on that day. You could hint at it possibly happening and then at sun down when it starts you can see if your players are okay with killing civilians that are out for their blood as well as possibly making them use improvised weapons and having to survive until the sun rises.
In the climax of our most recent arc, the rogue had become possessed by his evil sentient rapier because the wizard angered it. So the initial goal was to stop the rogue from killing the wizard and escaping, which meant knocking him out. I got the final blow, causing the rogue's soul to become trapped in the rapier, but the fight wasn't over yet. The rapier's true owner, the Queen of Ice and Snow, appeared and took control of the rapier, on a mission to kill the mostly defenseless NPCs that were hosting us at the time. We then went into split initiative - the rogue fought against the rapier in what was essentially a battle of wills, while the rest of the party tried to defend the NPCs and kill the Queen. It wasn't going very well for us on the outside and she had the upper hand by a good margin, but the rogue defeated the rapier and caused it to shatter, cutting off a ton of the Queen's powers and enabling us to take her out. It was the biggest, best, most impactful two D&D sessions that I've ever had.
Whether or not you care about the MtG tie-ins, Mythic Odysseys of Theros introduced a fantastic mechanic to give your boss encounters: Mythic Traits. Meet the trigger condition, and the battle changes dramatically as the encounter progresses into phase 2. All of the trigger conditions in that particular book happen to be "creature reduced to 0 HP," but there's no reason you can't tie it to something else, like "break the magical contraption," or "wipe out the minions."
One time, I saw a post on reddit that said D&D is math disguised as Skyrim.
Ironic given the setting came from a D&D game run in the development office.
Hey, I got the animorphs reference. Fun series.
I was so afraid of being the only one 😭
So I think one of the best tips I can give newer DMs and even experienced DMs is that the best boss is just a mashed up encounter.
So if you build the encounter for 4 monsters and give each a different extra ability Besides attack plus all bosses get 1 per round Reaction:half movement 1 basic attack. Now you have an easier balance boss and a built in cinematic since once they burn through 1 monster worth of HP boom you land a hit past the defense that crushed the left elbow, then the knee, etc. From there once they are down to the last monster HP give them Last Stand which is basically barbarian reckless for that punchy send off. Also the split nature of the turns mitigates Stunning Strike into Nova into your boss did nothing since it has a reaction and 4 turns per round to break the stun.
I’ve been watching lots of boss battle how to videos for my bbeg of my campaign, but have not been learning anything.
I gained 2 great ideas from this video that I intend to use!
Great video, thank you!
I’ve had campaigns were kobolds were harder to kill than dragons, rng really does work in mysterious ways
Making bosses a puzzle is one of the best ways to do it, like that lich fight of yours. Especially if you can make the players see a progression of their achievements in how the battle plays out. For example, I ran an epic bossfight with a titanic kitsune like creature. While the goal was to kill it, it was so huge that the various parts of its body had their own hit point totals and abilities. The tails, for example, could cast spells while the main body would launch physical attacks. The players had to prioritize targets to win. Attacking the tails with slashing weapons, however, would cause them to sever tails, and the number of tails the kitsune had determined how powerful the magic it could cast was (so 9 tails meant it could cast 9th level spells every turn). But the creature could also heal by eating the bodies that were around the battlefield. So the battle became a puzzle of how to get rid of the bodies in the area to prevent the creature from healing, while also crippling its tails to prevent it from casting spells, and figuring out how to deal damage to the main body to kill it. It was a blast and really satsfying.
Having multiple phases or steps during a boss fight can be good too. I once ran a boss fight with a semi-infinite health pool. They didn't know it, but the party's goal was to weaken the boss to a certain point so that a special NPC who had been traveling with them for a long time could use a special ability that would enable the boss to be defeated for good. This boss had a sort of limited immortality because of a ritual they had completed earlier in the campaign. My players loved it by the end because it came down to the wire. Only one or two players were left standing by the end of the fight out of a party of five. The others were brought back up with healing spells and the PCs had their hard fought victory.
Shout out to the amazing animorphs ref
Man I'm so glad I'm not alone
@@PlayYourRole also I super like your takes and will give them a shot in my current campaign
In critical moments, it's never the DMs job to adhere to the dice. The whole point of the DM screen is to allow you to lie and improv without the players knowing. Boss only has 20 HP?? Not anymore, 30hp.
In the game I’m currently running, the first major boss was set up session one. It started with them going to a small village to see what happened (bunch of story jumbo jumbo about the people sending a cryptic letter than were all found dead on the road). In the village, they noticed some stuff was wrong with the human guards (they were acting mechanical), the peasant they killed (they broke like glass and had a strange purple mist at one point), and the noble. They killed the noble really easily. The then found his legs, but not the rest of him. When they went to meet the king to hand in the job, the noble was there. What followed was a couple of dream visions where they see what could happen with this character.
Before the fight itself they have to bring down this noble’s cult so they can attack him directly. At this point, they know that something is up with him. They’ve gotten visions with him burning down the capital city, killing their favourite npcs, ripping apart men with his bare hands, easily taking down the best guards in the world. So when they enter a church and see him praying they expect it to be hard. He of course has a shirt monologue then draws his sword and moves impossibly fast and butchers a close npc then attacks one of the pcs. At this point, he’s just a normal noble that can move really fast and has a super strong sword. And the party is high level. So in one round of combat they slap him super hard and “kill him”. They watch him drag himself towards the altar, he curses them one last time, and appears to die. Then the party of course goes to loot this place.
Now comes stage two. They hear someone screaming and turn towards the altar and see the noble standing shakily, his mouth open just screaming. Then he begins to transform into a massive monster and his sword is also now much bigger. Oh and he has 4 arms. This is where I almost kill my entire party. He has this ability in this phase that lets him make another attack every time he hits. And the party brought in some weaker npcs as back up. He was ripping through them, which forced the party to use everything at their disposal. When they get him low, he begins to stumble. He brandished his sword, and screamed at the party, “You give me no choice! You forced my hand, may the gods save me.” And enters a blind rage as he succumbs to the power of the sword (it’s an ancient god-like being of bloodlust). At this point he becomes a really fast truck. If he hits you, it hurts like hell (3d10 damage and it’s magic), but he tends to miss and it only gets worse the more damage he takes. Even after he’s finally killed, he’s not done as now the party takes the cursed sword and uses it. The other bosses in the campaign are less single fights and more battles of armies as that’s where the game has gone.
Needed this soon actually.
Hope I helped!
Ive thpught of making a boss function off the Crocomire setup but never had the chance until recently.
Thanks for reminding me of it!
dude your tiamat pushing idea is genius and awesome...and I'mma steal it.
Great advice! I will be referring back to this one often I think.
I hope it all works out for you!
These tips plus a recent Zee Bashew Video about telegraphed boss attacks made for one of my favorite fights my players have been talking about for weeks
in my experience adding class levels to bosses or having them straight up be PCs with boosted health works the best. like i recently did a boss fight which involved 4 enemies. the boss himself being a slightly modified 10th level four elements monk. aka his abilities cost less Ki points and then a 9th level cleric and two 6th level cavaliers riding young red dragons(the dragons and riders having a shared health bar and slightly nerfed breath weapon.) and it was a tough fight for my honestly quite op party but they started thinking more on their feet as they had to think around the abilities that the enemies had including the monks go to of stunning strike. but they did win and im now preparing a second boss for their next major quest that is a party of 5 characters facing my party of 5. the enemy party are full blown PCs that ive custom built around a theme for each. the Paladin is an oathbreaker and specializes in the more defensive and control spells a paladin gets, there is a college of spirits bard i plan to be full support(yet to build him), a clockwork soul sorcerer built for raw power, a fighter with a homebrew subclass granting them support abilities, and the true boss of the encounter being a hexblade warlock who also is the daughter of my worlds god of death and she has a second phase she will enter once the rest of the team is dead and shes at 0 hit points of which she will get revived and receive a large power boost though its a timed encounter more or less as the players will just have to survive 1 minute of battling before she returns to her normal state though fully restored. but shes a 9th level warlock and the party is all level 7 so once shes alone and no longer buffed it wont be very hard despite her having a lot of powerful abilities.
Damn dude, I truly believe that you could explain an entire physics book to me and I would be interested as fuck. Meaning: I like the way you explain things. Thumbs up!
Also: I think it would be funny to have some funny outtakes and the end of your videos!!
Thanks so much for the encouragement! It legit means the world to me!
@@PlayYourRole Well, you deserve it you beautiful Bastard :D
My players just recently finished the first half of a campaign. The final battle of that culminating to a hostage situation. The party started with focused fire on the enemies but they quickly shifted to freeing captives and shifting the battle into their favor.
You mentioned Yeerks, you have my full attention.
You made an animorphous reference.
A little bit of my brain just slid out of my ear
DOPE! JUST DOPE! This was ALMOST what i needed lol! 98% This is SUCH an amazing concept... could you maybe explain how to do this BUT the goal is to make each player do "their thing." Like in order to win this battle to the Bard has to do bard things, the wizard has to do spell things and the fighter has to fight... REALLY bring out all of their individual traits. Similar to your Litch description BUT with more detail.
Thank you for this! I want to run a little short campaign soon and I don’t want to just throw dice and add numbers
I fully agree with this, and for more early boss fights that aren't the bbeg but you still want to be difficult. Environment, remember something as simple as falling rocks or a heavy storm thats making rougn terrain or such can make these encounters feel so much more alive and make the players have to think between their turns
I love seeing RPG campaigns, and there's one named The Unsleeping City, by Dimension 20 that haves really really cool boss fights, for example: a fight with one of the PC's antagonist that happened in the middle of a Ritual that depended on performance checks from everyone on the party, and the Ritual demanded saves from the pc that started it that ramped dificulty based on how much damage it tooked in the middle of the battle. Later, there where 2 big final battles that happened almost in sequence, the pc's only had a short rest, so they had to be more creative. The final final boss had great mix of narrative in the fight, the stakes were ultra high, they were weakneded, the allies they summon die (or flee) , a lot of them almost fell to oblivion, they almost die a thousand times, there's a lot happening, but the cool thing is that the narrative was fundamental, so it didn't felt like a dice roll fight, it felt like a life or death situation where they are giving their best.
There's two final boss encounters that my players really struggled with.
One was rather simmilar to the Tiamat thing you mention: the players had to stop a god from awakening and releasing the apocalypse. So in order to do that they had to fight the cult that was trying to awake him instead of the god itself (basically, if it managed to break free, it was game over). It was a fight more against the NPCs that they encountered during the campaign -and beat the players before- and a few minions where they really struggled with. It was actually a lot of fun for them to try and overcome challenges fast and use their spells in creative ways.
The second boss and BBEG was charging up a doomsday device-like machine with magic, so every spell used near the weapon powered it up. And since it was a group that relied rather heavily on magic (they were good non-magic fighters too), they had to start using them whent it mattered and keep repositioning and trying to stop the machine while fighting the boss that didn't really have HP -dealing damage to him made him make less actions in a turn-. A boss that quickly gave up when his best weapon was destroyed.
Hm, I like the style on this one. I've not gotten to run my campaign yet, but I've researched a bit on bosses. One of my favourite additions so far is The Angry GM's Paragon features, which adds a lot of mechanical shift and strength to a boss. Combined with u/leuku on Reddit's guide on goal-oriented encounters and boss mechanics there's a lot of things that help mechanically. Getting the players to focus on tactical stuff besides just hitting stuff is key, of course, which is where you do environmental stuff lots.
Narratively, I'll definitely need to mind the foreshadowing, no statblocks can do that one for me. Thank you for this wonderful video!
A lot of players experience this bc of the deeply flawed CR system that a lot of DMs rely on.
The problem is that the cr is based on 6-8 encounters per adventure day. Idk about your table but we normally have half that many or less.
I've found that by using the adjusted xp as a basis for encounters and doubling what qualifies as an easy, medium, hard and deadly encounter.
Next I use terrain of varying heights and cover and sometimes I implement a secondary objective in combat as well.
These steps normally make for much more interesting and immersive combat.
I follow one big rule for boss battles. WWZD. What Would Zelda Do(alternatively What would souls do). Let's be honest. Zelda games have some of the most fun and memorable bosses. Why? Because they have unique challenges associated with them.
So I pull directly from there. Maybe the evil arch mage has set up certain runes around the hall, that need to be destroyed before you can damage him. But be careful you risk getting damaged when you break these runes.
Maybe that adult red dragon has cloaked himself in lava, and so you can't get close without burning yourself, so the party must find a way to nullify that(my party found a way to douse him in frigid water and solidify the lava. I gave him a +3 to AC but removed movement speed for 2 turns).
You don't always need to throw more and more enemies. A unique puzzle will stump your party more.
At my table I do one huge change from RAW. I give most monsters a vulnerability. Especially if they have many resistances. So now you make it an interesting encounter for casters as they have to try different damage types.
Nothing resists or is vulnerable to magical weapon damage. So martials are the neutral hitters.
This gives wizards an edge with other caster coz they can have an insanely wide movepool. I feel its perfect coz you are both challenging your players and offering them a way to speed up encounters(it's up to them to figure out the weakness. This actually gives a use to the battlemaster feature to know about opponents weaknesses)
I reckon you might be able to do a video on how to start a campaign, like how to get the party set off on a quest in the first place
I think the main thing is thematic consistency and weight to a boss other than actual power or lore implications.
This is basically the entirety of my comment, the rest is just telling you a long example of what I mean. You don't need to read that, it's mostly for me.
My longest campaign was about my two players becoming high merchants in a super corrupted merchant's guild that basically ruled the world. There were many bosses there and they all sort of amounted to getting favor from someone else (like doing a hit to get the suport of one of the big companies), getting someone else's turf, or generally covering their ass when they got found out by one of the movers and shakers of the city (it all started when they stole and accidentaly used a super powerful artifact that wasmeant for one of the big businesses and now these underdogs have an edge in the game). It was built to be very secretive, very persuassion based, a lot of role play dictating the dangers rather than battle. But eventually, you just have to play the game as intended and beat up someone.
They got into super big beef with an underworld pitboss who had a casino/coliseum/slaver trading network and she just HAD to be taken out. She knew where their families lived, she knew the crimes they had commited and had managed to sneak by the guild and was a huge threat for most of the game. When it finally came down to fighting her I just made a level 20 barbarian, gave her that class with all the ghosts and gave her the ability to use her featues on herself (typically those can only be used on other people, but she worked alone). Obviously a level seven Bard and Warlock couldn't win, so it became about staging an assassination, cashing in favors, greasing palms, and all that fun stuff just to get her weak and hav a crew that would barely be able to kill her. They did, but BOY was that a climactic battle! Sure, she was broken as hell as a boss so it was really awesome for even the casino aspect of her character to play into the fight with the dice rolls. All the preparations, all the NPCs they had grown to like, all the planning of "how do we actually kill a huge powerhouse of the city and get away with it?" it was honestly the most fun encounter I had up to that point.
Then came the actual big bad: her father who actually gave her his old job as underworld boss. Thie was a high ranking mem be r of the merchant's guild, real Gustavo Fring vibes of "someone says his name and they are mysteriously found dead", level 20 swashbuckler Rogue with a better version of the artifact the players had gotten in the beginning to get the edge. He was them but better and stronger. The few times they met him they were terrified. He didn't know they had killed his daughter and actually no one did except them (for way too complicated reasons that I could have never seen them coming up with) so as they went higher on the guild and he became more of a prescence the players would tense up when I even mentioned him. To end off the campaign, he had to go too, they had to take his place to truly be at the top with no remaining enemies.
And what I love about that final battle (and they did too) was that there was no battle at all. It was all roleplay and convincing to the point where they put the remaining pillars of the guild against him and organized a perfect coup where they weren't even involved. For drama's sake I let them have a crystal to watch and tell him something while he died, but they didn't even lose a spell slot between them as stronger people took care of him. It would've been a very boring end to a campaign to go "and then the NPCs take care of him" but in this one it was the most fitting end. It started with them being rascals unknowingly stealing from him and it ended with them being that anonymous voice saying "take him out discreetly" while they drank wine.
All of this to say, that if you know what your campaign is about at the core, a boss fight is just an extension of that, a test of how well they have played that game in particular. With DnD I think it should always be a test of how they literally overcome the odds, how they defeat the randomness of the dice. I really recomend having very small parties, because you have no idea how much it limits their power, it makes them think a lot more than just "I attack this one". I think that puzzles hardly ever work in dnd, but with a very small party every combat becomes a puzzle they are for sure invested in.
My party recently fought the bbeg of the first half of the campaign. Their goal was to defeat him before he could drop the Rogue’s mom under 100 hp to guarantee Power Word Kill working to take her out. The party nearly achieved their goal by getting the Lich down to 13 hp before he successfully cast Power sword Kill and killed the Rogue’s mom (level 12 party). The party got separated for narrative reasons and has come back 2 in-game years later, now level 14, to face him again and avenge the Rogue’s mom (R.I.P Avalon D. Zenith)
Cool advice thank you
One thing I always like to remember for big encounters is your players can do crazy strategies, so can your enemies. Have a minion put Haste on the big bad, have the big bad Polymorph one of their minions into an elephant! Seriously, there's so many spells and abilites that DMs overlook for their villains and encounters. Glyph of Warding is PHENOMENAL for a DM, as you can set up all kinds of crazy traps with it. Just don't forget to get creative with you encounters. An encounter dosen't have to be hard to be good.
Animorphs reference ftw! I'm checking apotheosis out for the option of playing a yeerk on that alone
See i love dnd dm advice because it applies so well to other stories specifically video games.
How I introduced my villain was by using my players backstories to form them and also have the villain show up during the story several times so they know who the villain is but once they defeated him he introduced a new villain who is going to be the villain in a future campaign
I will use the tiamat example when I go and roll my first campaing
I subbed so i get the alert when it posts lol
if I had to give three go to rules
-make the map important either by making it able to dynamically change or posing a challenge to the players.
-give the boss one or more unique abilities or gimmicks that force the players to think creatively. An easy example is a boss with cold magic where players need sources of heat to not take damage every turn.
-tie your boss to the backstories of your characters and let them banter with the players.
I've never really had trouble with it tbh, both in presentation and in gameplay. I'm a big fan of horror -- primarily psychological and body horror. This reflects very often in my bosses, who take on grotesque appearances and most of the time have some way of fucking with my players on an emotional and non-mechanical level.
"How many times has a villain coming up at the end been satisfying? It doesn't happen."
Senator Amrstrong would like a word.
Granted, he's the exception and I agree the statement overall.
Putin sneaking in caught me so off guard. I always love your vids
Wow!
O hi
I like to have unique things to do for boss battles, but the end boss, the main villain of the whole thing I prefer the "fight to the death" simplicity. I just make the boss have 2+ forms and or have the environment change with altering lair actions. I make the boss strong, and for one I gave him and super strong ability he could only use when near death, if they fail the dex save at the end he unleashes all his power and does a ton of damage at the end which could result in player death and then they would be able to unleash all their rage onto him to finish him off.
Yeerks? No, but the Taxxons? Heck yeah! though now that I think about it, Taxxons would make GREAT D&D monsters...
I’m here for you animorph references
That's only a 5e problem tho. I started path2e recently and encounter building is so well made. Magic items, crit and action economie is all taken into consideration in the encounter balance system
No system is immune to dice ruining the plan. Sometimes the party steamrolls the encounter, other times the party gets tuned up by an encounter that they statistically should have breezed through.
@@Biostasis5x7 tbh, it doesn't happen as much in more balanced systems. Obviously dice have a big impact, but pf2 definitely almost always goes exactly as planned
If PF is THAT good, I would like to love it, but I hate it just because none of my friends are savvy enough to understand PF's complexity and it gets """"recommended"""" the hell out of it on reddit whenever anyone has """complaint""" on D&D5e.
@@mslabo102s2 PF is definitely more complicated than 5E, but if you can get around that honestly it allows for way more customization and flexibility with character creation. 1e moreso than 2e just because 1e has a decade of content and is just more complex overall, but 2e is great as well
@@phoenixRose1724
Path1e has more options, yes, but it suffers from the "skill tree" feat system where you have to plan your 20 levels beforehand.
Path2e doesn't have this probleme with it's 4 or 5 different type of feats that are mostly level dependent (and are more features than feats) than "have X feat as prerequisit"
4:15 Not necessarily. Not all storys need to have a happy ending, and in DnD that stays true even if you try to get the happy ending cuz if your allways going to win against the BBEG the fight not only beacomes predictable but meaby also boring.
In fact I heard opinions from older fans who think that losing is often more fun then winning.
In other words, embrace the randomness!
I have a level 6 party that is just about to show down with the BBEG: a lich who is trying to take over a kingdom in a coup. It’s going to be a crazy fight, and I don’t want it to be impossible, but the most likely outcome is TPK. If that happens, I’m totally fine with it, because the villain will have been properly introduced as a feared/hated antagonist for the sequel campaign a couple hundred years later. 😈
The most disappointing BBEG encounter was my first time DMing in Lost mines of Phindelver. *cough cough* Nezznarr *cough cough*
NEZZNARR. I reworked that bitches ENTIRE statblock as a FIRST TIME DM simply because I hated him and felt he wasn't intimidating enough.
@@PlayYourRole well you weren't wrong. ... my brother's halfling rogue, tackled him as he was making his escape, and tied him up like a calf at a rodeo. The only memorial part was my other brother's human fighter was 1v1ing Vhalak in a fistfight.
@@zikuanli8483 Don't bother with him, their only goal was to find a way to inflate their own self worth by thinking that they could somehow drag others down to their own level of self hatred, buttttt that was pretty much an impossible task. They've been blacklisted from the channel, hopefully they can find a way to love themselves instead of thinking drowning others in their own self doubt is a way of doing so.
i’ve heard of people straight up replacing him with a drider (though keeping his spells) just because that manages to maintain a suitably dangerous and evocative villain
@@Hazel-xl8in I only used that as a one shot courtroom plot that ended with him being convicted
They haven't been able to get in contact with the bbeg just yet, just had clues and glimpses about his plans/whereabouts.
However, they have encountered one of his lieutenants which is really important to one of the characters backstory. The way I made the encounter was for the party of 4 PCs to fight against 2 really powerful minions while the lieutenant fought against the PC that had history with him.
The fight was a cruent one and I almost got a TPK under my belt, but the party of 4 was victorious... This wasn't the case against the lone PC.
The lieutenant downed him and although the party tried everything to stop him, his advance was relentless and got the PC by the neck before throwing him down a cliff the artificer managed to use feather fall to save him, but they haven't been able to find him just yet. The lieutenant escaped but they are now more determined to find him.
I actually did something similar with my boss in the first campaign I ran as a DM.
Pretty much my players were fighting an arch Lich that was actually their friend since the beginning though they didn't know he was a lich.
Obviously I can't fit an entire campaigns worth of character and story but pretty much they had known him since the beginning and always knew he was a little off but trusted him all the same but I made it clear since the beginning he wasn't exactly a good person, but on the other hand my players weren't very good either.
But anyway in order to beat my final boss they had to do a threefold type quest one they had to find and destroy his phylactery since until it's destroyed he's immortal and because of his power regenerating only takes a day at most if not instantaneously so there's no hope of trying to destroy him for a few days while you look for it or try to foil his plan he's a consistent threat.
Next once they finally destroyed it he doesn't immediately die rather his soul returns to his body and makes him mortal again and thus killable so they still have to fight him and he is pretty much a level 20 wizard.
And finally while fighting him they have to try and keep him distracted long enough to keep him from completing his ritual, if they don't break his concentration which I gave its own health pool pretty much within a certain amount of time he casts the wish spell and releases a powerful elder evil.
I made this high level campaign so my players were level 18 or 19 so it wasn't completely unreasonable throwing them against this level 20 all powerful wizard
A vampire lord who you can't really fight at first because they are stronger than a level 20 character, but you just need to survive for like 20 rounds, and unbeknownst to the party they aren't even trying to kill them, just lead them one way or another.
The Andalites are coming for you, Yeerk!
Wow....this video is exactly what I needed for my BBEG (basically a giant kaiju made from fused bodies/essences of a dead god and a living demigod, infused with a CRAPTON of stolen mortal souls and necrotic energy)
Too bad the BBEG won't be used for a few years 😂 we're in the beginning of the campaign still
what is the quote from 6:59 from?
I mean, the answer to the title question it's that the D&D 5e combat and monster design need to be really enhanced. I hope the next version changes this, but for now we can use the community support for improve our game, as your videos do!
That animorphs referance WAS dated but I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I have my bosses have a minimum of 500hp and if I noticed that my players are about to kill it and not a single one of them went down I bump up is HP give him a new ability or 2 and it changes the arena up
I got the animorphs reference don’t worry
For me, I purposefully made the big bad not that strong, but he's been messing with, manipulating and making the player characters so miserable that he's become this larger than life figure in their minds, this unbeatable force who runs a Cult who has been almost single handedly run them and any NPC's they interact with ragged just because of how much time he's spent preparing. So that way, when they finally beat him, it's going to be, 'wait, we actually won?!" Especially since he's going to be trying to manipulate them right up tell they defeat him.
Thinking of BBEGs have me thinking of the most hillarious BBEG-fights I had yet the joy to play a part in.
We confronted the evil wizard in his tower, already in the middle of his evil ritual. He taunts us with his monologue and... was grappled by a dragonblood sorceress in turn one and pulled into a conjured blizzard the sorceress, but not the BBEG was de facto immune to. Grappling in Pathfinder means: no spellcasting. And with a puny dagger by his side he could only land potshots at my (at that point) half-dragon lady, that tickled no more, than the raging blizzard, that froze the BBEG slowly but surely turn by turn.
My party dealt with a murder mystery that uncovered vampires in the town and one young eligible bachelor with several prominent families in his pocket turned out to be the vampire lord. They were somehow able to keep their identities hidden long enough to get to him hanging out in the country club, then with the promise of being alone with a powerful noble(one of the party) they were able to jump him and beat him down enough to stake him and paralyze him. Then it was into the lake and put him at the bottom under an immovable rod. They'd even surgically taken out his turned entourage of noble vampire spawn. (Read: blew up a lot of them during, and tracked the rest down after, a masquerade ball. Where they were still able to keep their identies secret)
It wasn't difficult per se, but that was just due to their ridiculous luck in rolls. If they'd missed and messed up once it would have fallen apart instantly, so there was weight to it and they realized how lucky it had been.
In fact the only known among them was a former guard turned private eye, who had a reputation for being vastly unreliable. He actually made the most ridiculous plans work through sheer luck.
Boss fight: the BBEG dont die until round 5 or other number you like. Or... after the first pc dies.
For my bbeg he's a god that has a seal that will allow him to escape the plane he's trapped in. The goal in the fight is to stop him using the seal. The only issue is that in my setting gods don't stay dead. It'll take a few centuries but they'll reform. So the real objective is to do something to stop the seal from being usable
The seal was created by a different god and the bbeg doesn't have the means to create a new one
Probably why vampires are so classic, other than their prevalence in modern fantasy. Then again, there weren’t vampires in LotR, which DnD is definitely not based off of.
Starts at 2:56 yw
I'd say you are good at thinking outside the box, but I don't entirely agree with this philosophy. Setting up your villains to fail, and giving them exploitable weaknesses is a bit ... strange to me. But whatever. I try to go with "your decisions matter" and so based on what the players decide to do, and what choices they make during the game, things can get harder or easier for them. It keeps things from feeling gimmicky, and makes the players feel like they're actions are impacting the world in a real way. So for your Tiamat fight for example, I'd throw a bunch of side quests at the players and then see how they react. That way they can go quest for powerful weapons to try and defeat her, but they've lost the advantage provided by fighting her while she's in the portal, or they can rush to the portal to stop her from coming through. They are less prepared, but have the advantage of the portal, and can simply drive her back. That way the villains, and the player interactions are, a little more clearly, having an effect on things. You have some creative gimmick fights there, but i personally prefer less gimmicky fights, and sometimes I think it's okay to let the player's choices just put them into a situation, where victory may not be possible, and then running it, and seeing how it shakes out.
I'm running RoT (Rise of Tiamat) and decided early on this would instead go to level 20 with many magical items and many legendary artifacts by the time the final fight happens. I've got to SUPERCHARGE her in order for this to work. They're supposed to fight her at like level 15. They're five levels above and full of magic bullshit
My issue is quite often players not thinking enough to discover these (rather obvious) weaknesses.
i remember after a 6 month game we end up on the BBEG and i just had all the party member buff the barb he crit and ended up 1 shoting the boss cause he crit it was funny but not really fun.
I typically run official adventurers and beef up the bosses ALOT, also way more HP and what I like to call "adrenaline surge" witch is action surge but it recharged on a 5 or 6 on a d6 roll (like a breath weapon) this gives the boss a bit more threat and is able to deal a bit more damage to the players and even take some down to 0.
I have only killed a player ONCE with these methods but hey that's what happens when a sorcerer walks up to a green dragon and talks shit....they get chomped, go down in one hit then eaten, then die to stomach acid.
Does WotC allow using the MtG art as open source? Or is it rather easy to get permission from them? 🤔
Concentration spell restrictions make boss fights limiting. Makes me want to run a 2nd edition game where spell effects stack or run durations instead.
Apotheosis is an awesome RPG, can comfirm
Okay, I agree... add more things to do. But how to you convey that information to the players? I can't imagine you just told your players that: "Do 100dmg to Tiamat every turn, also she can't die"
For this unique encounter, I spelled it out for them. This did 2 things: let them know mechanically what to do, and because I NEVER explained mechanics it made it very clear to them this was an encounter that could end everything. It worked pretty well for me, but it won't necessarily for every group!
OMG ANIMORPHS-
Dnd Sal isn’t real, he can’t hurt you
Dnd Sal:
I'm SORRY????
@@PlayYourRole it’s okay, I’m dnd Joe
Six and a half hours?! That'd be more than two full sessions for my group. I'm bored if a fight goes longer than 30 minutes.
Yes when the barbarian roles nat 20’s with a vorpal weapon it can be anticlimactic
Tiamat always has another head!
If you were silly enough to give a PC a vorporal sword you need to accept the consequences of it.
The one time my character got a vorpal longsword, I only instakilled one thing with it, and it was early on in the campaign. Whenever I got a crit with it from that point onwards, it was always against something it could not instakill. My luck was not the greatest with one, but that is my experience.
Having seen prisoners which is such a dark hard to watch movie it was really off putting to see lol
Omg and wonder is such a sad movie wtf
Animorphs is imortal don't worry
For all fights I try to avoid the stereotypical caveman fight.
Ugg bashes Ogg, so Ogg bashes Ugg, so Ugg bashes Ogg.
Sometimes all I have going for the fight is different terrain, or traps. I had a fight in a bandit hideout where the bandits were using secret passages to flank the party.
Or ghosts are attacking the party in a vertical zigzag section of cave where players may be unable to squeeze down without taking off their heavy armor, and might have a hard time seeing and supporting allies that aren't just on the next level up or down.
Doubly so for big important encounters.
Kingdom Hearts death fight at big Ben was memorable, for having to also keep the clock stopped.
A fair amount of Zelda bosses require using the item obtained in the dungeon to reveal the bosses weak point.
And I'd say Perseus fight with Medusa inspires me a lot. Without the knoweldge of how to fight her, and the magical items granted by the gods, it's a completely unwinnable fight, only becoming incredibly deadly with the right tools and information.
It sounds like sin to d&d players. But i put the dice down for boss encounters. You deal damage through creative descriptions of attacks or utilizing the environment
Obviously you keep doing what's fun for you tables. But I personally wouldn't want a boss fight of mine run like that. I believe doing this is effectively the same as the DM arbitrarily deciding who won the fight. It almost feels like you could just remove the players at that point.
this seens like a D&D problem, I've never had this type of issue with my bosses and I rarely DM D&D, if anything, the bosses are the high points of my games, the most memorable and epic moments.
The best boss is a BBEG who is just a G. They started a revolution against a tyrant Majesty, gaining favor from the people in the kingdom which leads them to become the next Majesty. The kingdom is safe and sound for a long time, allowing the party to roam around and level up. Power corrupts. The new Majesty gets cocky, which isn't normal for how they act. Oh well, all rulers act like this. But then their goal seeking shifts. They want what's best for the kingdom and people, but what's best for one kingdom is worst for the world. They war with other kingdoms for more land to grow. They deal in dark magics to unnaturally lengthen their people's lives, because they want them to live happier, healthier lives. Their goals are still Good aligned, but their actions are Evil.
Even without a grandiose idea, just throw the boss into the world somewhere that makes sense. Make them a shop keeper or a thug or someone the party could meet, without the need for combat. Let them know the people they fight are people, not just useless numbers on an Initiative table. Give them a reason to question if they should do combat or not!
My alternate goal is to EAT YOUR BEANS.
I stopped over thinking by finding a business partner who never thought before acting but could sell anything. We balanced either out.
The Term BBEG annoys me. 50% of it is redundent. It should be the "BB".
I would be so disappointed and bored participating in a six hour fight sequence
Throwing out the bastards left and right at the end there hahaha jk jk
6.5 hours? Start using a timer.
We went through 22 rounds of combat with 6 players and 2 enemies with legendary actions. Timers were not necessary!