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Old 01-19-2021, 02:25 PM   #4
Polkageist
 
Join Date: Sep 2007
Default Re: A Boss monster book would be good to have

So I had a long missive about boss fight design stuff, but I was dumb and didn't put it in a safe spot.

Anyway, a fun/good way to put together a boss monster is to take a couple of smaller monsters with abilities and attacks that you want and glue them together into the singular boss.

What do you mean by glue? I mean that in a semi-literal sense. Sometimes you don't want to have a boss be multiple things, like a wizard with henchmen. Sometimes you want a singular big bad monster, but you also want it to act more than once per turn. Or you want a smaller monster BE big and scary and bossy. So you take a few monsters and glue them together (on paper) into one entity, but in a fight treat it as though it's several monsters that occupy the same space, and move around as one group. Each monster has an action set, has their own initiative, and has an independent resource pool. But, visually on the board, it looks like one monster. Mechanically, it's several monsters that are stuck together.

Say you want a big boss Orc. Super nasty, doesn't have henchmen (he ate 'em), and is big and scary. But he's just one monster vs. 4-5 heroes. Give BossOrc extra attacks and that's great to balance out the action economy, but it does give the fight a bit of a you-go-I-go feel and the boss is really bursty in that all his actions happen and may unintentionally delete a party member when you'd rather smooth out the damage and give the heroes a chance to react in between the flurry of claws and stuff.

So instead of 1 REALLY BIG ORC, take 3 smaller orcs and glue them together. Orc 1 is the melee orc. Orc 2 is the ranged orc, and has javelins. Orc 3 is the magic boy and has a wand of fire breath. Looking at the Orc stat line you can see that a typical orc has a melee attack, a ranged attack, and for the fire breath wand is just a DX roll to hit. We haven't reached out to other monsters, we're just looking at one orc stat line that has 3 ways to attack.

Using this critter isn't any harder than using three Orcs. Each Orc gets an initiative score, say 6, 5, and 4. Each Orc has a set of actions they can take: movement, some kind of attack, and can defend.
Here's where it differs.
Movement - Instead of having potentially different movement scores, you just record one and use that. All the sub-orcs move as one, and you only use ONE movement action in a round. Possibly two if it makes sense for it to be very mobile, or play with being able to make only one true "move" action but any given BossOrc turn can utilize a step. Probably the most "feel-it-out" part.
Combat - There are 3 orcs, so there are 3 attacks, and any Orc can use any of the attack options, melee, ranged, or magic. Seems like a lot, but it's spread over 3 actions that are interleaved with PC actions, so opportunity to use healing, and are at the single-orc scale. Defenses are similarly spread out, so it gets 3 'normal' defenses (i.e. parry/block) before those degrade or exhaust, which is appropriately Boss-like. It's not all roses for the BossOrc, since it is still only occupying one location it is just as vulnerable to being surrounded and the bad times that brings, giving the heroes a good edge.
Saves and recovery - Any time on one of the BossOrc's initiative spots. Does this mean it may recover quickly? Yes! But it still takes a full action to do so, so at worst a successful magical attack that BossOrc recovers from eats up their action resource. It is a boss after all.
Taking Damage - There are three HP pools, which become three HP breakpoints, and each time one is crossed the BossOrc loses one of its initiative slots. Which one? Doesn't matter! The point is that the BossOrc gets worn down and doesn't act as often, but you don't have to sweat the bookkeeping of tracking which sub-orc is 'killed'. Simply mark when each HP threshold is crossed and reduce the number of initiative slots accordingly.

Rasputin posted a link to a great resource for pre-built and really detailed bosses. I like the above for custom crafting creatures like mini-bosses, monstrous opponents that may have a lot of variety in their abilities, and just having a set of guidelines for putting things together ahead of time that makes keeping track of it all easier.

edit: Oh yeah, this idea came from an article I read somewhere a few years ago. I searched for it so I could cite the original author but I couldn't find it. If anyone knows of this, or runs across it please link it because I would LOVE to attribute this concept to is creator.
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