[DF] Big Solitary Boss Monsters - design theory

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Gigermann

True, but only if it's remotely possible to survive and/or defend against them—and in many cases, it really should not be. No need to stat Godzilla's attacks, except to potentially Dodge them (and in GURPS, that has nothing to do with the attack itself, unless it's Deceptive).

You can't know how much DR vs Fire Only and IT(Damage Reduction): Fire Only my character has. So do stat up the dragon's flame breath.

[roguebfl]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

You can't know how much DR vs Fire Only and IT(Damage Reduction): Fire Only my character has. So do stat up the dragon's flame breath.

I think that's Gigermann's point he doesn't know but the point is the attack is defined as lethal regardless how muvh your character has.

[Gigermann]

I do agree that the Players should have plenty of creative latitude WRT defeating the (Mega-)Boss—I've heard some good stories in that vein, and I definitely try to encourage that.

I'll restate my suggestion in a more-acceptable manner:
At minimum, stat the weakness, and otherwise, don't stat anything you don't have to. If the PCs can't possibly survive a particular attack, don't bother figuring it out in game-terms—it's pointless. If the PCs can't possibly damage the Boss with their usual weapons, don't waste time with the HP or DR.

Better?

[Langy]

Originally Posted by Gigermann

I do agree that the Players should have plenty of creative latitude WRT defeating the (Mega-)Boss—I've heard some good stories in that vein, and I definitely try to encourage that.

I'll restate my suggestion in a more-acceptable manner:
At minimum, stat the weakness, and otherwise, don't stat anything you don't have to. If the PCs can't possibly survive a particular attack, don't bother figuring it out in game-terms—it's pointless. If the PCs can't possibly damage the Boss with their usual weapons, don't waste time with the HP or DR.

Better?

Then what happens if they get their hands on an unusual weapon (say, a ballista or other siege weapon)?

[Captain-Captain]

Originally Posted by Toadkiller_Dog

Eh, if the boss is only has two stats:

Weakness: Hit him here and he dies
Attack: Fail to defend and you die

. . . then you've basically scripted in the only way to beat him and the only way to stop him. I think that's a bit lame. I don't mind one-weakness monsters that are otherwise invulnerable, but I think this potentially crosses the line into "Guess how I think you can beat this and you win, think of a different way to beat this and you're wrong and you lose."

Plus you've effectively said they do (Max PC HP x 6) dice of damage, cosmic (ignores DR). That's not fun IMO because there are no death checks, no amazingly low damage rolls, no "I use Super Luck and call minimum damage on him!" or the like.

I'd rather write down:

100 HP
DR 50 everywhere
Supernatural Durability
Wounded: Has a patch of missing armor, -10 to hit but no DR. Per-10 to spot.

Bite (15): 100d6 damage

than write:

Weakness: Patch of missing armor, -10 to hit, if hit there it dies, Per-10 to spot.
Bite (15): You die.

Plus if the PCs win, they know it wasn't just a pure puzzle monster, and if they lose, you can show them how unfair the fight was . . . but that you played by the same rules. The Black Reaver was a totally, extremely, ridiculously unfair monster in Rolemaster . . . but it was statted, so you knew it was conceivably possible to beat it, even if that was totally unlikely to happen.

All IME, IMO.

The best boss fight I gave my players was a nightstalker from Yrth. 15 HT berserk and mauling damage. They had to take it down to neg 75 to kill it. The group melee artist got hit pretty early on and had to improvise their tactcs without him.

Invincibility is overated. It just frustrates players. The boss should be memorable.

[Gigermann]

Originally Posted by Langy

Then what happens if they get their hands on an unusual weapon (say, a ballista or other siege weapon)?

Obviously, if you, as GM, put a ballista within reach of the PCs, you have to take your own medicine :P

[fredtheobviouspseudonym]

Originally Posted by Gigermann

. . . how would you treat the Balrog in LotR? Gandalf was clearly able to engage the thing in melee, and defeat it, with some magical aid. Really, it was just a super-capable "normal" bad guy, in a way, and doesn't really qualify as the type of boss I'm talking about.

Well, the Balrog, single-handed, dismantled one of the richest & most powerful kingdoms of Middle-Earth, wrecked its army, and killed two of its kings.

I'll call him "Boss." But Gandalf the Grey was a "boss" character too.

[Gigermann]

Originally Posted by fredtheobviouspseudonym

Well, the Balrog, single-handed, dismantled one of the richest & most powerful kingdoms of Middle-Earth, wrecked its army, and killed two of its kings.

I'll call him "Boss." But Gandalf the Grey was a "boss" character too.

I suppose you could say that "Boss" is "relative" to the affected PC(s)

[daniel_gudman]

So in the poetic Edda, there was a dragon named Fafnir. The hero Sigurd needed to kill him, so he spent a week spying on the dragon. Then, one night, he snuck down to the trail the dragon took every day down to the river, where he would drink. He dug a pit trap in the road, and hid in it. When Fafnir walked over the hole, Sigurd thrust up with his sword (yes, it was Gram) and stabbed him right in the heart.

The greatest strength of table-top, the edge that it has over all other games, is that the GM and the players can completely blind-side each other, anyone can do something no one else at the table expected, and the game can handle that.

If you're going to have a something so important it's a boss monster, stat it out, even stat out things you don't think you'll need. You need to be able to handle those surprises.

Defeating a boss monster isn't an encounter, it's an entire adventure. Preparing the battlefield, and countering enemy preparations, having a plan deeper than marching order, reacting when things go wrong... what makes a boss monster interesting is when it can force a long, multi-stage encounter, not when it's "save or die" rolls for the monster and the party.

[Bruno]

This apparently sat in my browser for nine hours because I forgot to hit send before I left the house. Meh, I'll hit send now, and try and catch up on responses tomorrow morning. Glad to see the interest!

What are the problems with boss fights?
Boss fights work great in video games - there's only one player, only one boss, and they go at it mano-a-elder-thingo until the player wins or until a save game is reloaded and they do it all over again.

The cost of player death in a video game is rarely more than a few seconds of your time to load the save game in a modern video game, and even classic arcade games used extra lives, letting you continue from a point usually no more than 10 or 15 minutes playtime away from the boss fight.

The fight can be easily tuned so that a single hit by the boss means instant death for the player and it becomes all about pure reflexes; It can be set up so that a certain level of being powered up/leveled up reduces a hit to something other than instant death, meaning that planning and preparation can compensate for bad timing. Either way, the cost of failure is more about a bit of frustration than any major time investment; player death is cheap.

The relationship in RPGs is usually the other way around - player death is expensive in time allotment (and emotional investment) while NPC death is cheap. This is likely a direct cause of the creeping increase in availability of "fix dead guy" effects in D&D from edition to edition - players are more and more used to having some sort of "do over" option in video games and so less tolerant of "final death" in their game space.

It's even more complicated by having a party of adventurers taking on one boss, rather than the usual one player one boss ratio. Outside of party-style CRPGs and MMOs, this isn't normal.

With a party vs a single monster, the monster has to split up its attacks four or five ways, and deal with possibly up to four or five different styles of attack and defense - squishing one player simply doesn't win the fight for the boss. Conversely, four players get to do up to four things at once to or around the boss - and there's no "blowthrough" effect of rolling more damage than it took to push something over the threshold of death. Nearly every single HP of injury done to the boss counts - there's only ONE chance for "overkill".
Every time it's stunned, it's like an entire squad of orcs was stunned at once.
Every time it fails to resist a spell, it's like an entire squad of orcs failed to resist at once.
It's easier to get players around behind or to the sides of a giant monster than it is a squad of orcs - the squad of orcs can get organized and present only front faces to players, the giant monster just can't form a circle with itself.