Big Boss Friday: He didn't seem that bad a second ago.

What’s this? What’s going on?! Oh, the humanity! Okay calm down, it’s only Big Boss Friday. Every Friday I plan to write something about everyone’s favorite encounter… the boss encounter. To start the first week off, I’m going to talk about one of the most deadly mechanics: The stacking weakness.

The basic idea is that through some means the big boss manages to make the party weaker to attacks. And by “some means” I really do mean anything, but the most effective use of the stacking weakness isn’t damage. The best use is giving your party a panic attack. Say your players are fighting someone who specializes in electricity attacks. Start by mentioning how the room feels damp at the start of one of the rounds. You don’t have to do anything at this point, just mention it. Wait for them to feel secure that you were just messing with them. Then start flooding the room. This one works particularly well if you let water flow from above as well. Periodically let a new leak hit a player at the same moment as an electrical attack. They’ll love you for it, and by love I mean they’re probably going to leap forward and choke you with your own dice bag, but I always take that as a sign I’m doing my job correctly. If you really want to have fun just put your players against a lightning mage in a submarine. Actually, just put your players against anyone in a submarine. A playful cat could cause total structural failure with the right die roll.

Another important lesson is that the GM never gets called for metagaming. If you want to use an actual stacking debuff life is much easier if you get tokens to keep track of the number of stacks. Now, you could keep the tokens behind a screen next to each player’s name, or you can tell a player they have minor burns and hand them a token. Not only does it let you let players keep track of their own status, but it insures the player (and in turn the character) has a pretty good idea of exactly how much trouble they’re in. Now I may sound evil, but boss encounters are supposed to induce panic. Don’t force your players to role play fear and panic; try to make them feel it. When a player can actually sit there and count their 10 stacks of minor burns (again and again hoping the number will go down) they react much differently to their situation. Have you ever had a player bolt out of a room because someone lit a match? It’s basically like that.