Woo barely on time.
Okay, first off I’m going to apologize for not having a non-boss post this week. I have a few half finished posts that just don’t feel ready yet.
Anyway, boss encounters are tricky for a lot of reasons. If you’re not careful you can drop your party pretty quickly, and while boss encounters should be difficult they shouldn’t be impossible. (Well… they can be, but that’s another Friday.)
Here’s the thing: it’s damn hard to balance a boss battle. They have cooler abilities and tend to last longer. The longer a fight goes on the higher the chance of a string of bad dice completely destroying one of your players. Depending on the tone of your game that could be… kinda the point, but unless your strategy focuses on hiding behind a mound of dead bards the deaths are often frustrating for your players. Don’t get me wrong. A boss battle isn’t a bad time to go, but a good story requires some degree of a stable cast list, and you’ll find a long term campaign is much easier if players don’t switch out there characters too often. This requires even boss battles being well balanced.
While you could start out by planning out your boss’ abilities, or maybe his damage output or defense I find a good place to start is actually your boss’ hit point pool. This works because a boss’ health can be heavily tied to his concept:
High Hit Points: Your standard tank/brawler. These bosses tend to be big, mean, or at the very least durable as hell. However, they also tend to have lower damage output. Odd as it may seem conceptually you probably want to make this boss relatively easy to hit. While your players may feel like they’re fighting the titanic with fire balls at least they can hit it. If your boss has high hit points and high defense you’re going to be there all day.
Mid-Range Hit Points: A little more damage, a little more crafty. This boss will either put out a little more damage, or be a little harder to pin down.
Low Hit Points: The only response to this kind of boss is, “Oh Shit.” Which your players should utter immediately after the boss attacks or after they attack him.
No or Dynamic Hit Points: These are special fights, and frankly the method I usually apply.
While a static hit point value is fine, although a bit harder to balance, I’m willing to admit I rarely give my bosses an actually hit point value and more a hit point concept, which I might potentially break at any time. So, what does it mean for a boss to have a dynamic hit point total?
Well, what I mean by dynamic really is dramatic. Let you bosses drop when it seems coolest for them to do so, or if it just happens to be easier for you. A pretty standard situation for me is when one of my players is on the ground with others going down, and one of them gives a final heave to try and drop the boss before somebody dies. If your players haven’t failed completely up to this point whatever your HP total may be it’s not a bad idea to pump up the drama and let the boss drop.
In a recent game one of my players had been dragged by the boss into a fire with enough burns on him jump his fire weakness up to 15. On the next round he was going to burn to carbon. Another player lunged forward and plunged a blade into the boss’ gut who had already taken a beating. The boss died, and my players dragged their ally out of the fire and threw water on him. They had fun, still felt some panic, but weren’t stuck coming up with a new character concept.
On top of this is the fact that a dynamic health pool really shouldn’t confuse your players. If a boss’ defense or damage output changes without reason it can be hard for the players to keep up. Sure that could be the point, but you can’t do that every fight.
My favorite and I mean absolute favorite bosses almost always have no hit points. These are your gimmick fights. The players have to do something else before the boss can be defeated.
In a recent side quest a few of my players were missing and the party consisted of a utility mage, infiltrator/gunner, and a scientist. With this in mind I switched gears and turned the session into a horror game. The players spent their time running around a Silent Hill style hospital and their final encounter involved climbing a tower of writhing bodies while the boss chewed away at the party’s wisdom scores. After performing all of this the boss himself required a single attack at close range to disable or kill him. Now due to their decreasing wisdom scores and defense against psychic attacks the encounter ended with two members buried in the pile and their last active member quickly succumbing to psychic attack. The party was failing quickly and not a single bit of that relied on their damage output or defense, only their ability to work together and quickly perform a goal.
So, what’s the point here? In reality you could just pull out a book and throw down some monsters from the pages, but if you wanted to do that why are you reading this post?
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