DMing with Charisma

Phased bosses aren’t an everyday food. If every bandit leader and his brother has multiple forms, the whole concept loses its impact. But for key battles, the sort that accompany campaign milestones or end arcs, there’s little more satisfying than watching the PCs win a fight they know they can’t handle. Because phased fights bring deadly challenges down to a reasonable level by manipulating encounter pacing, they fit snugly between “possible” and “impossible” in the exact place memorable fights live.

Designing a phased boss gives you plenty of opportunity to flex your creative muscle. But before you design anything you have to decide what sort of fight you want. There are different types of phased encounters, though the types themselves are means to an end. What really matters is the impression you want to give the players, and that impression affects what type of encounter works best. Continue reading →

I’ve alluded to phased bosses a few times, but I haven’t gone in-depth about it. A phased combat encounter is any encounter with multiple stages as part of the same fight. These stages must be mechanically distinct; a knight who becomes wary of attacks of opportunity isn’t entering a new phase, but a knight who switches to a heavy weapon or descends from horseback may be. The stages must all occur in the same encounter, but they don’t necessarily have to include the same monsters or even the same battlefield. As long as you compress multiple thematically-linked fights into one combat without a significant break between them, you probably have a phased encounter.

Despite the prevalence of phased bosses in other media, D&D doesn’t have a lot of information about doing it. I think that’s because it makes the math really hard. D&D balances encounter difficulty based on Challenge Rating math or an XP budget, and phased encounters don’t interact nicely with either. If you give your players an encounter with a 200-XP phase and a 300-XP phase, it’s harder than giving them two encounters because they don’t have the rest in between, but it’s easier than one 500-XP encounter because they’re not dealing with it all at once. D&D doesn’t like taking carefully-crafted mechanisms and adding a rule that says “and then you just wing it, we guess”, so there’s little literature on phased encounters. And that’s a shame, because good phased fights are among the most flavorful, exciting, and interesting fights you can give your players. Continue reading →

Players most strongly remember two kinds of fights: the very easy and the very hard. If a fight seems difficult on paper and the players blow clean through it with good rolls, good strategy, and/or a good builds, they’ll tell that story for years if only because it’s hilarious. If a fight pushes them right to the edge, they’ll remember it too, either because they overcame a difficult challenge or because they lost. Many fights fall in between, and that’s fine. Each fight should mean something to the game, but not every fight has to be a life event.

Boss fights are different. They should be memorable, which means they shouldn’t be humdrum, by-the-numbers encounters. The more important a boss fight is, the more it should test the players’ and character’s limits. I trust this concept is not controversial. The problem is doing it. How do you make a fight hard enough to test the party but not so hard you accidentally wipe them out? Continue reading →

Stealing boss ideas is easy once you get used to it. A DM can pick up almost any game with a boss, pick almost any boss in that game, and apply it to their game for a fun encounter. But, as I like to say, every project in the world, from D&D sessions to movies to entrepreneurial pursuits, begins with two steps:

1. Hey, you know what would be cool?
2. No, seriously, how would we even do that?

Every fun concept must eventually match up to reality. Once you have a boss idea, you have to apply it to the system rules (or choose which rules to violate/ignore, but that’s a whole other topic). That means figuring out how to work it into your campaign, but also balancing the encounter against what the party can handle. Continue reading →

Boss fights are hard. Most editions of D&D really aren’t designed to handle them, so there’s no simple math you can do to turn a fight into a boss. You could just apply a template to a monster or give the players an enemy X levels above them or give it Y minions, but none of those methods work on their face because they’re all intended to make the fight harder. They don’t make it more interesting. A boss should be difficult, and we’ll talk about that soon, but more imperatively it should be an interesting encounter. The players should remember the boss fight more than they remember the mooks leading up to it, and that generally means it shouldn’t be simply a scarier version of those mooks. The fight needs something to make it fun, and that responsibility falls squarely on the DM.

The most important thing in a boss encounter is what the boss does. Monsters are differentiated by their powers, far more than by their ability scores or equipment or strategy, and a boss should have boss-level powers. Coming up with those powers is an art, especially in 5E where monsters tend to work a lot like each other and Challenge Ratings are more the results of guesswork than usable tools for estimating encounter difficulty. And since we don’t have a good system for creating boss powers, and thus boss monsters, from whole cloth, we have to rely on a tried-and-true method that has existed since the beginning of the game: stealing them. Continue reading →

A few actual, non-hyperbolic years ago, I said this:

Yes, having an odd ability score as an ability damage buffer is a type of metagaming. But it’s also a way of defining a character. As in, “Rock Hardslab is so strong! He can even take a hit from a wraith and barrel on, unharmed, where lesser action heroes might falter!” I could have a whole other post someday on how selling something the right way can be the difference between rejection and applause.

This is that post. Continue reading →