How to create interesting boss battles?

Hello Veeky Forums

I'm planning a campaign focused in bosses - all the encounter will be constructed around one or more creatures which ones the players have to defeat to proceed the adventure.

I would like this game looks like a bastard son of Darksouls with Shadow of the Colossus. But this is when I get to the point:

How to create an interesting boss battle for my players? Something that breaks the formula of "high initiative, flank, hit until it dies"? Something that it's fun and challenging?

Any thoughts?

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theangrygm.com/return-of-the-son-of-the-dd-boss-fight-now-in-5e/
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>let it interact with your players, outside of it attacks player X
>multiple phases
>location change
>let your boss appear as too strong for your players
>they have to solve a puzzle instead lowering the hp to 0
>time limits

ThisBut not all at once.

On my first campaign as a DM, D&D 5e, I planned a boss who would be fought at a arena full of about to sprout magic beans(one of the permade magic items). Basically they would right the guy on a wacky minefield
Sadly it never happened because real life

Do research on boss mechanics. Area attacks, phases, tells, things like that. A lot of it is videogame stuff, but it can be adapted.

I ran a recent boss fight where every turn the boss put down a 3x3 area that would be crushed the next round, constantly forcing the players to keep moving rather than just staying static and in place.

Big things you need to consider are making the fight long enough, but not too long, how to counter player action economy, and how to make the boss dangerous without just one shotting players left and right, which isn't fun.

Take a look at Kingdom Death: Monster. You might not be able to copy the mechanics (it uses AI cards) but every monster in KDM is built around unique mechanics and attacks such that if you come prepared for the wrong fight even a low level monster can turn you to burger. If you go into a fight against the Kingsman thinking its the same deal as fighting a White Lion, you are going to get sliced, diced, and dissolved by acid blood before you have a chance to realize how wrong you were.

There is a place where I could get some inspiration to create different mechanics to my bosses? Something in the line of what you guys already said?

some sort of list, anything?

Just give it a fuck load of hit points, it'll be fine

t. Matt Mercer

My rule of thumb when designing boss fights is "you can't kill it just by spamming your biggest damage on it".
There always has to be some other requirement, be it that you first need to deactivate some sort of trap, you need to destroy his source of power, there are too many minor creatures to just deal with the main boss without thinking, etc. the important part is that no matter how hard they hit, the PCs should never be able to win the fight by simply dropping big enough numbers on the bosses head.

Other thing I like to do is contruct the battle as if it was some sort of fighting puzzle, where you need to keep paying attention to many things at the same time and mangaging them so shit doesn't hit the fan. Like, for example, a boss in which you need a character constantly running around cutting down ever-growing plants or they'll eat you out and another character has to lure bees into a big area so they can be dealt with with fire all while there's other two people barely handling the boss, making time so the others finish their jobs first.

I ran a 2 semester long campaign that was based on hunting monsters, with inspiration from games such as Dark Souls and Monster Hunter, and the Witcher novels my take away from this for creating interesting monster/combat encounters are below

1. Let your players research the boss ahead of time. You can still throw in some surprises to be sure, but have the bosses/creatures have not only strengths and weaknesses, but also quirks that can be manipulated.

2. While I do not recommend Vincent Baker's systems I do think he provides an interesting framework for how creatures/events/encounters should affect the party.

The most common one is deal damage to them and is used in almost everything but some of the others are quite interesting.

Use up a resource. Not just health, ammo, or spell slots. Have some item or novelty that is necessary to winning the encounter, let them utilize it and have the boss threaten it.

Separate Them. perhaps two of your party of 5 are swallowed up by the quaking ground and are offered a new opportunity or presented with a new threat related to the boss.

Turn their move back on them. Tempt the players to utilize something that is most likely not a good idea when they try it out, don't punish them for it, merely have it change the flavor of the encounter. Perhaps the research that the kraken's oozy exterior is highly flammable so the wizard shoots a fireball at it, which while doing some damage to the kraken now has the danger of fire being spread to your ship.

Give an opportunity for a player/class to shine. No not just spells are cool or favored enemies are nice, really give them the ability to do something that they as a player/class like to do, don't make it instantly win the fight or just do a ton of damage but have it alter the fight in some way.

Show a downside of a player/class/equipment. Platemail doesn't float, sometimes you don't have line of site, etc etc.

...

Give your boss multiple actions per turn, with multiple turns in the initiative order.
Don't make it so that all 5 of your players go do their move taking them down to half health, letting the bad guy get one move with which to do a stupidly overpowered attack instantly killing someone, then finishing their turn and instantly being killed off.

It's fairer to have the boss have multiple small attacks then a few really huge attacks.

bump

I did end up stealing ideas from Kingdom Death (namely the flower knight, the dung beetle knight, and slender man) for mechanics. The dung beetle knight uses burrowing attacks and swings his giant ceramic shit ball around, but in my campaign it was an ogre parts flesh golem swinging a giant black cooking cauldron filled with bodyparts around with area attacks. There was a trick to weakening him (which our fighter figured out after getting whacked and the pillar he was hiding behind smashed) but thats more DMs choice, and i also used the dung beetle knight mechanics for burrowing and terrain alteration on another creature. But more than that, i actually made "behavior cards" for general encounters as Kingdom Death inspired me to do. I have one for beasts, low intellect creatures, and high intellect creatures. Each deck ill draw appropriate at initiative and they give me about 12-17 primary "objectives" that the monsters will try to accomplish (atleast at start, shit always goes sideways), that way what targets or tricks a group of monsters uses is pretty random. I still do it "classically" pretty often, but it keeps me from getting in a rut or potentially focusing/protecting one of the party when im tired or improving.

Have it happen in an unnatural environment where the environment is as much of a danger as the boss. I once DM'd a boss battle where the players fought a giant golem in freefall. Those who could fly did so while those that couldn't had to dodge and maneuver their way through falling debris which was constantly changing.

if you want to have a "dark souls" kind of experience, keep consistant, if its gonna do a big/special thing, the party should have warning. even if it mixes it up between its big thing its gonna do, the "wind up" should always be the same. "it stomps the ground infront of it" or my ogre golem would take a turn to drag its cauldron back by a chain to it (when he flung it at the back line) doing only unarmed attacks or push attacks against anyone ballsy enough to get close, so our fighter and dual-wield ranger would wait to rush into melee until then or risk getting walloped by a point blank cauldron AOE.

also, recurring villains can fill this niche. Through the quirks of game play, the party was just dicking around and ended up fucking over a mid-level golem smith mage who i've had operating obsessively behind the scenes in super-villain style intentionally trying to fuck the party over (got a friend not in the game giving me ideas and sort of "playing" him and i give him very little information and his stuff takes time). Party has only just made the connection, so waiting to see where it goes, that is more of a methodical boss.

This is important for Dark Souls and Monster Hunter style combat, where actions are (comparatively) slow and meaty. Its all about learning patterns and reading animations.You need some kind of cue, audio or visual, to make the necessary informed decisions. The more threatening an action is, the bigger the tell. Non-threatening actions like persistent chip damage can come without a tell. Combine the two for more interesting player decisions.

>but not all at once
Ok, I fucked up...will my players notice it?

Are they all in roughly 16.6% amounts or did you accidentally 600% the boss fight?

Videogames.

The two headed, two bodied snake concept works well.

>two headed, two bodied snake
Isn't that just... two snakes?

MMOs, for all the shit we give them DO have a fair bit of experience at doing big boss fights and keeping them relatively interesting.

>Zones of ongoing effects are handy, as they force people to maneuver rather than staying in place.
>Multi-stage attacks. Have a barrage of ranged attacks ramp up every turn it's in use (As it gets up to speed) with the downside that it resets if they don't have LOS on a target. Stuff like that gives players an interest in interacting with the mechanics, especially if they can predict what the next stages is (A barrage into a huge explosion making people scatter after the barrage for example)
>Give the enemy several options. It doesn't matter how tough it is if it's boring to fight, so even if it's hitting people in melee give it options (A stomp that hits everyone in base to base, a slam that adds knockback to the attack, picking a dude up and throwing him at another dude)
>Have the environment play a role, either helping the players or the boss.
>Multi-stage bosses exist for a good reason, to give people a sense that they are making progress in the boss. Try not to have them be a dull HP slog without any indication of how you are going.

I think the most difficult part of creating a boss fight is NOT how the fight breaks the norms, but how to make the players accept the breaking of norms.
Special abilities or overriding game mechanic may feel like cheating to some players, especially when they fail to see it coming.
Maybe they are too dumb, maybe the gm fail to drop enough hints ahead of time, or maybe there are hints but the smart players just interpret them in a different way.

Sorry, I'm referring to a thought experiment that goes through some seemingly stupid phases before revealing a way to make bosses with a variable moveset and interesting abilities simply by combining stat blocks from other creatures.

Quite a long read, but here you go.
theangrygm.com/return-of-the-son-of-the-dd-boss-fight-now-in-5e/

>The boss is way over the player level and has been harrasing them the whole game.
>During the fight players can't damage it unless the player solve complicated puzzles under a time limit wile avoiding attacks
>boss is constantly using other attack outside of it attacks player X like hold person, polymorph, and confusion wile summoning a 2 headed 2 bodied giant snake.
>the cleric is now a chicken and the fighters brains are scrambled for the rest of the battle
>each phase the boss warps to a new location miles away and gets harder with even more conplicated puzzles and shorter time limtes
>there is also a over all time limit ontop of the shoter time limits

did they update the rules? because last time I played I only needed green saviors with armor to beat everybody except the phoenix. For that one I needed the green saviors that didn't age.

lots of hit points are helpful but can get boring since it is just rolling dice till it's over without much thought.

I have been studying kingdom death and boss fights and have a few things you could do to make the boss interesting.

1. indestructible: he can't be harmed except by certain kinds of powers or weakness (attacks only 1pt per attack but fire does full damage, they have to get him into the lava room and push him in kind of thing)
2. The boss has some huge advantage they have to deal with first. The user who brought up the 3x3 square bash is a good one. I like high mobility so they have to keep moving. Whatever it is that gives him that ability has to be dealt with. Smash the bashing crystal or destroy the wings of speed etc.
3. The boss has an area of effect ability that hits on turn x. so it's a pattern. Maybe a breath weapon like a dragon but it isn't a random roll. Or that bash attack or he has a cleave type attack that hits everyone in 5 squares
4. the boss has a second form. They defeat it only for it to burst out of the form and reveal it was a demon in the guise of old man kruthers all along. Can also be a ghost possessing the original body that is the real villain etc. The idea is now the fight is tougher and they have to change up tactics.
5. It multiplies, The body is cut in half and now you got two of them Think Hydra or troll that regenerates but instead it grows a new mini-boss to join the fight. They have to solve defeating it without causing more to appear.
6. Regeneration, it is the normal kind of creature but regenerates enough per round to offset the most damage. This is a pretty simple villain bonus and can be applied to minor bosses at lower levels. I once ran a campaign that had a owlbear living in a grove of goodberries and had eaten them so long he now naturally healed. makes for a longer fight but not necessarily better.
7. knock back. Boss attacks should give it control of the area. Have the attacks throw the players around.

>But more than that, i actually made "behavior cards" for general encounters as Kingdom Death inspired me to do. I have one for beasts, low intellect creatures, and high intellect creatures. Each deck ill draw appropriate at initiative and they give me about 12-17 primary "objectives" that the monsters will try to accomplish (atleast at start, shit always goes sideways), that way what targets or tricks a group of monsters uses is pretty random. I still do it "classically" pretty often, but it keeps me from getting in a rut or potentially focusing/protecting one of the party when im tired or improving.
Can you post these?

...

In Chrono Trigger, there's a fight that stands out with me against Magus where he's really strong against almost all physical attacks and all but one type of elemental attacks, and his elemental weakness shifts every time he's struck throughout the fight.

The key to beating him is to provoke his element-weakness change until it gets to one you can cast, then hit him with that element until he changes out of it again, and repeat.

7. Knockback I got from kingdom death. with the players and boss being in different positions each round it means they have to really think about how to reach it and be ready for how it counter attacks
8. Breakaway scenery. Have it smash walls, cave in a room and otherwise change the terrain.You could give it boss points that it can use to instantly change the environment in some way.
9. voldemort's horcrux. or the lich's phylactery. As long as these exist the bad guy keeps coming back for more. There is no reason you can't strip it off the lich and use it for someone else. If a lich can use one why can't some other magical being or someone with the money to get them made. It can let them reform. It could cast resurrection and they end up as some other race (which would be really confusing and fun for players) or it takes over the one holding it when he dies. lots of posiblities
10. reflection, this can take two forms. It can make copies of itself that can hurt the player but killing the reflections do nothing to the boss till they reach him, or it reflects attacks back at players. This could mean the first player to hit ti with everything will drop instantly but that is what clerics are for.

I thought I was going crazy over here

Rip Vecna.

>the hitpoints wasn't enough
>DM had to beg for his PCs to not kill the BBG
Pathetic as fuck.

>7, 8, 9, 10
Where are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6?

better than people using Kingdom death monster as good examples, let alone original.

What's wrong with Kingdom Death?

>not giving your boss unlimited hitpoints
>not only killing it once the battle reaches its climix

right above it

The philosophy behind this is fine enough, but I wouldn't apply it so globally. My players would eventually treat the boss itself like a mildly threatening wall that stands between them and a more pressing objective, which I find gets stale after a while. It tends to become obvious that you're playing a balancing game between the objective itself and the boss entity (who is supposed to be a big deal), and it runs the risk of making bosses a nuisance instead of a cataclysmic encounter.

Sometimes there's something to be said for a big fuckin' guy who simply wants to smash the hell out of you in the most non-sexual way possible.

Maybe instead of thinking of it in terms of "make sure there's always a secondary objective", you could instead think of it like "take whatever you have, and find a meaningful way to make it more interesting". So, in the 「big guy who wants to fuck you up」 example, instead of slapping a unique secondary requirement onto the fight, you could make it so that the boss itself has ways of combating the standard number-dump. For instance, he could be on fire, such that the heat itself turns the act of choosing to hit him up close into an active decision (it may also burn arrows to a crisp, etc). This isn't a secondary objective so much as its a logical reason for the characters to forego the DPS scramble without making it feel like you have to kite a dozen unruly cats into a 3x3 grid before the glowing "insert bomb here hole" opens in his chest. Maybe that's what you meant, though, and I'm rambling for no reason.

I do this all the fucking time and my players always love those fights