AFter 4 years of DMing (I'm a pretty new and young GM, only 22, my players are all younger) I've found myself on this problem no matter what I do. I've mastered 4e and other "tactical" games such as Savage Worlds, and every single "boss" battle I plan ends up being a static "Punch you, Punch Me" game like Final Fantasy.
When I noticed this I tried to add more than just "cool looking rooms", adding Hazards and special features to aid the players battle... but most of the time this ends up being lost space and players decide to ignore the tools at their disposal, and when they do the boss turns out to be so easy it becomes boring for me, and I start playing "punch u punch me" again. Specially since I don't see why or the PCs don't give me enough reason to do so, considering most of the beasts they deal with have low intelligence and I don't like to "meta role" and be tactical about it.
So well, I've been playing games, specially Shadow of the Colossus and Kingdom Hearts II, and I notice how dynamic bosses feel there, and I would like to "re create" the dynamism and emotion on a tabletop, specially since I notice on those games the protagonist is always running arround doing cool stuff while the bosses, for "idiotic" or "animalistic" they are, do cool stuff too. A couple examples:
-On Shadow of the Colossus a boss battle is against a giant horse. The horse gallops towards the player trying to crush him and do well, shorse stuff! The thing is there's a small complex on the middle of the scenario. The only way to defeat the Horse is hiding there and while the thing peeks inside to look for the player, you just exit from the other side of the complex and climb his rear while distracted.
-On Kingdom Hearts II, there's a battle against an enemy called "The Possesor". This thing is some sort of huge ghost ball that moves arround a haunted Dance Hall, the thing can enter the walls to shoot blasts of magic, enters columns to use them as tentacles, or enters the floor to use it as a mouth to chew on the player. So, since it spends the whole battle blasting spells and posessing stuff, the player HAS to keep on moving and running behind it. After they beat Possesor, it transforms into Black Thorn, a beast that becomes invisible and uses magic to confuse and hurt the party. Only by dealing a good amount of damage to him or Stunning him, he reveals himself and changes his tactics to full, savage melee combos.
The thing is, I find it hard to come with ideas like that or give my players (and monsters) a reason NOT to stand there, besides difficult terrain and boring hazards, and still they can just go arround them. Also, I have a tendency to use monsters from Monster Manual (3.5) or Bestiary (Pathfinder) to run the battles and just thinking of making exciting, cinematic and cool battles with... I don't know... a HAG, Bone Ooze or a Giant Roach makes me scratch my head... And the Punchbag Game begins anew...
Big bads by themselves have this major issue. By themselves they get parked incombat unless they get multiple actions and anti lock abilities.
I think that the key, and somethign present in both your video game examples, is movement. Now the 5E rules say that movement is constant in battle even if your stay in the same "square" (when using a grid). But this doesn't feel enough. On the plus side 5E allows free move - action move, which makes it even more dynamic and inviting to hit-and-run tactics.
So my advice is to move the boss as much as possilbe. Move it all round the location, whether you are using a grid or Theatre of the Mind. Use it to highlight the exotic location with all those cool features. If they players don't use them the boss will!.
Sure there is a chance the players will try to tie the boss down. Use it's abilities to break free. Sometimes it is worth taking an opportunity attack to keep moving.
Look at any medium where "boss" battles occur and you will see they always move around lots - in movies this goes right through from Errol Flyn's Robin Hood climbing the tower's spiral stairs and swinging from a chandelier, to the latest Man of Steel getting thrown around Metropolis. Movement = dynamism.
The easiest and laziest answer that I usually use (because it's the easiest and laziest) is phases.
Every so often, for whatever reason you choose (it might be rounds, it might be damage taken, it might be taking a specific element of damage, who knows; the thing that matter is 'on trigger of choice'), the boss changes phase. A phase change might entail the room changing, it might entail the boss changing, but something changes.
Some examples off the top of my head:
Magus from Chrono Trigger - His Barrier Change is a simple phase change. He deals damage to the party and his resistances and weaknesses change.
Lurker Below from WoW - He has a 'hammer on the boss' phase and a 'dodge the spout and kill some adds' phase, which he cycles between. In each phase, the actions required by the player are different.
Giga Gaia from Chrono Trigger - His hands need to be killed, but they'll respawn. This can be envisioned as two phases; 'has hands' and 'doesn't have hands' which he switches between based on different triggers.
Basically, when something happens, you change something about the battle.
Imagine that in every monster's stat block, there is an extra action listed after all the combat ones:
Action
Do something cool and unexpected
I really like all of the ideas above.
I mentioned in another thread that I recreated a stage-like battle from Karazhan in WoW by having "5 acts" of monsters appear on the stage, and "The Entertainer" summon new props and environments each time. Then in the last fight, the boss closed the curtain and shuffled everyone around who wasn't touching a "prop" on the stage. On top of that, he simply moved himself out of line of effect enough that they had to follow - and even then they had to use the props to engage him.
The next boss is a sentinel that laser rays everything - they have to hide behind statues, use teleportation doors (three doors - a, b, c - and each door teleports to the next in the sequence; a to b, b to c, c to a), and even investigate the "beaten sentinel" to take the gems powering it.
The next boss after that will be a giant Octosite (homebrew octopus + mindflayer personality). They can try and deal damage to it - if they unstun themselves or ungrapple themselves - but the goal of the fight is to get the Staff of Aberration Control in the key to close the portal to the Far Realm and suck the octosite home. Hopefully they'll use the scroll of sanctuary from the previous room. ;)
When I create a fun fight, I treat it as a totally scripted event in my mind. Similar to phases, I create step-by-step instructions even for the most inoccuous of intelligences – but only if the fight is intended to be a "fun" fight, rather than just a "go kill that thing" fight. My wyvern, for example, started with 120 hp. At 60 hp, he began flying from pillar to pillar, using his claw attack and bite attack in tandem (staying out of reach from the ground based damage dealers) with his added 10 ft. reach. The players began scrambling for cover, except the rogue with her shortbow. At 20 hp, the wyvern "enraged" and I gave it inspiration every round (advantage on one attack per turn in this case). Even the fighter pulled out all the stops and used his extra action ability.
How did it really play out? 60 hp, he flies. 21 hp came and he was doing ok, then in one turn three players CRIT and he went down before he could enrage. That's OK with me, because the players felt the realism of the creature moving and flying. Was it tactical? It wasn't special forces tactical, but when you see the things lions and wolves do to trap prey... this wyvern was tame (moving slowly and dodging to wait until the fighter attacked so his defenses were lower and tried to sting him - a scorpion does the same, it waits until you get close enough to sting and poke at it... then BAM!)
It wasn't even a boss fight. The rest of the fights until the Entertainer were just fun beat'm up fights - even the Statue twins, Horvin and Gorvin, one with a boar spear and the other with a crystal shield and wand.
Ahh the fun.
My point? The stats of a monster are a great starting point. An intelligence of 2 doesn't mean it will stay in a bad spot and just die because "durr avoid hurt" doesn't work in the creature's brain. Ask yourself "What would be more fun?" then make it yours.
Well, there's one thing here that I recommend that's drawn from the Legendary rules: Big bads are masters of their environment.
What does that mean? Well, in the case of a dragon, it means flying. You aren't pinned down, you're in the air, dive bombing the PC party and hitting them with ranged breath attacks. Moving fast and far enough that many spells or thrown weapons just don't reach you. Move in, attack, move out. Longbows work, but will a 50' cantrip? The wizard could toss a fireball or attempt a Save or Die spell, but the Legendary rules also give the BBEG the ability to succeed at saves very easily. PCs need to get creative.
In the case of a necromancer or fiend summoner, you will have armies of undead / outsiders, yes, but your lair will also be filled with living shadows, pits filled with grasping arms that tried to constantly grapple you, and other things related to the press of bodies to capture you. There may also be walls that shift and move, constantly cutting you off from being able to pin the BBEG down, and cutting you off from your teammates. Maybe some pools where they get pulled into watery depths.
I once had a shadow boss that summoned minor shadow elemental things. The small elementals were easily defeated (minion rules), but the BBEG could canibalize these shadows for powering magical effects. In short, he could use them to block access as if physical threats, or it could absorb them for constantly outputting powerful spells. Everyone was pretty much stationary, but the battle required strategizing.
There really is some great advice in this thread already, but I'll add some of my own tricks. When trying to make boss battles memorable, I usually:
- Give the boss some henchmen, usually 4 to 8 of them. These henchmen usually follow a pattern opposite to that of the boss: if the boss is ranged, hard to hit, with low hp, for instance, the henchmen are melee, easy to hit, with a lot of hp (always assuming the henchmen to be 1 or 2 CRs lower than the boss). In addition, you have to make them RELEVANT (it's no use if the PCs can just focus fire on the boss, drop it, and disperse the henchmen). I'll give you two examples:
- A powerful frost witch (ranged, high AC, low hp) is nearing the completion of his ritual, opening a portal to the elemental planes to gather an army of ice elementals. While doing so, she is guarded by a group of barbarians (melee, low AC, high hp) from the tribes she helds in her icy grip.
- A war golem (melee, low AC, high hp) guards the gate to a fortress; on the walls, a group of archers (ranged, high AC, low hp) shoot anyone fighting the construct. - Set the fight in a large room (if we're talking in squares, I'd say at least 12 by 12) and allow for movement, but provide some kind of cover (such as columns rising from the floor, which could be smashed by the boss to give the "oh ****!" feel). Even better, create some alternative forms of movement (teleporting circles, for instance) that both the boss and the PCs can use.
- Make the boss the absolute master of his lair (or environment): a sorcerer might animate the statues in the mansion; a water dragon might go underwater and then emerge in a wave of cold damage; a pirate leader can climb, jump and balance on every damn inch of his ship; a thief lord encountered in the streets is the dirtiest fighter imaginable, throwing apples, boxes, crates and even bypassers against the PCs. For the PCs to fear the enemy, they must feel he is the one in control.
- Give the boss interesting actions and/or combat "goals": a mad scientist's brain living inside a golem might grapple a PC and strap him to a lab table, activating an engine that transfers his will to the poor victim; a sadistic demon worshipper might actually WANT to be hurt badly, flying into a furious possessed rage.
- Allow for the "third ending": usually, a boss fight ends in two ways. Either the boss dies, or there is a TPK. Always force yourself to imagine a third possibility: it might be something boring and cliché, such as the boss fleeing when reduced to 1/4 of his hp; it might be something amazing, such as the creature submitting to the PCs and becoming their follower. Or maybe the boss simply wanted to test the PCs' prowess, and eyes them respectfully from now on.
Finally, if you don't have an idea for a boss fight, check the Demon's Souls/Dark Souls/Dark Souls II games (you can find plenty of playthroughs on youtube). They're full of exciting boss battles!
This is a mostly a repost from the “Fighters need cool gear thread.” It was in response to a divergent discussion about the viability improvising actions vs basic attacks. I’ve done a bit of rewriting to make it more of a response to this subject.
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I've adapted the stunting system from Exalted to just about every game I run. Essentially, it works like this. The player describes his stunt "player: I run at the orc but run past him remaining in his reach then jumping to the wall placing one foot against the wall pushing of from it to land on the orcs other side attacking him from a unexpected angle." If it’s not obvious the player would then describe what he is doing mechanically "I'm moving around to this side of him and attacking with my sword." Then the DM gives the player a bonus based on how cool the action is "Wow that’s pretty cool, take a +2 to hit."
If the player could achieve the same mechanical benefit by taking regular actions as laid out in the rules then there don’t need to be any additional checks to see if they are able to be cool. It’s really no different that a Wizard saying "when I cast magic missile I shoot out small flaming skulls instead of glowing bolts of force, but mechanically there is not change." Or a Fighter saying "I'm going to take TWF with 2 Scimitars, but I'm going to call them Sabers because I'm more of a swashbuckling type." If he could to the exact same thing mechanically without the extra flourish, I would absolutely just let it happen. This encourages the players to do things besides just standing there trading hits.
They can stunt any sort of check and even their AC or saving throws as long as they describe it in a cool, interesting, or compelling way. It's also important to keep the character in mind when stunting. The 18 Str 8 Dex fighter isn't going to be flipping off walls, he's going to be throwing his strength around. Of course the bonus doesn't have to be a bonus to hit, it could be a bonus to damage, advantage on another roll, or whatever makes sense for the stunt. Of course doing the same maneuver over and over again isn't cool, interesting, or compelling, so you have to come up with something new each time. Not everyone is a creative genius and able to spout epic prose on demand, so if the player is putting more effort than, "I hit the bad guy with my axe," then go ahead and give them a +1. Also you want to keep the bonuses generally low enough that the players don't feel hamstrung if they honestly can't think of anything. Save anything higher than +2 or +3 for the stunts that make everyone sit up and say
Now if the player is seeking some kind of extra mechanical benefit that would be handled differently. "I rain blows on the orc chief as hard as I can, recklessly attacking him to drive him back into the pit behind him." Now in this case I don't want the effect to be a given, but I don't want to hamstring the player's usefulness for the round either. So I might say something like "Okay, roll your attacks, for each one that hits you get a +1 to an opposed strength check, and each point you beat him by on the strength check will push him back a couple feet. This way the player gets to attempt something cool without losing his more effective DPR. Oh, and don't forget to give the player his stunt bonus 
In this way, I've avoided ever having a player tell me their character is boring even when all they've been doing is making basic attacks, or casting the same attack cantrip because they used all their spells. They are too busy thinking of new and interesting ways to describe their actions in order to get the bonuses to realize they've actually just been taking the same action over and over again.
5Shilling wrote:
This thread is filled with so much win.
Lots of great ideas here and you should strongly consider employing all of them.
But before you get into specifics, you have to look at your basic encounter design. Build upward from there.
Why are you having an encounter?
What central question will the encounter resolve? (Players want X, NPCs want Y. Who will get what they want? Or, can players achieve X despite Y? Before Y? Etc.) If you do not have a central question to your encounter, it will have no soul.
see you examples in Shadow or KH2. Each fight has a purpose, especially boss fights. Each encounter either is in the way of a goal or part of a goal (I need to slay this colossus b/c...).
Next, you need to ask "Why am I having a Boss Fight?" What makes this distinctive? Boss fights are climactic portions of a story - a crisis - in which opposing forces clash. If you have not asked the central question, you have not lined up the opposing forces. Likewise, you must build momentum toward a boss fight. Having a big bad dude isn't sufficient; there's a building emotional component that's required.
Next, you want to look at what makes for a set piece encounter. We want to avoid trading blows, so we need prerequisites, obstacles, circumstances, opportunities, and barriers. Much of this can be movement and specific terrain or other enviro effects. Maybe the boss is simply out of reach, or flickers in and out of this plane.
If you want "hitting the boss" to be one of the goals of the fight (instead of the totality of the fight), then you must include obstacles and impediments between the players and the opportunity to attack meaningfully. SotC requires that you climb the damn colossus. KH2 reinforces its bosses w minions. Both good. Sometimes there's variable resistances or a pattern of weakness and strengths. (MacBeth could not be slain until the forest moved and then only by no man born of a woman).
Introduce elements like this. Vampires and werewolves already require silver. Why not have an enchanted armor that must be destroyed before its wearer can be harmed.
How about a fire-immune boss in a volcano, where the very air deals 1d6 fire damage per round.
If you use models, maps, and minis, it's easier to put multiple levels and barriers. If you use TotM, use few but notable ones (he's flying or he's submerged. He's behind pillars). But conceptual impediments also work well in TotM. (Conan the Destoyer has a foe that's immune to physical attack, but takes damage when you strike his reflection).
Implement a stagger wave from FFxiii.
anyway. Start by asking & answering basic encounter design questions and use those answers to determine the preconditions and qualities of your boss encounter. Don't neglect the momentum, either. What strengths do each side bring to bear is going to answer a lot of your questions.
bawylie wrote:
I like the ideas 
I'll open another thread with some of my boss ideas so someone can help me out... XD
I'd check how long those video game boss battles actually take and how long your table top games take.
It really doesn't matter how cleverly you make a boss if it takes two hours to beat when the video game boss took say five or ten minutes (maybe less)
How long do these back and forth battles take?
The boss fights OP describes do not translate well to DnD coz the abilities of such monsters would be overpowering. Theyre basically powers you need to makenup yourself that break the usual kinds of effects/abilities, although 5e is very flexible in that regard, so it should be doable, just simply make up the power and balance it according to taste.
Otherwise I think:
1.The legendary creature rules will help a lot, boss battles getting a bit grindy has been a thing in recent years
2. Magic using monsters create more options generally
3. Magic items can add options
4. Roleplaying. Roleplaying. Roleplaying. Describe the solos actions. Make your players decsribe their actions. Taunt the players. It wont stay boring.
5. Environment effects that occur at certain times during a combat, or have a random chance of activating.
That dynamism is about changing the paradigm of the encounter. Even FFs do this, most commonly with phases (see post #4).
Two tips:
1. Make the players strategize. The monster may not actually be vulnerable unless compromised in some way; some monsters will win in a head-on fight, and players must plan another way to compete with it. Players must develop a short-term survival plan while devising a long-term "win" plan, and they may find multiple workable methods.
2. Make the players change their strategy. A dynamic encounter changes how the battle works so radically that pursuing with the same plan thru'out will not work. Betray the expectations you forged with #1.
Maybe healing destroys the monster now and damage makes it stronger; maybe the monster's heart (and only vulnerability) is not in this room, let alone its body; maybe the party's spells and weapons don't work anymore, and they must devise a hazard for their enemy, or trick them into changing phase again.
OP: I would suggest two things.
One, take the boss battles you like from other sources (games, shows, etc.) and just re-skin those. There's nothing wrong with appropriating from other media. In fact, I'd go as far as to call it best practice. Since you're already familiar with those particular scenes you don't have to worry about trying to force things to be interesting and can instead focus on the neat stuff the scene requires. If you players guess what you're stealing from, so what? As long as it's fun then you're playing D&D right. Don't worry about not being creative enough while you do this, by the way. You've got to level up your DM skills somehow. Why not do so on familiar terrain?
Two, and this one requires more preparation, don't focus on making your boss fights challenging enough or tactical enough or whatever. Instead focus on having the boss characters be memorable enough. I've found that when players hate a villain enough it doesn't really matter what his stats are. Any opportunity to fight him is satisfying. His stat block could just be any random Hobgoblin with, say, 15 exra HP, but when the players have some connection to him, then the fight gets personal. After you've teased them with week after week of narrow escapes and they finally corner him in the hills, then the boss fight feels fun even though your villain isn't much different than any other hobgoblin because of how much anticipation there is. This works best when you're okay with bosses not always being physically overpowering. It's good to have the occasional beholder or dragon villain, but there's nothing wrong with a crippled kobold that knows exactly how to humiliate your players and get away with it.
Aavarius wrote:
ankiyavon wrote: