Giant Serpent Boss Fight Mechanics?

[Mansam]

I'm trying to figure out a nice way to set up a fight against a large serpentine enemy. I'm not a fan of it just occupying a square area, and since its a boss I'm fine with going outside normal rules. I can always represent the length of the creature with multiple miniatures, or a model of some sort, but the idea of its body having to lie across diagonals on the grid rubs me the wrong way. Is it worth it to try a hex map for this battle? Or does anybody have any other clever solutions?

[Cyrad]

A square grid works fine. Just make a rule that the space between serpent minis is solid terrain. This prevents characters from doing weird things like 5-foot step between segments.

[Distant Scholar]

My DM did this once with a purple worm. It was so easy to flank. The DM also made it attack from its head (or tail, for the stinger), so when it was stretched out, we could attack it in the middle and it couldn't attack back.

[Cyrad]

Yeah, if you do this, might want to make it so that the PCs can only flank its head region or just simply remove flanking entirely.

[Mansam]

Ony being able to flank the head seems good. I definitely have plans for non-head attacks like tail swipes etc, should be fine. I just aesthetically don't much like using a bunch of miniatures to represent its body.