raelgoranth's page

my group of lvl 7s has been hired to kill a man by basically a really seedy thieves guild.Little does the party know this is basically to get rid of them as they were hired to fight what may be an unkillable man.

he is roughly a level 8 fighter(not an exact lvl yey), a few magic items to help counter the flying shenanigans of my party.and It is expected they should be able to down him decently fast. Thing is, its dark souls themed world and he is a cursed undead, so he just gets back up at full health again and is relentless ( a big theme of this game is you cant smash your way through everything) , he could be talked out of combat, but what are some ways I could help allude to the players that he isn't going via smashing, unless of course, they demoralize him to the point of hollowing ( in-game mechanic that if you lose your drive to go on, you hollow and become a mindless zombie. id love advice to keep this from becoming a boring slogfest

For all the DMs out there who write their own material, how do you design and run your boss fights?

While I often lament how RPGs have suffered since the development of the MMO, there's one thing RPGs could learn from video games: how to craft an exciting, dynamic boss fight.

So what are some clever tricks you guys have used before?

One thing I did to make a fun final boss fight was after a long campaign , my pcs eventually caught up to the big bad who had been plaguing the party and responsible for 2 pc deaths. I broke it up into phases . First phase was the party found him channeling energy from a artifact. The parts had to battle a horde of his minions who were shielding the big bad while they would stream into the with a constant flow of small creatures (terrain was not flat as well, it was like an opera room with balconies and such to make it more difficult. Phase 2 had he boss stop changeling and pull the party into a new plane where things got fun. Phase 2 was a series of puzzles and similar that the boss had tried to fool them with (like mirrors to new rooms , fake bosses , rooms filling with poison ) and the big catch all is that every so often, everyone had to roll a d100 and it would result in something strange happening (from random skill boosts/drops/turning a players hand into a pineapple. This character had an infinity for chaos ) . After that phase he turned giant and each limb had its own status sheet . The last phase was a bloodied and helpless boss that the pc"s got to stomp. My group had a blast though out the fight , specifically the d100 section. Including strange mechanics can be a lot of fun.