Should I do bosses like classic video game bosses

[Bandw2]

as in stages, with areas that do double damage or the boss wades through lava and can only be attacked from platforms(at least in melee) and smash down limbs and stuff on the platforms. this all can be fairly easy to do county the boss as a pseudo-swarm or squad.

also, when he hits certain HP you just swap the boss out with different mobs.

i'm thinking of doing this because i'm thinking of doing a VERY darksouls Esque game and we have already replaced pathfinder's gold-exp with kirthfinder's mojo and I plan on replacing that with souls.

so, I don't want the fights to be the by the numbers they tend to be and plan on making them more boss like by doing this by making them stage like and using "traps" and "swarms" with multiple mobs using the same health pool.

[Shiroi]

The problem you run into is action economy. A boss with no minions gets to attack once, and is attacked 3-7 times. Either he does normal 1 person damage and it gets healed by normal 1 person healing (boring, inevitable) or he does massive damage and it can kill people very quickly (tpk, bad balance). He then needs massive HP to survive at all against the pcs, which means a long and boring battle or an impossible one. There's rarely middle ground. The single boss theory is always a problem in pathfinder unless you can find a way to make it a single "manyboss". A hydra can have as many heads as players, and each head is its own enemy. The body gets a turn as well, so there's one more boss monster than there are pcs. Now you can balance the fight like you would any other, and it can be a fun and fair fight against a neat big enemy.

Environment can be useful too, and should be in that kind of campaign. But remember if they can't be attacked by melee half the time, ranged should do half damage or not be able to hit them all the time either. If they're only vulnerable to a certain element, don't make it one that only one player has access too, the fire blaster caster can easily hate fighting a boss made of lava and immune to fire damage if they didn't bring anything cold to the party and don't do party buffs either.

If you need checks to move around the terrain, make sure that everyone is even capable of a basic swim/acrobatics/escape artist check to get around. Or has a (parhaps longer or more dangerous) way to keep up.

AOE attacks from the boss can up DPR to challenging levels without one shotting the bard, and shifting resistances or immunities can spotlight players at different times of the match (but might confuse and tick off players if they aren't properly warned that a tactic has stopped working).

Boss rush style where a series of enemies present themselves (this isn't even my final form!!!) isn't a problem, but prolonged battles might affect the efficiency of certain buffs, drain daily resources badly, or make some mid duration buffs more useful. Keep in mind that rounds/lvl buffs get weaker and minute/level buffs stronger in this format, and it might increase the HP of the monster and produce different tactics to spotlight different team members talents, but it probably shouldn't increase or even affect your damage output in many ways. Controlling the damage of the boss to be manageable, just barely, is the key. If he only attacks one person at a time, once per round, this is very difficult to do without fudging dice and numbers.

If you want the battle to feel epic and cinematic and dynamic, you have to really put a lot of thought into how it deals damage, how much damage it deals, where and how it takes damage, how hard it is to hit, and be careful to see the glitches where one player can simply destroy it with a word.

I know a DM who split a party in a Cursed castle maze to make them fight their own strong challenges. The necromancer fought a strong vampire... and succeeded a dominate undead spell to make it a new toy. A druid similarly turned a plant boss into swiss cheese and rode a t-Rex boss out of the woods as a bird sitting on his head. Don't make something immune for no reason, but unless you want someone to feel really awesome and the rest of the party slightly cheated, and never see your battle run properly, be careful with anything that has harsh weaknesses your party can exploit.

Minions (including hidden minions like the hydra head example) make a boss fight much more balanced. Environment can make a fight more challenging, but should not make it impossible for anyone. Long drawn out fights can make a game session drag for anyone who prefers the role playing more than the rollplaying. And go over every encounter with a fine toothed comb to discover your own weaknesses, to correct any imbalances, and to ensure that your fight will be as memorable as it can be. You don't want to spend hours on a fight and then spend 2 hours playing it out, and nobody enjoy it. Be dynamic. If you need to, have a boss run off into the next chamber to try to heal or finish it's super world ending ritual spell. Give them a chance to address the fallen, tend to severe wounds, and rebuff. Then present them a way to follow behind, to finish the fight. This is a good chance to make changes to stats such as raising or dropping damage or AC, adding a fresh wave of minions, or altering terrain to be more in line with how you wanted it to be to begin with. You aren't limited to one room, to one boss, or even to one stat block.

Most importantly, have fun helping everyone have fun. Hope this helps!

[Orfamay Quest]

I wrote a lengthy jeremiad about this some time ago in a similar thread. Basically, video game bosses are a lousy model, and you should actively avoid it.

First, as Shiroi pointed out, single bosses have serious tactical limitations. They get one action per round, and are fairly easy to take out with various lockdown methods. You have a good grappler? Fight is over. You have a witch with the Slumber hex? Fight is over. You have a sorcerer who can spam enervation? Fight is over.

The usual -- and bad -- solution to this is to give the boss immunity to everything in an effort to give the fighter-types something (anything) do to in the fight, and then give the boss a billion hit points in order to keep the fighter from just accepting buffs from everyone and then wiping him out. This means that the combat degenerates into sanding the hit points off the boss with double-ought sandpaper between the fighter and the boss while the wizard and rogue cower because they can't take a single hit. This is boring and unnecessarily long.

A much better climactic encounter is simply to have lots of minions or even multiple bosses. This gives everyone something to do, gives the Game Master lots of tactical options, and allows for a much more memorable encounter.

I am also a huge fan of an active environment as part of the battle, whether that be lava pools, areas of reverse gravity, or a carbonite freezing chamber.

[N. Jolly]

I second Orfamay's statement of multiple bosses and environmental factors. One of the most memorable boss battles I ever put a party into as against a team of 'evil opposites' that was done in a location that had random motes of chaos. An NPC grabbed a PC by the throat and held them over raw chaos to nearly kill them before the others broke them out, and it was probably one of the best battles I've ever GM'd.

Single can work if you can make some way to keep the party from dogpiling on them via environment or such. It's still not a GREAT idea, but it's feasible.

Personally, I'm all for increasing or decreasing HP mid battle to accommodate the PC's abilities (sometimes you under or over estimate them, and it's important to plan for that), as long as it makes it into a more enjoyable encounter for everyone.

[Bandw2]

cool, thankfully we're using SoP so, I don't have to worry about magic crushing bosses.

also, the great thing about pseudo-swarms and squads is that they don't wreck action economy, they do standard damage to everyone involved.

I've also tested out making bosses work better by giving them more action economy turns and more health. so the single demon monster is basically 4 demons wrapped up in one, it has 4 times the HP and 4 initiatives and loses the next initiative every quarter of it's HP it loses. In this method, each initiative makes saving throws, meaning it's effectively 4 mobs that can be effected by single target conditions too.

It seems to work pretty well.

I don't know why I have't heard of people trying this out more often. it's the whole add more mobs thing but making it feel like a single boss battle to the players.

[Liegence]

Amazingly enough, the boss encounter you're theorizing reminds me a great deal of the final boss in the mega adventure in Dungeon #101 which is one of my favorite boss battles published in Dungeon. Check it out!

[taks]

I ran into a similar problem with a Mummy's Mask (I'm the GM) encounter recently. Without spoiling the encounter, in short, I have a 5th level party of 6 players, and an epic fantasy build. I "upgraded" a single "baddy" to CR 8, which I assumed they would walk through as they have every APL+2 battle so far. I figured APL+3 would be a challenge, but not deadly. I was sorely mistaken and realized it by the end of the first round.

The creature was of the "single hit results in a dead character" variety, rather than the tactically limited variety. The creature had 5 attacks (+15/+15/+15/+10/+10) and could easily have killed any one of the characters in a single round. Furthermore, since they are not heavily melee focused, they could not hit the very high AC. I had to fiddle a bit to avoid the inevitable TPK.

In the future, I intend to put a little more into minions as Shiroi suggests, as well as pay careful attention to what the party itself deals with well vs. what it deals with poorly. This fight was a clear example of what it deals with poorly.

I'm a new-ish GM, of course, and my group consists of several very experienced players. I expect to go back and forth a few times before I get the balance right.

[Renegadeshepherd]

When I do a single boss fight I mandate to myself that the boss can add economy to himself or can absorb lots of hits. For that summoning or spells like mirror images are needed to make things a bit better. Otherwise monsters like hydras as mentioned above can be great. If your a great narrator you could build a super high AC and save martial character. Just describe a narrative of how he fights heroically and makes the players work for it but isn't going to kill the entire group in a single moment like casters can.

[Bandw2]

taks wrote:

I ran into a similar problem with a Mummy's Mask (I'm the GM) encounter recently. Without spoiling the encounter, in short, I have a 5th level party of 6 players, and an epic fantasy build. I "upgraded" a single "baddy" to CR 8, which I assumed they would walk through as they have every APL+2 battle so far. I figured APL+3 would be a challenge, but not deadly. I was sorely mistaken and realized it by the end of the first round.

The creature was of the "single hit results in a dead character" variety, rather than the tactically limited variety. The creature had 5 attacks (+15/+15/+15/+10/+10) and could easily have killed any one of the characters in a single round. Furthermore, since they are not heavily melee focused, they could not hit the very high AC. I had to fiddle a bit to avoid the inevitable TPK.

In the future, I intend to put a little more into minions as Shiroi suggests, as well as pay careful attention to what the party itself deals with well vs. what it deals with poorly. This fight was a clear example of what it deals with poorly.

I'm a new-ish GM, of course, and my group consists of several very experienced players. I expect to go back and forth a few times before I get the balance right.

i learned fairly quickly that when i puff stuff on my side i need to buff defensive stuff or else encounters simply... end.