| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Boss fights in PF2 have two traits that... I won't say are necessarily issues for everyone, but they have been appointed as issues by my players and also by a lot of people in these forums. They are:
First: instead of feeling like an epic battle, bosses make the players feel somewhat useless because their chances of succeeding at any given task are so low. This is extra bad for spellcasters when they need to use resources to do their thing, and a lot of people feel like using their strongest offensive spells against bosses is a waste of time, unless they're Magic Missile.
Second: boss fights are extremely swingy because bosses crit so easily and they'll almost always down all but the beefiest of PCs in one well-rolled attack. If you're a fragile spellcaster, it almost feels like every boss has a Disintegrate attached to their weapon.
The solution I'm proposing here is something I've always used in previous systems but only came to more consciously think about after Matthew Colville's video called Action Oriented Monsters. If you haven't watched it, I definitely recommend checking it out. In PF2 terms, it basically consists in, instead of simply using a level +2, level +3 or level +4 (oof) creature, using a slightly weaker creature as a baseline and adapting it. This differs from an Elite Adjustement in that while the Elite Adjustment simply makes a creature have the stats of a higher level, we are going to adapt it specifically with being a boss in mind, while keeping the fight less swingy.
I've effectively done this a couple of times by now, and it has worked very well. However, this is not anything exact nor am I a game designer, so these are more like tips of things to try than a straight process. Tinker with it until it feels good for what you game wants to do; this is an art, not a science. With that being said, here's an aproximation of what I'm doing:
- Pick a creature you want to be your big baddy. I've found this works better with level +1 creatures, but as long as you can adapt the to hit bonuses, saving throws, skill checks and DCs of a creature to be somewhat close to a level+1, you can pick something lower or much higher and it can still work.
- Considerably increase the hit points of the creature so it can take a good beating from your party before going down. Do NOT increase any other defensive stats to anything higher than what a level+1 creature would have.
- If you picked a creature that has a starting level too different from your party's level, consider messing with it's normal actions and abilities a bit. Give it new abilities if you feel like one normal turn from the creature might be too weak (the advice in the GMG can help with this), and remove them if you feel like it might be too strong. This is extra important for Spells: be VERY careful so your boss doesn't have spells that are too strong for the party to handle.
- This is where the magic happens. Give your boss actions it can use when any other creature's turn ends. I like to give them a number of "boss action points", just like they have three in their normal turn, and some of these consume 1, 2 or 3 of these, using the already-established 3 action system to our advantage. It's important to note that, following the rules for Free Actions, no matter how many "boss action points" an action costs, they can only use one per trigger. This way your players always have a chance to react to a boss' move before it makes its next.
What these abilities can do? Well, anything, but be careful with giving the boss too many offensive options it can use to Nova. What I've been doing is that any strike made with these actions has a -5 Penalty. Making them multi-target damage (so the boss is threatening to everyone but can't focus fire one target to oblivion), utility, summoning weak minions, changing the nature of the battlefield and repositioning are also things that can work very well. Again, Tinker with it, this part comes with practice.
- Make so this creature counts as a level+2 for the purposes of Incapacitation, Counteracting, etc.
Once you're done with it and with a bit of trial and error, the result will be a boss fight that the players can't insta-win with one button (because the Incapacitation trait is still there and the creature has a lot of hit points), and is still very threateting to the party (since they essentially have the action economy of multiple creatures), but also won't make your party feel like they fail 75% of the time they try to do anything and can instantly die to a crit on a natural 13.
Before I end this, you might be asking "isn't this basically 5e Legendary Actions with extra steps?". Well... yes, it is. I have many gripes with 5e, but I think Legendary Actions are an incredibly good design and something that Paizo could have used very effectively in this game, since the game is all about actions and it already has it's entire framework built around them. If you think this is a cool idea but I've missed something, please leave a comment saying so, and if you ever get to try it, please let me know if you liked it or if I indirectly TPK'd your party :)
I think action oriented design works really well in 2E due to the 3-action system. It gives you a lot of leeway in inserting extra actions for your foes - 1 extra action during their turn, 1 extra action they can use at the end of a player's turn, and so on. I think it works better than most other systems because actions are more granular.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I like this. I feel like making accuracy the main scaling factor in PF2 was a mistake for the reasons you described and I think giving bosses more 'presence' with something like legendary actions makes them feel bosslike while also letting characters feel like they're good at their jobs and can do things reliably.
I like this. I feel like making accuracy the main scaling factor in PF2 was a mistake for the reasons you described and I think giving bosses more 'presence' with something like legendary actions makes them feel bosslike while also letting characters feel like they're good at their jobs and can do things reliably.
Yes, unfortunately I think this was PF2's biggest mistake and one that has started to grind my gears the more I play. I absolutely adore this game, but the whole accuracy deal makes so that what are supposed to be epic encounters many times make your players feel bad instead of excited. Before I started using this, my group was actually having much more fun fighting mooks and semi-bosses through their adventures than when they were fighting the big bads. That's... rather anticlimatic, I'd say.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
While looks nice in theory, the problem is that it kinda screws a lot of caster control spells because they usually are made to limit the enemy actin economy. The amount of times that the Aberrant Sorcerer slow saved lives in the party even when the enemy made the save is huge.
While looks nice in theory, the problem is that it kinda screws a lot of caster control spells because they usually are made to limit the enemy actin economy. The amount of times that the Aberrant Sorcerer slow saved lives in the party even when the enemy made the save is huge.
Well, ideally the creature's special actions should not be as valuable as their normal actions, so removing said normal actions on their turn would still make a big difference, not letting the creature use its strongest attacks and or/abilities. Plus, while the individual impact of each spell is smaller, the chance of success is higher. It is something to point out, though, so thanks for doing so. Nothing is there without downsides.
I think as a player I would be a bit weirded out by this, especially if the monster isnt especially unique in some way. E.g giving these abilities to an ogre is all well and good, until we are fighting ogres as non bosses and this goes away.
Yeah, there are definitely two camps on this one. Neither is necessarily right or wrong. But I think I fall into your camp.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I think it really depends on the party. If your players have trouble coordinating themselves, bosses must be hyper tough and action-oriented bosses may fix that.
But if your players know how to coordinate themselves, then action-oriented bosses may look like an endless mook fight.
I personally like the boss design. It pushes the party to work as a team instead of working as 5 individuals.
If your players have trouble coordinating themselves, bosses must be hyper tough and action-oriented bosses may fix that.
This is kind of patronizing. It's not about whether or not players can coordinate. It's just a fundamental part of PF2's design... and the OP's suggestion wouldn't magically be the death of teamwork either.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
If your players have trouble coordinating themselves, bosses must be hyper tough and action-oriented bosses may fix that.This is kind of patronizing. It's not about whether or not players can coordinate. It's just a fundamental part of PF2's design... and the OP's suggestion wouldn't magically be the death of teamwork either.
You read it as patronizing. There are multiple reasons for players not to be able to coordinate themselves. Their build and class choices, the fact that some of them don't want to be dedicated healers/debuffers during boss fights, some players don't like when it's too tactical, etc... Every table is different. And there's nothing bad in it, the goal of the game is to have fun, not to reach optimal efficiency.
If you have a coordinated party against a level + 1 monster, the monster won't do anything. Frightened/Sickened 2 and it's just a level - 1 monster. A long fight against a mook won't kill teamwork, but will surely kill fun.
|
As Gorbacz pointed out, the fact that PF2 doesn't do this wasn't an oversight or accident, but an intentional design choice. If a marmite troll is a boss today, is it still going to have those extra boss actions in a couple of levels when we fight the vegemite troll king who has five marmite troll bodyguards?
So since we probably don't want this behavior in minion monsters, why exactly did the monster have those abilities when it was a boss but not when it teamed up with some other minions? Is this a kind of conservation of ninjutsu?
---
That said, that's their design choice and you don't have to like their marmite-handling approach. I agree monster design could be hacked to make monsters more bossy in some situations. And quite a couple of ideas from 4E/5E boss design could be tried in PF2 as well.
PF2 already has some monsters with unusually many HP, like zombies, but that's because they have big weaknesses and they can die just as fast if you fight them the right way. But if we're going to try monsters with a lot of extra HP without a weakness to speed them to their grave, then they do need more different abilities to use on their turn, to make sure their turn doesn't become too samey every round.
Monsters that have to do a solo performance also should have more crowd control ability to offset them being lonely on the battlefield. But you don't want those abilities to aggressively multiply when deploying multiple of those monsters. PF1 mummies for example have a paralyzing fear aura that helps them when using them as a boss. But if you put a high level in a room with a dozen mummies, that's so many saving throws that the effect can become totally disproportional. So crowd control auras should probably be written so that if you save against one of them, you save against all of them.
I think when you start manipulating numbers like hit points, you need to keep in mind which things should co-change. A problem in PF1 was that to change for example a monster's to-hit, you would often end up also changing its damage. So raising its strength would not just increase the number of hits bit also the damage. If you're increasing a monster's hit points, it has more rounds to fight and so it can also do more damage. Consider keeping its to-hit the same but reducing the damage per hit a bit (because PF2 monsters already crit often when fighting as a boss).
I think the way this works best is with a "boss template" which gives extra hit points and actions but no additional numbers. This template could be added to a +2 enemy to create a pretty fearsome foe. This does change PC strategy during a boss fight (action advantage like slow is no longer as good, and probably some other things) so it's not something that's going to be for every table but I think it could work out great for the OP.