Air buster Style Fight

[siegfriedliner]

So there is a point in a final fantasy fight where a boss signposted from the begging of a large set piece dungeon. Its a fight in pathfinder terms against a large experimental construct which is been outfitted with the latest in weapons. Mid way through the dungeon you know you are going to be fighting this construct and you can go out of your way to disrupt this construct getting some of these new parts and that corresponds to it not using specific attacks in the combat you eventually have with it.

So if you were trying to port that style of encounter to a pathfinder style combat say for example having the big bad empowered by a circle of meditating cultist or magic devices in another room you can destroy before hand. How do you make the prep work feel meaningful but also make the encounter feel meaningful ?

[Malk_Content]

I did a similar style encounter with a group trying to fuse Golarion with the Elemental Plane of Earth. That last part of this plan was to bring forth an avatar of the earth plane and the players were trying to interupt this ritual.

The ritual funneled power from various sites across the city and they had only disabled one of these before heading to the final confrontation. Because of this the portal wad wide enough for the avatar to fit its arm in up to its shoulder (2 disruptions would have reduced this to elbow and 3 to wrist.)

The arm was a hazard with initiative ticks and area attack size based on how much they had disabled (in their case 3 ticks each featuring a hand slam and 15ft shift in terrain with pillars of rock forming and collapsing at random grid coordinates.) This formed the backdrop of a technically Extreme encounter that was more like a Severe as a certain number of cultists always needed to be maintaining the ritual.

After the encounter was the end of the adventure and thus the players in the end knew the nuance because we spent the next hour talking about it.

[Sanityfaerie]

So... one question is what kind of experience you're going for here.

On the one side, the *idea* of it is kind of cool. You have a boss fight coming up, and you can run around doing prep in ways that make the boss fight better, but you're on a ticking clock (or something). The problem is in the actual implications.

Specifically, by the basic conceit, every sub-quest they manage to pull off is going to make the final boss fight easier, and probably notably easier. You want this to feel like it has impact, right? Well, that's a problem, because it means that you're leaving to the players to guess (with really limited information) how many ticks they need to beat this thing. If they evaluate it wrong one way, they wind up doing all the prep quests, and the big bad boss guy just kind of falls over when they get there. if they evaluate it wrong the other, they roll up with no prep, and the boss flattens them. Also, having the reward for "you did a bunch of prepwork" be "and now the climactic battle is kind of a pushover" doesn't necessarily feel all that good.

I'd suggest that you not force the players to guess how hard you're going to make something. Of course, that leads to the temptation to fudge the numbers to make it *look* like the subquests matter when they really don't. (say, the big bad is weaker in obvious ways, but you fill in the numbers with extra cultists) I wouldn't suggest that *either*. Faking things for your players like that very quickly poisons the table dynamic, because they can tell, and they'll just stop caring about the things you say, because they'll know it's all a lie.

Instead, I'd suggest that you flip it a bit. Say that there are cultists calling forth some gribbly thing from the Great Beyond (or whatever). There's also a bunch of sub-rituals out there pouring power into the main ritual site to protect and strengthen it. You can run around wiping out the secondary rituals, but that gives the main ritual more time to pull their patron more fully into reality.

So you shut down as many rituals as you want to, and you make it to the main ritual, and you've got the cultists, and you've got the summoned thing, and you've got as many magical circles as there are secondary sites. Every secondary site you shut down shuts down one of the magical circles, and they do obvious things that the players won't like. On the other hand, the more you shut down, the more meaningful and potent the big boss dude is. (The cultists remain largely the same, barring any buffs from one or the other.) In general, the more sites there were that got shut down, the more *difficult* the fight should be (but only by some, not by a huge amount). At the same time, the more the Big Bad got called in, and the more exposed he is (due to the circles being shut down) the more real damage you can do to him as part of the banishing process, and the better the rewards (both in loot and in story effects) are.

Basically, instead of "fight more stuff now to cripple the end boss" you get something of a push-your-luck effect.

/*************/

Alternate thought: if what you really crave is the ability for the players to do stuff that shuts down the boss, then don't have the question be one of numbers. Have the question be "which ones?" They only have time to thwart three of the enemy plans (or whatever) and so they have to pick which three subquests they want to pursue, and, by extension, which three buffs they want the boss to not have (and possibly give the boss vulnerabilities int he appropriate places instead).

[Sibelius Eos Owm]

Sanityfaerie is right about cautioning against reducing the power of the final boss, but I think there's a more interesting way to preserve the feel. If rather than reducing raw stats, the boss retains most of the same stats (perhaps taking -1 to all stats or gaining the weak template at most) but loses certain abilities, it could reward the players for removing methods of attack the boss would have had.

The downside is if they're too successful, they don't get to have the spectacle of the boss' cool powers, but maybe instead of removing the ability to use certain abilities, some abilities have reduced DCs, effect, or increased cooldown timers. As another option, if a cool weapon thematically makes most sense being removed entirely, perhaps the encounter which removes the weapon also means facing it so they get to see how bad it could have been if they had to deal with a boss creature which could use this as an attack.

Other ideas include perhaps giving the boss a weakness which the party could exploit, leaving it vulnerable to a specific damage type or even weapon.

This way, at worst you turn a powerful boss who has a great variety of balanced crowd control tactics and debuffing mechanics into a somewhat less powerful boss who still most of the same stats but doesn't have anything special it can do in combat except slam the PCs around, which is still a full boss level attack, but missing any of the tactical play which can sway the difficulty of a fight without making the raw numbers unbeatable or irrelevant.

[Val'bryn2]

Read the final adventure in the Savage Tides Adventure Path from Paizo, it had the PCs in a battle against Demogorgon. Before fighting him, they could do about 5 or 6 little missions to weaken him, each of which ended up taking him from a CR 33 Prince of Demons to, at his worst, a mere CR 23 Demon Prince. Still had most of his powers, but weakened, lower DCs, Damage, etc, to show that Demogorgon had been fighting in the war, too.

Actually, they used the same general mechanic in Age of Worms, too. Haven't checked Shackled City to see how married to the concept they were back then.