In particular, have you ever had someone cast a save or die right away, and had the boss fail and die?
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It wasn't all over in a single round, but I have played in one PFS scenario where a character with the possession spell made the end boss fight absolutely trivial. In this adventure, the boss monster started out as mythic, and the PCs had to perform various actions to de-power it while evading its attacks, which were treated as hazards instead of a straight-up fight (because it would easily obliterate the PCs otherwise). Once it's weakened in this way, it's still supposed to be a pretty tough fight. However, this PC cast possession the first round, the monster failed the will save (which had a very high DC, thanks to the caster's highly optimized build), and the possessing PC just stood there and let the rest of the party beat on the monster's body until it died. Meanwhile, the body of the caster, who was deliberately built to be a near-defenseless pushover for just this kind of situation, was easily grappled into submission until their soul snapped back when the possessed body died. (I think the caster may have even had themselves bound pre-fight, because psychic casting is purely mental.)
Nobody else at the table enjoyed that fight; we all felt cheated out of the big emotional payoff. I'm not even sure the player who derailed it enjoyed doing so. And it seriously soured the GM on having anything to do with psychic casters for a long time afterwards.
My party was helping our Lionfolk Paladin complete the 3rd leg of his 4-part quest of uniting his lionfolk people and the BBEG for this particular part of the quest was basically committing the equivalent of genocide. It was emotion-evoking to say the least, especially for our paladin. Anywho, a couple of sessions go by and we're witnessing one atrocity after another, and by now we all want to put this BBEG feet first into a woodchipper. We finally reach him and we're all foaming at the mouth with rage (irl and in-game). Round 1, completely uncharacteristically, our warpriest not only won initiative and went first, but he casted Blindness and actually landed it somehow. The BBEG was a Sorcerer and every one of his attack spells were based on being able to see his targets, so the only thing he could use to attack us were Touch Attacks (with a 50% miss chance because of the blind). We were expecting a knock-down-drag-em-out fight and I don't think he even caused a single HP in damage to us. Dude was nothing more than a loot piñata.
My party was helping our Lionfolk Paladin complete the 3rd leg of his 4-part quest...
IDK, sounds like a blind finish of a quadrupedal quest and I'm not lion...
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My party was helping our Lionfolk Paladin complete the 3rd leg of his 4-part quest...IDK, sounds like a blind finish of a quadrupedal quest and I'm not lion...
Did you recently get someone pregnant because that was an epic dad joke XD XD XD
In one encounter our party’s Wizard decided it was a brilliant idea to cast Balefull polymorph on the BBEG for that encounter… this particular BBEG actually had a decent Fortitude and Will save and the DM told them outright this was unlikely to work as they would have to roll a nat 1 to fail either save… and he did just that… rolled a nat 1 on Fortitude and followed it up with a nat 1 on Will… our BBEG became a harmless bunny rabbit…
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Way back in a D&D 2e game the players had been hunting down a sort of prophet who called himself The Harbinger. He'd eluded them and when they finally caught up with him, he was summoning an evil hero from another Prime Material Plane who, in their plane, would have no equal and would destroy all who stood before him, etc. We used a critical hit chart in those days and my wife won initiative and the instant the new BBEG stepped through the portal she threw her axe at him and got a Natural 20. I had her roll percentile dice to see what the critical hit result was and it was "Chest destroyed, instant death". The whole game lasted about 40 minutes.
Two other times was using a homebrewed Star Trek game we'd come up with. We came up with the rules and everything from the ground up and it looked like it would be a playable game as far as mechanics went. On both attempts the players pulled a solution out of their devious butts that I did not foresee and the games ended in less than 20 minutes. With nothing else to do, we went out for Chinese buffet, which has become an in-joke with us. If the game ends too early, we go out and eat Chinese food.
No save or dies that I can recall, but we did recently have a fight against a demilich, who was effectively the end boss of a dungeon. The party's gunslinger got a x4 crit on the very first round. Goodbye demilich,
The sample demilich has 142 hp and dr 20/-. How did he to enough to one shot it (even with 4x crit)?
I actually played PF1 Giantslayer, and we destroyed the final boss in the surprise round + 1st round. Gunslinger + Witch + Sorcerer = poor BBEG written to be a challenge for casual players never stood a chance. The only real casualty of the fight was the Dwarf Fighter guy who built his character around fighting giants (complete with some "you get +2 to trip giants" feats) and even had 2 pages of dialogue and story about his final confrontation with BBEG written across the campaign but he didn't even get to swing his axe because actually competent people won initiative and gang-banged the boss before the dorf guy got to act. Funny, in a way.
It wasn't one round, but..... there was this time we were having this Halloween themed session. We had to go into a haunted house to get the macguffin. The NPC told us that if we heard chains rattling on our way back, to run as fast as we could. The dwarf fighter went inside and managed to ignore every single haunt in the entire house, making every save, and just going straight to the macguffin within seconds. We leave the house and start heading back to town.
Then we hear the chains and everyone takes off running. Everyone except that same dwarf. He just keeps plodding along at normal speed. It takes us a few turns in-character for us to realize this and another few turns to make it back to help. Meanwhile the dwarf is being attacked by a ghoul..... and we ended up feeling sorry for the ghoul! (At least, out of character.)
The ghoul was trying to wrap the dwarf up in its chains to drain his life force. But the dwarf was our TANK. His CMD was just way too high. And the dwarf was just smacking the poor ghoul every turn, but was doing little damage because that's not what his character was focused on. So the ghoul was just throwing its chains at the dwarf and watching them bounce off his chest before getting smacked in the face for 6 whole rounds.
Then the rest of us make it back to join the fight. I roll the highest in the initiative, crit on a 15 thanks to a Keen Scimitar, and proceed to buzzsaw the ghoul to death.
a specific ap i won't name for spoilers.
end boss is a top level caster. we get into her room.
my warpriest use silence as swift action via fervor on himself and close in. gm look up her character sheet. goes "..hmm she actually have nothing here that work in silence and she's crap in melee" (spells and magic items that needed command word etc, one of which is a freaking artifact!). it was basically a beat down from there. kinda felt sad for her too...
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Several fights against mid-adventure bosses where the witch was able to freeze them with the ice tomb hex. Then all the guys moved around the poor iced opponent and started hitting it. After the first hit did shatter the Ice tomb the opponent was free to act, but it was staggered and often was killed before getting to act.
I can't remember the specific boss(es) at this point but many a boss has died in the first round to our group. Either to the caster's save or suck (or even their save AND suck) spells or to the fully buffed martial characters that proceed to ignore the minions in the hopes that killing the boss in the opening round will convince them continuing the fight to the death isn't worth it for them (it usually works to at least convince them to run away).
Combining the Evil Eye hex (even on a successful save) with another caster prepared to take advantage of the debuff has been the end of many a boss enemy. Nevermind that there's martial characters out there set up to cause sickened and intimidate for additional penalties to the saves, the boss is nearly guaranteed to lose tragically to some spell.
At some point, I thought it would be an interesting twist to have a rod of lignification, based on a wood oracle's lignification revelation. Think flesh to wood, once a day, only some rounds. But you probably guess it already: It ended a boss fight very quickly.
Since then I disallowed / nerfed such effects, and wouldn't use them as a player.
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Many high-level (9+) PFS scenarios tended to end this way when I played at conventions.
Some diviner wizard with a +ridiculous initiative was always itching to show off his or her "I win" button to a new group of players, and the final boss would often not even last through that player's turn. Usually not to the level of acclaim they were expecting, though. Everyone would grumble about the anticlimax instead of applauding.
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Yeah, I can think of plenty of characters (primarily martial focused 6th level progression casters) who I purposefully didn't use all their buffs or class abilities to hit "peak" damage output so as to not completely trivialize encounters. Like sure, give me two rounds to buff before combat and I can walk in and one shot pretty much anything as written in the APs or bestiaries. But no one, not even me, found that particularly fun.
It was honestly more fun to struggle just a little, and then engage killed mode and finish off the enemy.
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Our heroes, "there he is!"
Main antagonist, "ahhh, the heroes" <EXITS THROUGH DOOR>
...FINIS...
yep, Cast Flesh to Stone on the BBEG and he rolled a 1 on his save....
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In Rise of the Runelords there is one encounter that is notoriously tough.
Our party had acquired a Mask of the Medusa earlier in the campaign, the monster managed to fail the DC 15 Fortitude save, and it was turned to stone.
I missed that session, so I'm not sure what happened next. The duration is only 1 minute, but maybe they managed to push it out of a window or something - I'll have to ask next time I see them.
If turned into stone, even for a minute, it's pretty trivial to then break off the head of the creature. Most creatures need their head to function.
Final encounter of Curse of the Crimson Throne.
Round 1 - Ref: none of your abilities work beause 'reasons'. Wizard spends 20 minutes cross checking rulebook for a spell that might get round "reasons".
Round 2 Ref spends 20 minutes looking at rulebook for a counter to the player's counter. Wizard spends 20 minutes looking for a counter to the counter. My abilities still fail to work because 'reasons'
...
Round I don't know what but it's been three hours: Wizard "I use the once ever item of Gate to summon the biggest angel I can". Ref: "It appears, it pulls the end villain to pieces. You win."
Also clustered shots would help a lot. Presumably the gunslinger made a full around attack, and while subtracting 20 form each shot is a killer, subtracting only 20 damage total from a full round attack is mildly inconvenient.
Of course, there are ways to get around even the DR/- of an evil creature like a demilich, as noted by glass.
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In one PFS scenario in Taldor, you have to fight the nasty noble. He's high level & riding a large lion...
Being a Gunslinger of 8th level, I walked forward and used Targetting to his arm, and he dropped his magical sword. The judge was irate to read the module and find the noble was not carrying any other weapon... so he dismounted, picked up the weapon & remounted.
2nd round I do the same, and by this time all my party melee types have moved up and mobbed him.
In the third round I used Targeting on the lion & hit him in the head for the Confusion effect. The lion attacked the noble & finished him off.
My Gunslinger rolled no crits, and didn't do one hit point of damage; he just (figuratively) stun-locked the BBEG.
The Lilitu Minagho failed a save vs stone to flesh, and now acts as a hat-rack in our mages private demiplane. We have picked up some pretty cool hats in Alyushinyrra.
We considered selling her to Nocticula, but she wasnt all that interested.We are about to fight her boss, should be fun. Oh boy, mythic is such a powertrip.
How did Staunton feel about that?
One that comes to mind is the time my GM had a two stage boss fight were a big scary construct secretly housed an ooze of some kind. We encountered the construct out in the open. After hammering the construct down and triggering 'phase 2', we all looked at each other and just... stayed out of range of the ooze while pelting it with ranged attacks. Turns out big globs of acidic jello are not so scary when encounter anywhere other than a cramped hallway.
Oh, another fun one with the same GM against a boss with levels in rogue. I played a high-dex Tetori Monk with a garrote. The party was being funneled toward approaching the enemy camp from a specific avenue via difficult terrain. I said 'nah, f-that' and went directly through the difficult terrain and reached the rear of the camp before the party did thanks to a stupid high movement speed.
Passed my stealth check because high-dex monk. Made a stupidly high perception check because, again, monk. Immediately asked which of the armed people I see was dressed the fanciest. GM answered.
The fancy-man was promptly and silently garroted and I proceeded to spend the entire fight choking him out, unseen, in a corner while his goons fought the rest of the party and kept expecting him to show up and start using alchemical items to blind PCs and sneak attack them.
Even when I was spotted, there was no getting him free because I kept my AC while grappling and he couldn't hope to break the grapple even with minions aiding his attempts.
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One that comes to mind is the time my GM had a two stage boss fight were a big scary construct secretly housed an ooze of some kind. We encountered the construct out in the open. After hammering the construct down and triggering 'phase 2', we all looked at each other and just... stayed out of range of the ooze while pelting it with ranged attacks. Turns out big globs of acidic jello are not so scary when encounter anywhere other than a cramped hallway.
It wasn't really a boss fight, but in one adventure the PCs ran away from an ooze they encountered in a dungeon.
Fortunately for them, they remembered the location of an untriggered pit trap they had spotted earlier, and avoided falling into it as they retreated.
The ooze was not so lucky ...
It wasn't even a cunning plan to lure the ooze into the trap; it just happened that way. The players were far more delighted by this bit of good fortune than with anything else that happened in the rest of the adventure.
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How did Staunton feel about that?The Lilitu Minagho failed a save vs stone to flesh, and now acts as a hat-rack in our mages private demiplane. We have picked up some pretty cool hats in Alyushinyrra.
We considered selling her to Nocticula, but she wasnt all that interested.We are about to fight her boss, should be fun. Oh boy, mythic is such a powertrip.
Staunton, in that one, got acid pitted and had to endure the Bards acid based puns as his flesh dissolved.
I bet Staunton wished he was more basic during that encounter