I'm finding past the low levels, solo monsters become pretty weak. How to beef up solo monsters without making the players feel ineffective?
Things I don't want to do:
1. No adds. Solo monsters like dragons or titans or huge giants must be able to stand up to a party solo.
2. I don't want to raise AC or defenses so high the PCs rarely hit them and feel in effective.
3. Damage resistances could work if set at a level where they don't make PC's feel ineffective.
4. I've added elite templates and it isn't enough to challenge high level characters.
I'm thinking of just keeping it simple and boosting hit points by the number of party members. This should allow a monster to last a long time while getting beat on by multiple PCs do a lot of damage. I think it only works for high level characters where a solo monster's offense can't match the healing and hit points of a high level party. It also has trouble with the chain slows a high level party can keep on a monster.
What are some of the ways you make a pure solo monster challenging to high level characters without using terrain and such? Just a straight up fight against a dragon where the thing can take the beating from and give a beating to high level characters in the level 15 plus range?
One time I made a complex hazard that is flavored as being due to the monster in question. The fight did go pretty well, but it's been a long time since I've done this simply because I find hazard creation to be a pain. I'm probably going to try and use this method again since I've been running into the same problem.
If you feel flavored hazards runs afoul of your "No adds" rule, when I realize I've completely forgotten to adjust a monster for multiple PC's I've found that increasing its max HP is a decent improv tool. It's a bit tricky to suggest how much HP you should use though. This is different from just adding more monsters because the weaker adds bring their HP pools with weaker stats, but giving the strong monster more HP gives them more turns to apply their stronger stats. Like I said though, I mostly do this to improvise if I forgot to prepare in advance.
Borrowing and repeating something I heard on these forums from someone else who I can't remember and so can't credit them for the idea...
Doubling the HP solves half the problem. The other half is the action economy - one enemy's three actions each turn feels cramped in comparison to the party's 9-15 actions in total.
The recommendation that I saw and liked is to double the turns that the enemy gets too. Think of it like two enemies in one body. Give them double the HP and give them two initiative counts to act on with their full actions on each - one at the initiative that they rolled and the other at +/-10 to get the corresponding initiative value that makes sense.That helps make it so that the enemy doesn't as often get two turns in a row. Judicious use of Delay may also be needed.
Other things such as buffs/debuffs still treat the enemy as one creature - so they don't apply twice, and the ones that degrade each turn (like Frightened) do so on the initiative count that it was applied on, not both.
Also, it is always two separate turns even if they do end up back-to-back. So the enemy couldn't, for example, use three 2-action activities.
That gives you the look and feel of having one single enemy, but maths out with the encounter design math such that you have two moderately high level enemies rather than one overpoweringly high level enemy that TPKs the party, or one underwhelming enemy that dies in 1.2 rounds.
The action economy issue is something I've contemplated as well. The actions are heavily in favor of the players. I've thought about doubling the monster's actions, but hesitate to do so as double attacks focusing on a single target from a high powered solo monster would likely take that player out.
I want the fight to last a long time and feel dangerous. I feel greatly increasing the hit points which allows the monster to do its high powered actions for a length of the time that will pressure the group resources and feel like more of an epic fight.
Solo monster offense seems set high enough. It's their ability to take punishment that is the problem. The fights end real fast when a party can blow their resources on DPS and kill the creature quickly, especially I think Paizo set weaknesses on high level creatures way too high. Weaknesses are between 10 and 20. For an entire party with usually two or more martials in our groups, activating weaknesses is fairly easy at higher levels. So monsters end up taking 50 or more extra damage per round. They just can't absorb that most of time from an entire party.
I could get rid of the weaknesses which helps some, but it also makes players with weapons made of special materials or that took measures to activate weaknesses feel cheated. I tend to leave them in.
That's why I want to start with a huge boost in hit points to see if the extra rounds of offense pressure the PC resource pools like hit points and spells enough to feel like an epic, tough fight against a strong solo monster.
I may add in a few condition resist abilities as well and allow them to get up quickly from things like Trip and recover from Slow faster.
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I usually design monsters intended to be solo bosses with their HP numbers pulled from the level above the rest of their numbers. Add an extra ability or two, because the extra turns means they're more likely to have the time to pull fun tricks.
I love reflavoring an add as part of the boss. I had a boss that was a rogue AI core inside a humanoid hooked up to a bunch of wiring hanging in the air, with a huge Doc Oc style robot arm that attacked the players in melee. Behind the scenes it was essentially a Technomancer and a construct who shared a combined HP pool and had separate actions. It worked very well in that scenario.
You can get extremely creative with it.
For a Giant boss who I wanted to be threatening, for example, I might have it swinging a massive chain in one hand almost absentmindedly, while it goes about its normal actions. Behind the scenes the chain is a medium sized monster with hardness doing a linear trample from and back to the giant's space and can be targeted and disabled.
If that style of thing isn't something you want to do, or do often, my preferred easy enhancement is giving in-world buffs. A Hasted giant with a ring of resistance to an element they'd normally be weak against can really bump up the difficulty and doesn't feel bad especially when they loot the items it was using.
Steal ideas from other systems. Both Draw Steel and 5e deal with this problem by giving the creature extra abilities they can use outside of its turn. Or if its a significant solo boss, giving it a multi-stage boss fight like a video game could be cool. There's at least one PF2 AP that has a multistage boss fight.
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The following is honestly intended to be constructive and not snarky and not accusing you of BadWrongFun,
You've stated on many occasions that your group plays a very high optimization level and high level game.
But you've also recently stated that your group is starting to find things boring, that you've fallen into a rut with classes, and now with this post that you're having trouble making solo boss fights challenging.
I can't help but think that the problem is that you have come close to breaking pathfinder. That you're just hitting or passing the limits it is designed for.
Maybe the solution is to deliberately move your game closer to the normal expectations of the game. Come to a gentle persons agreement that you'll deliberately build what are, by your standards, woefully unoptimized characters. Drop Free Archetype. Etc.
Or perhaps find another game entirely, one that better fits your playing style.
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Hit points are a solid, obvious first thing to try. It's a more fun thing to do than raising AC or saves or stapling resistances/immunities. It's much nicer than the common frustration of "why should I cast spells at it, it'll crit save anyway" that you get with L+3 and L+4 enemies.
But it's not perfect. You can still run into:
- the enemy gets so swamped with debuffs that it becomes toothless
- the enemy doesn't have enough actions to get to a PC it can hurt, it gets stonewalled by PCs that have enough defenses to cope with it
- the enemy has a big bag of HP but it doesn't do all that much different from one turn to another, so hacking it down just takes a lot of time.
There's two kinds of creatures that already have some solutions to this: dragons and wurms.
Dragons tend to come with fairly strong breath weapons that have an 1d4 round cooldown, and a high fly speed. They can try just strafing the party, spending actions to stay out of reach of half the party, and coming back for more. Typically, after the first breath hit, everyone will be thinking about how to avoid the whole party being in the blast zone the second time around.
Wurms are big enough and surprisingly mobile, so melee PCs can't necessarily keep them penned in and away from the back row. They also tend to have abilities that let them just shrug off some debuffs.
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Paizo hasn't really embraced the concept of "boss monster" so much; today's boss monster is tomorrow's lieutenant and the day after it's just a mook. That works for some monsters, but it cuts a bit against the idea of giving a boss monster really "special" powers.
I'm thinking of multi-stage bosses here. It's cool for a boss to be first arrogant (with some abilities), then if he gets hurt enough to get more cautious (fighting differently) and finally to get into desperate fury mode. That's not something you want every hobgoblin to do though, just because there was a L3 hobgoblin boss in the first adventure.
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So, if we say boss monsters get some special toys, we have stuff to work with. I'm thinking roughly as a framework:
* After losing 1/3 HP, the boss switches modes. This should take
* After losing the next 1/3 HP, the boss switches modes again
* When switching modes, the boss can shake off half (rounded down) of the debuffs affecting it for free
* When switching modes the boss moves, or the battlefield is changed somehow; at any rate, it should shake up any static stand-and-fight positioning. Maybe the boss gets a surge of energy and strides (without provoking). Maybe there's an earthquake and the whole room shifts 90 degrees.
* After switching modes, the boss has some (fully charged) new abilities to use, but also loses some previous ones
* Switching modes is always very clearly noticeable to the PCs
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The following is honestly intended to be constructive and not snarky and not accusing you of BadWrongFun,
You've stated on many occasions that your group plays a very high optimization level and high level game.
But you've also recently stated that your group is starting to find things boring, that you've fallen into a rut with classes, and now with this post that you're having trouble making solo boss fights challenging.
I can't help but think that the problem is that you have come close to breaking pathfinder. That you're just hitting or passing the limits it is designed for.
Maybe the solution is to deliberately move your game closer to the normal expectations of the game. Come to a gentle persons agreement that you'll deliberately build what are, by your standards, woefully unoptimized characters. Drop Free Archetype. Etc.
Or perhaps find another game entirely, one that better fits your playing style.
I think it is more of a PF2 design issue. The high level game is far, far easier than the lower level game. PF2 designers did make PF2 high level less problematic than PF1, but once you're past 13th to 15th level you really destroy solo monsters.
I think solo monsters need to be designed differently at the higher levels. The weaknesses are too high. Hit point pools too low. Ability to resist common actions like trip or grapple set too low. The whole game changes once again to the point it becomes easy mode. Not as bad as PF1, but still easy mode.
It is what it is. System mastery in nearly any game system is going to lead to these type of problems.
Let me be a little more specific.
I want to make a brutally tough solo monster that uses no magic, doesn't need the environment, and is just a big brutal monster that uses physical attacks to win. Think of a hulk or big old giant type of creature. I want it to pressure a PC group that has access to magic while it doesn't.
This has been one of the big issues with these types of games for years across editions. You have this big, physical monster that's supposed to be this awesomely powerful creature, but once it runs into PCs with a mix of strong martial capability mixed with magic they turn the fight into a fight against a kitten.
It would be like watching a movie with Godzilla or King Kong, but if they showed up they would get slowed, tripped, then beat to death like they were nothing.
I want to make a brutal physical monster with no magic that isn't in some special environment a tough fight that pressures resources for a high level PF2 group of mixed capability without making them immune to everything.
It's much easier to make a magical combatant tougher by adding some really tough magical capabilities that allow them some sort of defensive or offensive power that messes the party up. But that big dragon or giant or kaiju that should be able to go toe to toe with the PCs in a brutal physical fight that lasts and makes the PCs feel threatened has been tough to do at higher levels.
I'm landing on the best way to do that is give them an immense amount of hit points to take the punishment the PCs dish out while unleashing its powerful physical attacks to pressure their hit point pools. In the books and movies, these types of creatures don't really so much dodge or completely resist attacks from the heroes or opponents, they're so brutally durable and huge they can take immense amounts of punishment. I imagine hit points are the likely way I can mirror that with maybe some damage resistance.
I think I will give the monster Juggernaut too. I think that will help it deal with spells like slow. Maybe incorporate mythic creature rules in for creature creation.
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Now I have to concern myself with mobility. High level PCs can all fly and attack from range. And invisibility. This creature doesn't have True Seeing or See Invis, so maybe some scent ability or Blind-fight like feat. Then maybe a leaping ability.
I think you are kind of looping in a circle with this idea. In almost every story about big giant non magical monsters in magical worlds, magic is what quickly brings them low. So to create a version that magic is not the obvious exploitable weakness, it really has to have some advantages specific to the spell casting of PF2.
For your specific table I suggest:
1. It should be of unique rarity and any weaknesses it has should not be easily guessed, but require a lot of trial and error to find. It should be mindless (or count as mindless in combat), resistant to electricity and fire. Weak to something like acid or cold and have that be a very high weakness.
2. Let it have a low will save but very high fort save, and have the juggernaut and maybe greater ability. Give it a decently low reflex save but no legs so it is immune to being trip or nicked prone. Let it have enough energy resistances that the low reflex save balances out a bit.
3. Give it a nasty aura that does something like slow one if you are within 25ft of it.
I am envisioning some kind of giant worm that can quickly burrow underground between combat rounds.
Maybe have it be a very cautious hunter that prowls the dungeon, trying to swallow individual creatures and dive back under ground to finish them off. Maybe it has baby versions that are level -2 or 3 creatures in the dungeon that often surface to eat the dead left behind from combats to foreshadow that there is a big one in here too that doesn’t like pre-killed meals. They are as pieces so alien in nature they either count as mindless or are fleshy automatons being directed from somewhere else in the dungeon. They are so tied to the earth that they are immune to electricity, but acid (or maybe inhaled poison) not only causes them extra damage, it disrupts the pheromones that control them.
If they ever get slowed, their default action is to just burrow again and come back when it’s over.
4. I've added elite templates and it isn't enough to challenge high level characters.
Have you tried using higher-level monsters? This seems obvious, but the line about elite templates has me wondering whether Deriven Firelion is running a module and using the monsters suggested by the module. Sometimes, the GM needs to rewrite the module more drastically than just applying a template.
In my experience the PF2 XP Budget system is accurate for 3rd through 18th level (it is too brutal at 1st and 2nd level and too easy at 19th and 20th level). Changing hit points or adding damage resistance to a monster fudges a system that does not need fudging. However, the system measures risk and resource expenditure rather than speed. A glass-cannon monster with strong offense and weak defense is going to be a quick battle and a fortress monster with weak offense and strong defense is going to be a slow battle, regardless of the risk.
Since I run oversized parties through Paizo adventure paths, my two standard procedures are to either leave the encounter unchanged and make up the lower threat and experience points with an additional encounter or add more enemies to keep the threat the same. This leads to very few solo encounters that are a serious threat. The strong solo monsters are either on the additional encounters or when I rebuild a boss to a higher level (for example, Balancing a Seventeenth-Level Medusa).
A month ago (real time) the party ran into a Ssumzili, creature 12 in a planned encounter in the module. A 12th-level creature against an 8-member 11th-level party is 30xp, Trivial Threat (the party temporarily had a playtest Daredevil with them). And its defeat was terribly easy and fast. A ssumzili relies on its ability to hide in rain, but the party had invested in special senses that negated that. In contrast, back at 9th level I sicced an Young Umbral Dragon, creature 12. That was 45xp, Moderate Threat, and they had to work longer at defeating the dragon because it kept to the air. The wizard Idris cleverly cast Sliding Blocks so that the athletic rogue Roshan could grapple it in the air. Besides, the party's main damage dealer is the star-span archer magus Zandre.
I find that forcing the players to switch away from their usual strategy makes the combat more challenging and more interesting. On the other hand, since I do this often, my players have practice in many different tactcs.
Oh, and another way is to place the fight in an environment that heavily favors the opponent or actively works against the pc's.
Hurricanes, sandstorms, earthquakes, underwater rapids, traps everywhere, a lava field, in a collapsing cave vs a burrowing creature, etc...
The idea here is to mess with the PC's action economy, make executing their standard go-to tactics very challenging to execute and make it a much more dynamic situation.
Deriven Firelion said, "What are some of the ways you make a pure solo monster challenging to high level characters without using terrain and such?" But I see a difference between terrain that creates a challenge and terrain that the monster can exploit like any character could. Deriven Firelion later added, "I want to make a brutally tough solo monster that uses no magic, doesn't need the environment, and is just a big brutal monster that uses physical attacks to win." Okay, not needing the environment but able to use the environment works. For example, a dragon could use the air to make fly-by attacks and fly away if disabled by a spell to return one minute later after the spell wears off, right?
I once threw a big brutal monster at my party. The Ironfang Invasion module Prisoners of the Blight had a CR 15 lesser bandersnatch for the 15th-level party to fight. I was converting the module to PF2 and the only PF2 bandersnatch available at the time in the Archives of Nethys was the Primal Bandersnatch, creature 19. The party had 7 members and was already at 16th level, so they coud handle it. And I asked if they were willing to fight a 19th-level creature that was not a boss in the plot. They agreed.
They were attacked by a wendigo that I had rebuilt with extra dyradic abilities, and they advanced while fighting so that the wendigo might encounter other opponents (wendigos hate everything). They encountered the primal bandersnatch and hid so that the two monsters could fight. The party had already half defeated the wendigo, and the bandersnatch finished it off in one round. But that round gave the party time for Recall Knowledge checks and they learned about the bandersnatch's Confusing Gaze, a 30-foot aura that could have the party members fighting each other. They decided that their toughest member, the champion, would enter the aura to distract the bandersnatch in combat and the rest of the party would stay out of the aura and attack at range. The bandersnatch had a ranged quill Strike, but it did focus on the champion, who went down in three rounds despite Heal spells. The party cast Friendfetch to pull the champion to safety and more healing, and the rogue with sorcerous Dragon Claws stepped forward as the new distraction. It was a slugfest, but the party won before the rogue went down.
The primal bandersnatch is a tane, a creature of First-World magic, but its magic was automatic abilities, such as its fast healing and its Confusing Gaze, rather than spellcasting. Its danger would be barely touched by a Slow spell. And the Monster Core provides a 17th-level regular bandersnatch, too.
It sounds like that Deriven Firelion's party is good at nullifying a creature's ability to make Strikes. So a "big brutal monster that uses physical attacks to win" will be weak against them. To build a non-magical enemy that deals physical damage apply much of that damage without Strikes. Maybe a giant ooze leaks a puddle of acid. Maybe a land-based electric eel has an aura that deals electricity damage. Maybe a swarm creature deals damage to PCs within range with non-Strike actions. Maybe a crystalline creature shoots out piercing shards whenever damaged.
Mathmuse is correct. It is a module monster I'm modifying. A powerful troll.
I have done the higher level monsters. That's what made me want to boost the hit points of this monster. The higher level monster lasted longer, but it did so by making the players miss a lot and saving against their spells because it had much better statistics than the players. It made the players frustrated and annoyed that all their abilities didn't work.
I'm going more for a creature that gets hit and is affected by spells, but is so brutally strong it can take a severe beating while giving one. I think it feels better that the players can hit and affect the creature, but it still pushes them to the edge.
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I would take the base creature's chassis and make it a Superstition Barbarian, with the best of Legacy and Remastered Instinct abilities and feats if needed.
Just build it like a PC with the usual feats, skills, gear and tactics that a Superstition Barbarian of the appropriate level would take. And at least 1 Hero Point too.
If the weaknesses and resistances are easy to guess, a brute strength monster is always going to be brought low very quickly by casters. That is the way these things work in PF2.
But big tough solo brutes have always been incredibly susceptible to magic in these kind of games. In PF1, we had a fey sorcerer absolutely demolished the giant slayer campaign, like ruin it pretty early on and only have it get worse. You always have to do something to subvert those expectations because already knowing the general state of block of these creatures was unlocking them as puzzles.
Let me be a little more specific.
I want to make a brutally tough solo monster that uses no magic, doesn't need the environment, and is just a big brutal monster that uses physical attacks to win. Think of a hulk or big old giant type of creature. I want it to pressure a PC group that has access to magic while it doesn't.
This has been one of the big issues with these types of games for years across editions. You have this big, physical monster that's supposed to be this awesomely powerful creature, but once it runs into PCs with a mix of strong martial capability mixed with magic they turn the fight into a fight against a kitten.
It would be like watching a movie with Godzilla or King Kong, but if they showed up they would get slowed, tripped, then beat to death like they were nothing.
I want to make a brutal physical monster with no magic that isn't in some special environment a tough fight that pressures resources for a high level PF2 group of mixed capability without making them immune to everything.
It's much easier to make a magical combatant tougher by adding some really tough magical capabilities that allow them some sort of defensive or offensive power that messes the party up. But that big dragon or giant or kaiju that should be able to go toe to toe with the PCs in a brutal physical fight that lasts and makes the PCs feel threatened has been tough to do at higher levels.
I'm landing on the best way to do that is give them an immense amount of hit points to take the punishment the PCs dish out while unleashing its powerful physical attacks to pressure their hit point pools. In the books and movies, these types of creatures don't really so much dodge or completely resist attacks from the heroes or opponents, they're so brutally durable and huge they can take immense amounts of punishment. I imagine hit points are the likely way I can mirror that with maybe some damage resistance.
Were I trying to make a "Godzilla" style BBEG fight, I'd be bending and inventing some mechanics. Just brainstorming here so the specifics are probably not well thought out:
1. Give the creature a signature, telegraphed attack that is straight up lethal if PCs don't take any steps to defend against it. Mortals don't defeat Godzilla by tanking Atomic Breath: they get the hell away from that and attack when it's recharging. In the case of a troll this is probably a massive hulk smash attack that the PCs need to get away from or mitigate in some way (maybe a raised shield deflects some of it, or something). Either way, give it an offensive ability so powerful that PCs just staying in there swinging isn't viable when this attack is coming while also giving them a chance to get to cover (and then go on the offense while its on cooldown).
2. Give it some kind of recovery ability the PCs need to stop. This is a troll, right? Maybe give it something where if it has someone Grabbed at the start of its turn, it gains its Regeneration benefit no matter what by drinking their blood or something. So preventing this is really important so it doesn't regain those HP and thus spending an action to do something like Aid Escape becomes a good idea (and Unfettered Movement is a big help).
3. Give it an ability like Inexorable that some worms have where it can simply shrug off some effects on its next turn, so you can't just land a lucky Slow nat 1 and the fight's over. (A Mythic Resilience style ability also does this, but that also means most spells simply do nothing whereas Inexorable still lets things work for some time before they can be shrugged off and thus feels far less crappy. I cannot stress enough how much I hate Mythic Resilience.)
4. If you want to make it REALLY scary, give it the PF1 Mythic Agile ability: where it gets to be initiative twice. Given how PF2 works, you probably want to penalize that second one in some way like it only gets 2 actions or starts with one MAP.
Your group is full of optimizers and high level standard PF2 mechanics don't really keep up. So you need to go outside the box a bit and give it some abilities that make it a real threat.
(I remember my son once designed a level 24 "boss monster" and he was super excited about it. Then we ran a playtest and we kind of smashed it. He was disappointed, but it was a valuable lesson about just how powerful level 20 PCs are.)