The Boss Fight



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Sometimes pure hack and slash play can become boring and unchallenging.  This is bad for players, but it's also bad for the DM who (hopefully) is doing this for fun as well.  In this post I have a few thoughts for how to make the boss fight a little more interesting.

Level it appropriately

It's not my goal to kill the party.  If I kill the party then they might not want to play and things might get really boring for me.  Having said that, I want it to be suspenseful and I want their pulse to quicken when we get to some of these encounters.  So my goal is to level up minor encounters to cost them hit points and the boss fight is meant to take some characters down really low.  Now, the dice may take it in a different direction but that keeps it interesting!

With all that said, encounters that lead up to the boss fight are designed to weaken the party.  Drop their hit points (remember, in 1E you recover 1 hit point a week with rest), make them use their spells and scrolls and potions, and make them use some of their supplies before they get to the boss.  So, encounters should be set up to be anywhere between a hit die below the party's level to two above (obviously harder means fewer foes).  Again, the idea is to weaken the party to make the boss fight a challenge.  So in an adventure I just ran for mainly second level characters, the monsters were anywhere from one to four hit die (the boss was a five hit die monster, but he was alone).

Encourage problem solving

"Okay, you enter the room.  Bob looks at all hundred goblins, uses his gaze of death, and they all die instantly.  Great job, you collect 1000 experience points and you found treasure..."

Boring.  Now try this:

"At the back of the canyon is a small fort.  There is a wooden wall that is about four feet tall, behind which you can see a number of gnoll armed with short bows.  In front of the wall are positioned two ballista pointed towards the entrance of the canyon.  The canyon sits in between two large hills..."

A direct assault is going to be bad.  How can the party eliminate the fort and its in habitants?  This is more interesting than just hack and slash.  Maybe some climb the hills and try to surprise the guards, maybe an entangle spell gets cast, maybe some players shoot the gnoll manning the ballista, maybe all these things are meant to happen and once and then somebody slips on the hill or misses with an arrow...

Drop clues

Clues are great and they can serve as a way around a fight.  For example, two sessions ago my adventurers were clearing out a tower full of undead.  There was a ritual they could do that both created the undead and would "kill" them.  There was also a staff of undead control.  The party missed both, which is fine, but they were there!  Again, encourage problem solving.

Drop help

The way I DM things, characters are not walking Monster Manuals.  So I never say: "You have encountered a troll.  It has 48 hit points and regenerates.  The troll can only be killed by acid or burning."  Instead I describe the monster, what it does, and then describe how combat goes.  

So, if a boss can only be hit by magic weapons, I don't tell the party this ahead of time.  They discover it as they go, like they would in "real" life.  "Your sword connected but it bounced off."

With that in mind, if your boss can only be hit by magic weapons, throw some in the encounters that lead up to the boss.  If you want to make it interesting make them weapons that nobody is proficient in.  Find an esoteric pole arm, a scimitar, or a bastard sword.  In 1E this means that you have a penalty when using a weapon you aren't proficient in and this keeps the encounter at the end challenging.

For example, in the tower I mentioned earlier our boss was a drelb (Monster Manual 2).  This could only be hit by magic weapons.  As this was a second level adventure our party did not have a lot of magic, so I threw in a few +1 weapons in the encounters that led up to this one.  It took about eight rounds of combat, but the party overcame the drelb though quite a few characters took a beating.


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