Multi-PC, Linear RNG TTRPGs like D&D shouldn't have bosses.

[Lago PARANOIA]

You heard it right here folks. We already know the problems with bosses in systems like D&D. To recap: bosses get one action (plus that of subalterns) versus the party's. If you have PCs capable of busting out high amounts of damage or lockdown, the bosses are fucked.

RPGs have tried all of these methods and they've all failed miserably.

[*] Giving bosses extra actions. This breaks PC/NPC asymmetry along with internal consistency. Why does the Orc Warboss have 3 Legendary Actions while the mathematically more powerful Vampire Lord doesn't have any? Because the Orc Warboss has the 'Boss Monster' tag, dug.
[*] Giving bosses 'fuck you, you're not my dad' asymmetric defenses like Perfect Defenses and Legendary Saves.
[*] Giving the bosses more baseline numbers. Problem doing this with a Linear RNG: the bonuses you have to give to make 4-6 actions versus 1 balanced either means embracing padded sumo or pushing the player characters off of the RNG/denying them actions outright.
[*] Give the bosses more minions. Probably the best one, but you're admitting that the thesis of the thread is correct.

Now, if you do want to have bosses, you need to switch to an RNG where the defense and attack stack mathematically scales to accommodate multiple PCs. Having fewer or more PCs should mean having to adjust a defense or attack score by 1 discrete unit, not throwing in extra actions. This means a quadratic and probably an exponential/logarithmic RNG, such as with dicepools.

[Foxwarrior]

When using a non-linear RNG as your solution you're going to have the players whiff a lot, aren't you? A 15% chance to immediately KO a boss with your flesh to stone spell is a... bold... design decision I guess.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Maybe I'm missing the point, but can't you make any kind of monster a boss and justify the power boost in-game?

[Ignimortis]

Maybe I'm missing the point, but can't you make any kind of monster a boss and justify the power boost in-game?

Sure. But it has to be bullshit that isn't available to players.

On topic, though - I find that mechanically, extra actions work well. Narratively justifying them, well...that's harder. I mean, my players are mostly gonna fight demigods at this point, so I can get away with that bullshit. But a more grounded setting is gonna have trouble with that.

[jt]

None of these sound like reasons not to do it, that's just a list of approaches that have been tried and failed. There are limitless poor approaches to any goal, regardless of whether the goal is good or not. It's not evidence either way.

You can solve it using flat to-hit chances and scaling HP/damage at the same rate as you scale your CR guidelines. That is, if a level X monster is a challenge for four level Y PCs, then the average HP and damage at level X are 4x as much as they are at level Y. With the constraint that your benchmark number of successful attacks to kill an equal-level character has to be greater than the supported party size*, and the caveat that after some level you need AOE attacks that divide the benchmark damage by expected targets.

That's not my preferred solution - it leaves no room for increasing the power of battlefield control past level 1 - but it's pretty trivial.

* To prevent level-appropriate solo encounters from one-shotting people.

[OgreBattle]

If you have power levels, challenge ratings, then a significantly higher lvl CR foe will be the 'boss' yeah?

So you mean that there shouldn't be a "boss monster upgrade extra actions and immunitiies" thing you slap on a boss, the monsters should just be designed well enough to give larger numbers of lower level foes a challenge, right?

[Dean]

Maybe I'm missing the point, but can't you make any kind of monster a boss and justify the power boost in-game?

Sure. But it has to be bullshit that isn't available to players.

On topic, though - I find that mechanically, extra actions work well. Narratively justifying them, well...that's harder. I mean, my players are mostly gonna fight demigods at this point, so I can get away with that bullshit. But a more grounded setting is gonna have trouble with that.

You can in fact justify it and even make it available to the players. You could totally write a class that gained extra actions but little else and since D&D characters are supposed to just about double in power every 2 levels you could even make that class balanced.

You could also make it a somewhat intentionally shitty class where over 4 levels or so you gained the ability to go twice. While going twice is cool it's not worth being 2 spell levels behind. So take your 4 level kind of shitty class, pop in on your Orc sergeant and bam you've got the Orc Chieftain boss who's only got a small numerical advantage on an Orc sergeant but also has the action economy to fight a number of them simultaneously. And PC's don't need to be disbarred from using the class, they won't use it cause it's kinda bad and they don't have the DM power of slapping 4 more levels on something whenever they want.

DSM and I made something very similar. I used variations of it in games for a while before basically just accepting that all I was doing was giving bosses a small numbers boost and an extra action with extra steps. So I stopped jumping through hoops and just openly gave them those bonuses and saying that "legendary creatures" go twice.

[Foxwarrior]

And PC's don't need to be disbarred from using the class, they won't use it cause it's kinda bad and they don't have the DM power of slapping 4 more levels on something whenever they want.

Isn't this almost the same as the LA thing where players are "allowed" to play monsters but only if they want to be second-class citizens?

[jt]

Do non-PCs even need to progress in power using the same mechanisms as PCs? We seem to accept that adventurers get stronger by going on adventures and dragons get stronger by growing older. If it's okay for dragons to be different from PCs, do human NPCs have to get stronger by the same mechanism as adventurers?

Say normal wizards get stronger by conducting experiments and cross-referencing musty tomes. The party's wizard is able to do that, but since that takes decades and she's also an adventurer, she goes on adventures instead. Some other wizard who spends a decade reading books gains something, which makes him more powerful and increases his CR, but isn't a class level. That other route only has the loosest of balance considerations*, and a pile of extra actions isn't particularly dangerous along those lines.

* The CR has to be accurate, but it's fine if it jumps by five or whatever. The method of gaining power can't have an availability/effort/reward model that breaks the setting. The method of gaining power can't be available to current PCs - it can be available to the character, but spending a decade reading tomes makes you an NPC.

[MGuy]

I explicitly give "boss characters" in my project "boss status" because I don't see a major reason to give players access to everything team monster has. Players only really 'need' tools that help them adventure.

[deaddmwalking]

Some boss monsters can have gross physical anatomy that lets them play the many actions game (like a hydra). PCs aren't locked out because of different rules for NPCs/PCs regarding the action economy - they just don't have 15 heads and the relevant abilities that make 15 heads into 15 actions.

One thing we do in our heartbreaker is have a number of abilities that can provide you an AoO in a specific instance. For example, there is one that allows you to make an AoO when someone HITS you; there is another that allows an AoO when someone MISSES you; another when someone APPROACHES you. They each require a feat, and usually to have multiple AoO you would also need Combat Reflexes (and that's very limited), but this ends up allowing a creature to have some extra options. These are available to PCs, too, but if boss monsters are generically more powerful (due to higher level) they get more from these.

[Username17]

You know, 'sweep attacks' should probably just be a normal combat maneuver. So like, you can just normally make an attack at -2 against two enemies that does like 2/3 damage or whatever. And thus it is that when you hit on better than a 15+ and also have multiple enemies for whom 2/3 damage is still significant it's advantageous to do.

Have a couple of those just sitting around in the normal combat rules and 'boss monsters' will just naturally get 'extra attacks' without giving them any special text at all. The Fire Giant ends up attacking multiple party members because he's outnumbered and has big combat bonuses. That's it. That's the whole explanation. He doesn't have to have different stats from the Mook Fire Giant that the players encounter groups of at level 15. The Mook Fire Giants make individual aimed attacks because otherwise they won't accomplish much against the high level Angel Knight.

It's not a big philosophy problem, it's just a math problem. Maybe the to-hit penalty needs to be bigger than -2 to keep it from being used by level appropriate groups of ogres and slowing down the game. But that's an algebra question with an algebra answer.

-Username17

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I play a Pokemon tabletop game where the general guidelines for making bosses is doing just that: extra actions and immunity to being caught until you've chewed through its health bars. This has problems.

First are the verisimilitude issues people have brought up - this is exacerbated further when you have the capability of enslaving a boss and putting them on your fucking team. There is no way any sane GM would allow one guy to have one pokemon that has a billion HP and several actions per round because that has obvious problems. Second, you can't just bump up the levels, because once again, your players will usually try to catch the damn thing, and then they wind up with something 20-30 levels higher than the rest of their team and outshine the rest of the party when they use it. What do you do with that? Emulate the games and anime and just have the pokemon not listen to the trainer sometimes until they've "proven" themselves? I've done that, and it works, but it strikes me as a clumsy solution.

Really, both of these come back to the same issue: How can you create boss monsters in a system where those monsters are expected to get caught and brought over to team player? People bitched about Magus in Chrono Trigger too, and I'm too short-sighted to see how to get around this problem without de-powering the boss and hoping it's cool enough for the players to be okay with it. Sure, you can just have the players fight a bunch of pokemon at once, but that's most fights in this fucking game. You really do need big badass monsters with some smaller, slightly less badass monsters to throw down, because the alternative is giving one boss monster something like six fucking turns because he has to be able to take on three PCs and their pokemon all at once, and that stretches belief. In order to even begin to tackle something like this, I think you'd need to restructure the entire math system of the game itself so the power scaling is closer to D&D, but that has its own problems too!
For fuck's sake.

[Blade]

In my Mechs-vs-Kaiju game, the combat system add a layer of abstraction. All players do their actions and the opposition (which can be a single Kaiju or multiple monsters) does its attack roll.

The result of the opposition is compared with the total result of the PCs and the winning side gets to choose the outcome (in a list of outcomes, depending on the difference between the scores).

This uses the concept of "comic book fight scene" that has been discussed in another thread. All actions are small panels and the winning side gets the full page spread that highlights the way the fight evolves.

[jt]

How can you create boss monsters in a system where those monsters are expected to get caught and brought over to team player?

If you want to solve it with worldbuilding and a hammer: every living thing has a locus of power somewhere on the planet. Most never find theirs (or bother looking). If you're standing in your locus, you're vastly more powerful. Loci are a few acres big.

Sometimes a completely mundane animal like a wolf is lucky enough to be born in or near its locus, and then it's a very scary wolf, which adventurers might be sent to go deal with. Sometimes a goblin is born near theirs and leverages that into being chieftan. Sometimes a necromancer spends years finding theirs and settles in to become a major regional threat.

Sometimes the players decide to go find theirs, but the most they can do with it is to pick one of their loci to build a castle on, and that's a useful but mild power boost in the domain management game, and completely useless as soon as they go on an adventure. Similarly, if they befriend the necromancer from the previous paragraph, she's only going to be as strong as they are once she leaves her locus.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

If you want to solve it with worldbuilding and a hammer: every living thing has a locus of power somewhere on the planet.

That's close to how I chose to solve that particular problem, but I was hoping for a more setting-agnostic solution. I opted for "cosmic hivemind imbues a monster with the literal force of creation", but fixing this issue with fluff feels like putting a band-aid on a cancer patient, and I just realized that doesn't fucking apply to humans. I do like your specific idea, though, but it runs into the problem that the bad guy is only a boss in his own house, and that's not how I would prefer to run my games. I believe a boss should be more powerful in their lair or whatever, but I also believe they should be more powerful than the players outside of their lair, too. I'm starting to think my goals may be incompatible here.

[deaddmwalking]

I'm not sure that they're incompatible; a boss with minions is tougher than a boss without minions, but a boss without minions can still be more powerful than the players individually.

In that case, a lair is like 'minions'. It provides some benefits to the boss and it provides some penalties to the PCs. Given a choice, they'd prefer to fight their enemy on neutral ground.

Justifying why a lair provides benefits can be a little tricky. 5e does have the presence of evil monsters transforming the surrounding area into a dark nexus or something.

It is one more thing to balance; if a boss is difficult outside of their lair, they may be impossible inside it.

[jt]

I believe a boss should be more powerful in their lair or whatever, but I also believe they should be more powerful than the players outside of their lair, too. I'm starting to think my goals may be incompatible here.

How much more powerful does the boss need to be outside his lair? You can have the boss be more powerful (higher level) than the characters at all times, plus much more powerful (locuses conveniently grant extra actions and HP) in his lair. And that'll work fine unless you want to have the boss fight the players in the field, because the extra "in lair" powers are the only kind of powers that are actually targeted at addressing action economy disparity.

Another "worldbuilding and a hammer" solution: Boss powers come from being possessed by a demon. Beat the demon out of someone and they might become an ally, but they won't have boss powers.

[Dean]

And PC's don't need to be disbarred from using the class, they won't use it cause it's kinda bad and they don't have the DM power of slapping 4 more levels on something whenever they want.

Isn't this almost the same as the LA thing where players are "allowed" to play monsters but only if they want to be second-class citizens?

Kind of the opposite. LA sucks because it heavily disincentivises people from playing monsters which is a hugely desirable concept that people really want to be able to play. A boss class that disincentivises people from playing bosses is a good thing because you dont actually want players to use those mechanics and the concept of being an entertaining enemy when fighting lower level opponents in groups of 3 to 5 is not a valuable conceptual space to make sure to offer to pc’s.

It’s like how making murder illegal and marijuana illegal aren’t exactly the same. One is something that would be beneficial to be widely available and the other isn’t, so restricting one and not the other is sensible.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

You both raise good points. I think part of my problem is that the game I run has a [Boss Monster] tag to beef up an enemy, but because the Pokemon setting is fucking incoherent the book won't tell me why a boss gets these powers. In fact, the book straight up says to use the Boss template every few sessions and make "minibosses" that only have one or two extra health bars and actions. Sure, you can give it to a Legendary pokemon and most people will buy it because they expect them to be stronger, but having a pile of mechanics doesn't help me when I need to explain to my players why the Mewtwo they caught is suddenly brought low through the magic of the Pokeball.

The problem with just making the boss higher level is that while that's fine for humans since making friends with NPCs who are better than you is an important part of the roleplaying process, it's generally frowned upon to let one player have a giant fucking tool in his toolbox that nobody else gets, and pokemon are the proverbial tool. The natural response to this is to let everyone get giant fucking tools, but then that makes the rest of their pokemon pretty worthless in comparison and you feel bad because you've benched your buddies you've been having adventures with.

jt, it depends on if the boss is human or pokemon: If they're a human and you aren't giving them the Boss Template, then they need to be fuck-off overleveled: like 20-30 levels higher in a 50 level system, and if they have any kind of level-appropriate attack, then they will DROP fools every turn. If they're a pokemon then they need to be EVEN MORE overleveled, but like I've been saying, that's not the way to go. I keep running my brain around in circles about this and smoke comes out of my fucking ears.

[Username17]

Imagine that the player characters are Level X and that there exists some level difference Y where one becomes a "boss monster." This means that when the players are Y levels above a group of Goblins that they are each effectively a boss monster to the Goblins. And when they face a single Giant who is Y levels above them, that that Giant is a boss monster to them. I don't actually care what numbers you use for X and Y, it could be a few levels in a 10 level system or a double handful of levels in a fifty level system. It's genuinely not important because it just changes the arithmetic, not the math.

OK, now let us imagine that the base combat system has attack choices beyond simply "level appropriate attack" and that specifically there exist combat maneuvers that are optimal to use against boss monsters and maneuvers that are optimal for boss monsters to use against weaker foes. I will presume that combat maneuvers useful for boss monsters to use against groups of weaker enemies are multi-target, but lower damage.

In this model, when the players go up against the Goblins, the Knight uses Sweep Attack instead of Power Attack, and the Elementalist uses Burning Hands instead of Fire Bolt. And when the players go up against the Giant, the Giant also uses Sweep Attack instead of Power Attack.

And now when the players go up against the Giant boss monster, the boss monster is making multiple attacks per turn and threatening more than one player character and getting them involved, and none of the individual attacks are out of scale or ultrakilling a PC on each hit or whatever.

You don't need special boss monster templates or special boss monster rules. If you have a robust set of basic combat maneuvers then you can shake the boss fight organically out of the normal accumulation of numbers from level disparity.

-Username17

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

That's a far smarter approach to enemy progression than the system I play. I remember when I threw a level 40 Cacturne at my party in the desert during a sandstorm while all their pokemon were around level 10 or so. I thought that I'd scare them off (already a bad idea) when they saw how badly it could fuck them up and no-sell anything that wasn't super effective.

Queue the party slamming it with Poison, Burn, Curse, Paralysis, and Blind, kiting it for 5-6 rounds, then catching it with a lucky capture roll. I just about shit myself. That's just a funny anecdote, though - it doesn't really affect how true everything you said is. Fortunately, all the moves and abilities and shit that I can use as a GM are totally available to players, the problem is that the math doesn't work out to where a single high-level enemy is a threat to a bunch of low level players.

However, now that I think about it, one of my players is basically a boss enemy to all the bandits he keeps fighting - he regularly walks up to groups of bad guys, takes barely any damage from them, then starts to 1-2 shot them in sequence, but that's because he stacks DR like a motherfucker and relies on his pokemon for killing, not because the math just works out like that. I think a critical component of that is that he's a human being, and we don't have fucking pokemon types, so we can't take super-effective damage. This is a problem that goes back to the games - the vast majority of the time, you just want to spam whatever attack your opponent is weak to. That's part of the Pokemon mindgame! So naturally, slamming a boss with attacks that deal OODLES of damage will be preferable to almost anything else, and if you can't deal direct damage to it, then just stack status effects on it until it dies. Hrm. Maybe I'm too into the weeds of this particular system to see a way out of it when the best option is to rebuild it from the ground up.

[Whatever]

Sounds like part of the problem is wild pokemon not having access to Full Restore (or similar cure-alls for status effects). What about using enemy trainers for boss fights?

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Oh, I do that too. The book even has some wishy-washy stuff about how whenever your players crack through one of the HP bars of your boss, you can have it become Staggered and some shit can happen to it. These effects range from losing a turn to become cured of a status, but it says "mechanically, this doesn't mean anything within the context of the system". So these are really just suggestions, which is the sort of shit that makes me hate 5e.

As a separate issue, combat healing is intentionally gimped - if you use a Full Restore on your pokemon, it costs your turn for healing them and your pokemon's next turn for being healed. That's a fucking whammy and forced my players to quit it with the KO conga line bullshit.

[Chamomile]

Why were they able to inflict status effects on a boss so far above them in level? If level doesn't provide resistance to status effects the same way it does HP damage, that seems like a huge oversight, especially effects like poison or burn that just deal damage over time anyway.