Balancing 4+ PC's vs 1 Boss Fight in D&D, tech attacks

[OgreBattle]

So various times in D&D there's a problem where a party of 4-6 all shooting lasers at a single "big boss" can drop 'em in one round. Inflated hit points is one solution but leads to padded sumo when said party is 'not optimized' or lacking the key attack types.

I figure a 'solution' is to have big boss fights not be everyone doing their biggest attack, but having more of a maneuver and support element.


If it's a big dragon then a PC using their greatsword to propel another PC to smack it in the head, a PC grappling one of it's arms to make an opening for the other PC to stab at the chest. A PC stabs the dragon in the foot to prevent it from trampling everyone so the other PC's can get a shot at its weakballs. One guy is buffing or debuffing, the other then strikes.

If it's 6 dudes vs one evil dude in a big flat room then it shouldn't be easy to just have all the ranged guys shoot and the melee guys surround evil dude. So the one guy is able to maneuver in a way that keeps a PC in the line of fire.

The action economy imbalance seems like it can be solved with having more AoE's baked into the system. Everyone can do a spinny melee attack at penalty, everyone bigger can trample anyone smaller as a move action. Wizardry Tale of the Forsaken Land has casters being able to 'at-will' channel arcane energy into a partner's weapon, so stronger enemies take up two character's worth of actions for an attack with a good chance of harming them.

So the basic idea is the PC's can fight well as individuals, but against boss threats they must voltron their actions together to bypass high defenses, nullify "it will kill you in one hit" actions, and so on. Figuring out what the "deathblow" of a boss monster is and what actions are needed to reduce it's potency can also be part of the info gathering phase leading to the fight.

[Yesterday's Hero]

Kinda like the Thanos fight on Titan? I like the sound of that.

[Iduno]

Inflated hit points is one solution but leads to padded sumo when said party is 'not optimized' or lacking the key attack types.

You would have to have a balance point that isn't obviously bad in any way, which is a pain. Arkham horror card game balances around everyone doing damage and finding clues, so one character will have to be extra good at that thing if another character can't. There, scaling is only for locations (how many clues each place has) and mini-bosses/bosses. Each number that scales is a number multiplied by the number of players. But that's in a pretty narrow deck building game, so they control the range of ability each character has.

D&D doesn't have a point buy system or anything, so it should be simple. Just define how much each character should be doing, and scale based on that. Except balancing things hasn't ever been part of D&D. If it's for your own thing, you might want to have a written goal of what an average PC can do and put in any effort to reach that goal.

[K]

Honestly, this is just a fighter problem. Spellcasters have been Voltron-ing just fine for decades.

For example, some spellcasters cast Enervation or something like it to drop saves with no save, maybe some Polymorph into an ability drain monster, and then the last one or two casters drop the boss with a save or die.

[Dean]

DSM and I designed a multimonster model I've used many times since then. It works really well.

The idea of creating a series of maneuvers that party members can use to aid one another better than simply attacking the boss themselves is a good idea but no small task. Getting people to fight Boss monsters like in the movies requires making a lengthy list of maneuvers that can move allies, debuff, aid in attacks and damage, and cancel enemy abilities at the minimum. It also requires making using a varied mix of those tactics better than 4 people denying every attack option and 1 person hitting every round or, indeed again, those 5 people just hitting as normal. That is an accomplishable set of goals but it's by no means simple. It's also the most intimidating kind of design for me, where you're not making a single isolated system to do what you want but making dozens and dozens of options that all need to be superior and inferior to each other at different times and work well against you catalog of different enemies and monsters. It's not the sort of thing you can plop out as a clever little subsystem, that's making a whole combat engine and monster manual.

That said it's totally possible. I recall you, Ogre, making your games based around 5 different combat styles. So you can power attack or skirmish or flurry or whatnot. If you add in 3 more styles that are about restricting enemy options, debuffing and moving your enemies, and buffing and maneuvering your allies that's a really cool combat system I would be interested in.

[brized]

So the basic idea is the PC's can fight well as individuals, but against boss threats they must voltron their actions together to bypass high defenses, nullify "it will kill you in one hit" actions, and so on. Figuring out what the "deathblow" of a boss monster is and what actions are needed to reduce it's potency can also be part of the info gathering phase leading to the fight.

This also has to be weaved into the story and/or gameplay or else players will be upset. You can't just reload after you die like in Chrono Trigger, or respawn like in Dark Souls.

One way is giving the players enough time to learn the enemy's strengths so they can counter them before they get wiped out. Sentinels of the Multiverse games and Kingdom Death showdowns go for 4-8+ turns for this reason. They're also transparent about what enemies can do. Being expected to win a complex, tactics-dependent fight in 3-4 rounds (like a typical D&D fight) with no recon is too much for most players.

Another way is making researching epic opponents necessary to win, and choosing setting elements that immediately communicate that. It would also need functioning mechanics to support the investigation stuff. Maybe a mashup of Dark Souls, Call of Cthulhu, and Ghostbusters?

The game may also need ways to mitigate PCs dying or wiping. In Sentinels of the Multiverse, games are episodic and relatively short. Players still get an action if they "die". Kingdom Death has 60-hour campaigns and is pretty brutal, but has a "hero" mode for more casual players.

[jt]

I really like combined attacks and I'd like to see a system that does something interesting with them, but I don't think this is a natural problem for them to solve. The default problem with a boss monster is that the party's action economy advantage overwhelms whatever stat benefits it has. People will only use a combined attack if it's better than two of their regular attacks, so it's not a solution if the problem is already that two regular attacks are too good. You propose making the boss monster's defenses scale up so fast that a combined attack is required to damage it. I can see this working, but "overcorrect so hard one direction that we have to use a separate mechanic to bring it back in line" is awkward.

On the other hand, once you have overcorrected defenses so hard that people can't damage a boss monster without a combined attack, you have total freedom to balance combined attacks against boss monsters separately from regular attacks against regular monsters. Which does let you be lazy in a nice way.

The action economy imbalance seems like it can be solved with having more AoE's baked into the system.

This solves the boss's offenses. If a level-appropriate equal-numbers monster does N damage to one character, then a level-appropriate solo monster needs to deal N damage to four characters. But for the boss's defenses, it still needs to deal with the fact that the party's damage output quadruples when they focus fire on it. (Replace "four" and "quadruples" with your assumed party size as appropriate.)

This can be solved pretty simply by quadrupling its HP[1]. Which works fine if you're doing something like 4E's standard/elite/solo system. If you want to use something like 3E's "CR-2 means double numbers" system then you need to set HP to an exponential curve. Which works but with CR-2 and 20 levels then level 20 needs about 1000x as much HP as level 1, so at least four digits, which is getting into the territory of numbers too big for people to care about (most folks only care about the first two digits of a number).

[1] This is oversimplified: save-or-dies, battlefield control, and lockdown effects need to be handled separately.

[Zaranthan]

On the other hand, once you have overcorrected defenses so hard that people can't damage a boss monster without a combined attack, you have total freedom to balance combined attacks against boss monsters separately from regular attacks against regular monsters. Which does let you be lazy in a nice way.

I find myself in support of this, and call Chrono Trigger to the stand to testify for it. You don't use the double and triple techs on random encounters (except the few that damage everything on the screen), you use them on bosses. Because they're too expensive to spam and most of them carry rider effects that you only care about if the enemy is going to survive the raw damage.

Give both players a bigger pile of damage dice to throw than they could get with their own standard actions, give the ability some setup restrictions that eat their move actions, tack on a nasty debuff that you wouldn't bother placing on a single minion, and you've got an option that's worth two players' turns.

Maybe give it something that looks system-breaking, like bypassing the to-hit roll or "always crits" or penetrating all damage reduction. Then balance those defenses around the fact that they don't actually protect bosses.

[OgreBattle]

How to declare a tech attack is another question

A player delays their turn to be on the same initiative as the partner then they use the attack? This seems best for the “channel flames into sword” “he stabs and I channel lightning into the blade”

Or somehow organically fit it into the combat system like flanking attacks or “player A grants an accuracy and damage buff to the next strike on this target”.

[maglag]

How to declare a tech attack is another question

A player delays their turn to be on the same initiative as the partner then they use the attack? This seems best for the “channel flames into sword” “he stabs and I channel lightning into the blade”

Or somehow organically fit it into the combat system like flanking attacks or “player A grants an accuracy and damage buff to the next strike on this target”.

So if it's organically fit into the combat system, what's stopping that goblin mob from tech attacking a PC?

Or why should the PCs spend their own actions when they can get cheap minions of their own to power up their tech attacks? Because Chrono can't just bring a bunch of soldiers/mercenaries, but a PC can.

Armies of mooks become quite dangerous when they can tech attack higher level enemies.

[OgreBattle]

Wizardry: tale of the forsaken land ps2 game has teamwork ‘allied actions’ require the party members to build up a ‘trust’ level via using them together.

could do something like the goblin mob doesn’t have the teamwork to tech attack, but the drow strike team does

[Zaranthan]

Easy answer: tech attacks aren’t basic combat options like trip and disarm, they’re class features like sneak attack or feats like whirlwind attack.

Mooks simply don’t get them because they’re Warriors, not Fighters.

[jt]

How to declare a tech attack is another question

A player delays their turn to be on the same initiative as the partner then they use the attack? This seems best for the “channel flames into sword” “he stabs and I channel lightning into the blade”

You get this for free if you use whole party initiative (all players go in any order, then all monsters in any order, then all players...).
It also generally runs faster and holds engagement more easily, at the downside of increasing the first-turn advantage.

what's stopping that goblin mob from tech attacking a PC?

That might be how CR-appropriate hordes of monsters fight the PCs.

[Pariah Dog]

Wizardry: tale of the forsaken land ps2 game has teamwork ‘allied actions’ require the party members to build up a ‘trust’ level via using them together.

could do something like the goblin mob doesn’t have the teamwork to tech attack, but the drow strike team does

I always liked that game. And the enemies also had access to the teamwork attacks in that.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

This kind of reminds me of a system I had to homebrew for the Pokemon game I run.

As you know, Pokemon have Moves. Shit like Flamethrower and Hyper Beam. Eventually someone will ask "Hey, what happens when I aim my Flamethrower into your Hyper Beam?" The system doesn't provide an answer, but I do: You do some anime shit and now you have a twisting fuck-you beam of raw energy and flames that murders something super hard.

Now, in this system, Defense is straight damage reduction (but there's also Damage Reduction, but I digress): If you have 30 Defense, you take 30 less damage from all Physical attacks. This number is not hard to reach, and one of my players LOVES stacking DR out the ass so he barely takes any damage from anything. So, if I hit him with 3 Physical attacks and he has 30 Defense, that's a total of 90 damage he's eating up - assuming I even deal 30 damage. Less than that and you've got 3 dudes wailing on him dealing 1 HP with each attack.

This can be a bit of a problem: if you've got a bunch of weak Pokemon milling around in the wilderness and Mr. Tank walks up to them and starts smacking them around, they're fucked. It's going to be a slaughter and they have to GTFO immediately. Does no one feel the plight of the humble Pidgey? The solution: rather than hitting Mr. Tank with 3 attacks that deal a piddly 1 damage each, they instead hold all their turns until they go at the same time and, oh, let's say they all use Gust on Mr. Tank. Rather than 3 separate attacks, it's now treated as one BIG attack and everybody gets to add their stats to it. While Mr. Tank laughed at the thought of eating scratches from these stupid birds, they turned around and smacked him with 30 or 40 damage. He won't be so quick to laugh in the future.

It's something I find I use a lot more than my players, since it's a good way to let low-level threats punch above their weight, and players aren't as good at being a hivemind as I am. Of course, this comes with its own issues, but it gets the job done for me and I get to use silly imagery during attacks.

[hyzmarca]

The action economy imbalance seems like it can be solved with having more AoE's baked into the system.

This solves the boss's offenses. If a level-appropriate equal-numbers monster does N damage to one character, then a level-appropriate solo monster needs to deal N damage to four characters. But for the boss's defenses, it still needs to deal with the fact that the party's damage output quadruples when they focus fire on it. (Replace "four" and "quadruples" with your assumed party size as appropriate.)

This can be solved pretty simply by quadrupling its HP[1]. Which works fine if you're doing something like 4E's standard/elite/solo system. If you want to use something like 3E's "CR-2 means double numbers" system then you need to set HP to an exponential curve. Which works but with CR-2 and 20 levels then level 20 needs about 1000x as much HP as level 1, so at least four digits, which is getting into the territory of numbers too big for people to care about (most folks only care about the first two digits of a number).

The simple solution is to just move the boss off of HP altogether. Bam. It doesn't Have HP. No amount of HP damage will do anything to it. All problems solved without risking turning the game into padded sumo.

Having HP at all is a problem at very high levels, because there is not enough space between instant-victory and multi-session padded sumo fight.

If instead you say that the boss requires you to do X Y Z, where X Y and Z are binary succeed/fail actions, it's much easier for a GM to set the difficulty and the time to kill.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Doesn't that run into the problem of "why do I have HP but bosses don't"? I get that HP is just an abstraction, but it seems like one of those fundamental abstractions like BaB or something. Your description sounds more like a puzzle boss to me.

[hyzmarca]

Doesn't that run into the problem of "why do I have HP but bosses don't"? I get that HP is just an abstraction, but it seems like one of those fundamental abstractions like BaB or something. Your description sounds more like a puzzle boss to me.

If that's a problem, you can keep HP while still taking them off of HP. And yes, it's sort of a puzzle boss.

I've been playing a lot of Warframe recently, which is a loot shooter rather than a turn-based RPG, but it does have HP and exponential damage increases which have huge problems, as the way everything scales means that one-shot-kills or padded sumo are the norm for high level play, with no middle ground. One thing they did quite well is the exploiter orb boss fight.

First thing you do is break three cooling vents on her back. The individual vents have HP, but all have to be broken, and they ice up so you have to hit them with superheated liquid to melt the ice and shoot them.

Then the fight moves outside and you have to throw superheated goop onto her while waiting for her to overheat. And which point you pull out a panel on her head and shoot her brain. Her brain also has HP. It has so little HP that it really doesn't matter and most people with good weapons will one shot it, but it has HP. You repeat this three times to destroy all three sections of her brain, then she dies. And explodes, so you have to run or otherwise become immune to damage.

In many ways, she's a puzzle boss. But she's a puzzle boss that works across many character builds and level ranges. There are specific builds that are better or worse for fighting her, but everyone stands a chance, and the time to kill isn't significantly different between two different builds.

This is the big advantage of the puzzle boss format. You lose the satisfaction of throwing around huge numbers, but gain a boss that's of similar difficult to optimal and suboptimal builds. Though Optimized builds will still be better.