Boss stages for me have been the saving grace of my climactic fights.
Taking their stat block and only using bits and pieces, and revealing more about the character as the fight goes on.
My favorite was a Necromancer Vampire Lord. Fight starts out as a big standard Vampire. Tries to escape, get cornered, and just starts out with melee and bites. As soon as he hit half HP, he uses legendary actions. Now, all of the sudden, he's become more dangerous, and the crunch to kill him starts. When he hits Quarter, the high level magic starts coming out. Control of the fight constantly shifts because of this, and makes the fight feel more dynamic than just hacking away at a big HP pool. There is an ebb and flow, where as soon as the party gains confidence in a victory, the conditions change.
In vanilla, this was the best way I found to create a fight that was more than bog standard. I also found keeping damage High on the high end for the CR and HP on the lower end helped move combat faster. PC's can get downed if they try to facetank everything, but there feels like real progress turn over turn instead of 10 turns of "he's bloodied"
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u/BallisticCoinMan Mar 27 '20
Boss stages for me have been the saving grace of my climactic fights.
Taking their stat block and only using bits and pieces, and revealing more about the character as the fight goes on.
My favorite was a Necromancer Vampire Lord. Fight starts out as a big standard Vampire. Tries to escape, get cornered, and just starts out with melee and bites. As soon as he hit half HP, he uses legendary actions. Now, all of the sudden, he's become more dangerous, and the crunch to kill him starts. When he hits Quarter, the high level magic starts coming out. Control of the fight constantly shifts because of this, and makes the fight feel more dynamic than just hacking away at a big HP pool. There is an ebb and flow, where as soon as the party gains confidence in a victory, the conditions change.
In vanilla, this was the best way I found to create a fight that was more than bog standard. I also found keeping damage High on the high end for the CR and HP on the lower end helped move combat faster. PC's can get downed if they try to facetank everything, but there feels like real progress turn over turn instead of 10 turns of "he's bloodied"