Encounter-a-Day

One common complaint about 4th edition is that combat can be a bit of a slog. Solos, in particular, are notorious for this problem. But sometimes, you just really want a big, climactic fight against one really nasty enemy.

What’s a DM to do? As always, we take out the one tool every DM should know how to use, more useful than duct tape, a dremel, a swiss army knife and a leatherman combined: theft.

In this case, we’re stealing from video games. A common staple in video games is the large, multi-part boss fight that changes periodically throughout.

Let me give you an example. I’m coming up to the climactic ending of my campaign. The big bad in question is actually rather small; a halfling-sized warforged named Judgment who is (quite successfully) summoning an entity from the far realms to devour the world.

Now, there are three obvious ways to turn him into the big bad.

1. 1. Make him a solo lurker and hope I can craft the terrain such that it’s an interesting fight. Not bloody likely.
2. 2. Turn him into a hulking monstrosity “because of the far realms taint.” Not terribly desirable, since it radically changes the concept of the character.
3. 3. Make him an elite and surround him with a a more standard encounter. Yawn.

No, no, no. That just won’t do. You see, it’s important to me that the PCs get to fight Judgment as… Judgment. Without getting into detail, suffice to say that a couple of the PCs have a specific and personal (to the players even more so than the characters) vendetta against Judgment as he is.

I also want to make sure that the fight is different and interesting. And so I brainstormed, and here’s what I’ve come up with.

The fight starts off fairly normal. Judgment is just a plain old lurker, not even elite, with a couple warforged and illithids and maybe an umberhulk. When Judgment is destroyed, he shatters into dozens of shards. Hooray, they got to kill the real Judgment!

After the last of the enemies are defeated, however, and before the PCs can take a rest, the shards begin to regenerate into a small army of Judgments. In this form, Judgment is represented as a couple dozen minions, with the nasty ability that every round any one of the minions can deliver a very powerful attack.

Finally, after they defeat the split Judgment, all the pieces coalesce back together into a more abstract, crystalline form. This is Judgment’s final form, and his most difficult. He is now an elite controller who radically alters the way the battles go, drastically reducing healing, making PCs attack each other, and only being hit by rolling under his defense.

I hope this post has inspired you. Provided below are Judgment’s stats in each form.

Actually, as I write this addendum (which technically isn’t an addendum since as far as you’re concerned this all went live at the same time), I’ve just finished this fight. It worked out really well, minus some design issues with the last form of Judgment. The PCs were actually rolling too reliably and having a hard time missing him, and on top of that the basic attack thing wasn’t doing much damage. Turned it into a bit of a slog, so after a few rounds I decided to just end it there.

Other than that, though, I think the multi-part boss idea worked beautifully.