by Mitchel Emley

Ahhh boss battles. The ultimate expression of D&D’s combat system and the culmination of build up to reach the crescendo of your campaign. Of course, we’ll be covering the normal variety of boss battles as well as The Big Bad Boss battle! Building up to the final battle (or even just a normal boss battle) is something a lot of players look forward to. It’s often the highlight of a long stretch of gameplay and typically ends up with a loot pinata. But what is that turns a boss fight into an epic legend around the table? How do you make them amazing experiences that players continue to talk about for years? What’s the formula to pull it off? Stay and listen, dear reader, and I shall tell you.

Tension Is Critical

Setting the scene is one of the most critical parts of building up to that epic boss fight. Think of the final battles in movies and how they approach things. There’s music to set the tone, composition of the scene to establish presence, the design of the characters to build on those themes but none of these (except perhaps music) is available to the average DM.

Instead, you have to paint the picture with words. You’re building an audio-book moment of terror as you describe the thickening fog, the worsening stench, the hair raising on the back of your neck as something slowly begins to ooze into the scene around you. The boss itself needs to really sell this moment too, so picking creatures like a Lich or other spooky works very well in a tension setting.

The Use of Scale

Is this the final boss or just an underling who happens to be powerful? What sort of bad guy is on the table for your players to vanquish today and what are the consequences if they do? If this is a small group in a small setting, perhaps the goblin lord is The Big Bad who needs to be taken out? Or perhaps this is an Empire, and the target of the PCs is none other than the Emperor himself. Set the stage accordingly! An Empire would have vast resources and elite troops at their command, whereas the goblin lord may have just a tribes-worth of troops at any given moment.

Magic also changes the scale of power as well - an archmage that can fling out 5th Tier spells is no joke and should be treated as a power-multiplier of The Big Bad. Including them in the final fight amplifies the threat to the players and adds another layer of complexity for them to contend with. Don’t be afraid to pull from Tucker’s Kobolds here again to add layers to the battle. There’s no reason you can’t stretch player resources if they failed to take advantage of an opening in the ranks, or to build in possibly means of them to counter strategies that the boss is employing. Remember that you are ultimately cheering the PC’s on, you want them to win!

Give Prep Time

Oh the glorious joy of prep time! For anyone who has ever seen versus battles that involve Batman, there is notoriously always a “does he have prep time?” comment. Give your PC’s prep time to go over their strategy, prepare their countermeasures, to gauge exactly how they want to fight this battle. As a DM, be sure to give them that agency and not to use it against them with an “aha! He had a counter to your counter the whole time!”. Let the players succeed intelligently, reward that behavior, encourage them to think outside the box especially if you’ve built a giant HP sponge of a big bad that you know will take hours of real-time combat otherwise.

Players can come up with brilliant ways to defeat bad guys if given the chance to do so. I played in a game where a kenku and a mute character used their respective spells and abilities to prepare a philosophical counter-argument against The Big Bad’s motivation; why conquer this world and waste the blood of his people when a portal to another untouched world is right here. The DM was so impressed by the creativity and the time required to pull it off that he rewarded all the XP and magic items to everyone anyways even though it ended without a single fight.

Motivation Is Just As Important!

This ties into the previous point but consider motivation. What has TBB done that has earned the ire of the players? Did he personally kill an ally? A PC? Family members of the PCs? What emotional investment is there for the players as they prepare to fight this ruthless force of malevolence? Really take advantage of character backgrounds here and dive into the meat of what your players have given you. Establish as the DM that there are clear parallels (within reason) behind the bad things that have happened in the past to everyone and TBB who is at the heart of it all.

Building emotional connection to these events then adds additional buy in for the characters. Think of Madara, and how as the man behind the mask he orchestrated all the tragedies that plagued his world and personally affected the lives of the main characters. That kind of buy in is big and really encourages that “Let’s go punch the crap out of this bastard!” unifying mentality that amps up that boss battle to a whole new level.

Final Thoughts

When I DM, I prefer to set the scene and the scale long before the players actually reach the boss fight. I want the fight to feel like an accomplishment just getting there let alone the fight itself. I also prefer to use music to set the scene but I know not everyone has that opportunity for a variety of reasons. DM’s should feel free to express the battle the way they envision it, to bring to life the tension, risk, and potential cost of the battle. Really hammer home the emotional connections as well but do it in a way that draws the players in and makes them feel invested!

Dice Hard: The Caverns & Creatures Blog

Tension Is Critical

The Use of Scale

Give Prep Time

Motivation Is Just As Important!

Final Thoughts