A magic or mundane artifact generates an effect harmful to the PCs, but it is guarded by the monster's minions.
The encounter's setting starts to collapse during the battle, and all the combatants will need to escape.
A boss monster has a 'second form' that activates mid-way through the battle.
Traps are placed throughout the battlefield, and characters must be wary of them.
The PCs must complete a ritual while fending off attacks from the enemy.
The encounter area is a series of cliffs or platforms, forcing characters to jump around and risk falling, possibly into a pit, water, or lava.
There is a monster that uses the blink spell or tunneling to avoid attacks between its turns.
A minor enemy has the ability to summon or call for reinforcements every round.
There are three sides, not two, battling in this encounter.
A disastrous environmental effect, such as an avalanche, wildfire, or earthquake, occurs in the area, dealing damage and forcing the combatants apart.
An anti-magic pulse affects some areas of the battlefield periodically, suppressing spells and magical items when it is active.
The enemies are shockingly weak and easily defeated, but the PCs' goal isn't here -- the treasure chest is a mimic, or their princess is in another castle.
designing a boss encounter 03/08/2026, and want some input on what I have so far, and a particular mechanic I'm having a hard time designing. DND 5e
important mechanics: a party of 5, 13th-level characters played by people who have over 25 years of combined experience of playing TTRPGs, most of which are 5e, so we have to hit very hard for it to be interesting and difficult for them. The party currently consists of a barbarian/paladin, artificer/(gloomstocker) ranger, (twilight) cleric, warlock/paladin, and warlock (shes a guest character)
The main issue I am having is that I want this to be a puzzle fight, not just a hit-it-until-it-stops-moving style fight. The TLDR is that the monster they are fighting is an undead bisected elder brain. I want to riff on the right-brain left-brain thing, giving them similar stats but different strengths. For the puzzle part, I want the sections to have a high minimum damage threshold that the party needs to turn off somehow. It is a psychic barrier that either physically repels the incoming strikes or stops the attacking party from being able to strike through to the creature.
a *very* rough idea of its statblock. Like I said, the right and left brains would be similar, but with different active effects they can do and different spells they can cast.
lore-wise, this elder brain was found in the Underdark by the BBEG, who took it and experimented on it. She now uses it as a conduit to control parts of her army known as the Human Almalgamations-- undead soldiers who are not quite zombies but not quite sentient undead either, using modified illithid brain slugs to control them. The BBEG herself is a god-queen vampire (long story), and while she has a few thousand vampires underneath her, they do not make an army themselves (also, she only turns those with human heritage, but that's less important in-game).
She might have more than one of these under her control, but this is, at the very least, the first elder brain she's had these successful experiments on. It's just a tool to her and her generals, and while the vampire queen is more interested in the arcane, psionics have their uses, too.
This is set in Nebidisk, my high-magic acronial setting, the vampire queen and her cohort are heavily inspired by pre-Soviet Russia, circa the early 20th century, and late 19th. Her full title is Tsariana Rosline Greywinter, the God-Queen of Vampires. she's also the head of a large country, as well as being the direct god of death, the arcane, and undeath. not too important for this particular encounter but i feel like its important context
I am also pulling from the Monster Manual V, for dnd 3.5, for some of the abilities, but if people are more familiar with it and can point me in a more precise direction, I'd really appreciate it.
People are quick to point out that Dungeons and Dragons is designed for dungeon crawler adventures and a lot of the problems players experience come from trying to use the system for things it wasn't designed for. We've all read a hundred think pieces about how it's bad actually that DnD has rules that most players ignore and how there's a lot of unnecessary complexity. Everyone knows that the game is awkwardly trapped between a style of fantasy steeped in mid 20th Century ideas about race and a desire to make the game as inclusive as possible.
But for some reason, I'm the only person here willing to point out the biggest and most obvious flaw with Dungeons and Dragons! Everyone else is too scared to say it, so I guess I will have to be the one to point it out!
The cramped dungeon environment is a really bad fit for dragons. The ability to take to the wing is an important aspect of dragons, both strategically as a game element and mythologically as a representation of unconstrained power. If you put a dragon inside of a dungeon, you are severely limiting the dragons ability to control the pace and shape of the battle. The ability to make tactical fly-by strikes and disrupt their enemies, both with blasts of fire breath and by snatching specific targets and moving them away from their defensive positions, are incredibly important for making dragons complex, engaging, and terrifying foes.
Fighting a dragon inside the dungeon does make sense for a group of level 1 noobs fighting their first white dragon hatchling. You don't want those players feeling overwhelmed, so limiting what the dragon can do makes for a better encounter. However, once your players are familiar with the game, take that adult red dragon and put it outside! The dragon will be able to take full advantage of its more unique abilities and your players will feel challenged to come up with clever solutions to limit the dragon's abilities and turn the tides of battle in their favor. Having to constrain and ground the dragon and then fighting the beast head-on creates a satisfying flow to combat, where the players' actions can significantly impact the battle beyond just reducing the enemy's hit points.
I just wanted to give my own two cents on "involved" combat encounters in D&D and similar TTRPGs.
Generally give your players the expectations that combats are something to be solved rather than beaten. Communicate that with them clearly in order to create more fulfilling combat that isn't hitting things until no enemies are still alive.
Give combat encounters a goal. I'll list a few examples later, but generally you should think of what an encounter is meant to achieve for the players. Sometimes it's fine if it's just "an obstacle meant to be overcome", but this shouldn't be the only goal.
Consider tipping points, when it becomes clear that victory is certain for the player characters, but the combat could still continue. Create off-ramps for such encounters, where you can have a satisfying narrative way of ending it earlier. Fleeing minions after the leader has been killed is a classic.
Consider the environment. Cover, different types of elevation, and dynamic elements (vehicles, rotating gears, a rushing stream, etc) will make an encounter more engaging. This is more challenging to run theater-of-the-mind than with minitiatures/VTTs, but still doable.
Use different types of enemies in the same encounter. A simple way is to use both ranged and melee attackers, allowing your players with ranged options to pick off the enemies further away, while the melee-based heroes have their own enemies to deal with.
Have enemies with multiple phases. In 5e, enemies with the Mythic trait (mostly found in Mythic Odysseys of Theros and Fizban's Treasury of Dragons) are one example for this, as they gain more abilities the more damage they take. Alternatively consider creating monsters that consist of multiple stat blocks, where defeating certain parts of it changes what it can do and what your players can do to it. E.g. turn Mazaal from The Legend of Zelda - The Minish Cap, into a D&D monster.
I'm not good at making monster stat blocks, but imagine a construct with two hands (each with a distinct stat block) and a head that shoots beams from its eyes. The head has a Tethered trait that makes it invulnerable while the hands (that can grapple your heroes!) are still active. Once the hands are defeated the head starts jumping around like crazy, knocking over the heroes with shockwaves as it hits the ground. That sounds like a very engaging combat encounter to me!
Now when it comes to combat goals, here are a few suggestions:
Ensuring the safety of an escorted NPC or a valuable item that the party is transporting to a different loccation.
Keeping an enemy in a magic circle that allows it to be killed permanently, since it would otherwise just regenerate or be outright invulnerable.
Waiting for reinforcements as hordes of enemies attack the party, placing a timer on the encounter.
Preventing an enemy from reaching a specific spot on the map, such as an altar or a mechanism.
or, "Running Encounters with an Information Economy"
PREAMBLE: Something that frustrated me for a long time as a player in TTRPGs was how hard it could be to guess enemy tactics. There are a lot of things that you can do with good tactics, but a lot of the time you lack the information to use those tactics. For example, setting up a prepared action to counterspell just wastes your turn if nobody tries to cast anything. This can be especially frustrating when you're up first in the initiative, and don't have much more than just a description of who/what you're fighting to go off of.
AN ANECDOTE: One day I decided to try an experiment. Each round of combat was supposed to be happening in the same six seconds of elapsed time, right? So, the next time I went first, I asked my GM if I could see what the enemies were doing - everything was happening at the same time, so I should be able to read their body language, the directions they were starting to move, and where they were looking to get an idea of how they were going to act, right?
As I honestly had been expecting, my GM said no. It wasn't their turn yet, so they weren't doing anything yet. I resolved that I did not want to run my own games that way, so I came up with some ways that when I ran a game, I could help my players to not be going into battle completely blind.
THE POINT: Tipping players off to enemy tactics is just good GMing. When they get a "read" on an enemy, they'll feel like an absolute genius. When the party plans for what the enemy will do and uses tactics to put the odds in their favor, they will lose their minds over how cool they feel. Here's a couple things I do to make that happen.
The first is giving enemies tells for what they're planning, which sounds simple, but actually requires a change to how encounters are typically run. Basically, you should know what an enemy will do before their turn, and typically at the end of the last one. Then you narrate them doing something to hint at that as part of their action. For example, a dragon might inhale deeply before using its breath weapon, or a manticore might slowly go from lashing its tail from side to side to holding it stiff as it prepares to launch a volley of spikes.
You don't have to stay committed to a course of action once you've given a tell, but if the players do something that would cause an enemy to reconsider its tactics (or determine them, if you hadn't decided anything for it yet), that's another time to give a tell. For instance, you might have already described a dire wolf lowering on its haunches as it starts stalking toward the ranger, ready to pounce, when the halfling rogue stops taking cover behind the fighter. In that case, you might describe the dire wolf shifting its stance, licking its lips as it turns its attention to this weaker-looking prey.
There's no need to give a tell for every action, of course. That would get taxing for you, and tedious for the party. Generously sprinkling in clues as to key things enemies want to do can keep players engaged, and help them break through the indecision about what to do with their own turns, though.
That brings me to my other trick. If you read the anecdote section above, this is something I came up with as a direct result of that. I decided to add a special action type that is just for the players, the "Observe Action". Every player gets one Observe Action on each of their turns that they can use in a number of ways to get more information about the conditions on the battlefield, or to gain an advantage.
The first use is just applying their skills in the normal way. If they could use a skill to recall information about a particular creature, they now do this as an Observe Action. This one is technically an explicit nerf in Pathfinder, since recalling is stated to be no action, but I find that most groups only check on one monster at a time anyway, and on the occasions when they don't, starting combat with check spam just slows the action down, so I include it. It usually doesn't hurt anything, and having it on the list can actually remind players that doing this is a thing they can do in the first place.
The second is also more or less a bookkeeping task, and that's using informational magic, like the Detect spells. It doesn't change the cast time, but once the spell is up, any further focus to gain more information uses their Observe Action. This is mostly just to remind players they can have these going while they fight, but I do also make any part of using the spell once cast that would normally be a Standard Action into an Observe instead, as a small bonus.
The third use, and the first truly new option, is to "read" a group. This is similar to recalling information, but allows for some different questions to be asked. Use these as a baseline.
Who has the highest/lowest HP?
Who can deal the most damage with physical attacks.
Who has the highest bonus to hit?
General "lean" of the group's alignment. (Most common alignment component on a single axis.)
How challenging does this fight look? (General CR range of the encounter, described as Easy, Average, Challenging, etc...)
Individual with the highest/lowest value in a particular ability score.
Highest/lowest value in a particular saving throw.
Basically, this option is there to help players decide who to focus their attention on. Let them use it for whatever will help them get a better idea of who or what they're facing. Let them ask their main question up-front before rolling to establish the check (whatever skill and DC seems appropriate), but let them ask additional questions after if they get a high roll.
It goes hand in hand with the last option, which is gauging intent. This one should probably be done with Insight/Sense Motive, and it just comes down to that original question. What's going to happen next?
The first way this can work is that the player focuses on a specific enemy, and gets a sense of what that enemy specifically intends to do. In other words, the player tells you who they want to get a "tell" for, and if they succeed, you give it to them.
Alternatively, the player might ask if anyone in the enemy group is about to take a specific action. For example, "Is the cleric about to get targeted." or "Does anyone look like they're going to call for backup?" So basically, instead of focusing on the behavior of one individual, the player is staying alert for a particular situation. Don't let the players get too broad with this one, of course, but it's okay to be a little generous with what they can ask about.
Even more than when I advised it above, if someone successfully gauges the intent of their enemy, and that intent changes, let them know. You should treat a success as them continuing to be alert to what they were observing for until their next turn.
I also toyed with the idea of letting players use their Observation to look for openings to improve their chance of hitting, or for a weak spot to do more damage. I like the idea of this, but felt like it stepped on the toes of other, existing options too much, and would be too tempting to players over the other uses. So I decided to keep Observation Actions as purely a source of information, and not directly pumping numbers. Still, if it sounds like it would work for you, try it out.
For everyone who read this incredibly long post of mine, I hope it helps you out. I haven't done a post like this in a long time, and I really appreciate you taking the time to read it. If these rules improve anyone else's games, hearing that would really make my day.
I am terrible in mathing out 5e encounters, and this one is actually important
I want an encounter with Orc bandits, who use goblin slaves as cannon fodder. They are trying to steal food from a merchant passing along a road. The players spot it from far away, and can ambush the bandits. The encounter happens in the woods.
The goal of the encounter should be to defeat\kill the bandits, but protecting the merchant, or at the very least his food
I want the map to have elements of the third dimension, and I want it to be blanced to be an easy encounter to kill everyone, but that protecting the merchant will be difficult
The group is 7 players with 5th-level characters, half casters half not.
