If you've seen my other post, I need more advice for the Horror themed dnd I'm planning. There's a lot to unravel
I HATE horror movies that end with a happy ending. If I saw the big scary monster in the film end up getting killed by some teenagers or a single mom and her 5 year old kid I'm not going to be awake in my bed in fear the monster will come for me
cuz' it's dead.
For the final boss, how can I make it interesting and challenging, and give them a 'happy' ending without letting the thing die? And letting them fear that it's still out there? Letting them just rough it up and then it fleeing is also kinda lame ya know. I feel like the boss should be more about them escaping it with their lives than the other way around.
From a story telling perspective, this could be pretty simple. But mechanics wise? I'm bad at that. Which is part of the reason I'm trying out new things. There's just so much you can so with dice rolls to make it fun
Do you want the players to flee, or do you want them to believe the boss could still be alive after the fight?
Also, what is your boss? Mechanic's wise its hard to give ideas on how to make the boss seem scary without knowing what kind of boss it is.
As for fleeing, I have personally found that when attacking as the boss if I describe his attacks in depth making each one very detailed my adventures usually get the idea if they walked into a fight they can't handle.
I'm open to anything, but a chase scene was my first idea. Not necessarily them giving up but them winning by getting away.
The boss is a race I made up that's sort of like a devil, her goal is to feed her 'children' which are a bunch of monsters that can only travel through water (but it's foggy in the town). She's probably not a hard hitter and relies on group attacking. She's kind of grudge-esc. I haven't worked out all her attacks and such yet but she can swim very well and is hiding in the lake for most the campaign without them knowing.
I haven't planned her stats or attacks much yet, so I'm open to ideas there
Well... A pretty classic defeating the big bad trope is to destroy some sort of artifact binding them to this plane. They defeat the bad guy by sending them off into oblivion... but... make it obvious that it isn't dead, just banished from the plane.
Part of the problem with enduring bad guys in movies is that when the director wants the viewer to know there will be a sequel, they just show, a moving finger, a missing corpse, an egg, a baby (whatever), another victim.
In your case, you can't really give that information to the players. You could however, drop rumors after they have been "victorious". After a session or two, they hear of a town with the same type of killings or some village girl found a strange stone and has since gone missing...
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"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
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If you've seen my other post, I need more advice for the Horror themed dnd I'm planning. There's a lot to unravel
I HATE horror movies that end with a happy ending. If I saw the big scary monster in the film end up getting killed by some teenagers or a single mom and her 5 year old kid I'm not going to be awake in my bed in fear the monster will come for me
cuz' it's dead.
For the final boss, how can I make it interesting and challenging, and give them a 'happy' ending without letting the thing die? And letting them fear that it's still out there? Letting them just rough it up and then it fleeing is also kinda lame ya know.
I feel like the boss should be more about them escaping it with their lives than the other way around.
From a story telling perspective, this could be pretty simple. But mechanics wise? I'm bad at that. Which is part of the reason I'm trying out new things.
There's just so much you can so with dice rolls to make it fun
Do you want the players to flee, or do you want them to believe the boss could still be alive after the fight?
Also, what is your boss? Mechanic's wise its hard to give ideas on how to make the boss seem scary without knowing what kind of boss it is.
As for fleeing, I have personally found that when attacking as the boss if I describe his attacks in depth making each one very detailed my adventures usually get the idea if they walked into a fight they can't handle.
I'm open to anything, but a chase scene was my first idea. Not necessarily them giving up but them winning by getting away.
The boss is a race I made up that's sort of like a devil, her goal is to feed her 'children' which are a bunch of monsters that can only travel through water (but it's foggy in the town). She's probably not a hard hitter and relies on group attacking. She's kind of grudge-esc. I haven't worked out all her attacks and such yet but she can swim very well and is hiding in the lake for most the campaign without them knowing.
I haven't planned her stats or attacks much yet, so I'm open to ideas there
Well... A pretty classic defeating the big bad trope is to destroy some sort of artifact binding them to this plane. They defeat the bad guy by sending them off into oblivion... but... make it obvious that it isn't dead, just banished from the plane.
Part of the problem with enduring bad guys in movies is that when the director wants the viewer to know there will be a sequel, they just show, a moving finger, a missing corpse, an egg, a baby (whatever), another victim.
In your case, you can't really give that information to the players. You could however, drop rumors after they have been "victorious". After a session or two, they hear of a town with the same type of killings or some village girl found a strange stone and has since gone missing...
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale