Hi, my players are approaching a big boss fight in my campaign (which has a lot of homebrew content), and I was wondering if this which way to manage the fight would be better.
A little bit of context, the enemy boss is a massive ooze-like creature/planet that's crossing a rift in space to land on the city and start eating everything. As it is, the party has no way of fighting it, however they have been helping in the construction of a cannon that can actually destroy the enemy and save everyone, but they'll have to protect it until it can fire; so here's the fight:
The boss is not targettable by attacks or spells, but it will take at least 20 turns to reach the city and that would be game over (literally a TPK, but I can increase the amount of turns it takes if it seems too fast).
The boss can drop meteors that spawn enemies and try to attack the weapon. The enemies are aberrations the party had fought before, starting with the lesser minions and ending with 3 bosses at the same time (if this is too much, only the last wave of bosses could be used).
The cannon takes 10 turns to charge the attack and fire, and here's my doubt, is increasing the charging time each time it is hit and giving it HP too harsh? or just the charging time increase would suffice?
The issue I see with this is it seems too narrow. The players can't really think of their own plans and tactics to deal with the BBEG, they are seemingly forced to just follow the plan and roll the dice to see if the plan works. The other issue I see is that if the plan isn't accomplished within 20 turns, it becomes an automatic TPK. For a BBEG with minions this will happen a lot sooner than you think.
Some suggestions:
A lot of this will depend on the battlemap you design. First, I would suggest making a way the party can push back the Ooze. This can be a tower that can push the Ooze back 5 turns, but the tower can only be used once and there are only 3 such towers set up on the battlemap.
Second, 10 turns to charge the cannon is too much time. Rather than have it set to time, I would suggest the players need to gather the ammo and load the cannon. The ammo can be stored 90ft away and BBEG minions can try to stall players from reaching the ammo. Also, limiting the necessary cannon to hitpoints can be too cruel, but perhaps the party need to mend it if it gets hit by minions too much?
The waves of minions can be up to you, I don't know what bosses you had in mind to use, but maybe have each boss show up with a wave of minions. Example, an ogre commanding a troop of goblins.
Main idea is you want to give the players room to come up with thier own strategies and plans to defeat the BBEG rather than an ordained path the players must follow.
The towers idea is nice, the enemy is falling on the city, but I guess some sort of force field or magnetic force can slow its descend, so yeah, it can be applied.
I thought about the ammo before, but I considered that would be even more of a railroad other than just defending the cannon (I mean, aside from defending it and killing as many monsters as possible, they would also have to worry about who fetches the ammo and also protect that guy). The weapon is a self-charging cannon, so I was thinking if the loading time increasing on hit would be a suitable weakness.
The players will have fought every enemy (aside from the falling boss) so they'd already come up with their strategies for each of them and information about the big ooze was given beforehand (they know it is coming and that's why they helped in the construction of the weapon), so I guess they are following their own plans?
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Hi, my players are approaching a big boss fight in my campaign (which has a lot of homebrew content), and I was wondering if this which way to manage the fight would be better.
A little bit of context, the enemy boss is a massive ooze-like creature/planet that's crossing a rift in space to land on the city and start eating everything. As it is, the party has no way of fighting it, however they have been helping in the construction of a cannon that can actually destroy the enemy and save everyone, but they'll have to protect it until it can fire; so here's the fight:
The boss is not targettable by attacks or spells, but it will take at least 20 turns to reach the city and that would be game over (literally a TPK, but I can increase the amount of turns it takes if it seems too fast).
The boss can drop meteors that spawn enemies and try to attack the weapon. The enemies are aberrations the party had fought before, starting with the lesser minions and ending with 3 bosses at the same time (if this is too much, only the last wave of bosses could be used).
The cannon takes 10 turns to charge the attack and fire, and here's my doubt, is increasing the charging time each time it is hit and giving it HP too harsh? or just the charging time increase would suffice?
The issue I see with this is it seems too narrow. The players can't really think of their own plans and tactics to deal with the BBEG, they are seemingly forced to just follow the plan and roll the dice to see if the plan works. The other issue I see is that if the plan isn't accomplished within 20 turns, it becomes an automatic TPK. For a BBEG with minions this will happen a lot sooner than you think.
Some suggestions:
A lot of this will depend on the battlemap you design. First, I would suggest making a way the party can push back the Ooze. This can be a tower that can push the Ooze back 5 turns, but the tower can only be used once and there are only 3 such towers set up on the battlemap.
Second, 10 turns to charge the cannon is too much time. Rather than have it set to time, I would suggest the players need to gather the ammo and load the cannon. The ammo can be stored 90ft away and BBEG minions can try to stall players from reaching the ammo. Also, limiting the necessary cannon to hitpoints can be too cruel, but perhaps the party need to mend it if it gets hit by minions too much?
The waves of minions can be up to you, I don't know what bosses you had in mind to use, but maybe have each boss show up with a wave of minions. Example, an ogre commanding a troop of goblins.
Main idea is you want to give the players room to come up with thier own strategies and plans to defeat the BBEG rather than an ordained path the players must follow.
Thanks for the tips.
The towers idea is nice, the enemy is falling on the city, but I guess some sort of force field or magnetic force can slow its descend, so yeah, it can be applied.
I thought about the ammo before, but I considered that would be even more of a railroad other than just defending the cannon (I mean, aside from defending it and killing as many monsters as possible, they would also have to worry about who fetches the ammo and also protect that guy). The weapon is a self-charging cannon, so I was thinking if the loading time increasing on hit would be a suitable weakness.
The players will have fought every enemy (aside from the falling boss) so they'd already come up with their strategies for each of them and information about the big ooze was given beforehand (they know it is coming and that's why they helped in the construction of the weapon), so I guess they are following their own plans?