I was recently using a legendary boss (which I don't do all that often), and I was finding the legendary actions... kind of boring. Yeah, they contributed a bunch of damage to the encounter, but I'm not sure a bunch of chip damage is really what bosses need. While I think it's a good idea to have more than one action per round, to avoid action economy issues and long periods of not much changing followed by an abrupt huge swing, going all the way to 4 actions (3 of which don't do much) seems an overcorrection.
I was thinking to instead go with twice per round, but make the extra action much more significant -- maybe just give the creature two initiative scores, separated by 10 points or so -- but I was curious if other DMs had the same feeling.
Legendary actions supposedly balance the playing field for a boss vs the party.
If a monster only has offensive LAs then I think you should feel free to change it up to defense, healing, or movement. Even if if bends the after another creature's action rule. Play it as a Reaction.
It's a BOSS it's supposed to do things that make the fight challenging and interesting.
One of my favorites is the use of minions. The boss commands a minion to jump in front of a bullet saving the boss from damage. Another would be for the boss to eat or otherwise suck the life from a minion to heal. Changing the environment is also a good one.
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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?"
Legendary actions supposedly balance the playing field for a boss vs the party.
That's not actually what they do. Consider an adult red dragon. Over 3 rounds, standard damage calculation is
Breath Weapon (hitting 2 targets): 59 x2 = 118 damage. Legendary Actions: Scorching Ray (21), Rend (18), Rend (18); total 175 damage.
Multiattack: Scorching Ray (21), Rend (18), Rend (18); Legendary Actions: Scorching Ray (21), Rend (18), Rend (18); total 114 damage.
Multiattack: Scorching Ray (21), Rend (18), Rend (18); Legendary Actions: Scorching Ray (21), Rend (18), Rend (18); total 114 damage.
It would not really change the overall balance if legendary actions were removed, breath weapon changed from 17d6 (59) to 25d6 (87), Scorching Ray was changed to level 5, and Rend became 4d8+8(26) physical, 3d6(10) fire. The total over 3 rounds would then be
Multiattack: Scorching Ray (42), Rend (36), Rend (36); total 114 damage
Multiattack: Scorching Ray (42), Rend (36), Rend (36); total 114 damage
Mostly the way this would be different is that there's a much more significant chance of 'full hp to 0 hp with no-one able to intervene' with the second setup, since you might well be using said dragon against a party of around level 12, and a significant fraction of them don't have 87 hp.
In any case, I wasn't saying I dislike legendary actions because they're unfair or unbalanced -- I dislike them because they're boring.
I like them. Fights were 2 characters go, then the monster, then the other 2 go aren't very exciting. If the monster does something after each character goes, it's much more exciting. Some of the dragons have really cool legendary actions, like the Blue Dragon's ability to turn invisible.
As a player, I find legendary actions extremely vexing in the good way of vexing. They make the monster less predictable and give it the opportunity to act multiple times per round in various ways. As the DM, you're controlling them so you don't have to use them, but I don't see why you wouldn't unless it's because you're about to TPK if you do.
If you don't like the actions in your particular legendary monster's statblock, maybe the problem is you need a different monster. Find one you like and if you have to reskin it because you wanted it to be a dragon, all good.
In D&D, no matter the edition but especially in 5E, the Action Economy usually determines the outcome of evenly matched fights. That is to say, unless one side is overwhelmingly stronger than the other, the side with more actions will typically win. Legendary Actions solve this problem in a clever way. A creature with Legendary Actions can take one, and only one, at the end of another creature’s turn. This means that a Legendary Creature has about as many actions as a 4-person party, but also that the number will drop if there are less creatures in the combat. But why go through all this trouble when we can just make the monster stronger?
The link also includes a tool for building and scaling the CR of a homebrew legendary monster that you may find useful.
The problem is that with three legendary actions per round, there's not really enough budget for each one of them to do much.
WDYM?
If you want a monster's CR to be consistent, you have to split up its available power between all of its actions. That means, if a monster is getting three legendary actions, no one can be all that impactful.
You left off the next paragraph, which is the more important one.
We could just make the monster hit harder with bigger numbers. Why go through all this trouble of taking extra attacks when we could just load all that damage into one big attack and kill a player a turn? Because spiking the players is not the point of a boss fight. The job of the dungeon master is to facilitate fun and interesting adventures. The role of the Legendary Creature is to change up that formula occasionally to a solo fight without just throwing a deadly encounter or one-shotting a character.
Now, the above is true: a credible boss for a 3 round encounter, if it's only getting 3 actions, needs to be doing OHKO damage every turn, and since abilities can miss or be saved against, raw damage should be around 150% (you don't need to actually kill a PC, it will look like a credible threat if it's just reducing to 0 hp), but you don't need 3 legendary actions per round to avoid one-shotting PCs. For the vast majority of legendary monsters, removing their legendary actions and giving them an additional turn would do the same thing.
I tend to agree that legendary actions are a beneficial option for combat. In terms of not being able to do much damage, why is that so much of an issue. One thing I like to do with legendary actions is try to balance the action economy even more. How you do that is up to you but some examples which I enjoy are the dazed condition (a creature can only do one of move, take an action, take a bonus action), debilitating affects which require some action cost to remove like being restrained by vines which require an action to break free of. The amount of damage that they are doing is not as important but for solo bosses especially being able to stop the PCs from being able to take 3-6 actions per 1 the monster takes is a massive deal and it helps in a way that just increasing damage wouldn't do. I especially like giving creatures legendary action options which it can't take during its turn.
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I was recently using a legendary boss (which I don't do all that often), and I was finding the legendary actions... kind of boring. Yeah, they contributed a bunch of damage to the encounter, but I'm not sure a bunch of chip damage is really what bosses need. While I think it's a good idea to have more than one action per round, to avoid action economy issues and long periods of not much changing followed by an abrupt huge swing, going all the way to 4 actions (3 of which don't do much) seems an overcorrection.
I was thinking to instead go with twice per round, but make the extra action much more significant -- maybe just give the creature two initiative scores, separated by 10 points or so -- but I was curious if other DMs had the same feeling.
Legendary actions supposedly balance the playing field for a boss vs the party.
If a monster only has offensive LAs then I think you should feel free to change it up to defense, healing, or movement. Even if if bends the after another creature's action rule. Play it as a Reaction.
It's a BOSS it's supposed to do things that make the fight challenging and interesting.
One of my favorites is the use of minions. The boss commands a minion to jump in front of a bullet saving the boss from damage. Another would be for the boss to eat or otherwise suck the life from a minion to heal. Changing the environment is also a good one.
"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
That's not actually what they do. Consider an adult red dragon. Over 3 rounds, standard damage calculation is
It would not really change the overall balance if legendary actions were removed, breath weapon changed from 17d6 (59) to 25d6 (87), Scorching Ray was changed to level 5, and Rend became 4d8+8(26) physical, 3d6(10) fire. The total over 3 rounds would then be
Mostly the way this would be different is that there's a much more significant chance of 'full hp to 0 hp with no-one able to intervene' with the second setup, since you might well be using said dragon against a party of around level 12, and a significant fraction of them don't have 87 hp.
In any case, I wasn't saying I dislike legendary actions because they're unfair or unbalanced -- I dislike them because they're boring.
Ah that's why I suggested trying to make them interesting instead of just an increase in damage.
"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
The problem is that with three legendary actions per round, there's not really enough budget for each one of them to do much.
I like them. Fights were 2 characters go, then the monster, then the other 2 go aren't very exciting. If the monster does something after each character goes, it's much more exciting. Some of the dragons have really cool legendary actions, like the Blue Dragon's ability to turn invisible.
As a player, I find legendary actions extremely vexing in the good way of vexing. They make the monster less predictable and give it the opportunity to act multiple times per round in various ways. As the DM, you're controlling them so you don't have to use them, but I don't see why you wouldn't unless it's because you're about to TPK if you do.
If you don't like the actions in your particular legendary monster's statblock, maybe the problem is you need a different monster. Find one you like and if you have to reskin it because you wanted it to be a dragon, all good.
This is a useful discussion of why Legendary Actions are functionally different from just making more damage: https://rpgbot.net/dnd5/dungeonmasters/legendary-creatures/
The link also includes a tool for building and scaling the CR of a homebrew legendary monster that you may find useful.
If you want a monster's CR to be consistent, you have to split up its available power between all of its actions. That means, if a monster is getting three legendary actions, no one can be all that impactful.
You left off the next paragraph, which is the more important one.
Now, the above is true: a credible boss for a 3 round encounter, if it's only getting 3 actions, needs to be doing OHKO damage every turn, and since abilities can miss or be saved against, raw damage should be around 150% (you don't need to actually kill a PC, it will look like a credible threat if it's just reducing to 0 hp), but you don't need 3 legendary actions per round to avoid one-shotting PCs. For the vast majority of legendary monsters, removing their legendary actions and giving them an additional turn would do the same thing.
I tend to agree that legendary actions are a beneficial option for combat. In terms of not being able to do much damage, why is that so much of an issue. One thing I like to do with legendary actions is try to balance the action economy even more. How you do that is up to you but some examples which I enjoy are the dazed condition (a creature can only do one of move, take an action, take a bonus action), debilitating affects which require some action cost to remove like being restrained by vines which require an action to break free of. The amount of damage that they are doing is not as important but for solo bosses especially being able to stop the PCs from being able to take 3-6 actions per 1 the monster takes is a massive deal and it helps in a way that just increasing damage wouldn't do. I especially like giving creatures legendary action options which it can't take during its turn.