Player Bad Luck (Nearly) Ruins Boss Fight, News at Eleven

Feeling in need of a little venting about last night’s session. Everything had been going swimmingly with the game. People had done some great role-playing with an NPC (so they were all full-up on Inspiration) and then we get to the big fight with the dragon. The fight opens with some solid hits on both sides.

And then…the ranger rolls a nat 1 with her shot using the Arrow of Dragon-Slaying. And from there, all the players’ rolls tank. The table is a large one, yet we still went whole rounds without anyone landing a hit on the dragon. The PCs’ HP are dropping. I can see the frustration and exhaustion building on the players’ faces. I suggest stopping mid-battle and picking up next time, but no one wants to do that.

I shave some HP off the dragon to speed things up (being a large table, as stated above, I tend to increase monster HP for the big fights so they’re not over in two or three rounds. But when they can’t even hit it, that doesn’t matter much. I think about throwing a cave-in to change things up, or having the damage lower the creature’s AC. But nothing feels right, doesn’t feel like it would just cheapen the win.

In the end, the PCs were triumphant, but it was such a slog. I know that there’s not much I can do about fickle dice, but I always try to improve my game. Any thoughts on what I could’ve done differently in this situation?

Typically, a challenge is perceived as a "slog" when the outcome is basically known but you're just rolling it out and it's taking forever. At best you're testing to see how many spell slots get used and how many hit points the PCs have at the end. Those stakes tend to be fairly uninteresting and becomes doubly so when it takes a long time to get an outcome.

Dragon fights tend to benefit from legendary actions and lair actions which keep things a little more interesting and varied. Were you using those? How much were playing up and using the terrain in interesting ways? Were the players doing the same? Were they taking actions other than swinging a sword, loosing an arrow, or casting a cantrip or did they have more interesting options? Were both you and they making your best effort to describe the bits your role asks you to describe? Was everyone getting their turns resolved quickly so that no single person was waiting a long time for their turn to come around, checking out mentally?

Ultimately, if the "slog" you're perceiving is due to the outcome being known and the dice making it take longer to get there, you can just end in narration in my view or change the outcome such as by having the dragon flee or offer to parlay. Then it at least potentially becomes a chase scene or social interaction challenge which changes the scene and the stakes up in an interesting way. This is also a good place for a wave of new enemies to enter the scene to mix things up and add to the difficulty.

It really comes down to the "dramatic question," that is, the question that frames the stakes of the scene: "Will the PCs slay the dragon or will they be slain by it?" Once that question is effectively answered, you may as well wrap it up or change it up.

Yep, I was using all of those, plus the environment. The white dragon caught them in a choke point. The rogue got boxed in with a wall of ice, and the freezing clouds and falling icicles wreaked havoc. And only one PC thought to get out of the choke point (or get creative with her actions, getting good use out of oil and alchemists fire over time).

But most of the PCs just hammered away ineffectually at the dragon with plain melee attacks. Heck, the paladin neglected to move his moonbeam spell back onto the dragon after it moved, opting instead to swing his sword and miss repeatedly.

In the end, when loss finally was a given, yeah, the dragon fled. But until then, I just couldn’t justify fleeing when two PCs had gone down, and at least three more were at single digit HP.

Perhaps, looking at your advice about them using the environment, I could’ve given them hints about how “the low-hanging icicles above him shake and shiver precariously as the dragon roars” to encourage them.

iserith said:

Dragon fights tend to benefit from legendary actions and lair actions which keep things a little more interesting and varied. Were you using those? How much were playing up and using the terrain in interesting ways? Were the players doing the same? Were they taking actions other than swinging a sword, loosing an arrow, or casting a cantrip or did they have more interesting options? Were both you and they making your best effort to describe the bits your role asks you to describe? Was everyone getting their turns resolved quickly so that no single person was waiting a long time for their turn to come around, checking out mentally?

Ultimately, if the "slog" you're perceiving is due to the outcome being known and the dice making it take longer to get there, you can just end in narration in my view or change the outcome such as by having the dragon flee or offer to parlay. Then it at least potentially becomes a chase scene or social interaction challenge which changes the scene and the stakes up in an interesting way. This is also a good place for a wave of new enemies to enter the scene to mix things up and add to the difficulty.

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Ralif Redhammer said:

Yep, I was using all of those, plus the environment. The white dragon caught them in a choke point. The rogue got boxed in with a wall of ice, and the freezing clouds and falling icicles wreaked havoc. And only one PC thought to get out of the choke point (or get creative with her actions, getting good use out of oil and alchemists fire over time).

But most of the PCs just hammered away ineffectually at the dragon with plain melee attacks. Heck, the paladin neglected to move his moonbeam spell back onto the dragon after it moved, opting instead to swing his sword and miss repeatedly.

In the end, when loss finally was a given, yeah, the dragon fled. But until then, I just couldn’t justify fleeing when two PCs had gone down, and at least three more were at single digit HP.

Perhaps, looking at your advice about them using the environment, I could’ve given them hints about how “the low-hanging icicles above him shake and shiver precariously as the dragon roars” to encourage them.

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Haha, you're brave to put the dragon in melee range!

It sounds like in some ways the PCs were not being particularly tactical. When the dice go the wrong way, my expectation is that players will shift tactics to start getting advantage or bonuses to the rolls (Inspiration, bardic inspiration, bless, Help action, etc.). So that's something maybe the group could work on.

With white dragons in particular, I like to put useful magic items in blocks of ice. I describe them in the environment and then it becomes something of a trade-off for the players to consider: Do I spend an action to get that magic item or do I use it to attack? When the item is particularly useful in context (say, a potion of cold resistance or potion of flying), it makes for interesting PC tactics to get those items then use them against the dragon.

Do your players think it was a boring fight? Honestly it sounds like the dragon kicked the crap out of them and they won by the skin of their teeth.

Frustrating sure but probably not boring, they might have considered it a big win!

iserith said:

Typically, a challenge is perceived as a "slog" when the outcome is basically known but you're just rolling it out and it's taking forever.

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This is why when folks refer to boss fights, especially in the context of D&D, alarm bells ring. For drama, we should not know the outcome - if we do, then we're in slog territory*, where we're running the numbers, party resources vs monsters, just to get to the end.

This in and of itself is not necessarily a 'bad thing' - some folks love watching values slowly tick over as they make choices from a pool of options. However, it can be greatly improved by shifting the focus of the encounter, by allowing loss/losing to be a perfectly valid option**. This can be achieved with a time through a technique that is sometimes referred to in game design as 'displacement', though its not unique to games.

Displacement (a technique/tool that encourages/forces player action) is common in film (ticking time bomb) and games (simplest form being a time limit). A more colourful example might be harm the dragon enough to scare it away from the village before it finishes torching their homes or defeat the dragon before it can free its mate from a magic spell***.

Now, the DM has a powerful tool for dictating a point of resolution - they can decide the encounter will last X rounds, and the pressure is now on the party to push the resolution they want in said time.

Ralif Redhammer said:

Perhaps, looking at your advice about them using the environment, I could’ve given them hints about how “the low-hanging icicles above him shake and shiver precariously as the dragon roars” to encourage them.

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Yeah, and this is a problem with computer games as well, where signalling is poor and the player, believing (often quite rightly) that there 'must be a way to win else why is it happening', cannot read - and thus learn - whats from a given encounter/event. They also often have the luxury of repeating an encounter/event until they succeed, something that D&D tables typically do not have. Its always a good idea to stress even that which we might believe to be obvious, if it is critical success, though we've all forgotten to do this at one time or another.


*Which makes sense, as we're basically simulating the murder/destruction of one agent by another - fun for some but personally, a snooze fest.

**I do believe that failure needs to be an option in encounter designs. While boss fights is not a term unique to computer games, its certainly strongly associated with them. The problem here is that, in a computer game, success is ultimately meant to be possible - its even expected. Yet in D&D success should never be expected. Welcomed, planned for and enjoyed, sure, but the beauty of the medium is that win or lose, success or failure, the game can keep going. The drama, the adventure can adapt to the table's play.

***In both scenarios, failure is an optoin - in the first, the dragon can torch the village and snatch up some villagers before retreating to their layer, presenting the players with the next stage in the adventure. In the second, if the mate is released, the DM should provide the players with the option to retreat, so that they can regroup and prepare to engage a now more-powerful, greater ranging threat.

Another, perhaps more obvious though often missed scenario is the simple, 'monster fights until it thinks it can't lose then tries to retreat' - why would an intelligent being such a dragon stick it out unless they though they were winning? And if they are winning, then the party is under pressure to retreat or try something desperate. If the party has the obvious upper hand and the dragon has no escape then - IMO that's a boring encounter because we all but know the outcome, why not skip to the end and avoid the dice rolls? And of course, there's always the option of the dragon giving up and attempting to negotiate for its life.

I agree with [MENTION=5889]Stalker0[/MENTION]

Was it really a slog?

If the players just barely won it, they'll remember a hard long fight against a dragon that they won by the skin of their teeth.

Would you rather have that or a cakewalk that'll leave the players going "that? that was a dragon?"

To answer your question though:

If the luck is really running that bad, or worse if the HP or something else in the situation was miscalculated to make the fight much harder than it was intended to be, I may have certain things happen that would even the odds.

For example, White Dragons are arrogant to the extreme and yet not particularly bright (for Dragons). I might have the dragon open itself up to an AoO or 2 because it can't conceive of these puny beings hurting it.

And/or I might have it position itself in such a way that the PCs can flank it (and thus really mitigate bad rolls).

Things that would be believable/justifiable for the monster that also happen to mitigate terrible luck.

No, no one was bored-looking, that's for sure. And they certainly considered it a big win by the XP they got!

Stalker0 said:

Do your players think it was a boring fight? Honestly it sounds like the dragon kicked the crap out of them and they won by the skin of their teeth.

Frustrating sure but probably not boring, they might have considered it a big win!

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What’s obvious to the DM isn’t always obvious to the players, so true. I’m thinking about, at the start of the next session, mentioning how much as a DM I love when PCs interact with the environment to their advantage.

Because, yeah, I'm a sucker for swashbuckling moves and clever stunts.

Gardens & Goblins said:

Yeah, and this is a problem with computer games as well, where signalling is poor and the player, believing (often quite rightly) that there 'must be a way to win else why is it happening', cannot read - and thus learn - whats from a given encounter/event. They also often have the luxury of repeating an encounter/event until they succeed, something that D&D tables typically do not have. Its always a good idea to stress even that which we might believe to be obvious, if it is critical success, though we've all forgotten to do this at one time or another.

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My group took 95 minutes to kill the demi lich in Dead in Thay. Some times bad dice rolls happen to groups. You can either call the fight or just slog on.