Am I the only one who doesn't like the arbitrary "boss monster" tag?

[B.T.]

A Goblin Manslayer [Elite] is a boss monster because he's so much tougher than the PCs individually are.

The keyword doesn't pile on hit points or damage. The monster is a badass, so he can take more punishment and dish out more damage. The keyword reflects that.

I'm not going to bother arguing this degree of hairsplitting. ("Which came first, the keyword or the monster's difficulty?" "Pardon? I was gazing at my navel.")

There are significant downsides to simply throwing higher-level monsters at PCs in an effort to drive home the point that the PCs are fighting a head honcho while still expecting them to emerge victorious. For instance, a higher level monster might have defenses so high as to make them extremely difficult to hit, bogging the fight down in miss after disappointing miss. Elite and solo monsters are a way of correcting for this, by providing monsters that are essentially two or five individual monsters stacked on top of each other.

The purpose of "bounded accuracy" is to prevent this from happening.

Also, I'm just ignoring the dude who came in here and started telling us that if your games don't have boss monsters they're wrong because, well, that's ridiculous and presumptuous.

 

[Dannager]

I'm not going to bother arguing this degree of hairsplitting. ("Which came first, the keyword or the monster's difficulty?" "Pardon? I was gazing at my navel.")

So then your position is that badass monsters should not exist? That seems silly, but it's the only remaining one I can think of, since you've rejected both a) deciding that a monster is elite or solo and changing its stats to match, and b) deciding that a monster is much tougher and changing its keyword to match.

And yes, bounded accuracy addresses this as well. Both are solutions.

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

I wonder if it would help if we actually had 80 (yes 80) levels of monsters. Provided their progression was sensible, then an 80th level monster would be the correct challenge for 4 20th level PCs.

 

[Minigiant]

For those who say bounded accuracy handles it,

IT DOESN'T.

Damage and effects still increase with level even if accuracy really does not.

A level 1 goblin and a level 6 bugbear might both have +2 to attack but the bugbear deals twice the damage. Even if you refluff the bugbear as the goblin chief, he will still one hit knock out most PCs. And he still can be killed in a round.


Rocket tag.
Whoever wins initiative, wins the fight.
Very anticlimactic.

 

[B.T.]

So then your position is that badass monsters should not exist?

The level system should handle badass monsters.

For those who say bounded accuracy handles it,

IT DOESN'T.

Damage and effects still increase with level even if accuracy really does not.

A level 1 goblin and a level 6 bugbear might both have +2 to attack but the bugbear deals twice the damage. Even if you refluff the bugbear as the goblin chief, he will still one hit knock out most PCs. And he still can be killed in a round.


Rocket tag.
Whoever wins initiative, wins the fight.
Very anticlimactic.

The solution is not to have solo boss fights to begin with. It's a bad trope drawn primarily from bad sources (comic books, videogames, cartoons/anime).

 

[Stalker0]

Its been said before, but hopefully I can say it more convincingly

As monster design evolved through the years, developers began to realize a fundamental truth....a fight with 4 weak monsters works differently than a fight with 1 big monster.

Further, they realized that the 1 big monster fights were often worse than the 4 monster fights....that one strong monster was simply not pulling the equivalent weight.

The reason is this...the rules system is designed with those standard monsters in mind. The one set of actions a round, how defenses work, how effective debilitating conditions are, etc.....everything is designed around the party mentality. Simply scaling those numbers doesn't fundamentally fix the problem, because so many of the rules remain the same.

One of 4e's greatest contributions to the game was this recognition, and it provided an avenue to alter game design through the elite and solo tags.

The solo tag gives license to bend or break the normal rules. A solo monster gets to act more often, repel effects that a normal monster could not, do more area damage, and be significantly tougher than an equivalent single monster.

And even here it took 4e a long time to develop solo monsters that really did the job. The early attempts were pretty bad to be honest, but eventually I think they got it right.

4e got a lot of stuff wrong, but its approach to monsters was spot on. Those rule exceptions created better encounters and more balanced and yet exciting fights.

I think there is a place for boss monsters in the game, but I don't think designations such as elite or solo belong on goblins.

I don't agree with this argument myself, but its an argument I can very much understand.

A lot of what we are debating isn't so much mechanics as it is the flavor those mechanics invoke.

I think we can all get behind the idea that dragons and beholders are just different from your usual monster. They are special, powerful, the exception to the rule. So for them to use fundamentally different mechanics is not a huge flavor issue imo.

However, the same cannot be said for the "elite goblin". For some, it can be a flavor break that one goblin has X abilities, but the elite goblin has all sorts of weird different abilities other goblins don't.

So perhaps for the humanoid monsters, working the tougher monster angle is the way to go for boss encounters. But for other monsters, I think the solo and elite tags are extraordinarily useful and should be maintained.

 

[Minigiant]

The solution is not to have solo boss fights to begin with. It's a bad trope drawn primarily from bad sources (comic books, videogames, cartoons/anime).

Contrived that be, my friend.
Fights where one side is a single combatant or a single combatant with a few much weaker allies is common. It is natural in many situation.

Dragons are known for their selfishness. Must I force every dragon fight to be pairs or make his wimpy henchmen not only appear in the fight but also be stronger?
Must the evil wizard always summon monsters first turn?
Must ogres always appear in gangs and thus only be level 10+ fights?

 

[Ahnehnois]

For those who say bounded accuracy handles it,

IT DOESN'T.

Damage and effects still increase with level even if accuracy really does not.

A level 1 goblin and a level 6 bugbear might both have +2 to attack but the bugbear deals twice the damage. Even if you refluff the bugbear as the goblin chief, he will still one hit knock out most PCs. And he still can be killed in a round.


Rocket tag.
Whoever wins initiative, wins the fight.
Very anticlimactic.

I think that's more illustrative of why bounded accuracy with scaling damage is not a good idea. Truly flatter math would have the effect that people say it does, but the current 5e system is not truly flat math because something still scales.

So then your position is that badass monsters should not exist?

The idea is that badass monsters are what they are because of what the monster substantively is (i.e. a dragon vs a kobold), choices the DM makes, and what plays out at the table. Putting a keyword "badass" on a monster does not make it so, or help a designer or a DM make it so. At best, it's wasted space. At worst, it's a metagame distraction.

For most of D&D's history, a monster stat block has been neither of those things. It has been a representation of certain capacities of the monster in a suitable mechanical form for usign that monster in game play.

Perhaps not, but I'm not really buying the appeal to tradition. Monster stat blocks may have been limited to this purpose at one point, but D&D evolved to the point where they mean more now (any backwards steps by a certain edition nonwithstanding).

 

[FireLance]

Putting a keyword "badass" on a monster does not make it so, or help a designer or a DM make it so. At best, it's wasted space. At worst, it's a metagame distraction.

Funny, I would have thought that at best, you'd get a monster designed to provide a more interesting challenge for a group of PCs than one that simply has more hit points/higher defenses/higher damage. At worst, you get more hit points/higher defenses/higher damage AND you have to ignore the label.

 

[Minigiant]

I think that's more illustrative of why bounded accuracy with scaling damage is not a good idea. Truly flatter math would have the effect that people say it does, but the current 5e system is not truly flat math because something still scales.

The issue is truly flat math will never work for D&D. It has characters going from lowly kobolds to mighty dragons. Maybe in a realistic war game where there are only humans maybe. But in D&D, Something has to scale.

Scaling has to happen. And the fewer things that scale, the more exceptions you must make to create the story and game play you want.