Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5913169" data-attributes="member: 2067">You don't HAVE to have BBEGs in adventure-based design. The game works normally without it, and lets people snipe all the goblins they want. You CAN have a BBEG in adventure-based design by rolling a bunch of goblins together into one creature.Say, an Assassin has a Death Attack that deals, on average, enough damage to kill an enemy (8 times normal damage in 4e). Most encounters can be ended with that death attack before they even begin. One-hit-kills.But the BBEG counts as two or three or four normal enemies, so he has two or three or four times the normal HP, so the assassin's death attack only deals half or a third or a fourth of the creature's HP (which is only enough to kill it after a while...<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />)You can set similar effects to a similar threshold. Say, Sleep works by knocking unconscious any critter below X hp, and creatures it doesn't knock out it still renders drowsy (next hit deals 8 times normal damage). It might knock out a goblin, but it only makes the Goblin King a little woozy -- woozy enough for the fighter to bean him good. You could hypothetically make the entire adventure just one creature, if you wanted. You wouldn't "nerf" Save-or-Die effects, but neither would you have the creature die outright, if they were powerful enough...and weaker creatures could still doe outright (or functionally die outright, like with Sleep). Gives you a lot more flexibility, there. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification