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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Laurefindel" data-source="post: 8355441" data-attributes="member: 67296">However, many of these options cost the baddie an action to activate, and actions economy is where boss monsters lose.summoning allies effectively gives the baddie more attacks, but since the PCs will find a way to focus fire on the summoner anyway, it doesn’t increase it’s longevity much. And oftentimes, when I use a “boss monster“ it’s partially because I don’t want to be tracking a bunch of underlings. Also, if I know that the boss would need a bunch of allies to provide a challenge, I would  plan them in the encounter in the first place.spells can help, assuming that the baddie is a spellcaster. ”Martial” bosses could have magical stuff that emulate spells, but it partially defeats the point of having a martial boss. It also assumes that the baddie can use magic items. And all that magical gear will likely end up in the players hands ultimately, so I’ve got to carefully weight what I introduce without resorting to cheap shenanigans to deny them extra loot that was only there to up the challenge.the list goes on but not all are effective solutions, or ultimately become variants of “be smarter”. Guides that tell me how to achieve being smarter with my monsters are great, but they are most helpful when you have the leisure/time/willingness to carefully prepare your encounter.uping the hp and the AC works, but the baddie still loses the action race big time.for a fast and furious fix I sometimes “stack” two monsters on top of each other, or merge them together. The ogre bandit captain is effectively an ogre and a bandit captain side-by-side in the same 10’ square, for example. When the bandit captain dies, you still have the ogre to fight...otherwise, I give a special reaction option, legendary resistance 1/day, and 1-point legendary actions to bosses to boost their action economy in a jiffy, mostly inspired from character classes abilities for familiarity (this monk-y monster can catch arrows, auto-succeed on a save once, and make an unarmed strike attack at the end of a player’s turn).im curious about this “not so legendary action“ doc. Seems like something I could use…[edit] ok, so that doc codifies something I was doing with better wordage, clear guidelines, and more versatility. * grab *</blockquote>

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