Rechan, thanks for more good ideas. I'm not sure exactly what I'll do yet for the solo fight, but before you mentioned the monolith, I hadn't even thought about tying it in directly to the combat.
Duh!
To really mix up the insanity of the place, I might make the effects random each round. I like the idea of a weird beam splitting the ground (creating trenches) that last a round or two, combined with a sort of mind-affect blast. The characters can avoid it all by staying mobile, and of course the bad guy will have to keep on the move too.
It reminds me of the only other Solo fight I've thrown at my players. They were fighting a Brown dragon a few levels ago, in a long hall with glowing crystal set in the wall ever 5 feet. Every round, 2 crystals (rolled randomly) would glow brightly, and on the following round they would blast everything in line across the hall. The players and the dragon had to move constantly to avoid the beams, which was great... but the last round of combat, I accidentally charged the dragon at a player who'd been previously blinded by its Sand Attack.
I say "accidentally" because in my eagerness to cause some pain, I'd forgotten which squares I'd marked with the beams, and the dragon stopped right in the cross hair. The trap's initiative came up and blasted the dragon to Holy Hades and back. It was a dramatic, if not fitting end to the fight.
Duh!
To really mix up the insanity of the place, I might make the effects random each round. I like the idea of a weird beam splitting the ground (creating trenches) that last a round or two, combined with a sort of mind-affect blast. The characters can avoid it all by staying mobile, and of course the bad guy will have to keep on the move too.
It reminds me of the only other Solo fight I've thrown at my players. They were fighting a Brown dragon a few levels ago, in a long hall with glowing crystal set in the wall ever 5 feet. Every round, 2 crystals (rolled randomly) would glow brightly, and on the following round they would blast everything in line across the hall. The players and the dragon had to move constantly to avoid the beams, which was great... but the last round of combat, I accidentally charged the dragon at a player who'd been previously blinded by its Sand Attack.
I say "accidentally" because in my eagerness to cause some pain, I'd forgotten which squares I'd marked with the beams, and the dragon stopped right in the cross hair. The trap's initiative came up and blasted the dragon to Holy Hades and back. It was a dramatic, if not fitting end to the fight.
). So, maybe there's a way to incorporate this distance judgement problem into combat: maybe the squares on your "grid" are actually different sizes, so, for example, shifting one square in one area of your battlespace might equate to shifting 2 squares on the other side of the board? Or angles could be distorted, heights exaggerated, etc. Play on a polar grid, or a grid with otherwise curved squares, etc. Opens the door to lots of confusing movement effects...
