DMs! Have you ever had a “boss encounter” turn into a cakewalk? What happened?

[Sadras]

Having dealt with polymorph quite a bit lately, I will say that while exceptionally powerful, its not nessarily instant game over. It usually means the party gets a solid round of attacks on the creature, and then it goes back to work. The BBEG is still heavily hit, but it usually gets a least some chance to do something once the first attack drains the polymorphed hp.

I mention it because at first when dealing with it I threw up my hands and said "combat over", but having experienced it a few times, its not quite as bad as that.

Cast polymorph, PCs wave goodbye while caster maintains concentration = combat over

 

[Inchoroi]

As do I. I rejoice with my players when they triumph against the odds.

I do my best to challenge my players, and I definitely do not go easy on them. But when they come up with something really clever, I give their well earned victory to them. This can sometimes make an encounter a lot easier than I intended, but in the end all my villains are expendable, so I don't care when, how or that they meet their end. The villains are supposed to die, and if they do so in a way that entertains the players, I consider my mission a success.

I want my players to feel like they are the heroes. That means that they should have these epic victories... these moments where they outsmart my villains and humiliate them. If one of my villains meets a particularly humiliating end, I will often ask my players if they want to fill in the details of the scene, to add one-liners or some kind of flourish (the likes of which are usually reserved for action movies).

What scares me right now is that my players have zero inkling that they've done everything the true villain has predicted (this link is to a TvTropes, you've been warned), perfectly, and if they aren't careful, they'll be the ones to end the world after destroying several very innocent men, and a few not-so-innocent men. Granted, it's not a true Xanatos Gambit because there is a way out, if they're clever enough to figure it out, but the fact that the players have done exactly what the villain wanted them to throughout the last real-time year of sessions is...somewhat chilling.

 

[Dessert Nomad]

Cast polymorph, PCs wave goodbye while caster maintains concentration = combat over

So they go do stuff for an hour, then have to fight it again with fewer spell slots?

 

[WhosDaDungeonMaster]

You know, since my rolls are behind the DM screen and the players never see how many HP the boss has left, I have never had this happen. As the DM, it is your (and my) option to adjust the outcomes so the bosses don't suffer from such situations. If I find out I didn't give the boss enough HP, I just keep letting the players whack on it until the situation is dire enough to justify the encounter as a boss and the party still wins out.

My group recently encountered zombies for the first time. Only one player knew about zombies not always dropping at 0 HP, but kept the secret to himself until after the fight. Well, due to some lucky checks on my part, one zombie (the last to go down...) took a whopping 79 points of damage before it was finally defeated! My players were stunned! Why wasn't this thing dropping? they would wonder. The new player (a cleric PC) explained to them afterwards, since he knew.

My point is, you can do the same with bosses. You don't have to have them go down at 0 HP, you don't have to have them fail a save or check if it means ruining the climax of years of gaming.

 

[Mouseferatu]

So they go do stuff for an hour, then have to fight it again with fewer spell slots?

Depends on the kind of encounter. If it's not something they have to kill, an hour's grace could well end the fight.

Example from one of my own campaigns was when the PCs were on a riverboat and encountered a giant water serpent (I forget the specifics of exactly what kind of creature it was). The wizard turned it into a duck. By the time an hour had passed, they were well beyond the thing's territory.

 

[Mouseferatu]

They also had an encounter in which they transformed... Uh, again I forget the exact opponent, but some sort of giant. Anyway, they polymorphed it into a chicken. Then they used several castings of stone shape to open up a tiny compartment deep in the wall of a nearby cave, put the chicken in, and seal it back up.

So, when tiny creature in stone hollow barely big enough for tiny creature turns back into huge creature... Well.

 

[Sadras]

So they go do stuff for an hour, then have to fight it again with fewer spell slots?

For the love of Great Gummi, why would they have to fight it again? How linear are your adventures?
They encountered it while travelling on open tundra. The PCs left after it was polymorphed. Why would they encounter it again?

 

[Imaculata]

You know, since my rolls are behind the DM screen and the players never see how many HP the boss has left, I have never had this happen. As the DM, it is your (and my) option to adjust the outcomes so the bosses don't suffer from such situations. If I find out I didn't give the boss enough HP, I just keep letting the players whack on it until the situation is dire enough to justify the encounter as a boss and the party still wins out.

Then what is the point of having stats for your villains at all?

I would feel like I was robbing my players of their well earned victory if I did that. I'm not going to have my big bad make his save, when the dice said otherwise. Take for example what happened a few sessions ago. One of my players managed to cast a Feeblemind spell on my big bad evil wizard, and he failed his save. This rendered the big bad completely unable to cast any spells, but it is exactly what this spell is meant for. If I told my players that he made his save, that would be straight up unfair to them. It would also render the spell useless, because what is the point of having this spell in your spellbook, if the DM is going to fudge the save for big bads anyway?

I do not know in advance how a fight is going to play out. Sometimes the players get lucky, and a very hard fight becomes a bit more manageable (as was the case here), and sometimes they make a fight way too easy. But as a DM I have to keep in mind that the players can also get very unlucky. They can have fights where they keep failing their important saves and get absolutely wrecked. I have tought myself to there for let the dice fall where they may.

I have learned to embrace the epic close calls that happen naturally by following the rules, and also the epic defeats.

My point is, you can do the same with bosses. You don't have to have them go down at 0 HP, you don't have to have them fail a save or check if it means ruining the climax of years of gaming.

There is no need to fake a climax to your epic boss fight. Not every boss fight has to end in a climax, and if you just let the dice fall as they may, you will still have the occasional epic moment, I guarantee it. And knowing that it wasn't a fudge on the part of the DM makes it all the more special. It also means that your players can feel rewarded for being clever, and can feel confident in the knowledge that the same rules that apply to them, also apply to their opponents.

 

[WhosDaDungeonMaster]

Your choice.

I prefer to use prudence in randomness. But it would be more disheartening to my players when they finally meet Mr. Baddie if the encounter played out like he was a wimp and/or buffoon. Of course, I would never cheat my players if they do something clever or such. But, I disagree, a BOSS is suppose to be climatic! Otherwise, they are just another encounter...

Also, I won't penalize a player, either, sometimes making a critical hit that would kill them into a normal hit (unless I know they have a way to restore them later on) or decreasing the effect of a spell or something on a failed save. Luck is part of the game, to be certain, but if you are such a slave to fate as to not use good judgment, then you are doing a disservice to your players IMO. But, that is your game and you know your players best.

For the record, everything I wrote was "you can", not "you should". I have most of my encounters go as the dice indicate, but the OP was about what happens when your finale fizzles because of a single bad die roll? My point was, you have the power as DM to say it won't happen and give your players the enjoyable and challenging reward of a good, dramatic encounter.

And the point of having stats? Well, they are the guideline. Sometimes the baddie has too many HP and is about to TPK. Why not let the last hit, when only one player is standing, win out the day and send the foe to the floor in defeat? That makes the encounter heroic and something to remember, instead of "Hey, remember when the monster killed us all off? Wasn't that a great way to end the campaign?"

 

[Dessert Nomad]

Depends on the kind of encounter. If it's not something they have to kill, an hour's grace could well end the fight.

Would something that they don't need to kill and can just bypass without worrying about it later really qualify as a "Boss encounter" that turned into a cakewalk in the first place? I mean, if your 7th level party can afford riding horses, they can all outrun a remorhaz without casting a spell. My take on the thread topic is that it's about things that one would expect to be a hard fight that ended up trivialized in an unexpected way; finding a random encounter that you're able to bypass doesn't really seem to qualify. Since I figured the situation was germane to the topic, I thought even though it wasn't an actual 'boss fight' it was still a fight the party would need to actually win to get to their objective that turned into a cakewalk, not a fight that could just be avoided entirely without that avoidance causing any problems later. And since polymorph just delays the problem in that case rather than solve it, I asked for clarification.

For the love of Great Gummi, why would they have to fight it again? How linear are your adventures?
They encountered it while travelling on open tundra. The PCs left after it was polymorphed. Why would they encounter it again?

Hmmm... you know, I'm looking through this thread, and this appears to be the first time 'open tundra' was mentioned, or the fact that the creatures was not in a significant location, and that the PCs could just walk away from it. But I do note that the thread title uses the words 'boss encounter'. Maybe, just maybe, it's not actually unreasonable to assume that a fight in a thread about "Boss encounters" was not a pointless random encounter that could be ignored, but something that, even if not an actual boss, was a creature that was actually in some way involved with whatever the PCs objective is or the location where it is. For the love of Great Gummi, why would they bother to fight it in the first place? How bad are your adventurers at bypassing unneeded encounters that they'd fight a deadly encounter that they are fine with bypassing?

It's really douchey to leave out key information about a situation, then get snarky when someone asks questions trying to understand what you posted. And it's really overflowing the canoe of douche to leave off that key information when the situation you posted in a thread that it doesn't come close to fitting the thread topic, and the person asking you questions is clearly trying to make sense of what you posted in light of what the thread is about.