J-H
Hero
I'm doing a D&D adaptation of the Twelve Labors of Hercules, which will end up on the DM's Guild once I'm done playtesting. I get these ideas and go "Hmm, that would be fun..." The Augean Stables adaptation involves trying to burgle a dragon's lair for a specific item while fixing a blocked sewer drain that's making the lair intolerable for anyone to be around.
In this case, I ran the Bronze Boar (statblock below the narrative). The boar comes with 8 Giant Boars (MM) and 17 regular boars (MM) in the sounder of wild pigs. For the regular boars I used a mook system of "Has it taken more than 6 damage? Flip the token upside down. 6 damage after the first 6, or more than 12? It's dead." to reduce bookkeeping. During the first 3 rounds any character prone on init 20 also took minor damage from all the smaller (ignorable) pigs trampling them.
My test players are my boys (9 & 11), who are running an arcane trickster, tempest cleric, totem barbarian, and druidlock (adaptation I made). They are 7th level. They are unfortunately light on AOE damage due to spell choices, and also spent some of their big AOE spells on the BB before they realized it had a DR aura, so they solved the encounter the hard way. If they'd been able to drop a pair of fireballs, it probably would have been easier.
The rogue dropped to 0hp 3 times, and the cleric and barbarian went down once each. I was generous and allowed them to throw healing potions at someone once or twice... the fight was in muddy, pig-damaged terrain, which hindered their movement. They also lost the constrictor from their Staff of the Python, although it served well first! The druid took zero damage the entire fight due to positioning and a class feature that functions similar to Sanctuary for plant & beast creatures.
Once they figured out the boar had a damage reduction aura, and that once per round it would damage everyone when hurt, they put the non-Reckless barbarian in front of it. Pigs aren't that smart, and the barbarian was Enlarged and actively killing the smaller pigs. They just hoped it would miss with its one attack per round more often than not and focused on slaughtering their way through all of the other pigs. 3/4ths of the party was near the Bronze Boar and hemmed in, and they had some bad experiences early in the fight with everyone with taking damage from the squeal. The boar's one attack means sometimes it didn't do anything effective in a round, but it also managed a pair of critical hits, and those were really brutal (nearly one-shotted the rogue in round 1).
They did deliberately bait out some Squeals where one character would provoke the damage to get some AOE damage dealt to the other boars around the big one; 10 thunder damage resisted to four creatures is still 20 damage for "free." I was hoping they would think about blindness as an option (still chancy with the high Con save modifier, but possible), but they heard "one glaring eye and the other is a mass of scar tissue" in the description and just assumed it only meant perception checks.
I think I had this sort of puzzle-solving and reprioritizing in mind when I designed the boar a couple of months ago. I think this is the first time I've seen or run a boss encounter where one of the best solutions is "Tank the boss attacking you for five rounds, but don't hit him back until all the minions are dead."
I am really happy with how it went. Is there anything with that sort of mechanic in the published books? I don't recall seeing anything, but that may be because the MM focuses on monsters in isolation rather than as part of a bespoke encounter. Having an aura that effects only porcine creatures is rather specific.
In this case, I ran the Bronze Boar (statblock below the narrative). The boar comes with 8 Giant Boars (MM) and 17 regular boars (MM) in the sounder of wild pigs. For the regular boars I used a mook system of "Has it taken more than 6 damage? Flip the token upside down. 6 damage after the first 6, or more than 12? It's dead." to reduce bookkeeping. During the first 3 rounds any character prone on init 20 also took minor damage from all the smaller (ignorable) pigs trampling them.
My test players are my boys (9 & 11), who are running an arcane trickster, tempest cleric, totem barbarian, and druidlock (adaptation I made). They are 7th level. They are unfortunately light on AOE damage due to spell choices, and also spent some of their big AOE spells on the BB before they realized it had a DR aura, so they solved the encounter the hard way. If they'd been able to drop a pair of fireballs, it probably would have been easier.
The rogue dropped to 0hp 3 times, and the cleric and barbarian went down once each. I was generous and allowed them to throw healing potions at someone once or twice... the fight was in muddy, pig-damaged terrain, which hindered their movement. They also lost the constrictor from their Staff of the Python, although it served well first! The druid took zero damage the entire fight due to positioning and a class feature that functions similar to Sanctuary for plant & beast creatures.
Once they figured out the boar had a damage reduction aura, and that once per round it would damage everyone when hurt, they put the non-Reckless barbarian in front of it. Pigs aren't that smart, and the barbarian was Enlarged and actively killing the smaller pigs. They just hoped it would miss with its one attack per round more often than not and focused on slaughtering their way through all of the other pigs. 3/4ths of the party was near the Bronze Boar and hemmed in, and they had some bad experiences early in the fight with everyone with taking damage from the squeal. The boar's one attack means sometimes it didn't do anything effective in a round, but it also managed a pair of critical hits, and those were really brutal (nearly one-shotted the rogue in round 1).
They did deliberately bait out some Squeals where one character would provoke the damage to get some AOE damage dealt to the other boars around the big one; 10 thunder damage resisted to four creatures is still 20 damage for "free." I was hoping they would think about blindness as an option (still chancy with the high Con save modifier, but possible), but they heard "one glaring eye and the other is a mass of scar tissue" in the description and just assumed it only meant perception checks.
I think I had this sort of puzzle-solving and reprioritizing in mind when I designed the boar a couple of months ago. I think this is the first time I've seen or run a boss encounter where one of the best solutions is "Tank the boss attacking you for five rounds, but don't hit him back until all the minions are dead."
I am really happy with how it went. Is there anything with that sort of mechanic in the published books? I don't recall seeing anything, but that may be because the MM focuses on monsters in isolation rather than as part of a bespoke encounter. Having an aura that effects only porcine creatures is rather specific.
