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Message: <blockquote data-quote="VikingLegion" data-source="post: 7343224" data-attributes="member: 6794627">Wow, this got feisty.  Some good points by both sides, but in an effort to bring this back to the OP's point:All I know is if I play it straight up in NPC design, my players - good strategists all - will utterly melt the big boss in 1 round and make for a terribly disappointing session.  One way I've found to make these major encounters more exciting is to give the boss some kind of damage mitigating factor that needs to be "solved" by the players before they can really pour on the pain.  Sure they can injure the NPC, but they will be able to tell (based on my verbal descriptions as damage is being rolled) that they aren't inflicting the full amount that they feel they should be doing.  Often there will be some kind of environmental clue to help them figure out after a round or two.  Is that a bit video-gamey?  Sure.  Is it preferable over the terribly anti-climactic fight with Veriakas that @<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?u=37579" target="_blank">Jester David</a> described a few posts above?  I feel it is.  Here's an example:My players were on the Negative Energy plane trying to recover an item of pivotal importance from an undead master-bard.  He was a unique NPC in the storyline, something like the bardish equivalent of a lich.  I gave him several offensive-based powers based on the infusion of Death magic into Song.  But I knew they would be all for nothing if he was dispatched within a round.  So to beef up his defense I encased him in a suit of bone armour that absorbed 80% of all incoming damage.  When the PCs first entered his chamber, a sinister pipe organ (made of skulls and femur-pipes and the requisite gothy effects) started blaring out a cacophonous dirge.  This caused some debuffing effects on the players, but they since they all made their saves they figured the best route would be to burn down the bardlich as fast as possible and then worry about the organ.  The bone armour on the bard had its own pool of hitpoints and was almost treated as a separate entity, but it wasn't until round 2 or 3 that the players realized that the musical dirge in the background had another effect - it was completely reconstituting the bone armour at the top of each round.  So unless they wanted to continue smashing their heads against a wall and only getting 20% damage on the maestro, they had to switch up tactics and take out the organ.They started to beat on that, which freed up my boss to do some boss stuff, which really pushed the cleric to the limits of his healing ability.  But the organ's hardness rating and damage resistance made it fairly hard to smash.  It's not all that easy to do structural type damage, I mean, who really prepares for that?  One of my houserules has always been that wizards can cast an unprepared spell directly out of their spellbook as though it were a scroll, but that destroys the page (exactly as a scroll would be consumed).  The party wizard, who hoards spells like a miser, heroically cast a Shatter spell from his book, permanently losing the spell.  I thought it was a great team-oriented move, so I made sure the bards loot had a spellbook with 2 or 3 new spells the mage had never scribed before.  Once the organ was reduced to a pile of bone shards, they turned on the maestro with a vengeance.  He still had what was left of his bone armour, so that prolonged him another round.  But without the song to keep replenishing it, they were able to smash through his protection and then his body in turn.Again, maybe it played a bit like a raid-script from an MMO boss?  All I know is that it turned a major villain from a 1 round smash-n-grab, into a 5 or 6 round white-knuckle bout that they barely got out of, and with the mage having to sacrifice one of his learned spells.  You can bet he reminded everyone at the table for several weeks afterwards.  But as I said, I made sure he was compensated for it, and it made for an encounter we still remember vividly some 8 years later.This type of tactic can take a few forms - an impenetrable suit of armour, maybe a collection of gemstones that orbit the NPC like ioun stones, each absorbing a full hit before shattering and falling to the ground - really anything that can take a massive attack and negate or lessen it, at least for a round or two before the puzzle is solved.  You can't go to this well too often, else it will become a gimmick that makes your players groan.  But when used once or twice in a full campaign, especially on fights that need to last a few rounds and be memorable, I think it's a viable option.  And if any of my players wanted to roll up a bard and ask how do I get such cool special abilities, I would simply reply, "Spend 500 years in the Negative Energy Plane and you too may learn how to construct a similar pipe organ!  Oh yeah, and also, since you will have to give yourself whole-heartedly over to the darkness, you will have to voluntarily hand over your character sheet and become an NPC.  Sounds fair?"EDIT:  I can't be the only DM to have ever used a bard as a major villain, can I?</blockquote>

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