D&D 5E Legendary, Lair, and BOSS Actions

[Nebulous]

Make them non-optional. The first three saves succeed, period. Save #4... bombad be rollin'...

Well, if players knew that's how it worked, they'd metagame with three cantrips and then pull out the buttkicking spells.

 

[Nebulous]

The trick is having a progression for monster ability so legendary actions do not appear to be arbitrary actions just to keep the monster alive a couple more rounds. And 5E is too simple at this point, to offer any layers of complexity if you always want PCs to have a decent change to hit, land a spell, etc. due to bounded accuracy. It becomes an all or nothing thing, versus shades of grey.

Can you explain this more? What is an example of shades of grey?

 

[Dausuul]

Can you explain this more? What is an example of shades of grey?

I would guess it's about having gradations of effects; e.g., hold monster used on an orc might impose the Paralyzed condition, but used on a giant it imposes Restrained, and used on a dragon it merely reduces its movement speed.

The problem is that having separate effects for legendary targets would result in spell writeups taking that much more space, when they already take up a third of the book. (It's not enough to have gradations of effect for conditions, like slowed --> restrained --> paralyzed; that works for spells like hold monster that simply impose a condition, but not for spells like polymorph that have custom effects.)

 

[KarinsDad]

It may be a little meta for your tastes, but I think the legendary save thing should be something the players can learn of in advance if they do some research.

That way, they can use a bit of strategy and some mind games, peppering it with less important, but still mildly debilitating, spells early in the fight, and if it wastes its free saves on those, THEN they pull out the big guns. If the monster chooses not to spend its free saves, those minor spells might just swing things to the players' advantage anyway.

Of course, this only works if you have multiple magic users with saving-throw type spells. And if it's a magic-resistant monster with advantage against all magic saves, you're not going to waste your time with that sort of spell at all, anyway.

Yeah, this is fairly meta.

I would try a slightly different approach. I would let the players find out that these particular types of creatures are incredibly badass. Very few tales of legendary heroes taking them out since many attacks against them hardly damage them at all. These types of dragons (as one example) have no weaknesses, scales like individual shields, teeth like greatswords, etc. There could be tales of the surprise that Wizarak the Great's Finger of Death spell actually hurt the white dragon and drove it off, other spells earlier in the fight hardly bothering it, etc.