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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 9775602" data-attributes="member: 2067">It's weird that so many people are caught up in the rest cycle without taking the time to examine monster design.If you want a "boss monster," it clearly needs to have different rules than a regular monster. 4e understood this OK. 5e Legendaries get at this, but have a problem in that there aren't that many of them and they aren't at every level (including lower levels where folks still want a "boss monster" experience). It's also not clear - especially to newbies - how to turn a regular monster into a Legendary (are there different hp targets? how should l design a legendary action?) Using a tougher monster doesn't in and of itself really solve the problem, since the larger hp pool also comes with higher damage that makes attack rounds more binary. If we assume that players are just going to alpha strike, and that if we want a powerful boss monster, we have to accept that alpha strike...that means we need to take that into account when we want a climactic encounter (and we can still have lesser encounters that don't NEED an alpha strike, or that are OK if they are largely neutralized by a group doing a alpha strike since they weren't mean to be "boss" encounters anyway). What would one encounter that was the size of 2 or 3 normal encounters look like? How can we avoid grind and tedium and keep the table time reasonable in that situation? Can we make a boss monster wizard feel "fragile" without having them die in the first round? That sounds more interesting to me than flattening the variety in PC abilities.</blockquote>

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