Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gardens &amp; Goblins" data-source="post: 7438569" data-attributes="member: 6846794">This is why when folks refer to boss fights, especially in the context of D&D, alarm bells ring. For drama, we should not know the outcome - if we do, then we're in slog territory*, where we're running the numbers, party resources vs monsters, just to get to the end. This in and of itself is not necessarily a 'bad thing' - some folks love watching values slowly tick over as they make choices from a pool of options. However, it can be greatly improved by shifting the focus of the encounter, by allowing loss/losing to be a perfectly valid option**. This can be achieved with a time through a technique that is sometimes referred to in game design as 'displacement', though its not unique to games.Displacement (a technique/tool that encourages/forces player action) is common in film (ticking time bomb) and games (simplest form being a time limit). A more colourful example might be harm the dragon enough to scare it away from the village before it finishes torching their homes or defeat the dragon before it can free its mate from a magic spell***. Now, the DM has a powerful tool for dictating a point of resolution - they can decide the encounter will last X rounds, and the pressure is now on the party to push the resolution they want in said time. Yeah, and this is a problem with computer games as well, where signalling is poor and the player, believing (often quite rightly) that there 'must be a way to win else why is it happening', cannot read - and thus learn - whats from a given encounter/event. They also often have the luxury of repeating an encounter/event until they succeed, something that D&D tables typically do not have. Its always a good idea to stress even that which we might believe to be obvious, if it is critical success, though we've all forgotten to do this at one time or another.*Which makes sense, as we're basically simulating the murder/destruction of one agent by another - fun for some but personally, a snooze fest.**I do believe that failure needs to be an option in encounter designs.  While boss fights is not a term unique to computer games, its certainly  strongly associated with them. The problem here is that, in a computer  game, success is ultimately meant to be possible - its even expected.  Yet in D&D success should never be expected. Welcomed, planned for  and enjoyed, sure, but the beauty of the medium is that win or lose,  success or failure, the game can keep going. The drama, the adventure  can adapt to the table's play.***In both scenarios, failure is an optoin - in the first, the dragon can torch the village and snatch up some villagers before retreating to their layer, presenting the players with the next stage in the adventure. In the second, if the mate is released, the DM should provide the players with the option to retreat, so that they can regroup and prepare to engage a now more-powerful, greater ranging threat.Another, perhaps more obvious though often missed scenario is the simple, 'monster fights until it thinks it can't lose then tries to retreat' - why would an intelligent being such a dragon stick it out unless they though they were winning? And if they are winning, then the party is under pressure to retreat or try something desperate. If the party has the obvious upper hand and the dragon has no escape then - IMO that's a boring encounter because we all but know the outcome, why not skip to the end and avoid the dice rolls? And of course, there's always the option of the dragon giving up and attempting to negotiate for its life.</blockquote>

Verification