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<blockquote data-quote="Iosue" data-source="post: 9520947" data-attributes="member: 6680772">Certainly a fair consideration!In my XP, against a powerful foe, my players tend to bring out their big guns early. This whittles down the monster's HP by quite a bit, but the back half of the battle ends up a little sloggy as the party plinks off HP with their melee attacks and at-will spells, hoping their remaining HP and healing will hold out long enough to finish the job. The end is rather anti-climatic, as the monster is firing away on all cylinders, and then...is just dead.What I like about this implementation is that the players need to consider how to weather the early barrage, and whether to use their big guns to try and take out one or more parts early, or to save those for later against the higher HP core. But also, as a DM, I like that there's a narrative throughline to the combat that can indicate to me when a monster might consider making a break for it. With the standard monster, I eventually get to this choice--well, it's likely that they will beat this monster, but perhaps I can still drop a character--that incentivizes keeping the battle going to the bitter end. But with this, there gets to a point where I can say, &quot;Okay, the dragon sees that he's getting the worst of it, and might actually die, so he's making a run for it.&quot; And there's an actual story reason for it. &quot;You've injured the bugbear chieftain's weapon arm, so now he's looking to retreat.&quot;That said, you can very easily reverse this implementation to get that, &quot;fight gets harder as it goes on,&quot; feel by having the loss of a part trigger various attack or defense benefits. Lord knows that &quot;more powerful 2nd form&quot; is a very common trope in a lot of media. Basically, the important idea is giving your PCs a little more choice than attacking one thing, and letting their choices create new situations on the battlefield, for good or for ill!</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Iosue, post: 9520947, member: 6680772"] Certainly a fair consideration! In my XP, against a powerful foe, my players tend to bring out their big guns early. This whittles down the monster's HP by quite a bit, but the back half of the battle ends up a little sloggy as the party plinks off HP with their melee attacks and at-will spells, hoping their remaining HP and healing will hold out long enough to finish the job. The end is rather anti-climatic, as the monster is firing away on all cylinders, and then...is just dead. What I like about this implementation is that the players need to consider how to weather the early barrage, and whether to use their big guns to try and take out one or more parts early, or to save those for later against the higher HP core. But also, as a DM, I like that there's a narrative throughline to the combat that can indicate to me when a monster might consider making a break for it. With the standard monster, I eventually get to this choice--well, it's likely that they will beat this monster, but perhaps I can still drop a character--that incentivizes keeping the battle going to the bitter end. But with this, there gets to a point where I can say, "Okay, the dragon sees that he's getting the worst of it, and might actually die, so he's making a run for it." And there's an actual story reason for it. "You've injured the bugbear chieftain's weapon arm, so now he's looking to retreat." That said, you can very easily reverse this implementation to get that, "fight gets harder as it goes on," feel by having the loss of a part trigger various attack or defense benefits. Lord knows that "more powerful 2nd form" is a very common trope in a lot of media. Basically, the important idea is giving your PCs a little more choice than attacking one thing, and letting their choices create new situations on the battlefield, for good or for ill! [/QUOTE]

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