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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 7009438" data-attributes="member: 6677017">5e does not support solo monsters as boss fights, unless they are Tiamat. It simply doesn't.Take a deep breath, and realize that this is the truth.Now, you (general you) can house rule to change it. Or you can express disapproval of that design decision, or frustration with having to change in-grained habits to start implementing it. Or you can give up on 5e in disgust.But you must accept the truth of the way the game is designed. Based on all they put into the game, I have a hard time believing that they failed to anticipate that it would work that way. So we should consider it to be at least passively included design.Personally, I'm of the group that has a difficult time getting out of the mind frame that I can plop down a single monster out of the book and use it as a boss. While I'm okay with it in theory usually, it seems to limit your options in practice, and just is hard to really internalize.The best way to handle it, in my opinion, is probably to realize that since the world works that way, and few BBEGs think they can stand alone against a group of heroic champions, they simply don't plan to get themselves into such situations. This means playing smart, using minions, tactical retreats, etc. And if you really think about it...how often does a solo BBEG stand up against a whole group of heroes in fiction? Generally they are more than a match for one or two heroes...but a whole party of them? You just don't see that. Partly because heroic fiction rarely has a party 5 characters wailing on a solo BBEG; which is probably because that is substantially less interesting than a party trying to fight their way through hordes of minions and the top lieutenant to get to the BBEG in the first place.Heck, 5e goes further. The BBEG isn't even necessarily the toughest guy in his organization! The muscle bound lieutenant or fireball flinging sorcerer might have a higher CR than their boss. You almost never see that in recent D&D editions. That in and of itself is a major thing to get used to. The boss isn't necessarily the strongest guy in the group.I also like the way the stats we've seen go all the way to the top (a god), so there isn't likely to be a whole tier of epic monsters like in 3e. It's "bounded monstrosity". This is really important to me because the relationships of monsters to other monsters have to make sense. I don't want there to be stats for some non-unique CR 28 monsters just to give high level PCs solo's to fight. Anything at that level needs to be a unique being who really is stronger than Demogorgon but weaker than Tiamat.So I think the basic conclusion is: 1) Remove from our minds the idea that solo BBEGs are viable threats, 2) Remove from our minds that the boss is necessarily the most powerful combatant in his group, and 3) Reinterpret the world in that light.Yeah, easier said than done. Maybe in 15 years when us pre-5e players give some input on an issue, some knowledgeable soul with have to clarify our weird statements by explaining to the post-5e players how in the stone age monsters scaled in such a way that you could just take a single powerful monster and make it an effective boss fight for the whole party without any other monsters or carefully laid plans.That's a really cool way of phrasing it that makes the point better than the rulebooks (while still actually saying the same thing!)</blockquote>

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