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hydraphantom
2018-05-03, 08:38 PM
I'm working on a monster as the boss, the battle is planned roughly as follow:
1. The Boss is a spider-like demon, it's so massive that one of its legs is a colossal monster. The PCs and a lot of NPCs need to stop its march towards the royal palace.
2. PCs would focus on one single leg, NPCs on others, if done sufficient damage on one of them, the boss would fall off the balance and crash down. All the peoples would rush up and beat the main body.
3. After a while, the boss would mend the leg, stand up and spawn a bunch of minions to stop them from attacking it.
4. Repeat 1-3 a few times.

Would such boss work? Characters would take damage from shockwave when been to close to its leg after it moves, and will take massive damage if directly stepped/crashed on.

awa
2018-05-03, 09:37 PM
First ill assume you have a party that likes cinematic fights in the first place
Short answer no

reasons why based on that description it sounds like the leg can’t do anything while their attacking it, that's not really a fun fight it’s just can you do enough damage in X rnds to win
Also if it get back up it should not be repeat it should do something different change up the battle not just do the same thing again

I would recommend that instead of stabbing it in the foot repeatedly they should need to colossus climb the thing, fighting minions on its body in order to get to a weak spot on the creature.
Once struck maybe it thrashes around a bit forcing checks to stay on and having more minions swarm if the heaviest hitter has only a few rnds to kill the thing before ever swarming hordes drive them back it adds more tension, then just hitting its leg again.
Other random ideas
Its a spider so maybe it shots hairs at creatures that fly next to it but also make the climb DC easier so that non wizards can compete, good climbers should get various bonuses to reward them

If your party is into cinematic fights you might break it up into a few set piece battles, one climbing the leg one, on the body at a final fight at the neck. You could add flavor by having various allies impact the battle field at various times, like maybe the first time a pc falls a flying npc swoops in and get them back into the fray before being shot down by hairs(this works best if they care about the Npc) Or have the pcs notice some kind of artillery is going to strike and giving them an int check to know where so they can either move out of the way or knock foes into it.
edit (also just in case)
have Npcs do stuff off screen or In short cut scenes, adding a bunch of npcs fighting alongside a party can massively slow down a fight

hydraphantom
2018-05-04, 02:31 AM
First ill assume you have a party that likes cinematic fights in the first place
Short answer no

reasons why based on that description it sounds like the leg can’t do anything while their attacking it, that's not really a fun fight it’s just can you do enough damage in X rnds to win
Also if it get back up it should not be repeat it should do something different change up the battle not just do the same thing again

I would recommend that instead of stabbing it in the foot repeatedly they should need to colossus climb the thing, fighting minions on its body in order to get to a weak spot on the creature.
Once struck maybe it thrashes around a bit forcing checks to stay on and having more minions swarm if the heaviest hitter has only a few rnds to kill the thing before ever swarming hordes drive them back it adds more tension, then just hitting its leg again.
Other random ideas
Its a spider so maybe it shots hairs at creatures that fly next to it but also make the climb DC easier so that non wizards can compete, good climbers should get various bonuses to reward them

If your party is into cinematic fights you might break it up into a few set piece battles, one climbing the leg one, on the body at a final fight at the neck. You could add flavor by having various allies impact the battle field at various times, like maybe the first time a pc falls a flying npc swoops in and get them back into the fray before being shot down by hairs(this works best if they care about the Npc) Or have the pcs notice some kind of artillery is going to strike and giving them an int check to know where so they can either move out of the way or knock foes into it.
edit (also just in case)
have Npcs do stuff off screen or In short cut scenes, adding a bunch of npcs fighting alongside a party can massively slow down a fight

Thanks for the reply, yeah it would probably be pretty boring without the boss fighting back, I'll see what I can do...

Wraith
2018-05-04, 04:05 AM
Honestly, I think that sounds like a pretty neat encounter.

What awa said is true - if your players don't want a cinematic fight then it could potentially come across as a little bit tedious, but if they are into that sort of thing I think it'd be a lot of fun.

The first leg just takes damage. It shouldn't have an arbitrarily high number of Hit Points, but enough that it takes a reasonably number of rounds of all your players stabbing away at it to feel like an achievement when they take it down. "Dude, look at me! I did nearly 75hp damage in 3 rounds, I'm a combat monster!" sort of thing.

Then the second leg fight also features minions running around to distract them; they still have a set number of rounds to "kill" the leg, but they also have to divert players and/or attacks elsewhere, meaning that they are slower at killing the leg. Especially if the Spider Thing is making some kind of AoE stomping attacks where they have to be mindful of the battlefield as they go; it doesn't have to fight back in order to be a threat. Heck, maybe it even casts a few spells their way occasionally, like Web so that they're stuck behind while it walks off, and chasing after it eats into their precious time limit.

Alternatively, they tank the minions' damage and focus on the leg, so they're even more beat up and there are still minions around when another wave hits them for the third leg. Maybe these ones are bigger and tougher than before, so more resources have to be diverted away from killing the legs, until there's just one PC left who at the very end might be able to legitimately say that she single-handedly "killed" a building-sized monster while her friends fought something else. I know people who would kill for a war-story like that. :smallbiggrin:

I personally find the idea very appealing and would love to take part; there's a lot of strategy involved and decisions to make in a fight which is more than "just hit the Thing", and a time limit can be thrilling - so long as it's not overly generous or unrealistically short one, of course. I think that's the key - if you can reasonably estimate how long the fight should take and have them win right on the wire (assuming that you intend for them to win) rather than with tens of rounds to spare, then the tension will really pay off.

Knaight
2018-05-04, 04:10 AM
Could it work? Sure, easily. Is it particularly interesting? Not really. To start with, this is less a cinematic boss fight and more a videogame boss fight, and that often doesn't transfer well. Reveal weak point, hit weak point, they recover, repeat is just not that interesting a format, spawned minions or no.

There are functional aspects here - the distance to the royal palace is a sort of encounter HP system that can really work with the players defending it, and there's interesting things to be done in terms of manipulating that. Breaking legs reducing it, immobility spells to buy time, grappling to buy time, the question of whether to try to kill or slow, the list goes on. There's also some fun to be had in terms of it mattering which legs you go for. A spider can walk just fine on four legs if it keeps the outer legs on each side of its body, it crawls along weirdly if it has four legs all from one. On the other hand, that dragging process is going to do way more damage to the surroundings than the puncture wounds caused by walking alone, which makes an interesting set of decisions around collateral damage, at least once it reaches the city. Then there's the possibility of non-leg targets as well, from fangs to spinnerets.

Pronounceable
2018-05-04, 05:27 AM
There's about %90 chance this won't work because your players came up with something entirely out of the box. Maybe they'll have those npc armies dig a pit of holy water or hit the spiderdemon or its path with some spell combo you couldn't have thought of that trivializes the whole battle. It's what they are for, after all, and DMs overriding their cool and/or smart ideas for the sake of a "cinematic experience" is horribad DMing.

However there's no reason to abandon the whole idea. Giant spiderdemon is certainly a good boss, you just need to be ready for players' weird ideas you could've never thought of. The problem is, of course, you can't think of those so can't prepare for it. What you should do here is set the scene beforehand and let players know there'll be a giant spiderdemon marching on the city soon. Encourage them to plan their course of action with those npcs, possibly even lead them towards your default scenario through their mouths, but not too much, and then end your session with the thing appearing. This will let you sneakily steal their ideas and make sure your scene won't go completely off rails. Make a battle that's gonna play out as they planned but throw in one or two twists they didn't think of.

Also if you really want them toppling a giant boss by hitting the legs, spider is a bad idea. You're better off with 2 or 3 legs, even a single one it hops on. Or put a many winged beast instead; it's a demon, it doesn't need logic. A giant thing walking on 8 legs isn't gonna fall down by whacking at one leg, especially if it can quickly heal those legs. Then again, just cos I can't think of a useful strategy against a giant arachnid right now don't mean your players won't. So maybe 8 legs will be fine.

Quertus
2018-05-04, 05:59 AM
Let's not forget this question: if the thing is so big that each leg is a colossal monster, how is the party possibly keeping up with it to stab at the legs?

Or this one: if each leg is a "colossal" monster, that implies (3e?) D&D, which implies that by RAW the thing just has a single pool of HP, and that the players are within their rights to call shenanigans, unless it is actually 8 colossal constructs, shaped like spider legs, holding some giant spider-body-shaped platform. Which would be really cool.

awa
2018-05-04, 07:15 AM
if their in the mood for a cinematic fight they wont worry about the fact that each leg is its own monster, their are precedents (sorta)

if they dont want a cinematic fight the legs are the least of your problems

ExLibrisMortis
2018-05-04, 10:43 AM
This sounds like a videogame boss, so if your players are interested in that, you have a decent chance they'll play along and it'll be great.

A brief suggestion: make the leg appear and disappear once per round, as the spider takes steps, with a big stomp effect wherever the leg lands. That means you only get to attack the leg every other round; since you want to deal about three rounds worth of damage, the whole fight should be five to six rounds. Each round the leg is up in the air, some lesser (spider) demons appear, which can be controlled or killed, as desired. Slowing the leg without damage (the old stone to mud/mud to stone shuffle, for instance) might buy you an extra round of "stick the shins", too.

The idea being that you need to control adds and focus burst dps, to use MMO jargon.

erikun
2018-05-04, 10:53 AM
The giant spider boss moving towards a kingdom sounds like a neat idea, although this doesn't sound like a very interesting way of doing it. The biggest problem is that you are assuming the players will handle it only one specific way (everybody whack on one leg, deal enough damage to stop it from moving a few times) and give no other method of interacting with it. What if they decide to use catapults with rocks or flaming oil? What if they try sinkholes or trapping the legs somehow? What if they decide to try to climb it?

Also, my concern is that this might not be the most obvious solution. After all, if a giant 8-legged thing the size of a city just shows up one day, it isn't necessarily true that everybody's first idea will be "let's stab its leg until it stops moving".

The whole Shadow-of-the-Colossus idea isn't a bad one, though. I'd probably recommend something other than beating on its legs like a MMO raid boss, though. Perhaps that could still work (if the players come up with nothing better) but also have other options available. I'd assume the most likely "solution" would be to grapple up to its head and then attack it from there. Somebody mentioned the idea of smaller spiders as a more interactive fight - they could be resting on the giant spider's back, forcing part of the party to hold them off while others start attacking the large spider itself. Or they might go with the catapults idea, in which case that might stop (and damage) the large boss while some smaller spiders get off and attack.

Or, heck, perhaps it isn't small spiders - maybe it's hobgoblins who are prodding and controlling the giant spider, meaning the party could get onto the giant spider's back and kill the hobgoblins in order to stop it.

awa
2018-05-04, 12:10 PM
one thing if you want the players to go at it a certain way you should do two things first dont give them a lot of time, giving them a lot of time and have an authority figure tell them the plan dont make them try to guess it.

I find that so long as the plan is reasonably if some one tells them to do it the players generally will.

Jarawara
2018-05-04, 02:13 PM
2. PCs would focus on one single leg, NPCs on others, if done sufficient damage on one of them, the boss would fall off the balance and crash down. All the peoples would rush up and beat the main body.

The first thing I took notice of is that you're shaping the battle by assuming what the players will do. You'll be right more often than wrong, but your whole plan can fall apart the moment the players don't do what you were expecting.

Step 1: Mega-colossus spider is approaching the city. NPC's offer to fight the other legs, tell players to focus their attention on one leg.
Step 2: Players realize this tactic is doomed to failure. They realize that only by destroying the brain can the Colossus be defeated.
Step 3: Also realizing the spider's cranium is way too thick to penetrate, they intuit that the DM (you) had intended this to be a dungeon crawl *inside* the head of the spider. They climb/fly/teleport up to the spider's ears and enter the dungeon, expecting to face a dungeon filled with parasitic "defenders" until the final boss fight inside the spider's head.
...
...
...
Step 4: After hours of spectacular gameplay and the DM having a nervous breakdown from having to completely wing it all night long, someone takes note of the fact that spiders don't have ears. No one cares. Another great game session for the game log!

Jarawara
2018-05-04, 02:19 PM
and the DM having a nervous breakdown from having to completely wing it all night long, someone takes note of the fact that spiders don't have ears.

Add to that two new threads being posted on the GitP boards: "My players have reached the final chamber, and my boss fight is against a colossus spider brain. What kind of powers and attacks should it have?", and "Can fantasy spiders have ears?"

Knaight
2018-05-05, 05:14 PM
Let's not forget this question: if the thing is so big that each leg is a colossal monster, how is the party possibly keeping up with it to stab at the legs?

How does a squirrel keep up with an elephant? Speed and size are less correlated than they seem like they should be. See also: Jump height/distance.

FreddyNoNose
2018-05-05, 05:37 PM
I'm working on a monster as the boss, the battle is planned roughly as follow:
1. The Boss is a spider-like demon, it's so massive that one of its legs is a colossal monster. The PCs and a lot of NPCs need to stop its march towards the royal palace.
2. PCs would focus on one single leg, NPCs on others, if done sufficient damage on one of them, the boss would fall off the balance and crash down. All the peoples would rush up and beat the main body.
3. After a while, the boss would mend the leg, stand up and spawn a bunch of minions to stop them from attacking it.
4. Repeat 1-3 a few times.

Would such boss work? Characters would take damage from shockwave when been to close to its leg after it moves, and will take massive damage if directly stepped/crashed on.


Sure, you could effectively kill the whole party!

j/k

Rockphed
2018-05-05, 10:09 PM
The first thing I took notice of is that you're shaping the battle by assuming what the players will do. You'll be right more often than wrong, but your whole plan can fall apart the moment the players don't do what you were expecting.

Step 1: Mega-colossus spider is approaching the city. NPC's offer to fight the other legs, tell players to focus their attention on one leg.
Step 2: Players realize this tactic is doomed to failure. They realize that only by destroying the brain can the Colossus be defeated.
Step 3: Also realizing the spider's cranium is way too thick to penetrate, they intuit that the DM (you) had intended this to be a dungeon crawl *inside* the head of the spider. They climb/fly/teleport up to the spider's ears and enter the dungeon, expecting to face a dungeon filled with parasitic "defenders" until the final boss fight inside the spider's head.
...
...
...
Step 4: After hours of spectacular gameplay and the DM having a nervous breakdown from having to completely wing it all night long, someone takes note of the fact that spiders don't have ears. No one cares. Another great game session for the game log!


Add to that two new threads being posted on the GitP boards: "My players have reached the final chamber, and my boss fight is against a colossus spider brain. What kind of powers and attacks should it have?", and "Can fantasy spiders have ears?"

I think that "dungeon crawl inside the head of a giant spider" is the best way to have this boss fight go down. Even if the "dungeon" is a single room, and thus the fight starts as soon as the players get up there, that sounds like an epic session in the making. The "shadow of the colossus" type climbing of the giant spider is also epicness in the making. Fighting a colossal spider leg, on the other hand, sounds kinda lame.

Beleriphon
2018-05-06, 10:13 AM
I'd also be wary of this as a fight. I'm assuming your players have seen Empire Strikes Back. One of them will try to do exactly what you are now thinking of. If they don't try to tangle the thing's legs and force it down to repeatedly stab it in the face I'd be sorely disappointed.

Cealocanth
2018-05-08, 09:08 PM
The first thing I took notice of is that you're shaping the battle by assuming what the players will do. You'll be right more often than wrong, but your whole plan can fall apart the moment the players don't do what you were expecting.

Step 1: Mega-colossus spider is approaching the city. NPC's offer to fight the other legs, tell players to focus their attention on one leg.
Step 2: Players realize this tactic is doomed to failure. They realize that only by destroying the brain can the Colossus be defeated.
Step 3: Also realizing the spider's cranium is way too thick to penetrate, they intuit that the DM (you) had intended this to be a dungeon crawl *inside* the head of the spider. They climb/fly/teleport up to the spider's ears and enter the dungeon, expecting to face a dungeon filled with parasitic "defenders" until the final boss fight inside the spider's head.
...
...
...
Step 4: After hours of spectacular gameplay and the DM having a nervous breakdown from having to completely wing it all night long, someone takes note of the fact that spiders don't have ears. No one cares. Another great game session for the game log!'

Brilliant. Agreed, with the climb also being included as a thing. I would run this as an 'instance' dungeon, that being that this is a "dungeon" with premade encounters that takes place in multiple 'zones', some of which are outdoors or on different maps.

Encounter 1: Theatre of the mind. Streets of the city are swarming with Queen Arachnia's endless spawn, floating down on spider threads from their mother's belly. Goal is to get from one end of the city to the other, Left 4 Dead-style.

Encounter 2: Theatre of the mind, probably Dramatic Task (In the style of 4e or Savage Worlds). The climb. The players focus their timing to grab hold of one of the spider's legs when it makes impact and climb up and across the body of the city-sized monster, fending off the spider's children and the cultists which live upon her back. They enter the spider by either digging through the exoskeleton somehow (the Shatter spell is a thing), or through the mouth, eyes, or spinnarette, each way having its own hazards.

Encounter 3: Battle Map. This is a womb level, in which the players whack the spider's brain until it dies, all the while the immune system of the spider tries to fight them off.

Fair warning, though, this is extremely video gamey. I run a game that has set out encounters and video-game style zones like this, and both myself and my players really enjoy that style of gameplay. If your players prefer to freeform frolic in your world and you can work with the improvisational skills that are required to do that, definitely just set the premise and let them go nuts. I could see them trying to tie a mile-long rope around the spider's legs to trip the thing, like Empire Strikes Back.

Psikerlord
2018-05-08, 09:46 PM
I think this fight could totally work and would be excellent fun.

I think you would want a random table to roll on every round for some kind of complication - like a clutch of giant spider rappelling down to attack, or a spray of web to restrain the party, or a random building is knocked over and they have to dodge the rubble, etc - something to keep them on their toes every round, as they attempt to work on a leg to bring the beast down.

I dont know if I would have the beast get up again once it's down. I'd probably change the nature of the fight at that point. I'm thinking maybe the creature is too big to kill from teh outside, instead, the party must go into the belly of the beast to kill it (or through an eye to get to the brain, or whatever). But they cant just wail on it to kill it, something special has to happen.

Very much a set piece with unique rules.