Designing a ritual fight

[Redhood101]

I’m designing a boss encounter for around level 7. The set up is that the party has found a corrupt spirit. They can either destroy the spirit or dispel the corruption. I’m not sure how to really run this. I want destroying the spirit to be easier but have a dark impact on the rest of the game. But doing the ritual is harder but saves the spirit. Does anyone have advice on running an encounter like this? Does the ritual just take X number of rounds and they have to survive and onslaught of enemies? Please help.

[nickl_2000]

First thing is that you are going to need to make it VERY clear what will happen if they just kill off the spirit. Since this is campaign changing, there needs to be no doubt in the minds of the players what will happen if they fail.


Just an idea that came to mind for the ritual is to have an NPC be the only one who can complete it. Then it's the PCs job to keep the NPC alive long enough to get it done, and the spirit and his friends are actively trying to prevent it. While they can just fight it out, this does encourage some other more non-linear thinking and problem solving.

[Wildarm]

I would do it ghost busters style. An NPC who has knowledge of the corruption, lets the players know the spirit is innocent and has a plan to try and break the corruption. You just need to keep him AND the spirit alive for X rounds. Players actions will all be about drawing aggro from the spirit, killing it's minions and protecting the NPC as he completes the ritual.

Things like this have been played out against monsters like liches and vampires who you can kill, but that just makes them flee and reform somewhere else. You want to keep the creature occupied long enough to deal with it in some non-combat way.

I've done this before by having a character scribing runes in a circle around the center of the room. Scriber moves at half speed while prone to do it. Minions were the main threat and the BBEG would attack the scriber if it didn't take damage in the last round otherwise it targeted whoever did the most damage to it last round instead.

Worked pretty well, there was a good balance between players sniping the boss to keep it's attention and then picking off the minions with their remaining actions in the round. I was careful to describe the boss getting weaker to let players have an idea of its current health. Another tradeoff is the boss healed if it was not attacked. So, if the boss got too low on HP, they would have to let off attacking it. So the boss sometimes got a shot in and sometimes the minions couldn't be cleared quickly enough. Healer had to step in and keep the scriber alive. It's pretty easy to work off the DPS of 1 character x slightly less than the number of rounds you want the scriber to work for the boss HP. Add in minions HP per round roughly equal to the DPS of the remainder of the party. That should be fairly balanced in getting all the conditions to work together.

[Man_Over_Game]

As Nickl said, punishing players with a conclusion that they were not aware of will not sit over well. Make sure that they fully are aware of their choices, and what those consequences mean.

Past that, you basically have the same obstacle: The spirit attacking the players. The only thing you need left is an optional objective that the players can opt in to that increases the difficulty of the encounter.

Using another NPC is an option, but that doesn't help much during the fight itself, as the players will protect the NPC whether they care the spirit lives or dies. It doesn't give the right "choice" that we're looking for. No, they need to make the active choice to kill the spirit in the heat of the moment.

My recommendation is to either:


Have the Corruption be some sort of collection of evil, Astral Plane parasites that have been feeding off of the Spirit. The players know how to attack them, but the Corruption will spawn several small creatures to fight the players, at the same time they're dealing with the Spirit.
Make it so the Spirit is protected by several cultists who are causing the Corruption. They have Sanctuary on themselves and regularly cast Shield and Cure Wounds on themselves. In order to channel the Corruption and control the Spirit, they can't take offensive action, but killing them will end the Corruption (as annoying and hard as that may be). If the Spirit is killed, their link will be suddenly severed and knock them unconscious.

[Warmage]

Using an NPC is a viable option, but that may leave the PCs in merely a supporting role. You can have the NPC instruct the PCs on the method but not actually come along for the ritual. Then have the PCs use a standard or full action to advance the ritual. Every successful roll advances the ritual and after X successes, the ritual succeeds. Have the corrupt spirit and allies attempt to disrupt the ritual by attacking the PCs to break their concentration. Alternatively, an enemy wizard could be using their own actions (and rolls) to reverse the ritual.

I've run something like this before in 3.5, but with the PCs stopping the big bad Priest's ritual from succeeding.