Building Bosses as close to the rules as possible

[AlanBruce]

Greetings! I have been on playing a few FromSoftware games lately and noticed that a few of the more iconic bosses could possibly be recreated here.

I am aware of action economy and how a party of four (or more) can trivialize any encounter if properly optimized.

Still, I believe these bosses can lay out the pain even if confronted solo. My thoughts were on the following:

Gehrman

Orphan of Kos

Slave Knight Gael

Isshin the Swordsaint

Do you believe these can be translated to 3.5? I would assume most of these would be fought by mid-high level parties.

Looking forward to your input!

[Morphic tide]

The only one of these with the slightest chance to work faithfully is Slave Knight Gael, but there's a fundamental flaw with porting anything FromSoftware in the last decade: It's all split-second movement. 3.5 does not support off-turn movement. However, this shares a solution with the action economy problem outside of giving more actions outright. The thing of it is giving better actions than currently present in 3.5.

In general, you should be able to get a lot of the issue dealt with by Immediate Action movement, Move Actions as partial charges, Standard Actions being AoEs or flurries, and a mix of Stun, Daze, and Prone infliction to burn player action economy. Give Immediate Actions or ranged Attacks of Opportunity to force sizable Concentration checks on the casters and punish any fragility, forcing the melee players to actually sit in formation instead of charging in, and play the boss intelligently to go after the spellcasters in particular.

Except the Orphan of Kos. Have them deal with it by just jumping at everyone in the party and throwing out mountains of saves against Fear, Prone, Disarm checks, Wisdom damage, just make
a bloody landfil of agonizing mechanical representations of its boss fight because the thing is an infant God of the Eldritch variety and should most definitely have a solid chance at putting parties in the mid 20s in the ground with them left wondering what the hell killed them. If you can compare it to an existing monster statblock that isn't a Greater Deity, Archfiend, Demon Lord, or other such top tier entity and think it could handily deal with the Orphan, buff the Orphan to be a pain in the ass for it in at least one way. Because this thing is most definitely Epic, and not your piddle level 21s but a fight for prospective God-killers, being as how it's a newborn God itself.

[AlanBruce]

Thank you for the responses. Having fought all of the above mentioned bosses in their respective games, many of them actually can put up a most challenging fight eve against a party (these games allow to summon cooperators, effectively mimicking a party of both tanks and casters, depending on the game).

What I did notice with a few of these bosses- orphan for instance- is that it will knock the Hunters off their feet and leave them prone. This is done often and with frustratingly good effect. In 3.5, that's one action used to just to get back on your feet, casters and party buffed with Fly notwithstanding.

I do find The Orphan to be aptly suited for a fight in this system. I cannot recall if he disarms, but if using the rules, he ought to probably sunder, given the weapon he wields and the strength behind it. Piling on a bunch of debuffs on the party seems like a very good idea- this is not "just a monster from the books". It's an eldritch newborn that is just starting to quickly learn what he can do...and is incredibly mad.

Gael has a lot of D&D aspects to it (in my opinion, Dark souls takes a lot of elements from this game). The "knight" aspect of his name should not be taken as the literal class, however. His behavior, at least at first, mimics that of a barbarian with rage and probably pounce thrown in. Also, leap attack, frequently used.

He does get spellcasting later on, but am unsure if this would be by virtue of him multiclassing or getting a boost due to The Dark Soul in him.