Article on Boss Fights (aka Solos)

[Jolith]

I thought this was a really interesting read and wanted to post here to get your guys opinions. I'm running a game in my RL group and was very tempted to try this out.

angrydm.com/

[candi]

What level is your group?

[Jolith]

15

[candi]

All of my solo advice falls flat then (my experience is up to level 9).

I just read the article, wow. I've done something like that to great effect, but nothing so cleanly defined. The only thing I would change is the Boss Monster Resilience, I would make it identical to the Khalastar Dual Soul racial ability (adding Dominated to the list of conditions it can save against).

I'd say go for it, if you put time and effort into making the narrative good even if the "Boss Monster" approach falls flat the result will still be towards the high end of the Epic Scale. That's the beauty of designing encounters around a narrative structure (stages in this case), the results tend to err on the side of good.

[Ogremind]

That is really cool, actually.
I've always hated boss fights in video games, just because they are the only place that status effects would make much difference, and almost all bosses are immune to them. I definitely like the idea of a staged fight -- though I would probably alter his "overdamage lost" to "overdamage is halved". The skill challenge offers a particularly interesting change up -- I would make it "success means moving onto the bloodied stage, failure means having to fight stage 1 again and then the bloodied stage."

Also, one problem I have found with 4ed solo monsters is their ability to take out a member of the party in one turn by concentrating all of their actions on him -- though that might not be a problem beyond first level.

[Rojito]

I am really impressed i cant wait to get my tabletop dm to try these