Reminds me of when my dm pulled an aboleth on us like a rancor pit, we all panicked and dumped all the damage we could in one turn on it, burn most of our daily resources, and killed it before it could move because we all rolled well on initiative
@@burningshine5524dnd is about fun, creative interactions and roleplaying with friends first and foremost, creating an interesting narrative secondarily, and being a crunchy, mechanical game is tertiary. If the main point was just the mechanics of trying to build a character able to beat x thing from the monster manual, then you wouldn’t even need a dm.
@@burningshine5524DMs aren’t allowed to make a boss more difficult? Spitefully in this context would most likely mean they killed it so fast that there’s no sense of victory after being the boss, no sense of “WE DID IT”, instead a “Damn that was it?”
My fav player never heard of dnd till stranger things. Is somewhat of a chad persona. Plays a rouge and NEVER fails to entertain me with his goofy shenanigans. In the second session he started to write down the hitpoints of every attack and calculated the hp of the enemys 😂 i had the pleasure of explain the concept of meta gaming to him, he was so bewildered 😂. Or his attemps at RP, just adorable😂 get yourself someone who has NEVER heard of dnd into your party, it's either going to be the best or the worst xp of your dm life 😎
I once had a wizard at the end of the dungeon that was meant to be ambushed cause I knew how much they loved ambushing. It was supposed to be a clone and then the fight would begin in earnest with him revealing himself. I forgot this, naturally. So they ambush him and blank him in a single turn, then have to escape the dungeon. I'm going over my notes a week later and notice how I had intended for the guy they killed to be a clone. It was awful and they loved hearing about it after the fact.
That's such a great way to give your players what they want and make them feel like they made a good plan but also not ruin the BBEG as a villain! Makes a good story now though
Every now and then I'll have a BBEG that can't be killed until something dramatic happens. There have been a couple occasions where a player does something descriptively cool, with the good rolls to back it up, and I drop the BBEG early because "yeah thats good enough".
I do an altered version, where i have a rough estimation for boss health, like 500 hp. If it gets shredded by lucky rolls, i increase the rough damage, and if theres an opprotunity for it, i give narrative reasons for doing so, like "you crit by hitting the boss, it gets pissed, and its form turns larger abd more muscular as you feel the magic of the creature increase."
@@steeledminer616You are missing out that "that's a cool strategy" is often a win condition. It's not just extending health for the sake of adding turns, but rather making the fight feel tense and climactic.
After like 20 years of playing D&D I still say that arbitrarily increasing the BBEG's hp is the best solution. I've played with a lot of people with various skill levels, but more often than not I am trying to make a coherent world fight "builds" and not characters. I want to make a fun fight. Not instigate rocket tag. If the players come up with a strategy or plan, I'm hot going to just negate it. But often my players "plans" are just to throw lots of dice until the annoyance goes away.
@@steeledminer616 If players are getting multiple crits in and there is no dramatic fanfare, there's something wrong going on. This is a game of make-believe, not a video game. Nobody likes downing a big bad in one turn, not the players nor the dm. This isn't "making the boss mega unstoppable to stomp my players," It's meant to give your players a chance to do something and get to feel cool. Also, again, if the strategy is being rewarded and your players find out how you're doing bosses, would that not just encourage them to propperly strategize more often???
My gaming group has a phrase we all use called Third Dragon because we fought a pair of adult dragons as the boss for a dungeon. They bombed initiative, we jumped them, my paladin crit, and long story short between luck and optimized characters we had one adult dragon killed on his first turn (hellish rebuke), and the second dragon died before his third turn so our DM just threw a third dragon into the room. Now whenever a boss gets butchered and the DM has to suddenly throw in more enemies we all say oh look its third dragon.
To be fair, sometimes the dice do just go along with the narrative *perfectly*. I was playing Warhammer RPG - the system uses percentile dice, you succeed by rolling under your score for that ability (same success/fail as Call of Cthulhu, if you know that one). One of my friends was playing as a snooty elf merchant, who tried to haggle to buy a pack of playing cards, rolled badly, and had to pay full price. I also wanted to buy playing cards. I hadn't been planning to haggle, especially given my antisocial wizard had a really low haggle ability. Still, seeing the failure, copied the other player's attempt at haggling, rolled, and succeeded. Whole thing happened *just* loyd enough for the elf to hear. Those dice rolls were utterly beautiful.
My buddies and I do a similar thing. We call it dudes D&D camping weekend. We go camping somewhere very remote and basically camp and play D&D for 5 or so days. We also have 2 trained chefs in the group, so we are basically rustic foodies for a week.
The boss health bar thing makes perfect sense, as long as your players don't know that's what you are doing. You are basically balancing the fight in real time, not too easy, not too hard.
I had one occasion where the players disappointingly one shotted a BBEG, so I decided on the fly to make him load bearing. His death was felt by his pet horror in the basement, which went berzerk and started knocking out support walls. The players found the missing villagers... they wound up fighting a Vozhd. (The villagers were flesh crafted into a single 10 story tall horror and then turned into vampire spawn to extend the torment and give the almalgamated beast super powers like being able to walk at all)
I sometimes fuge the dice and health a bit for time purposes for quick one shots where we don't have the luxury to take our time and play things out naturally. But for longer campaigns we go where the wind takes us. And it can get pretty crazy.
As a DM who had my party's Monk stunlock a boss to death before I could show any of its homebrewed abilities, I absolutely add health to the fights at times if it'd make the fights more fun. I also let players get kills on bosses if it'd be more satisfying to end the fight then and there, even if the boss still has HP. The Monk taught me that day to make sure all lore significant encounters were stun immune from then on, because screw Stunning Strike.
I can’t wait to start playing, but I was watching legends of avantis, and I could tell the DM during a huge fight in icebound didn’t want his story to end. So after killing two party members he kind of skipped the bosses turn, to fall off a waterfall, they were all floating on ice fighting the thing, knew the waterfall was coming up. And yeah it was canon in this story the thing was afraid of water so when they landed it was easier to kill. Then when a player had a potion to revive another and said this other player had one he didn’t even ask which ones or what the effects were. He didn’t want the story to end there but the dice were just killing the players, ‘Plot like the devil, DM like an angel’ he kept saying and if what he said was true that he had been working on that story for years yeah I wouldn’t want my players to die to one of the bosses 9 sessions into 42 session campaign. The story has to be dangerous, to be engaging right? Well it’s the dice that decide if a story is dangerous, or deadly.
I was outsmarted my last session. The players did some insane playes, and essentially rendered the boss usless and put him to sleep in 3 turns. Did the whole dm meme and ripped out 3 pages of notes. Honestly, I was impressed. I had to give it to them, good stuff.
One of my friends wanted to try starting a mini campaign at level 7 and at the beginning we had a fight with the boss and we were supposed to run away or something but he underestimated stunning strike so that was where that campaign ended. World saved, crisis averted, all thanks to bonk.
Play 3.5 on the cruise...there's this wonderful little book called "Stormwrack: Mastering the Perils of Wind and Wave" It has all sorts of things in it that will make you more comfortable on the giant ship over the immense depths of the unexplored ocean.
Once I tried to run a CR6 White Abashi as a boss for a party a little too big for it (like 6 lvl 7s or something). I definitely totally absolutely planned from the start to give it 3x it's normal HP, access to cleric spells, & a second phase with a hellfire nuke attack (the fight lasted like 5 rounds anyway)
I’m terrible at gushing boss health so I’ve always had a timer for mine. So irrelavent of if the players could actually do anything to it depending on how wasted the party was I would either say the most recent attack killed it, if everyone was near dead, or due to the party being so deadly efficient the BBEG or boss scuttled away in some dramatic fashion to fight another day. Kinda like a power rangers fight.
The idea I like is to not have a set hit points but an average, once the players near that average, you wait until you find a thematically good point to let the boss die Its all about how you want your players to interact with the boss and how that boss' impression feels
I did that once when I was starting out! Now I'm not an amateur and it's super easy to handle the game without hiding my rolls or making up health lol.
I have on occasion fudged the numbers on the BBEG. Not by much but enough to be interesting. Every victory will be hard won, or mulitpart. I have on one occasion turned a long battle into two smaller ones, bringing the party to a low before the BBEG escapes to plan how to get rid of them properly and more publicly
Ya honestly if the party takes out a boss to fast I will usually improve a 3rd phase. For example I had evil warlock who made a pact with a cabal of devils. Apon his death his body began ripping into the shape of a portal and outsteped 2 of the devils he had made a pact with. The party then had to fight them instead.
nothing is as awkward as when the DM announces his favorite player four sessions before the end of the campaign, and asks another player to use a different character for the final boss, but is then disappointed when the group utterly falls flat on their faces because the synergy was destroyed
Anything that i want to be a proper boss has phases. Unless they do something creative that makes sense and rolls well enough, they can't drop more than one phase at a time.
i should probably start doing some variation of the boss health one to make sure everyone in the party has a chance to actually fight (one of the players has TERRIBLE luck when it comes to initiative over multiple campaigns)
I’ll never let the no HP fights go man, it makes prepping for combat completely pointless. My DM did this and I found out and haven’t played since. It felt like he didn’t respect my time in planning my character
I don't think I've ever done the hitpoints one to that degree (I have sometimes just added 50% to hp in a fight). Usually i throw enough adds at the party that insta-killing the boss isn't as much of a problem. And for non-boss encounters theres always reinforcements or *gasp* the enemies using consumables.
Oof, some of those were really bad. Especially the crit 5 times in a turn making the fight last longer. But no set hp is also very problematic, for many reasons.
Honest with my rolls, if I want something to happen I'll set up the stats so that whatever it is can't fail. Every GM has favourites, but there are different favourites for different things. If you play in a format where you can no prep, learn to do it. Not so that you can actually not prep, but so that you can prep when those pesky players mess it all up. No health bar bosses has always interested me, but I VTT with health bars visible to the players. To acheive similar I just have to spawn new mobs or invent a second phase on the spot.
I don't do the boss HP thing, bosses are the thing in which I give most of my effort and I heavily test them. My players like games with really hard boss fights, since we all like soulslike games/any challenging game. I usually create normal encounters to make my players stomp them tho, for compensate.
I always do the health bar thing with the exception of when I forgot that Blight exists and the druid smacked the giant plant monster (who was vulnerable to necrotic) for 128 damage, killing it instantly. I had to hand it to them for my poor planning.
Legit had a dm challenge me make the most broken melee character he ever saw, he had to double the hit points of most of our encounters, sometimes triple them because I understood the assignment a little too well.
I'm GMing a PF2E campaign right now, and have been for about two months now. The amount of rolls I've fudged from like 6 sessions is insane. You know how hard it is to stop 4 level 2 players from dying to 2 level 1 spiders? I thought it wouldn't be that hard, and I was completely wrong.
![ว้าว!ลุงบีมแบกทองมารับขวัญหลานกันยกบ้าน [cc] แดนแพทตี้ SS2 | EP.49 |](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Osihq1OAs-4/mqdefault.jpg)
Classic mistake. Never give them anything until they reveal what evidence they have. If they had you dead to rights you wouldn't even be questioned.
“Just one more thing…”
This is basically the plot of The Tell-Tale Heart
How tf did playing like an asshole become the standard in this community
@@rodrigosoto5035 Random Poe reference. Poe's poems pwn posers!
I learned that way back in school.
"Do you know why you're here?"
"No." (internally: Wonder what they found this time?)
True story, our dm got mad that we killed the boss in two turns, and on the spot he added three.
Reminds me of when my dm pulled an aboleth on us like a rancor pit, we all panicked and dumped all the damage we could in one turn on it, burn most of our daily resources, and killed it before it could move because we all rolled well on initiative
He clearly was a bad DM, because you wouldn't notice you actually killed the guy with good DMs. Like me.
@@mr_avokado_manTbf he couldve either vocally got mad at them at the moment, or had brought it up afterwards
Added three... what? Health bars? Clones? Random thematic monsters?
Find better dm
“I must go, the sea life beckons me,” is a phrase I never knew I needed to hear. Thank you.
I feel i have heard that from a pirate before
Sounds like Jotaro
That ultra wide DM stance is necessary for unlocking maximum improv and maximum NPC rizz
I was hoping SOMEONE would comment on it.
that leg spread is crazy
It's like he's wearing Dennis Reynolds' patented extremely short jorts!
WIDE
How the E-4 Mafia stands At Ease
@@MetalheadSapling truth
I wasn't prepared for the music that plays when you catch a Pokemon in the Gen 5 Pokemon games.
Thems were trumpets my friend, that was gen 3
@GeneralCDragon, while Gen 3 is known for it's brass instruments, if you look online, the song that plays is from generation 5 of pokemon.
ur both wrong. I've played hg/ss my whole life, even now. that my friend, is gen 4
I was just about to comment how that brought me back to my childhood
@@GeneralCDragonno? No that was Gen 5 bruh. How tf did you think that was Gen 3?
The no health bar thing is just boss phases in action. No worries, I say as I spitefully add 500 extra HP.
Look, I do this too, but I make sure to scale the XP rewards up as well.
And sometimes, I really just want a specific player to have a moment of glory
@@killeryodellingmonkey4192ewww XP
Sorry for your party
@@burningshine5524dnd is about fun, creative interactions and roleplaying with friends first and foremost, creating an interesting narrative secondarily, and being a crunchy, mechanical game is tertiary. If the main point was just the mechanics of trying to build a character able to beat x thing from the monster manual, then you wouldn’t even need a dm.
@@burningshine5524DMs aren’t allowed to make a boss more difficult? Spitefully in this context would most likely mean they killed it so fast that there’s no sense of victory after being the boss, no sense of “WE DID IT”, instead a “Damn that was it?”
“I have favorites” 😂😂
I was searching for it! 😂
My fav player never heard of dnd till stranger things. Is somewhat of a chad persona. Plays a rouge and NEVER fails to entertain me with his goofy shenanigans. In the second session he started to write down the hitpoints of every attack and calculated the hp of the enemys 😂 i had the pleasure of explain the concept of meta gaming to him, he was so bewildered 😂. Or his attemps at RP, just adorable😂 get yourself someone who has NEVER heard of dnd into your party, it's either going to be the best or the worst xp of your dm life 😎
Idk why but that, "The sea life beckons me." roll credits killed me
I once had a wizard at the end of the dungeon that was meant to be ambushed cause I knew how much they loved ambushing. It was supposed to be a clone and then the fight would begin in earnest with him revealing himself. I forgot this, naturally. So they ambush him and blank him in a single turn, then have to escape the dungeon. I'm going over my notes a week later and notice how I had intended for the guy they killed to be a clone.
It was awful and they loved hearing about it after the fact.
That's such a great way to give your players what they want and make them feel like they made a good plan but also not ruin the BBEG as a villain! Makes a good story now though
Canonically then, the real evil wizard was still out there... ready to ambush the ambushers.
@@DrakeWurrum In my campaign, we prepare for him to ambush us. We are professional ambush victims, after all.
@@DrakeWurrum oo I like that. Wish I had thought of it ten years ago
Every now and then I'll have a BBEG that can't be killed until something dramatic happens. There have been a couple occasions where a player does something descriptively cool, with the good rolls to back it up, and I drop the BBEG early because "yeah thats good enough".
Yeah, that's the reason I have taken a liking to bosses with hidden health mechanics that require something besides just hitting to kill
“Are the rumors true?!”
“Yes, my constant power stancing has indeed made me, as they whisper, ‘caked up’”.
I do an altered version, where i have a rough estimation for boss health, like 500 hp. If it gets shredded by lucky rolls, i increase the rough damage, and if theres an opprotunity for it, i give narrative reasons for doing so, like "you crit by hitting the boss, it gets pissed, and its form turns larger abd more muscular as you feel the magic of the creature increase."
Zach looks like he's about to risk it all for Padme and introduce some younglings to the dark side 😂
Increasing the encounters' difficulty when the players have a winning streak is actually good basis for a neat mechanic.
@@steeledminer616You are missing out that "that's a cool strategy" is often a win condition. It's not just extending health for the sake of adding turns, but rather making the fight feel tense and climactic.
After like 20 years of playing D&D I still say that arbitrarily increasing the BBEG's hp is the best solution. I've played with a lot of people with various skill levels, but more often than not I am trying to make a coherent world fight "builds" and not characters.
I want to make a fun fight. Not instigate rocket tag.
If the players come up with a strategy or plan, I'm hot going to just negate it. But often my players "plans" are just to throw lots of dice until the annoyance goes away.
@@steeledminer616 If players are getting multiple crits in and there is no dramatic fanfare, there's something wrong going on. This is a game of make-believe, not a video game. Nobody likes downing a big bad in one turn, not the players nor the dm. This isn't "making the boss mega unstoppable to stomp my players," It's meant to give your players a chance to do something and get to feel cool. Also, again, if the strategy is being rewarded and your players find out how you're doing bosses, would that not just encourage them to propperly strategize more often???
@@steeledminer616 You're taking this as a hard and fast rule rather than treating it as a case by case basis.
@@steeledminer616 You clearly understand what it is that I am saying but are being wilfully obtuse.
My gaming group has a phrase we all use called Third Dragon because we fought a pair of adult dragons as the boss for a dungeon. They bombed initiative, we jumped them, my paladin crit, and long story short between luck and optimized characters we had one adult dragon killed on his first turn (hellish rebuke), and the second dragon died before his third turn so our DM just threw a third dragon into the room. Now whenever a boss gets butchered and the DM has to suddenly throw in more enemies we all say oh look its third dragon.
The health bar is why I gauge my oarty with minions and mini-bosses first before the main bosses.
Always. Gotta soften them up for the real pounding.
As a DM of nearly 10 years (with a single game having lasted the past 6 years) this video speaks to my soul on a level that scares me.
Oh my god that is some dedication right there. Hope the campaign ends well.
He turns to the sea life to avoid the awkwardness he just created
suit top shorts bottom the classic
Ngl that no boss health bar thing is actually a really good idea.
To be fair, sometimes the dice do just go along with the narrative *perfectly*. I was playing Warhammer RPG - the system uses percentile dice, you succeed by rolling under your score for that ability (same success/fail as Call of Cthulhu, if you know that one).
One of my friends was playing as a snooty elf merchant, who tried to haggle to buy a pack of playing cards, rolled badly, and had to pay full price. I also wanted to buy playing cards. I hadn't been planning to haggle, especially given my antisocial wizard had a really low haggle ability. Still, seeing the failure, copied the other player's attempt at haggling, rolled, and succeeded. Whole thing happened *just* loyd enough for the elf to hear.
Those dice rolls were utterly beautiful.
that power stance at the start is crazy
My buddies and I do a similar thing. We call it dudes D&D camping weekend. We go camping somewhere very remote and basically camp and play D&D for 5 or so days. We also have 2 trained chefs in the group, so we are basically rustic foodies for a week.
I relate so much to not giving Bosses an actual health bar
I didn't expect my DM-ing tactics to get exposed like that but at least I now know I'm not alone!
The boss health bar thing makes perfect sense, as long as your players don't know that's what you are doing. You are basically balancing the fight in real time, not too easy, not too hard.
"I have favorites"
"Not that one"
"You're not one of them"
😂❤ I feel attacked, I do all of those. I steal plots, lie about rolls, have favorites, prep things last minute, and I give my bosses double health.
I had one occasion where the players disappointingly one shotted a BBEG, so I decided on the fly to make him load bearing. His death was felt by his pet horror in the basement, which went berzerk and started knocking out support walls.
The players found the missing villagers... they wound up fighting a Vozhd.
(The villagers were flesh crafted into a single 10 story tall horror and then turned into vampire spawn to extend the torment and give the almalgamated beast super powers like being able to walk at all)
"Yes, I prepared this adventure well before asking you to recap the last session."
I sometimes fuge the dice and health a bit for time purposes for quick one shots where we don't have the luxury to take our time and play things out naturally. But for longer campaigns we go where the wind takes us. And it can get pretty crazy.
As a DM who had my party's Monk stunlock a boss to death before I could show any of its homebrewed abilities, I absolutely add health to the fights at times if it'd make the fights more fun. I also let players get kills on bosses if it'd be more satisfying to end the fight then and there, even if the boss still has HP. The Monk taught me that day to make sure all lore significant encounters were stun immune from then on, because screw Stunning Strike.
I've known DMs that don't give the boss hp and just have it die when they want. I no longer play with those DMs.
I can’t wait to start playing, but I was watching legends of avantis, and I could tell the DM during a huge fight in icebound didn’t want his story to end. So after killing two party members he kind of skipped the bosses turn, to fall off a waterfall, they were all floating on ice fighting the thing, knew the waterfall was coming up. And yeah it was canon in this story the thing was afraid of water so when they landed it was easier to kill.
Then when a player had a potion to revive another and said this other player had one he didn’t even ask which ones or what the effects were. He didn’t want the story to end there but the dice were just killing the players,
‘Plot like the devil, DM like an angel’ he kept saying and if what he said was true that he had been working on that story for years yeah I wouldn’t want my players to die to one of the bosses 9 sessions into 42 session campaign.
The story has to be dangerous, to be engaging right? Well it’s the dice that decide if a story is dangerous, or deadly.
I was outsmarted my last session. The players did some insane playes, and essentially rendered the boss usless and put him to sleep in 3 turns. Did the whole dm meme and ripped out 3 pages of notes. Honestly, I was impressed. I had to give it to them, good stuff.
One of my friends wanted to try starting a mini campaign at level 7 and at the beginning we had a fight with the boss and we were supposed to run away or something but he underestimated stunning strike so that was where that campaign ended. World saved, crisis averted, all thanks to bonk.
How is no one freaking out about how amazing this is!!!!!!
"Prepped everything in the car on the eay over"
You *prepare?!*
My version of preparation is daydreaming all the time at work.
daydreaming and hastily scribbled nonsense in my phone XD
@@whitemoonwolf13
Cultured. Efficient. Pragmatic. Sexy.
Play 3.5 on the cruise...there's this wonderful little book called "Stormwrack: Mastering the Perils of Wind and Wave"
It has all sorts of things in it that will make you more comfortable on the giant ship over the immense depths of the unexplored ocean.
The boss health one is so true I just count their damage numbers and I’m like yeah that’s good
Once I tried to run a CR6 White Abashi as a boss for a party a little too big for it (like 6 lvl 7s or something). I definitely totally absolutely planned from the start to give it 3x it's normal HP, access to cleric spells, & a second phase with a hellfire nuke attack (the fight lasted like 5 rounds anyway)
the boss thing sounds cool. Prevents meta and yeah, if done well can extend a fight or shorten it if and when needed *shrug*.
“I must go, the sea life beckons me”
POV: You hyperfixate on marine biology
the only cruise iv ever wanted to go on.
I’m terrible at gushing boss health so I’ve always had a timer for mine. So irrelavent of if the players could actually do anything to it depending on how wasted the party was I would either say the most recent attack killed it, if everyone was near dead, or due to the party being so deadly efficient the BBEG or boss scuttled away in some dramatic fashion to fight another day.
Kinda like a power rangers fight.
Bro is CHEEKED UP on a Tuesday
The idea I like is to not have a set hit points but an average, once the players near that average, you wait until you find a thematically good point to let the boss die
Its all about how you want your players to interact with the boss and how that boss' impression feels
I did that once when I was starting out! Now I'm not an amateur and it's super easy to handle the game without hiding my rolls or making up health lol.
The Pokémon Kanto ship music is so nostalgic
insane fit. turtleneck and chat suit coat with shorts
Jokes on you, none of my enemies have any actual heal points!
Fair. I've made bosses, seen my player get halfway through in few turns, then said to myself "Ah, the hp was too low" and buffed it up
unless the bbeg is supposed to be frail and weak it makes sense for their health to be flubbed if the party is doing to much damage
The Pokemon soundtrack gave me nostalgic whiplash.
Listen, I'm not about to confess to anything. You come back with proof, then we'll talk.
Also, the music was perfect
I have never wanted to go on a cruise before... today!
Tory power stance really adds to it
I have on occasion fudged the numbers on the BBEG. Not by much but enough to be interesting. Every victory will be hard won, or mulitpart. I have on one occasion turned a long battle into two smaller ones, bringing the party to a low before the BBEG escapes to plan how to get rid of them properly and more publicly
Goddam now that's a power stance 😂
Ya honestly if the party takes out a boss to fast I will usually improve a 3rd phase. For example I had evil warlock who made a pact with a cabal of devils. Apon his death his body began ripping into the shape of a portal and outsteped 2 of the devils he had made a pact with. The party then had to fight them instead.
Did not expect the Pokemon music outro lol
Why the hell was he standing like that 💀
Also “all of these are concerning” 😭
The Car Ride Prep time is a real thing
He is standing rather at ease if I do say
nothing is as awkward as when the DM announces his favorite player four sessions before the end of the campaign, and asks another player to use a different character for the final boss, but is then disappointed when the group utterly falls flat on their faces because the synergy was destroyed
Good Lord the STANCE-
Anything that i want to be a proper boss has phases. Unless they do something creative that makes sense and rolls well enough, they can't drop more than one phase at a time.
My DM does all of that, i aint even upset, i just enjoy the game. Its all super fun regardless😊
i should probably start doing some variation of the boss health one to make sure everyone in the party has a chance to actually fight (one of the players has TERRIBLE luck when it comes to initiative over multiple campaigns)
I’ll never let the no HP fights go man, it makes prepping for combat completely pointless. My DM did this and I found out and haven’t played since. It felt like he didn’t respect my time in planning my character
I also fudge the rolls when im rolling too well. I rolled a lot of nat 20s during my players first boss fight and I just used like 3 of them.
A D&D Cruise... Damn that's cool
Good Lord the S T A N C E-
I don't think I've ever done the hitpoints one to that degree (I have sometimes just added 50% to hp in a fight). Usually i throw enough adds at the party that insta-killing the boss isn't as much of a problem. And for non-boss encounters theres always reinforcements or *gasp* the enemies using consumables.
Imagine rolling a nat twenty only for a strong wave to knock it to a two
That boss health thing is kinda smart
Boss hit points are more guidelines then actual rules.
Fair warning for this. 50$ is not a lot on the price reduction, so use it but don't exspect to make much of a dent in the 1,300.00$ price tag.
The fucking wide leg stance says it all
Oof, some of those were really bad. Especially the crit 5 times in a turn making the fight last longer. But no set hp is also very problematic, for many reasons.
The boss one is too true man what the hell ahahahahhaha
WAIT IS THAT A GREECE SHIRT?
WOOHOO
Honest with my rolls, if I want something to happen I'll set up the stats so that whatever it is can't fail.
Every GM has favourites, but there are different favourites for different things.
If you play in a format where you can no prep, learn to do it. Not so that you can actually not prep, but so that you can prep when those pesky players mess it all up.
No health bar bosses has always interested me, but I VTT with health bars visible to the players. To acheive similar I just have to spawn new mobs or invent a second phase on the spot.
It will have AL tables too. Curious if it will have the new books present
What a power stance.
I don't do the boss HP thing, bosses are the thing in which I give most of my effort and I heavily test them. My players like games with really hard boss fights, since we all like soulslike games/any challenging game.
I usually create normal encounters to make my players stomp them tho, for compensate.
That is Click-Splitting ... !! Split-Baiting ...!! Oh, you know what I want ... I mean MEAN!!!
I always do the health bar thing with the exception of when I forgot that Blight exists and the druid smacked the giant plant monster (who was vulnerable to necrotic) for 128 damage, killing it instantly. I had to hand it to them for my poor planning.
Legit had a dm challenge me make the most broken melee character he ever saw, he had to double the hit points of most of our encounters, sometimes triple them because I understood the assignment a little too well.
I feel attacked
Write that down. WRITE THAT DOWN!
Yeah lol, my players in a CoC campaign are gonna fight a possessed tank, no idea how much HP to give it, It'll be when I think it is good.
I liked the little disclaimer
That wallpaper reminds me of Harry Potters family tree. (I've only seen the movies)
Im so early, i get to see one of my favorite DnD creators!
Im jealous i would love a dnd cruise
I'm GMing a PF2E campaign right now, and have been for about two months now. The amount of rolls I've fudged from like 6 sessions is insane. You know how hard it is to stop 4 level 2 players from dying to 2 level 1 spiders? I thought it wouldn't be that hard, and I was completely wrong.
Bro, eyeballs death
Nah as a first time dm i feel called out😭😭
As a DM I feel all these confessions