Your Boss Fights Are Tiny Stories

This is going to be a living article. I will keep adding to it and refining it as I develop this idea further.

I love "The Monsters Know What They're Doing", by Keith Ammann. I love it because it gives a relatively static piece of text (a monster's stat block) a shape. It makes numbers into a story. An Oblex is not just "just another goo with a couple weird spells". It will not just present to the players and fight. It will skulk, try to prey on the most vulnerable of the team, and subvert the party over the course of half a session.

Inspired by this (and by Matt Colville's masterpiece, Action-Oriented Monsters), I have started designing my boss fights to achieve a similar effect.

The best boss fights are tiny stories.

Let me explain.

Most stories follow a three-act narrative structure. They have:

• A beginning, where we get introduced to the characters, the situation, and the main conflict they're going to resolve throughout the story.
• A development, where characters interact, and things happen in a way that builds tension towards...
• The climax, where the conflict is resolved one way or another (Luke blows up the Death Star).
• The denouement, where the consequences of resolving the conflict are felt and processed.

This is just a brief intro. There are many (many!) resources detailing the three-act structure. My favorite one is this video by Chris Fox, but a quick search will yield enough results to bury yourself in.

Over the years of DMing, I realized that all the most epic boss fights I ran followed this structure almost to a tee. They all went somewhat like this:

• An explosive beginning, where we find what the monster can do (often in painful fashion). This often ends with the players thinking that they are in the backfoot, or what I like to call the "Oh, s*$t" moment.
• A tactical middle, where the characters slowly gain advantages on the monster through regrouping, learning and chipping away. They go from being in the backfoot to slowly gaining advantage. At the end of this period, they should have a feeling of "Okay, we can do this folks!".
• A climax, where the monster, feeling that it's cornered and about to lose, launches one more, extremely powerful attack, or suddenly changes form. Think of a second phase on a boss. This is the second "Oh, sh$t" moment, and it's not uncommon for party members to drop unconscious here.
• A denouement. After barely surviving the climax, the party finally defeats the monster, and are free to lick their wounds.

If you want to see an example of this structure in action, see this post: I Put a Bloodborne Fight in my Curse of Strahd campaign.

This pattern has, without fail, lent the most epic battles I've DM'd. Every time, after one of these battles, everyone at the table agreed that "that was the hardest fight we've done", and "we need to get out of here and make camp", but also that "that was so epic. I can't wait to do it again."

I've given them the nickname of Cinematic Boss Fights.

Now, this is nothing new. As I said, I was already doing this in many of my fights without realizing, and I'm sure the most epic bosses are already shaped to have this structure. However, the three-act structure has made it so much easier to design custom fights for my players, because now I have a skeleton that I can flavor as I need.

That's it for now!

I look forward to your feedback and comments at borja@bardic.tools.