How to Win Your Boss Fight

Yep, I finally saw How to Train Your Dragon. Beyond the shout-out to the little geek who was listing off Dragon Manual statistics for the beasties (anyone? anyone?), there's a lot that can be learned from that movie, in terms of telling a compelling story. For now, I'll skip the subtle lessons at the start (some truly awesome character sequences as Hiccup meets and tames Toothless), and pick a very easy example in the boss fight which climaxes the movie.

I want to see more boss fights that run like that. There was a sweet spot that it hit, I'm trying to pin it down. But it seemed to me to be a great combination of teamwork and individual heroics. Well, and an utterly awesome Night Fury. (Seriously. I want to stat one of those things out.) Now, the individual heroics might have to be tweaked a bit, since RPGs are for many players, but it still provides a good model.

The Gimmick Move and Powergaming
Minor spoilers in this section, by the way.


The move that gets pulled off to end the fight is the familiar "gimmick move", so to speak. When I saw it, one of the thoughts crossing my mind was "Hiccup's powergaming." He lures the giant dragon creature up into the sky, and then blasts its wings. Could be a powergamed cheap shot. Yet it didn't seem cheap. It didn't feel like he was cheating the cosmic DM out of a well-planned encounter. Though maybe that was partially because a straight encounter would've been impossible to win. The thing was, though, it seemed like the entire situation wasn't handled like many DMs handle powergaming. Which seems to go like this.

"I blast the room's pillars."
"You--WHAT?"
"I blast the room's pillars. That'll cause the roof to collapse, killing the monster."
"But...*sigh*...okay." *rolls dice* "The roof collapses on the monster, and it dies in massive throes of agony." There goes a nice encounter.

Well, I look at that boss fight...and that's not what I see. Instead, what I see is a hard-won victory, and one which exploited the opponent's weakness. It was still interesting. It was thought-out, and it was still challenging. In other words, the cosmic DM looked at the improvisation, thought it was cool, and then fleshed out the obstacles in front of it. In my mind, too many crazy plans are just allowed to pass. There should be drama incorporated into those as well, and that way the boss fight doesn't seem cheaped-through. In other words...

"I blast the room's pillars."
"You're aiming to bring the roof down on the creature?"
"Oh yeah."
"Well, let's see. That's not going to be simple. He's not a dumb creature, and he'll be trying to stop you from bringing the roof down on him. There's also the other monsters nearby, and some of them have ranged weapons. What's the rest of the party doing?" *prepares to incorporate a miniature skill challenge*

The Price of Victory
Another spoiler in this section.


Of course, at the end of the fight, we have the traditional "plunge of death", with the fate of the hero unknown. And he winds up...well...mostly unhurt. As we soon find out, however, he's lost a leg in the fight. This points to another thing that makes memorable encounters: scars. Interestingly, the scar doesn't detract from Hiccup's dragon-riding, as it's designed to hook specifically into the dragon-riding harness. In other words, it's mainly just a mark of honor.

Consider giving the PCs similar glory-scars. It doesn't have to adversely affect them. It just has to give them a new way to be cool. So that the characters can say "See this? That's when I slew this guy..."

So yeah. It got me thinking, mainly. Elements like this can lend quite handily to spicing up a final encounter. In fact, they could even be purposefully designed in, playing to the players' knowledge skills. So, then. That's how to win your boss fight.