RPG combat is boring.
Don’t get me wrong, conceptually combat is extremely exciting. The legendary heroes kick down the door, rush into a monster filled chamber, weapons drawn, magical energies percolating, and engage in a life and death epic battle against their wretched foes in the name of goodness, righteousness, and first dibs on the loot.
If you’re lucky, a good gamemaster will do his or her very best to impart the tension and immediacy of violent struggle into the combat encounter. At the end of the day though, you’re still going around the table, taking turns rolling dice to try and whittle away at the monsters’ abstracted health. It can be a bit tedious, especially if the fight lasts more than a few rounds.
The worst — the absolute worst — are boss fights. You know, the big final encounters that the game has been building up to for weeks and months worth of play sessions. Almost invariably, that fight is going to be against some overpowered jerk with a ridiculous amount of abstracted health on top of their already massive ability to mitigate damage. The philosophy at play is that a difficult encounter is more challenging, and a challenging encounter is better. Weeks and months worth of game have led up to this point, and it would be a shame if this Ultimate Evil were to go out in a few rounds like a chump, right? The desire to make things challenging is a good one, but the problem is that just making the villain really difficult to kill doesn’t make the encounter challenging. Having to grind away at the evil dude’s mountain of abstracted health just makes the fight long. And boring.
So, the next time you’re rocking the gamemaster’s chair, consider trying something different. As opposed to making your villains extremely hard to kill, make them impossible to kill. Or rather, structure your combat encounters so that the road to victory isn’t paved with chipping away at the BBEG until they keel over from the death of a thousand die rolls. Instead, make the fight into a puzzle. Make victory dependant on the players’ ability to solve the problem the villain represents. Let them win by showing off how clever they are.
Imagine the following scenario: it’s the climax of the adventure. The characters have stormed their way to the top of the evil wizard Fizzlegrump’s tower, and are about dole out a boatload of swift and righteous justice for Fizzlegrump’s kidnapping of the local jousting team’s peacock mascot. You, as the gamemaster can have Fizzlegrump buff up using the standard spells and magical items found in the rules, roll for initiative, and let the player characters grind away at his protection and/or health turn by turn over a countless number of rounds, just like every other combat scenario. However, another option would be that as the characters enter Fizzlegrump’s chamber, they see him hovering in the middle of the room, protected by an impenetrable force field, with tendrils of crackling mystical energy leading to twelve glowing spheres arranged around the room. Fizzlegrump can hurl insults alongside his magical attacks, safe from the characters’ wrath until they figure out how to deactivate the spheres so they can finally punch him right in his scrawny, book reading face. How do they deactivate the spheres? Maybe there’s an easy to solve colour pattern. Perhaps there’s a riddle they’ve come across repeatedly over the course of the adventure which holds the key. If Fizzlegrump happens to be the very first puzzle boss you’ve included, then it’s probably best to just let them smash the spheres.
Obviously this approach isn’t suitable for every combat encounter. The rats the players clear out of the basement of the local tavern for their very first Level 1 encounter aren’t going to require an elaborate Tower of Hanoi to overcome. The majority of the combat is still going to be by the numbers, deplete-their-health-before-they-deplete-ours affairs. Which is perfectly fine, so long as the fight doesn’t drag on and on. Most RPG combat encounters should be used as a way to pace out the game session. Or because the players performed spectacularly poorly during a social encounter. The puzzle boss exists as an alternative for important fights which should be more memorable: arch-villains, returning antagonists, particularly impressive monsters. Encounters which should be distinct from the handful of goblin guards in a hallway — and not just because they last an extra hour — are perfect for turning into a puzzle.
Some things to keep in mind when building a puzzle boss:
– Don’t make the solution too difficult
Every gamemaster has at one time or another been frustrated with their players because they weren’t able to figure out the oh-so-clever mystery or riddle he or she had slaved over for hours. It’s important for gamemasters to keep in mind that sometimes obvious solutions are only obvious because they’re the ones planning the encounter. Also, sometimes players are just oblivious. Regardless, the goal of the puzzle boss is to be fun and challenging. What you don’t want is for the players to become frustrated because, for whatever reason, the answer is eluding them. It helps to prime the players by giving them clues and telegraphing the solution leading up to the encounter.
– Don’t make the solution too easy
It can be a difficult line to walk, but you don’t want to telegraph the solution to the puzzle boss too blatantly. If the players go into the encounter already knowing exactly what they need to do to overcome the villain, there’s no tension or drama, and again, they’re not going to feel as though they had to earn their victory.
– Be flexible
If the players come up with a solution to the scenario that isn’t what you planned, but still makes sense, why not let them be right? The players still get the satisfaction of figuring out the solution and overcoming the opponent, and as the gamemaster that’s what you wanted, so there’s no conflict.
– Normal combat can be a part of the scenario
There is no reason you can’t add to the tension of a puzzle boss encounter by including some more traditional combat elements. The hero characters can split into groups, with one group figuring out your fiendishly clever trap, while the others protect them from the villain or the villain’s minions.
Executed skilfully, a good puzzle boss encounter can be a really effective tool for getting the players to engage with the story you’re trying to communicate as the gamemaster. A puzzle encounter is a challenging and memorable departure from standard RPG combat, and requires the players interact with the game world in new and different ways. It can be difficult to integrate puzzle bosses into your adventures to begin with, but with a bit of practice most gamemasters will quickly find them to be an extremely useful tool.
