First, an aside: I figured out an easier way to handle agro. The boss must spend a number of threat tokens equal to the taunt value of the main tank on attacking the tank before he can spend them on any other attack. Makes the sequence of events much smoother. And a clarification: taunt tokens are exchanged within a given range, and only work within that range. I mention that because there might be 3 tanks in the last phase of the priest fight.

The Fallen Cardinal
I’m calling this guy level 10 because it’s an easy number to work with. I was struck by the idea of the ghost of a crumbling cathedral while I was thinking about ways to bring in the environment. A transition from corporeal to ghostly to demonic seems to offer a great way to call for very dramatic transitions between fight phases.

Since he’s level 10, he starts with 50 “health”, gets 10 menace points per turn, and has an effective attack roll of 25. Quick math in my head says a Paladin of that level probably has an AC somewhere around 24-25, and assuming that’s true, I may have to take that as an argument to move the base attack to [L]+10 and make spending menace point son accuracy something outside of the cost of the power. This has the additional benefit of giving the boss something to do with the spare one or two menace points he might be sitting on, so I’m going to call that the new rule for now.

Quick math also reveals that 50 health might be low. Let’s assume a 20 man raid: even doing badly, they’ll probably accrue 10 “hits” minimum per round, which makes for a quick fight, probably 2 quick. 100 would probably better, and for purposes of scaling with the number of players, the new yardstick is [L]*(number of players/2). So for our assumed 20 man raid, that’s 10*(20/2), or 100

I envision this fight having three phases: the first against his physical form, a rotting corpse in the regalia of his faith (giant hat and all). This will probably be pretty straight up, with a lot of his abilities focused around summoning up other undead minions to go after people, and maybe gaining some health back from their attacks, so taking him down requires managing his minions. The next phase will be his ghostly form, rising up from his body, and this will probably be rough to fight because of the whole incorporeal thing, so he’ll shrug off a lot of attacks, but he’ll also probably take extra hits from radiant attacks. Last, he’ll call upon his demonic masters to pull the whole cathedral into hell. This is partly because I love the visual – lit by flames and magma, with parts of the cathedral merged into the rock walls, the floor falling away to reveal magma below, leaving only a few places to stand, with the cardinal turning into a towering physical demon in the classic mould. The physical part of this fight will be the most straightforward (giving the strikers a bit of a chance to shine) but the environment will be the big challenge.

Designing Stage 1:
Ok, I want a melee attack, a ranged attack, and a summon, all bearing in mind that his usual budget is 10 menace points.

For the melee attack, I envision him just laying about himself with his ornate staff. For 1 menace point, that would be single target, 20 to hit, 1d8+5 damage. Let’s jazz that up a bit, and see what he can do with 4 menace points: let’s keep it single target and just jazz up the damage with a 3 point bump, bringing it to 3d8+5. That’s a hefty hit, but I admit it feels like it’s expensive – taking that as a note to self to possibly consider upping damage a bit.

For range, we’ll make it a smite, and we’ll call it 6 points, 1 base, 2 for range, 1 to shift the defense to reflex, and 2 to bump damage, so it’s a single target base 20 to hit against reflex for 3d6+5 damage. Again, feels expensive for what he gets, and I think this reveals to me the problem – the damage scale I’m using (from page 42) is really scaled for single attack, but I need to scale the raid boss for _group_ attacks. He should be attacking multiple targets every round, and the way these things are pricing out, that’s not an option.

So that calls for another tweak: Attacks will get priced assuming they’re area attacks. If they’re single target attacks, they get a free two level bump to damage. That reduces those two attacks to 2 and 4 menace points respectively, and I’m good with that.

At this point I feel like we’ve shaken loose most of the clunky bits, so rather than continue to show you all the work, let’s get to the end point.

The Fallen Cardinal

Initial Phase: During this phase the priest is a rotting human form in the rich regalia of a cardinal. He summons forth defenders from the mausoleum beneath the cathedral to fight for him, and he draws strength from their service.

Undead Priest Phase
Health: 30
Success Threshold: 10, extra success threshold at 20 and 30.

Attacks:
Unholy Staff
The priest lashes out with his ornate staff of impossibly tarnished gold.
2 MP- Near, single target, vs. AC. Base attack: 20, Base Damage 3d8+5

Dark Smite
The priest calls down a column of darkness to strike an enemy.
3 MP – Long range, single target, vs. Reflex. Base Attack: 20, Base Damage: 3d6+5 (necrotic)

Dark Reckoning
A wave of dark energy washes over the priest’s enemies
7 MP – Long range only, all targets in a single area, vs. Will, Base Attack 20, Base Damage: 4d8+5 (necrotic)
Notes: This is his ugly attack, and if he isn’t taunted enough or he gets too much menace back from his minions, he’ll spam this.

Call Minion
The Priest summons an undead warrior to harass his foes, then crumbles to dust, releasing a stream of black energy back to the priest.
4MP – A 3 token, 8/16/24 threshold minion appears in any area. At the beginning of the Priest’s next turn, the minion is removed from play and he gains any remaining tokens as menace tokens. If a minion “cashes out” for any number of tokens, it also heals the priest for one point.
Notes: The priest will try to spam these whenever possible (especially if he end s up with 12 menace points) , preferably into unoccupied areas like the middle distance, and use the payout to explode in Dark Reckonings.

Phase transition: Once the priest’s physical body is destroyed, his ghost form rises up to strike down his attackers.

Ghostly Priest Phase
Health: 30
Success Threshold: 10/20/30
Special: Insubstantial. Takes no damage from attacks which do not also Push, Pull or Slide, unless those attacks have the radiant keyword, in which case it takes an extra point of damage.
Environment: Lighting one of the cathedral’s candles and saying a prayer will inflict one point of damage. This can only be done from the medium range area, and requires a DC 20 religion check. Failure on this check grants the Priest one MP, just like a failed attack.

Attacks:
Dark Radiant Burst
Blades of shadow blast out from his ghostly form, striking all nearby enemies.
5MP – Short range, all enemies in area, vs. AC, Base Attack 20, 4d8+5

Shadow Spear
A spear of shadow launches at an enemy
3MP – Long Range, single target, Vs AC, Base Attack 20, 2d6+5

Float
3MP – The priest floats up into the air, out of melee reach, and remains there for the duration of the fight, or until he takes a 3-threshold hit (30 points of damage in a single hit)
Note: he cannot use Dark Radiant Burst while floating, so he will freely throw around Shadow Spears.

Circle of Shadows
The Priest draws a circle around himself that shields him from all attacks, and in fact draws power from their hostility.
11 MP – For the duration of the round, the priest takes no damage. Each time he is attacked, he instead accrues 1 MP.

Shadow Apocalypse
The priest has gathered enough shadows to unleash an unholy storm
18 MP -All areas, all targets in all areas, vs Will, 8d10+10
Notes: This is the classic “Do not screw up the tactics, or we all die”. If the priest uses Circle of Shadows, and people keep attacking him, he’ll have enough points to bust this out, which will suck immensely.

Phase Transition: As the priest falls, he calls out to his demonic master, and the earth shakes and cracks, stone walls shoot up on all sides (or perhaps the Cathedral falls, it is hard to say). In then end, the scene is now a great stone chamber whose features echo the cathedral. Much of the floor has fallen away, leaving only three stable areas, and the Priest has transformed into a demonic figure, ten feet tall with fiery skin and a great flaming sword.

Demonic Priest Phase
Health: 40
Success Threshold: 12/24/36
Special: Fiery: Gains Resist 20 to fire attacks.
Environment: The close, medium and far ranges are now physical locations (the three remaining stone platforms). Moving between them now requires a movement power or an Athletics check with a difficulty of 20. On a failure, the character still moves, but his desperate scrabbling to hang on and the distraction it provides grants the priest 1 MP.

Notes: On paper, this is a pretty simple phase with simple powers, but the demon’s mobility paired with the fact that you can’t let him get off on his own, should allow for things to shift pretty easily, as the demon will always move to the weakest group. His powers are priced with the assumption he’ll jump than use them. Nod to Bartoneus for sending me down this particular direction of thought.

Attacks:
Jump
The demon makes a mighty leap form one platform to the next.
2 MP – The Demon jumps from one platform to another, and is now considered in melee range with the PCs in that range category.

Blade Sweep
The Demon sweeps his blade in a fiery arc through his enemies
4MP – Short range, all enemies in area, vs. AC, Base Attack 20, 3d8+5 (fire)

Blade Hammer
Powerful overhand blows rain down on a chosen enemy
4MP – Short range, single target, vs. AC, base attack 20, 4d10+5

Inferno
The Demon incants a powerful fiery ritual that engulfs another one of the pillars in flame and falling rock
8MP – Any range but short, all enemies in area, 4d10 + 5 (fire) and 4d8 +5 damage (falling rock).
Note: This ability can only be used if the Demon is alone in a given area

So there it is: Does it make sense, and can you see it? This was, honestly, MUCH longer than I expected, so I no longer have any true perspective on it. Normally, I’d sit on it for a week or so to polish, but I’m working on this out in the open, warts and all, so I’m curious as to impressions.

Ok, so now that we have the baseline, let’s see about jazzing things up a little. There are three big areas we want to address: we want to make sure there is some reason to use one attack instead of another, we want to capture some way to simulate aggro management, and we want to generally be able to jazz up the fight with special events, terrain and so on.

The first is the easiest, and we solve a bit of the third at the same time. The trick is that you can offload most of the fiddly bits onto the bad guy. The simple gimmick for this is to assign vulnerabilities to the bad guys that reflect tactical situations, and those can be paired with resistances. To give a concrete example, suppose the Boss can turn into a swarm of bugs – for the duration of this it might not take damage from any attacks except those that can hit more than one square. Or perhaps he can still be hit, but he’ll take an extra point of damage from those attacks.

Provided that these vulnerabilities and resistance switch over the course of a fight, you successfully capture the idea that if you know what to do during each phase, you can fight more effectively. Now, admittedly the fact that in a WoW raid this knowledge is gained by dying repeatedly until you get it right, but that knowledge can probably be gotten some other way depending on the venue – for a convention game, for example, it might be part of the prelude.

There’s a temptation to address the second point (aggro) with complex systems, causing certain actions to increase aggro, marking to move it around and so on, but that is unnecessary complication. If you step back, aggro is really just a mechanized way for the boss to “fight smart”, seeking to go after the most cost effective targets – the squishy ones in particular. As a GM, you can already make that decision, targeting healers and more lightly armored PCs, so the only thing we really need is a way to allow the PCs to inhibit this.

So we’ll compromise on a simple mechanic: any time an attack would mark the boss, the attacker gets a taunt token. Taunt token’s can be spent to cancel a menace point which it used to fuel an attack that does not include the PC as a target. This does not cancel the attack, just the menace point – the boss can spend another or, if he cannot, the attack changes targets to the taunting PC. However, we want to model the idea of a “Main Tank” so let’s add one more twist: at the end of a turn (after the last PC, before the Boss), all the taunt tokens need to be given to one character. This also saves the trouble of havign to track everyone’s threat tokens.

For the third and final bit, , we need to add in a little bit of extra variety – enemies that support the boss, terrain features and so on. We don’t want these to be too fiddly, so we’re not too worried about details – what these should take the form of are choices – opportunity cost decisions that give a reason to choose one action or another (rather than provide only one obvious choice).

There will generally take two forms: The first will be special actions that can only be taken at specific times and places. If the fight takes place in a fallen cathedral, perhaps there are candles to be lit (which takes an action from someone in the middle range), and lighting a candle reduces the number of threat tokens the boss has, or grants attackers +1 damage or otherwise provides some benefit. These are easy to design, and simply depend upon the description of the environment. The only limiter is that these are usually only useful in a single phase of the fight.

Representing secondary creatures is a little more difficult. Mechanically, they should be represented as one more power of the boss – he spends menace to make them appear, but since it’s not an attack, it’s not influenced by aggro. Support enemies will appear in a given area and be represented by some number of threat tokens. They work like the boss, in that players can attack them instead, and if they clear a threshold of damage (usually the boss’s level -2) then they remove one of the tokens. If there are any tokens left when the boss acts again, then they get used. What they’re used for depends on the monster: sometimes they’ll be turned in for straight damage to a target or targets in the area their in, but if the creature is more built for harassment, then the boss may get those threat tokens back in addition to any it generates this turn.

Now, with the reminder that this is still just an interesting stunt, tomorrow I’ll try to take this theory and create a sample or two, and maybe discuss how to use some of these ideas in a less over-the-top fashion.

Gamefiend threw out the question of whether or not you could run a WoW style raid in 4e, and I’ve been finding myself chewing on it. I’m pretty confident the answer is “Yes”, though I admit I think you’d be kind of crazy to try it, since anything that involves juggling that many players is crazy enough to really qualify as a stunt. It’s something you could do at a convention, but it’s probably better suited to online play (heck, maybe it’s a good use of google wave). This is the a window into my thinking on this, and while it’s super, super raw, I figured I’d share it as I work through the details on how I’d make it happen.

Now, you could do it as a straight-up fight, just by making a staged villain[1], probably a triple solo to make sure he has enough hit points to last, but that could quickly end in madness as everyone takes their turn to move and arrange and track their hit points and so on. Also, you’d need to add more area attacks or the things just going to get torn apart by sheer numbers.

So instead, I would probably set it up like an open ended skill challenge with an abstract map. The trick is to capture the two elements of a good raid: distinct roles, and a necessity to change up tactics.

The simplest way to do the “map” is to set up areas of engagement: Near, middle and far. Near means adjacent to the boss (where the main tank and melee damage dealers are going to be), far means at a distance (where most of the healers, buffers and ranged damage-dealers hang out) and middle is the space between, most occupied by skirmishers, off tanks, and specialized roles.

The boss, whatever he is, has a level. That level pretty much determines exactly what sort of threat he is, and also is the basis of most of his capabilities. His hit points are abstracted into the number of “Damage successes” it will take to take him down. I’m calling the ballpark on that his level (which I’ll just call [L]) times 5, but this is totally unplaytested, so that might be off base, especially since it would probably be smart to scale him with the number of players. I’d endorse representing these with tokens, like poker chips, but it could just be that I’m nuts for tokens.

In a straight up fight, things go like this: On your turn you can move one “space” (or two spaces if you use any kind of movement power) or use a power (whether to attack or not). You might also do something else, but that’s much more situational. Moving is hopefully self explanatory, but the actual fighting is something else.

When a player attempts to attack the boss, he can use any of his attacks, with the following limitation. Melee/close attacks require the character be near the boss, and ranged attacks (anything that would invite an attack of opportunity) need to be from the middle or far distance. If a character uses an ability to heal or buff an ally, that works normally.

An attack is always assumed to hit successfully, but most of the time the only thing that matters is the damage dealt – Raid Bosses are immune to all manner of special effects and statuses (except when they are not, see below), but benefits that help allies can still be triggered. If the damage dealt meets or exceeds a certain threshold (probably based off [L]), then it counts as a success, and the boss takes one point of “damage” – accruing damage successes is what ultimately takes the boss down.[2] However, any failure gives the Boss one “Menace Point”.

This matters a lot because, after everyone’s taken a turn, the boss gets to go. He has a number of menace points equal to his level, plus any he’s gained from player failures. He uses them to build his attacks – he should have a list of abilities that have menace point costs, but in the absence of that it works something like this.

For 1 menace point he can make an attack against a single target in the “close” area. It is an attack against AC, where the boss effectively rolls 15+[L] and does damage equal to the low normal damage on the table of the gods (aka page 42 of the DMG)[3]. For each additional menace point spent he can enhance the attack by doing one of the following:

• Affect an additional target
• Affect everyone in the area (costs 3 menace points)
• Target the middle distance instead
• Target the long distance instead (Costs 2 menace points)
• Increase damage one step to the right (low normal becomes Medium normal, high normal becomes low limited and so on, costs 2 points)
• Increase the effective “attack roll” by +2
• Change the attack to a different defense (Reflex, fortitude or Will)[4]

The boss can make as many attacks as he has menace to pay for, and certain bosses will have special abilities that they can spend menace to trigger that do more than just damage.

This proceeds, round robin, until either all the PCs are dead or the monster has taken enough damage to go down. Simple as that.

Now, this is very basic, and very mechanistic (which is, arguably, very apt for a raid) with very little in the way of tactics. It would be intensely boring because most player will simply do the same thing every round. However, this lays down the baseline for the next step, adding in important things like aggro, roles, abilities and events. And that comes next.

1 – A staged villain is one who, when reduced to zero hit points, changes rather than dies. In most cases this is a physical transformation (like clay statues that have snakes burst out of their chests when they’re beaten) but it’s also a useful way to simulate the changes in tactics that are familiar to video game players. Normally, each “stage” has normal hit points for its level, though you can just as easily make one stage elite or solo (but I normally wouldn’t – the point of this trick is to offset the long dull endgame of solo fights). Easy to budget for it too, as each stage is just treated as its own critter, which is a little bit kind to the players, but I think it comes out in the wash.

2 – As an optional rule, you might allow additional thresholds to speed things along, and to make strikers feel more valuable. So if a creature’s threshold is 11 and a hit deals 23 points of damage, you might decide it removes 2 points of damage and so on. Alternately, that might just be situational, but that’s something for tomorrow’s post.

3 – I am tempted to have damage be measured in healing surges rather than hit points, but I need to think about the impact this has on healing, and whether it means tanks (sorry, defenders) end up insufficiently tough. If damage is in hit points, it’s the one thing that can’t just be handled with different colored poker chips, but the onus of bookkeeping is on players, so it is distributed. That said, tokens or cards definitely have certain logistical advantages, especially for the large combats. Similar thinking could be applied to damage (just say that at-wills, Encounters and Dailies do 1, 2 and 3 respectively) and while that simplifies things, it’s actually a bad idea because it makes things REALLY boring for the player, and removes the tactical choice-making I hope to introduce next.

4 – This is, by the way, insanely abusable, which is why the DM shoud not actually use this on the fly unless he’s willing to show some restraint. It’s a decent yardstick for pricing boss powers though, and I’ll use it later when I craft up some demo raid bosses.