Boss fights in D&D are tricky. See, in a video game, you can run so many "combat encounters" that it can be easy to differentiate a boss - this guy takes more than one minute to kill? Must be a boss. Even in difficult, unforgiving games like Dark Souls, where you need to be careful even when fighting the handful of poorly-armed Hollows you face just by the Firelink Shrine, a boss fight stands out.
In D&D, though, every fight tends to take a while to complete. Unless the challenge is totally trivial, you're going to spend probably ten minutes minimum just moving through peoples' turns. And thus, when you get to a climactic fight, you have to figure out how to make it memorable.
Indeed, I think you can build a satisfying dungeon without any true boss fights. If each fight feels special because of its environment, its monsters, and the strategies the players use, that's fine.
But if we want a villain to really feel special, we also want it to feel special when we face them.
FM bosses come in two varieties: Solo monsters and Leaders. The former are designed to be faced truly on their own, and pose a threat to the party (of an appropriate level) even without backup. The latter are meant to have lackeys (I'd say minions, but that has a specific meaning in FM).
Notably, FM sometimes gives us two versions of what, in the Monster Manual, would be a single legendary stat block, with one serving as a named Villain and the other being a generic version that does not necessarily play the role of a legendary creature - the standard Vampire is a CR 13 Skirmisher, which, yes, has a bonus action and reaction that makes it an "action-oriented monster" and a full-page stat block, but could technically play lackey in a high-level fight against some other boss.
In most cases, the "Villain" stat blocks are given specific names and backstories, but you can easily re-skin them. These are meant to make for memorable encounters.
We'll look at Count Rhodar von Glauer, the vampire "villain" character, as our showcase for the way that FM builds these characters.
The Count is a CR 19 Solo monster, which means that he could be a significant challenge on his own for a tier 3 party.
Now, let's talk about the really distinguishing features:
The Count has three "Spears of the Damned," magically summoned and made of darkness. In addition to his blood-drinking sword, Sanguinus (he doesn't actually physically bite people in combat, but gets the usual vampiric attack through his sword,) he hurls these spears at players to deal damage and then pin them down by impaling them.
Now, a Solo monster needs a lot of actions to make up for the fact that they're so outnumbered. The Count thus gets, usually, five attacks with his main Multiattack. He swings Sanguinus twice and then hurls each of his Spears of the Damned. Now, if a spear is currently impaling a player, if he uses it to attack someone, that player is no longer impaled (and thus no longer restrained).
So essentially, he's going to have a big burst of damage at the start, but sacrifices some damage to keep party members locked down.
Like other vampires, the Count has a bonus action that can momentarily Beguile a creature into attacking an ally or falling prone, or he can use a bonus action to move without provoking opportunity attacks. Finally, he has a reaction that can deal some damage to a foe that just hit him with an attack.
So, he hits hard, hits a lot, has a lot of health, and can fly. And he can kind of choose between damage or crowd control to make sure there's a problem for the party five times on his turn.
Now, most Legendary monsters have two factors: Legendary Resistances and Legendary Actions (and often Lair actions, which FM keeps but has its own designs for them).
FM alters both of these.
So, Legendary Resistances are there to ensure that a boss isn't taken out by a single spell - Banishing the Demon Lord who has crashed out of the Abyss in the big climactic fight makes things, well, a bit anticlimactic. Sure, if they're banished only after weakened by three other powerful spells they need to burn their LRs on, that's a bit better. But the problem with Legendary Resistance is that it creates a "null result," which means that whatever you were trying to do, the monster is unaffected. Sure, you moved their meter down a bit toward being unable to get out of a powerful spell effect, but there's a good chance you're just going to kill it before you churn through all of them.
So, FM's take on Legendary Resistance is really cool: Each "villain" has a 3/day way to get out of failing saving throws (there are a couple variations that don't quite work that way) but each comes at a cost. In The Count's case, he needs to sacrifice one of his Spears of the Damned, shattering it to absorb the power of the spell he would have been subjected to. Until the next dusk, the Count cannot re-summon that spear, which means that his action count is reduced to 4, and he can only pin down two characters, not three.
In other words, yes, you're unable to Turn Undead on him and send him fleeing from his ruined castle, but by doing so (and assuming he failed his Wisdom save even with a +9) you've still significantly reduced his power to hurt you.
FM also replaces Legendary Actions with Villain Actions.
Each villain has three Villain Actions, which they can, like with Legendary Actions, use on the end of another creature's turn. But, each of these Villain actions can only be used once per encounter, and they can use a villain action only once per round. The latter is not unlike any "uses three actions" features on existing legendary monsters, like a Lich's Disrupt Life.
But this means that these effects will only happen once during an encounter, and thus should be dramatic and shift the dynamic of the fight.
Villain Actions are also given in a suggested order. In the Count's case, he splatters blood on creatures within a 20-foot radius sphere, potentially giving them a special "bloodstained" status effect, which gives him advantage on attacks against them and gives them disadvantage against his Beguile until the end of his next turn.
The second one is Fire Drake, where he gets to transform into a fiery dragon and blaze across the battlefield up to twice his flying speed, ignoring difficult terrain and causing fire damage to anyone he passes through.
His third allows him to fill the room with mist, heavily obscuring the area (note that he has blindsight) and he gets to teleport around the room making four Sanguinus attacks against targets in the mist, before the mist dissipates.
The structure of these follows a similar pattern: the first is usually a wake-up call: this is a boss, and has serious abilities. The second sort of knocks the board over and rearranges the pieces - either moving players around or moving the boss around. And the third is a final, big burst of damage - by round 3, the fight's getting desperate, and this is the boss's last chance to take the party down.
These actions don't need to be taken in this order, but they're arranged that way as a suggested order, to make things dramatic. But if the fight is going faster than expected, you might jump to the final one (the "ult") immediately, or if the fight is likely to go on for more than three rounds, you might hold off on one of them until the boss goes down to 50% health or something.
So, here's what I really like about these Villain Actions: The boss does less.
That might be surprising given that one of the biggest challenges in a boss fight is managing to give the boss enough to do to make them a threat to a coordinated party. But the old Legendary Actions aren't actually gone - they've just been incorporated into the boss' main action. You have five attacks (at least to start with) on your turn. And the bonus actions and reaction give you even more wealth in the action economy.
A single Unarmed Strike as a legendary action is... it's not nothing, because it includes a grapple, but it's kind of this low-impact, normal thing the vampire usually gets to do. These three villain actions are all Big Moments.
And it's also less to track. You don't have to remember if you used two or three of your legendary actions in the middle of a round.
So, pretty soon we might start to look at how we want to incorporate these ideas into our own homebrew monsters. The tuning of attack bonuses and damage, though, is something we might want to look at next. I've often used the DMG's "creating monster statistics" table for my own homebrewing, but we'll see how well this matches up with that table.
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