When preparing your campaign for Dungeons & Dragons, it’s only natural that you want your boss encounters to be epic, especially if they happen to be a key character in your story, and taking them down is either a big shift or even the end of the story.
With that in mind, along with the boss battle itself, you can make things even more grandiose by adding a second phase to the encounter, with Latin lyrics in the background and everything. Still, how do you make sure that this second phase is exciting enough, actually increases the challenge, and lives up to the first phase you prepared before it?
Increase Stats
Good For Improvising A Second Phase, Too
This tip is probably a given, but it’s worth talking about. One of the best ways to make the second phase harder is to do a simple buff to the boss’s stats. Boost their health, AC, attack bonuses, DCs, the whole thing.
While it is a rather simple thing to do, you can actually increase the difficulty significantly by just tweaking these numbers around. As a plus, you can also consider giving the boss resistance or immunity to a certain damage type during the second phase.
Improve Action Economy
Make More Attacks Per Round
Along with buffing their bonuses, simply allowing your monster to hit people more often is a great way to ensure they’ll be deadlier. Instead of two attacks per turn, allow them to attack three or four times, for example. But there’s more.
You can give them Legendary Actions that involve extra attacks (or give them more Legendary Action points per round, so they can do more), along with new abilities that use their reaction or bonus action, improving the number of things you can do per round.
Add A Visual Transformation
It Makes The Mechanical Changes Easier To Justify
A second phase isn’t just the mechanical changes you’ll give the boss. The narration and descriptions will make things far more epic, so make sure your second phase comes with an interesting description of how the boss changes.
You can give them an actual change, like turning them into a dragon (and maybe giving them dragon features from their stat blocks), or it can be something purely visual, like them getting bigger, more muscular, or with a magical aura emanating from their bodies and weapons.
Change The Environment
Change How The Place Looks Or Move To Another Place
In order to make things more epic, you can make the transformation emanate so much power that the location is affected. Walls collapse, the ground and windows break, and the earth tremors.
Alternatively, you can make the boss move to a different location in between phases, with the party needing to catch up to them towards a new battle arena.
As a plus, feel free to make these changes so drastic that they become actual hazards. The place collapses over the party, magic emanates from the ground to the point it can damage or hinder them, and so on.
Add A Slight Pause To The Fight
Ready Yourselves
Speaking of changing to a different location, this is a good way to trigger the next tip: Add a slight break between fights, especially if the first one was too hard. Let the players recover themselves through items or healing spells before they continue.
As the boss increases their power and moves through their lair, you also build anticipation over what they’re doing, adding some suspense before they appear even stronger than before.
Weaken The Players
Am I Stronger Or Are You Guys Just Weaker?
One last thing you can play around with the environment is to give the boss or the location powers that work as debuffs to the players. It can be a boss ability or a Lair Action (which, by the way, adding those on the second phase is good) that activates with the phase.
You can weaken them by affecting their movement, giving them a weaker (but still bad) condition, preventing healing, or even giving them exhaustion. It can be something weak that lasts through the whole fight or something strong that can be undone during the encounter.
Change The Winning Conditions
Weaken The Boss Before Killing Them
To win a fight in D&D, you can do more things than just beating someone until their health reaches zero. Maybe the boss has an impenetrable barrier that needs to be taken down, or they can only be defeated by the weapon that is currently in their possession.
Regardless of how you’ll go about it, giving the encounter a different winning condition is a fun way to break the pace. Maybe the only way to take their barrier down is a puzzle that needs to be solved while they’re attacking the player characters. Who knows?
Add New Abilities
Maybe Some Specifically Designed To Counter Your Group’s Main Tricks
We briefly tackled this idea when we talked about transformations and action economy, but giving your second phase exclusive powers and features is also a given and a nice trick to pull. New powers show that the threat has escalated.
You can even go one step further and design powers that would break your players’ main strategies, forcing them to think outside the box in order to defeat your boss, who’s too good for their shenanigans.
Add More Monsters
To Me, My Minions!
A smart person takes every advantage they can. Another way to increase the danger and improve your overall action economy is to add some extra enemies to the fight, helping your boss even the scales in terms of sheer numbers.
You can make them summon minions, like undead, fiends, or whatever fits the theme, or your boss can make one or more copies of themself or summon a particularly tougher but singular monster, so instead of a large group of weak minions, you have two or three characters that are extremely powerful as the boss fight.
Add Time Restraints
Kill Them Before It’s Too Late!
During the second phase, your boss may start their powerful ritual, or maybe channel a power that will cause too much damage to the whole party at once – possibly even downing and killing some of them. Thus, they need to be beaten. Soon.
Regardless of whether you’re going with one of these ideas or make something else, showing the players they’re running out of time is perfect to add tension and dread to the boss fight, with dire consequences if they’re not fast enough.
- Original Release Date
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1974
- Player Count
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2+
- Age Recommendation
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12+ (though younger can play and enjoy)
- Length per Game
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From 60 minutes to hours on end.
- Franchise Name
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Dungeons & Dragons
- Publishing Co
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Wizards of the Coast