A boss fight in Dungeons & Dragons is likely one of the most climactic moments of your campaign, if not the most climactic one. It’s where the story leads to, and where many plot points will be resolved through good, old violence. Well, that’s the idea, at least.
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It’s not the best feeling in the world when your players completely annihilate the BBEG in a single turn, or if you accidentally go too hard and cause a TPK where they clearly didn’t have a chance at any moment. There are some problems to watch out for when creating a boss fight, and some ways to avoid or fix these problems.
Action Economy
One Against A Group Is Rough
Making sure your boss is consistently using their action, bonus action, and reaction every round is important, but that still won’t keep up with a whole group of people who are likely doing the same in each of their turns.
Adding both lair and legendary actions is a good way to help you here, but depending on what these do, it might not be enough. You can also consider adding minions or even going as far as letting your BBEG have more than one turn per round — why not?
Initiative
That’s A Bigger Problem Than It Seems
If you haven’t noticed, most high-level monsters in the 2025 Monster Manual have absurd initiative bonuses, and that’s not a random update. If the monster sucks at initiative, the whole party may use their best abilities straight away and obliterate the BBEG before their turn even pops up.
Thus, ensuring your character is quick enough to be at least one of the first characters in the turn order, and then having the villain hit hard right away instead of the opposite, is a good way to add challenge to the fight and not die right away.
Taking A While To Hit Harder
Use The Good Stuff Right Away
Scaling the fight is a fun thing to do. You start the fight by just punching them, then you decide to use your Disintegrate on one of the PCs. However, because players tend to hit harder as soon as they can, you may not get the chance if you stall.
It’s one of the reasons we recommended boosting your initiative, in fact. As soon as you can, feel free to use your best tricks right away, showing the party that your boss is a power to be reckoned with.
They Just Attack
Not Much Going On
If we’re talking about crude optimization, making a boss that can take a lot of damage and also hits hard is technically the ideal boss. However, while that works, it’s also boring.
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Engaging doesn’t need to mean challenging.
Ensure your attacks do more than raw damage, like maybe add conditions, or that, to hurt the boss, they need to do something more than just attack them, like destroy crystals on the battlefield that are generating a force field around the boss. You can come up with better ideas, but still, the point stands.
The Battlefield Isn’t Interesting
Open Fields Are Fair, But Boring
We kind of brought this up already by talking about making something more interesting than just attacking and using lair actions, but this is important enough to have its own entry; what’s happening on the battlefield?
Add some lava, toxic gas, or a magical storm that can hit people. Add objects that can be used as cover or improvised weapons. Make the fight on the top of a cliff, which makes falling a nearly guaranteed death. If your players are high-level enough, make a fight against a flying BBEG where there’s literally no ground to stand on, and everyone needs to figure out how to stay airborne.
The Conclusion Is Binary
They Either Kill The Boss Or Die
Realistically, if you were getting your butt kicked by a group of people, would you stand your ground and fight until your last breath? If the answer is no, why would your intelligent BBEG do the same? If the NPCs involved in the fight are sentient beings, then stop treating them like killable monsters from a game and treat them like people.
Have escape plans ready, or find ways to cheat death if necessary. Try to negotiate with these adventurers for your life if your boss is close to death. Anything that changes the pace or kill or be killed mentality, which is what they already experience in most fights against minions.
You can also change the point of the encounter altogether. For instance, the party and the BBEG might be fighting over getting an item and escaping with it, rather than actively trying to kill one another.
There Are No Decisions During The Fight
What Should We Do?
Going further on ‘just taking turns attacking’ and ‘kill or be killed mentality,’ an intense boss fight may require your players to make complicated decisions. For instance, if your boss wants to run away, they can kill a beloved NPC, forcing the party to think about chasing them or reviving the character.
A ritual that is being performed during the fight, a minion who’s escaping with an important item while the boss is doing something else, or other ideas, can put the players in a dilemma to solve during the fight itself, wondering what is the best decision.
They Don’t Fight Like They Should
Mechanics Should Meet Roleplay
This might feel weird or even contradictory, but if your boss is known for being a guy who doesn’t fight and just manipulates things from the background, then they should be actually weak during their boss fight, and their tactics could rely on hit-and-run strategies, manipulating others to fight for them, etc.
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For when your players struggle to lock in.
The point is, if you’re designing a character to behave in a specific way during conversations, plans, and other things, their combat tactics and stat block should reflect this idea. A character who fights from the shadows and assassinates people isn’t going to throw a Meteor Swarm during their boss fight, right?
They Don’t Threaten Everyone
Only One Or Two Characters Are Nearly Dead
Sometimes, the melee characters charge into the boss, creating an epic fight, and they get severely hurt, but make it out alive. Only for the ranged warlock to mock them as they didn’t take a single hit, since they were extremely far away, spamming Eldritch Blast safely.
The point here is that your boss should have tactics that make every player character feel targeted and in danger. Sure, you can focus on one or two things, and characters like tanks will probably take more damage than the rest, but the fight needs to be dangerous for the whole party, not just half of it.
Use encounters against minions to understand your players’ tactics, so you can design a boss that will challenge them all.
The Ending Is Abrupt
So, How Do You Kill Them?
We don’t decide when the boss’s health reaches zero (though you can fudge that, technically), especially if your players are hitting them harder than you expected, but you can still do something about it. Whether they have a way to stay with a single hit point, like a Relentless Endurance, or they can start a second phase once their health drops to zero, among others.
Our homebrew recommendation, though, is to have the boss enter a ‘defeated’ condition, where they don’t die, but the fight ends. You can do whatever monologue you want as your boss is defeated, and let one (or more) of the players decide how the killing blow is going to be.
- Original Release Date
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1974
- Player Count
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2+
- Length per Game
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From 60 minutes to hours on end.
- Age Recommendation
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12+ (though younger can play and enjoy)
- Franchise Name
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Dungeons & Dragons
- Publishing Co
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Wizards of the Coast