The heroes have retrieved the last MacGuffin and are just about to enter the lair of the Final Boss. They’re nervous. They have no idea as to the extent of their enemy’s power . Only glimpses and rumors from town and the corpses of the villain’s many victims hint at what this wizard/warrior/monster/scoundrel might have in store for them. Little do they know, neither do you.
One thing I’ve learned from prepping for the finale of an adventure is that stating out and planning tactics for the villain can the most complex and time consuming aspects of the work. How do you ensure this fight stands out in your players minds as an appropriate climax?
Consider simply having a vision of what you want the villain to accomplish. Establish a theme. Then when the time comes you have free reign to use your theme and mold it into any kind of power your devious mind can contrive in the midst of battle. Your villain can pull a few nasty tricks from their sleeve and really bring memorable moments to your fights – moments that if you stick to a stat block may never otherwise be possible.
This method also has the advantage of allowing you to instantly scale the final encounter. Have your players breezed through every fight so far? Do they all have daily powers, healing surges, action points, and item powers at their disposal? Maybe that swarm in the last room almost crushed them single-handedly. Either way, you can practically ensure a memorable last fight – with an appropriate amount of wickedness and taunting, if you throw out that stat block.
You might be protesting right now that this approach ruins the integrity of the game. Most players like to know they beat a static challenge. Use moving targets too much, and if the players find out they are likely to feel frustrated or cheated. The rules (and there are lots of them!) exist because many RPGers want something more than a collaborative story effort. They want a game. On the other hand, only the most rules lawyer and purist of players is going to hold scaling adventures on the fly against you and it doesn’t hurt to recover a little bit of that collaborative story effort from under the shadow of the core rules.
The difficulty in this is the art of drawing the curtain of the game over the mechanics underneath. For many encounters I like to stick to the dice and be as ruthless to the players or their fodder as the dice dictate. Over time this brings a natural variety to the game. But if you can successfully keep the focus on the world the heroes inhabit, their players will have no reason to wonder or care if you came up with that neat villain power last night or ten seconds ago. There is no contract between GM and players not to change once the game has begun, but there is a contract for the GM to find ways to make the game fun. If you want to ensure that the finale encounter is memorable you really only have two choices. You can rely on perfect planning and hope the fight goes off exactly as planned or you can spend your creative energy on making your villain come alive and scale the stats on the fly to ensure it stays alive long enough to really get the attention in deserves.
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At the age of eight JackOfHearts was invited to play Dungeons & Dragons during summer camp by kids that were much cooler than him. When he wasn't working on the family farm or practicing tennis, he spent much of his teen years reading fantasy novels and playing games of the role playing, collectible card, tabletop, and video varieties. He's now a nine-to-fiver who never forgot the joy of descending into a tomb for forgotten treasures. 
Hi , great post here
I always played with minimal stat blocks whenever I DM’d, and I generally use this rule for HPs: critters have 1, relevant npcs have enough to take a bashing.
This helps the game in different ways: lesser prep time, no relevant npcs screwed up by a lucky roll (“200 HP dragon? Well, I just rolled a 20, so I deal 1d10+199 dmg…”), and always exciting combat scenes, where players don’t have spend hours clearing the field of an already won battle…
I really like this style.
An interesting notion, and something I toyed with at one time, but finally decided it does eat away at the integrity of the game too much. You do realize that you’ve just written an argument for railroading, yes? At what point do you just say “to heck with it”, toss out the rules, and just make up what happens in combat?
Although I’ve never gone completely off the cuff, I might have to give that a try! However, I typically do tweak the stats (especially hit points) on the fly to make the fight memorable. If the party tears through the villain so fast that it’s anticlimatic (as opposed to an awesome butt whooping – the difference is entirely in the current mood of the players) I have often thrown a bunch more hit point on the villain to keep it going.
More often however, after a great attack that almost finishes off the villain but doesn’t, I just drop them dramatically and call it good rather than making someone take an anticlimatic simple attack for those last few hit points.
So I’ve had it go either way. I’ve raised and lowered AC on the fly (which can be tricky if the players pay close attention) to keep it fun.
But I like the idea of just having some vague ideas and making it up as I go, especially powers. With 4e’s monster system, that is far more possible now. Thanks for the idea!
@Brian: If a collaborative effort between the players and GM is going to be fun, there are almost certainly going to have to be some adjustments on the fly. If you want to call that rail-roading you may, but to me rail-roading is when you’ve removed choice from the players to force the actions you’ve planned for them to happen. This is more like improvisation, something that I strongly favor but in almost all cases takes away from the “game” half of D&D and adds to the “role playing/story” half of D&D.
I’ve seen this method work and I’ve seen it really frustrate some players.
It worked really well when I had to scale down a horrifying 5 player adventure designed for 6th level veterans. Very few people showed up to the event and I ended up running the entire thing with a father and his 13 year old son, both of whom had never played 4e.
It went really poorly at a similar event when a player got upset over some home-brew encounters. After challenging whether or not I could target him with an opportunity attack, he demanded to see the creature’s stats. He left the table and said I was “cheating” when he found out I was adapting old AD&D encounters for them to fight on the fly.
I guess it’s tolerable when rule bending helps the players but aggravating when it works against them, even if it’s a challenge you’re sure they can handle.
I do this all the time. I think the only people you can’t do this with are those who are playing to “beat” the game. For players like that, it is important that everything be consistent and “by the rules”. Most players are more flexible than this. It’s worth making the modifications needed to make the game fun wherever possible.
That said, I also strive to design encounters that are just right at the very outset so I don;t have to do this. But without having the ability to playtest, sometimes encounters aren’t as fun in play as you imagined them. Adjusting on the fly allows you to get back to fun, and not just a boring slog.
“At what point do you just say “to heck with it”, toss out the rules, and just make up what happens in combat?”
Everytime I sit down to play