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Newbiedm, Sly Flourish and I have all been talking about making Solo monsters with a bit more kick. The best model that I can conjure up for how solos should feel is on basis of World of warcraft. I’m not saying that you should need an army of PCs to fight a solo (though Rob Donoghue did a good take on this some time back). MMO bosses are great to study because they are consistently fun. Any time something is consistently fun you have something that you can find patterns in and build off of.
So what do MMOs have that we want?
- State changes. MMO bosses often have several ways to change the nature of the fight. Sometimes the boss will summon minions, other times it will dissapear and perform some grand attack. It slugs it out with the players, but that is not all that it does. In the state changes the monster highlights its personality and powers in a visually and mechanically forceful manner.
- Unstoppable. MMO bosses never stay stun-locked or permanently immobilized (or whatever madness your players seek to inflict on it). They can be effected by status effects, but when it’s time they cannot be stopped. MMO bosses always force players to react to their actions when they need to.
- Environment and monster are one. Bosses always have the home-field advantage, and are able to use and create favorable terrain effects for themselves.
I promised Limit Break monsters some time ago, buut the journey had been much longer than I anticipated. But now I present worldbreakers and lawbreakers. Both types of solos can be used in any campaign to make a solo that jumps off of the battlemat and engages the players in new ways.
Worldbreakers are creatures of such physical or supernatural power that they are capable of transforming and altering the environment with their powers. With one action, the worldbreaker solo can change the whole map or cause a massive status effect to all opponents. Worldbreakers typically represent solos that are Large or bigger, capturing their presence and raw power.
Lawbreakers have incredible talents and unique abilities that allow them to transform reality and game ‘physics’ around them. Lawbreakers maintain an aura around them that changes the rules of the game. Lawbreakers are meant for standard humanoids of Large or less side, highlighting talents or abilities taken to an extreme.
In this article we will deal with worldbreaker solos.
The Worldbreaker
A WorldBreaker Solo has powers with the keyword worldbreaker.
Whenever a power with that Keyword is used, all negative status effects and conditions that require a save are removed.
All Worldbreaker powers have a number after the keyword (“worldbreaker 2″, “worldbreaker 3″, etc) . This is the breaker timer, which decrements at the beginning of the creature’s turn. When the counter has reached 0, the power can be used again. So worldbreaker 4 can be used every fourth round. Worldbreaker powers effect every creature on the map unless stated otherwise.
Building a Worldbreaker Power
A worldbreaker power will cause either a change to terrain, a status effect to be temporarily applied to some or all players, or a mix of both. Worldbreaker effects should last 1d4 turns at the most.
Each worldbreaker power also has one to two powers that can be used only while the worldbreaker power is in effect. These powers are followup special attacks that represents what the monster does once it changes the world.
When creating the initial world breaker power, you want to do one of the following:
- Apply a status effect to all players
- Create traps or hazards on the board
- create difficult terrain or terrain effects
NOTE:The worldbreaker power does not roll to hit! This power applies its effects automatically. It is crucial to limit damage output if there is any. The initial power changes the battlefield and sets up the followup powers that can do damage.
You’ll want to pick themes that represent what the monster does best. A monster that is based on cold damage might slow or temporarily petrify foes, while a fire monster may create several fire hazards on the board.
Follow up powers
Next we create powers that can be used only during the duration of the worldbreaker. Such powers can and should get rreally creative. Suggestions for the attack are:
- Opposed check between PCs and Solo, with the Solo damaging any creature he beats
- Skill Challenges to avoid a major effect
- Summon minions
- Inflict escalating ongoing damage
Follow up powers should never apply effects automatically, requiring a test of some sort whether it is an attack roll from the solo or a skill check from players.
Examples of Worldbreaker Design
Bilfaaz
Bilfaaz the White Dragon has the worldbreaker power “Winter’s Fury”. He uses this power to create a brief but intense snowstorm that lasts for 1d4 turns, blinding and slowing all characters on the battlemap. Bilfaaz is removed from the map, and now has access to two new powers: Snowblind Pounce and FrostDread. Snowblind Pounce forces an opposed check between the PC’s Perception and tthe Dragon’s Stealth. Every PC that rolls lower than Bilfaaz’s Stealth is hit by the dragon and takes extra damage. FrostDread creates snow tendrils that attempt to attack the PCs and strangle them. This is represented by a short skill challenge.
Thrune
Thrune the Gorgon has the worldbreaker power “Thundering Earth”. Thrune stomps his hooves and sets up termors underneath the earth, placing three tremor hazards around the board. And player affected by the trap gets pushed and knocked prone. While Thundering Earth is in effect, Thrune can use “Gorgon’s Legion” or “GoreStorm Trample”. ”Gorgon’s Legion” creates several minions based of Thrunes petrifying gas. Each minion is immune to the tremors of Thundering Earth and can deliver the effect of the petrifying gaze on hit. Gorestorm Trample allows the gorgon to perform a trample attack for increased damage to one PC in range of a tremor hazard.
Similar Posts:
- The Second Coming: Worldbreaker Beta
- Worldbreaking 101. Waking Nightmares.
- 4e and the Art of the Limit Break, Part 3: Martial Limit Breaks
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I like this. It definitely spices up what might otherwise be a rather dull solo fight.
This looks genuinely fantastic – can’t wait for the Lawbreker article!
If a Worldbreaker is stunned or unconscious, it’s still stuffed though, right? It doesn’t have the standard action needed to activate a Worldbreaker power and throw off the condition? Am I missing something?
I’ll have to look over the language, but the intention is to make the worldbreaker/lawbreaker powers always be capable of triggering their major powers. I’ll edit that soon so the language clearly reflects. Glad you guys like it!
I agree – this kind of mechanic will probably be a staple of some epic solo fights. Other than a few continuity issues and how to phrase the mechanic of using their worldbreaking power regardless of stun etc, great article!
Your examples are incredible, but Bilfaaz’s stat block does not include the stealth skill. It has a +15 to athletics, but no modifier for his main worldbroken power.
Those both look fun, but they also both scream “almost certain TPK” to me, at least for the characters likely to fight them. I’m not even sure how well the level 9 party of my current campaign would do against Bilfaaz.
Re my previous comment: I keep forgetting to take into account attack bonuses. Because Bilfaaz would mostly miss against our level 9 characters, they would probably be fine. But it would still seem pretty hairy.
It’s a good start, I think, but looks like it needs some development or tweaking to the powers themselves and thus to the design concepts. Winter’s Fury, for example, can be activated every 3 rounds and lasts, on average, for 2.5 rounds. This means that for 2/3 of the encounter the PCs will be blind and the dragon will be unattackable as he repeatedly makes Savagery attacks and summons minions to kill the characters for him.
Perhaps the best way to resolve this, I think, would be for the Worldbreaker power to start recharging on the round after its effect ends.
Hmm. I agree that Bilfaz’s worldbreaker is quite overpowered because of the ability to take him off the map. I really like this concept, though. Very cool.
Thanks everyone for the comments! I’m glad you like and I’ll make sure that I take all of that into consideration. I’ll revise this stuff and edit soon. There are a lot of places where I realize I missed some stuff.
Thanks again!
You are really on to something with this! One major gripe I have about solo fights is that they need an incentive for the PC’s to stay there long enough to kill it (Brutes are the worst in this, lots of HP!) and solo monsters, in all honesty, can be boring. There needs to be something to keep interest and jazz things up. The Worldbreaker/Lawbreaker addition will indeed help makeup the shortcomings.
Now, one small thing that I feel I should bring up is that there will be certain kinds of players (esp. the rule lawyers) that will abhor these fights. Just simply because they can’t understand it. I had one of my players freak out once because I made a zombie talk and “zombies don’t talk because their too dumb”. :sigh: Anyway, to more important matters! My thoughts on Bilfaaz.
Just for the sake of things, this will be a well rounded party (1 of each type of class and an extra striker) of lvl 3 PCs each having one to two magic items at their disposal. Meat is up front, squishies in the back. Let’s say fight begins and right out the front door, let’s start worldbreakin’. So Bilfaaz goes off the map and you roll a 3 for turns. That will end Bilfaaz’s turn and the PC’s can do absolutely nothing. Understandable that solo monsters are powerful, but making PC’s feel useless doesn’t usually go well. The only thing they could really do is total defense. Instead of off the map, I’d say…concealment. This will make your PCs want to get near the dragon to avoid total concealment penalty (-5 is too much to overcome at this lvl with their gear, an attack would be +9 at best and that means you’d have to roll a 14 or better to hit his AC). Total concealment is anyone more than 3 squares from the dragon, due to the storm. Let’s also take out the blinded effect, that’ll impose an unfair penalty and will make Snowblind Savagery near impossible to avoid.
Okay, so now you got your PCs practically hugging and smacking the dragon, Bilfaaz turn two. Let’s go with some savagery. Okay, let’s say he’s normally got like +2 to stealth, but in his storm he has +6. Let’s change the flavor a bit too, like uh… he moves with such speed that it’s like a blur to the PCs as he darts around rakeing them one at a time. Rollin’ for stealth anddd….with bonuses you got an 18. PC’s roll….okay so about 3 of them fail. Generally there is 1-2 ppl in an average party with a large perception bonus. Tank and two squishies get hit. Take 8 HP of dmg. This attack is creative and cool, def keep this one. If anyone whines about their passive perception, your in a snowstorm and a white dragon is running around messing people up, you will be actively searching for it, not sitting there twiddlin’ your thumbs. Oh and let’s add to this, after the attack is finished he positions himself 4-5 squares away from any PC. This potentially leaves some PC’s in total concealment range and they’ll have to move, gotta keep the PC’s on their toes!
Okay, so next turn dragon gets hugged and smacked, let’s say ballpark of 160HP left. Turn 3 for Bilfaaz, time to spawn some minions. Snow Wyrmlings is used. Ohh, nice roll, you get 5 minions to play with. Now these guys are a bit smaller, so let’s say they are total concealed at anything more than 3 squares away. Minions placed; 5 minions, 5 PC’s, nice odds there. Now these guys having Bilfaaz’s defenses is probably a bad idea. These guys need to be weaker than the boss, they are the minions after all. So let’s say Bilfaaz’s defenses minus 3, that will make em a bit easier to squish. Also, this attack needs to be limited. Get some good rolls and keep using “Snow Wyrmling”, I see potentially around 10+ minions in 3 rounds. Let’s change this to an encounter and make it 1d6+2 minions. That should be enough to scare the PC’s, but not threaten their lives too much.
Now here is where everything changes, end of turn three and the worldbreaker power ends. You could simply use the power again…and again….and again. With constant use, you could probably kill everyone eventually. A power this cool (no pun intended) should not be spammable, though I guess preference depends on the person. I’d say make it a twice per encounter only or…..perhaps it activates when Bilfaaz is bloodied and doesn’t stop till he dies. Actually, I think I really like the second thing because it’ll impose a sense of urgency (We need to kill this thing fast!) and just when they might be getting bored, this turns things around. Think about it from the players perspective. Your fighting this nasty dragon, killing him bit by bit. The party is doing great……then he starts bleeding. BAM snowstorm! This turns the tables completely. ROAR, here come the minions! Surrounded….a dragon close to death…..this is where you pull out all the stops. WHAM! BAM! The minions go down after a round or two, time to focus on the big boy. He is darting around, scratch after scratch, the wizard goes down. Four of you left, dragon still has a nice chunk of HP. Gripping your axe you race forward to avenge the potential death of a comrade! DAILY TIME! ACTION POINT! You tear him the frick up. The snowstorm stops. All is well.
Sorry, maybe I got into that a bit too much…..anyway! All in all, great idea and I hope this comes into fruition as something wonderful. I think I’m going to experiment with some builds myself. Oh and I do apologize if anything came out d-baggy, I wrote all of this with love and constructive criticism, nothing more. I hope this helps!
What about XP? Especially with Bilfaaz, Worldbreaker seems to make him more powerful. I love the idea though! Already planning ways to use it…
Yeah, I had the same problem as Shane with the old cold dragon, the thing would never get hit. Why not do a normal recharge system in place of the “wait three rounds” system. Then I don’t have a complete new set of numbers to track and remember as a DM. I’m tracking it as a rechargable power like I do every other monster power in the game. I just don’t see a compelling reason that it needs to be every “three rounds” instead of on a recharge of 5-6 or even 6 (given that it makes the thing unattackable).
The concepts here, however, are GREAT and really excite the idea of using solos in unique and interesting ways. The examples given provide good views of the idea, although they have some mechanical concerns.
The monsters are significantly harder and need to be the equivalent of a higher level solo to have those powers or else it’s unbalanced. I would also probably prefer the minions created to have their own stats rather than sharing those of the master…and why do they not do minion style damage (static number) if they’re minions?
I also thought that it would be really cool if Thune used the hazards he creates to fuel a follow-up power. Maybe he burns the hazards to pop out a bunch of his legion. So the hazards become even more dynamic. There’s also no indication in the stat block of the hazards what their range is.
This is a great way to make me think hard about making solos cool. I will certainly be playing with these concepts SOON.
A big reason not to use a d6 to recharge is pacing of combat. This solo probably only gets the spotlight once, why let chance steal its thunder. I agree that recharge makes sense for all the little human guards with a recharge ability, but for the final solo world-breaking boss, for the interest of the fight, don’t let the dice make the fight a boring one – just track the rounds.
I was thinking about the “problem” of the Stunned condition prohibiting use of the Worldbreaker power, and how one could work around it, and came up with one idea: Don’t.
PC powers that Stun are limited, generally restricted to Daily powers or the occasional encounter power. Most of them are “until the end of your next turn,” meaning that the monster will at worst miss a single round in which it can benefit from it’s Worldbreaker power. If the PCs expend those resources (or save them up for the “boss” fight) then perhaps they shouldn’t be penalized.
As for Save Ends effects that stun — a solo has a +5 saving throw. Only the very worst luck is going to allow your solo to be stunned for more than a round or two.
I made a solo with the worldbreaker rules if you want to see my take on it.
http://homeden.wordpress.com/2010/05/05/terror-tuesday-13/
@ Shane:
“PC powers that Stun are limited, generally restricted to Daily powers or the occasional encounter power. Most of them are “until the end of your next turn,” meaning that the monster will at worst miss a single round in which it can benefit from it’s Worldbreaker power. If the PCs expend those resources (or save them up for the “boss” fight) then perhaps they shouldn’t be penalized.
As for Save Ends effects that stun — a solo has a +5 saving throw. Only the very worst luck is going to allow your solo to be stunned for more than a round or two.”
The problem with action denial powers are that they are much, much more powerful against a solo monster than a standard monster, because a solo monster is meant to take up more “space” in an encounter. it’s supposed to represent 5 monsters, but as anyone who’s run a solo can tell you it doesn’t always work out that way, and the limited number of actions a solo monster has compared to a band of 5 monsters is a large part of that.
Here’s a look at this problem by another D&D blogger, The Angry DM, who puts the problem into perspective:
Solos Are Disproportionately Affected By Conditions
PCs have a lot of different ways to inflict statuses and conditions on monsters. In a standard fight, a given PC can only ever do this to one fifth of the enemy party. In a solo fight, every condition affects the entire monster party. While it is true that solos get a +5 to saves, that doesn’t really help the problem because many, many conditions last until the end of the PCs next turn. If the party is smart and spreads the use of encounter powers out, they can keep the solo monster laboring under detrimental conditions through the entire fight.
Because solos do not have the action budget of other monsters, they are devastated by action denial conditions. Action denial conditions include dazed, stunned, and prone: conditions that remove one or more actions or the ability to act outside of the normal initiative order.
Worse yet are daily powers that inflict conditions until the end of the encounter. There aren’t too many, but each of them is five times as effective on a solo as in any other encounter.
Also, you are discounting several builds that are built with denying actions to solos in mind. The infamous “orbizard,” while weakened by recent errata, is not gone. If you haven’t heard of this build, it works by making use of the Orb of Imposition wizard class feature to reduce save bonuses by a ridiculous degree. Before the errata it was possible to create an orb wizard that could inflict such a penalty that it was impossible for the monster to make a successful save. Even after post errata, an orb wizard can make sure that a specific monster can’t make saves with any certainty. This is a problem, because as stated earlier every action denied to a solo monster is 5 times more effective than an action denied to a standard monster.
That turns what should be an action-oriented fight into a boring tank n’ spank, where the stunned monster gets ganged up on and beaten down, and can’t show off it’s cool abilities because it doesn’t have the actions it needs to be an effective threat.
For more on issues with solo monsters, check out this article: http://angrydm.com/2010/04/the-dd-boss-fight-part-1/
Holy Cow! Lots of great stuff here. Thanks for commenting and sharing your feedback! I wanted to stop by and let you all know that I am working on the next revision of the Worldbreaker rules right now. Having paid atttention to all your feedback and playtests, I have a strong idea of what needs to be done for the next version to make it really awesome. Thanks again for your interest and comments and stay tuned for the next installment!
One last thing …I suggest that you follow me on twitter (gamefiend) where I’ll be talking over the worldbreaker stuff and all my crazy ideas for 4e.
I like this idea. I am somewhat inclined to agree that a standard recharge would simplify running creatures of this type, but I also have run many a monster that just aren’t as cool as they should be due to crappy rolling on my part.
Then again, unless you roll your recharges in the open, it is sometimes better to use DM fiat for a timely recharge in the interest of building tension and not making a big encounter into a cakewalk than playing it as the dice dictate.
A suggestion for reducing the numbers to track as a DM while gaining some extra control over the timing on worldbreaker powers: give the solo an extra action point (3 total), and whenever it uses an action point, the Worldbreaker power triggers as a free action. This helps even out the disparity in the number of actions between a solo and a group of players, lets you use those powers at opportune moments, and does not rely on luck of the roll to make it happen.
Awesome idea, though. I hope some folks at Wizards pay attention to the blogosphere and consider adopting some of the excellent ideas that have been floating around for how to make solos truly solo in future product releases.
The summon minions are good for an mmo feel but I’d drop the OG dmg and petrify from them. For the dragon’s zone happening every 3 rounds and last 1d4 means each one has a 50% chance of running into the next one. People already complain about solo fights taking too long and heres one where they’re going to spend at minimum 1/3rd of the fight blind and unable to hit anything while minions pick them apart.
When do you plan to release Lawbreakers?
They sound equally fascinating.
An excellent idea, and an excellent way to duplicate what WoW already knows how to do – keep a boss fight interesting right to the end.
I don’t know about the recharge mechanic, though… letting it recharge could give the Worldbreaker mechanic the same problem that solos already have, which is repetitiveness in round-by-round action. The best way to do it would be to make it an encounter power, usable only while bloodied. Encounter only, so the mechanic is only used once and doesn’t get stale; while bloodied, because it gives the PCs time to establish the fight before it changes. In addition, if you give all solos some form of Worldbreaker/Lawbreaker mechanic when they’re half-gone, you’ll have fights that your players will pay a lot more attention to, and be a lot more concerned about. “The dragon is now bloodied.” “Oh crap, here comes the hard part…”
Another possibility is having a way that players can somehow defeat the Worldbreaker, and thus gain a final advantage over the solo that lets them achieve certain victory. Close the portal letting the Otherworld energies through, and the Alienist is dazed from the backlash until end of encounter; ride out the 10.0 earthquake, and the Tarrasque is spent, unable to deal so much damage. Could lead to a big feeling of accomplishment to not just defeating a solo, but surviving them as well.