Big boss fights

How I run a boss fight

Right, this is a thing close to my heart. I was dearly hoping that the adversary book would have a chapter on it, but I am going to put my opinion on how to run a good boss fight here. This is not just theory crafting; I have been running games with a lot of combat and conflicts in fate for a while now, and some of them have involved complex set ups to keep the fight challenging and involving.

The disadvantage a boss has in a fight is action economy and size of stress tracks. Because the players will be taking a lot more actions than the boss, they get the chance to get a lot more done. As such, if they are sensible, they will be creating advantage in an attempt to stack up enough advantage to succeed when they make attacks.

The boss must have an attack and defence skill higher than the fight skills of the players. If not he is going down in a round or two with no challenge. The players can spam attacks and take the villain out. The bad guy won't attack to any great effect. Fight over, not much fun had. So, lets assume that the boss is harder than anyone else in the fight.

So, the players all want to be able to effect the fight, and they have more actions to use against a superior foe. But if you let them stack advantages then it is all going to be over pretty quickly too.

Assume that each of the players in a party succeed in a create advantage, then the person with the highest fight can then call on all them in one roll. So, in a party of 4, they will

1. create about +6 worth of advantage,
2. attack at a natural 2 lower than the bosses fight (assuming it has a fight of 2 above the players)
3. cause about 4 stress, plus the weapon ratings in your setting. If they are sensible they might tag an extra aspect and probably cause a consequence.
4. Then the boss attacks one player, who spends fate points to defend, or takes some stress.

Before long your boss is going down, and the fight will have been a bit easy. If the players manage to handle to fictional positioning to rotate who the boss is damaging, then they won't have been in a great deal of danger at any time. This always felt a little disappointing to me.

So, what do I do to try and change this? Three different methods.

I try to set all of my big bosses up with three different aspects with a lot of free invokes on them. I will have one aspect which can generally be used on the offence, one that can generally be used on the defence and another to help in either situation. Why do I do that? It means that the big boss can deal with big spike damage, and can threaten people, but has a limited lifespan of doing so. Also I try to make some of these advantages one that some of the non main fighting pcs have the skills to overcome. They will then be making overcome actions to make their enemy easier to fight, and feel like they are contributing to the fight successfully.

I also give my big bosses more than one action per round. I usually only allow one of them to be an attack action and use the other for either an overcome or a create advantage. This means that they don't get quite as quickly buried in negative aspects, and also means you can use the create advantage can be used for scripted big attacks (see below).

I give them a scripted area of effect or whole fight attack. Something which can damage everyone. To put limits on this, I try to make sure that it has to pay one invoke of its aggressive aspects free invokes to use it, and it has to create an advantage at the start of the turn. Once this happens, my players now know that they can see when one of these attacks is coming in, and try to overcome the aspects which put them in danger. I do this to give a sense of urgency for one of the big attacks. The players know they are all about to be attacked, with an invoked aspect (tat was created at the top of the turn) unless they do something about it pretty soon. This means that they can then spend the turn trying to overcome those advantages, or create advantages to invoke against the attack, or try to get in cover of some sort. It means the fight is threatening to everyone, rather than someone just having to tank the damage and gives a sense of danger, but one with limited uses (the number of invokes of the aggressive aspect) and that can be dealt with (the telegraphed threatening by the early create advantage).

This system has worked for me a lot of times, where just someone with a fantastic fight got into either a steam-rolling or an unmemorable fight. I hope this is something useful!