>>43855007
just give the dragon more actions per turn

most systems would limit the dragon to something like 1 action to move, 1 action to do something combat related, and a few minor actions that are free in some way.

just give the dragon 1 or 2 extra combat actions that fall in between the player turns to make it more threatening

>>43855049
I'm not just talking about DnD (I don't actually play it personally) but DnD5e has the only offered solution I'm aware of?

>>43855058
Edge of the empire has major NPCs acting once in their initiative slot and once more at the end of the initiative order.

>>43855007
This sounds more like a problem in encounter design rather than the system itself, really. Think about it from a non-turn-based perspective. If the fight really is just the dragon and the party hanging out in the middle of an arena and hitting each other with sticks, it's going to be boring turn based or not.

Think about the fight against Grigori in dragon's dogma for example. It was more like a little journey to the arena for half the battle, while stuff was actually happening at all times, you have to dodge fire breath while running around and climbing bridges that are falling down etc. When you finally get to the arena, he's constantly moving around, begins flying around, swooping down to snack on you, etc. You can even climb him while he's flying past.

I think (good) boss battles in video games could be pretty useful inspiration for this stuff in general.

>>43855139
I'd be lying if I said I'd never been inspired by a bossfight in a video game, but in many games bosses are health sponges and those aren't too fun in either video games nor RPGs. Things like telegraphed attacks and the like are all well and cool, but would they translate well to an RPG? I don't know, I may have to try next week. I primarily play Dark Heresy and it's the inspiration for this thread. Fighting a 'boss' tends to boil down to him hitting one dude and the party hitting him. I would never say that one of my strengths has been planning fights and I'd say they're my weakest aspect as a GM, always room to improve on it but I'd like to start sooner rather than later.

>>43855326
>health sponges
Those aren't good boss battles though.

In general, since all you do as a player is plan what your character should do, swinging a sword isn't as cool and fun as it might be in real life. As such I think the best way to go is to just have the encounter change a lot during the fight.

>the fight starts on the bridge of the Chaos lord's flagship, but soon his lieutenant crashes a cruiser into the side, propelling you into a zero-g combat along the outside of the hull and wreckage. As victory seems certain, a rift opens and daemons pour out, while the bbeg retreats into the warp. After dispatching the foul monsters, you head into what appears to be the remnants of a small imperial ship in the warp. In order to catch up with the traitor, you need to set maximum speed and jump out of the ship with chainsword in hand, ripping into the cowards own ship and holding on while fending off disgusting spawn, and survive the inevitable impact when his ship crashes into an asteroid. Finally there you will make your final stand and destroy his filthy traitor body, and let his soul break apart in the warpstorm while ripping open space again and riding the asteroid back to safety.

Something like that.

>>43855326
Also I think in general try to get your players to be a little more creative with fighting. If they can beat the campaign by just going "I attack the guy", something's wrong. Especially final confrontations with bbeg needs to involve throwing your weapon in an attempt to interrupt him or something similarly different and desperate, otherwise it's not really a proper finale.

>>43855561
You'll have to forgive me, I've not been playing many games lately (Just Bloodborne, whose combat doesn't really lend itself too well to an RPG in any way that I can see), but generally video game bosses tend to be stage-affairs, where either certain combinations of attacks/items/whatever can dramatically speed up a bossfight, or you split the fight up into increments (at 40% health the boss goes into a ranged form for x seconds until you can fight him again, in this time he might spawn adds and you have to survive him blasting the arena with a volcano cannon or something). That's what I meant by health sponges, where damage to the boss dictates how the fight happens. If you evade forever, the boss won't do anything new. I do like your example though!

>>43855601
Generally, that's how it tends to go though. I've tried various iterations of unique enemies that play to players strengths and weaknesses (so some enemies are made to get sniped by the sniper, but likewise some exist to close the distance with him and force a fight he's not suited to). But everyone gets sniped/carved/exploded indiscriminately.

>>43855007
In my system I'm resolving this by granting big monsters (let's say above troll size) more activations in a round with different Initiative values. Also several of their actions affect all or most enemies around, like a stomp, or are responsens to their actions.
The problem still stands for powerful human-sized enemies, but still, there are a number of options for out-of-turn actions

>>43855007
Surely you just give sufficient fast and large characters more actions than others?

Let's say characters have Initiative stats ranging from 1 to 10, and size ranks which we can call 0.25 (much smaller than a human) to 6 (vast creature bigger than a house). A normal human has stats 3 and 1 respectively.

Multiply the two scores by each other. If the result is less than one, the character makes one action. If the result is 1 or 2, the character makes 2 actions. 3 4 or 5, the character makes 3 actions. 6 7 8 9, four actions. 10 11 12 13 14 makes five, 15 16 17 18 19 20 makes six and so on. The first action is at the character's Initiative, the second at -1 the previous, the third at -2 (so -3 total) and so on.

- Everyone gets at least one action
- One action occurs at that character's max speed
- Characters that are merely big don't get to blitz the field or any such bullshit
- A size 4, 5 or 6 dragon can tail whip everyone in a party in the space of one turn like it would in a real time engagement, and the dragon controller doesn't sit around picking his bum.

>>43855708
Well, obviously a lot of it is also just on the players. I haven't played dark heresy so I don't know exactly what kind of options you really have. When I was playing Eclipse phase a few years ago, we had some pretty neat encounters that worked so well partially I think because the other party wasn't just there to kill us. For instance we ran around in some massive underground breeding complex on mars (I think?) and there was another party that was also infiltrating at the same time, so we tried to get rid of them at the same time as extracting what we wanted, but the locals were also enemies, so it became somewhat more interesting. We did have some other neat moments when I took control of the local hovertrains to use as momentum to driveby-claw the other intruders, opening all blast doors to flush out all the air and thus suffocating everyone who wasn't wearing a suit, our resident shooty tooty guy spent most of his time shooting grenades out of the air and/or in the hands of the other intruders, but in general there wasn't a whole lot of
>I hit you
>you hit me
>I have better stats because I'm a pc, so I win
Obviously, in the grim darkness yadda yadda you kinda need a lot of grim slicing and dicing, but it sounds like you could just try making encounters more difficult, both in terms of just more/stronger enemies but more preferably different and difficult combat situations that are out of the ordinary - all to force your players to actually come up with something more interesting than just shoot/swing/psykerpowers at that over there. Honestly, I think maybe quicktime events, or CINEMATIC stuff that's not all that great in video games, would be good ideas for cool things that you should encourage your players to try. That's when you get those 'Los Tiburon' moments. Zone of the enders is another game I think of when it comes to good boss fights off the top of my head.

>>43855058
Take a look at how D&D 4e does monsters, especially from Monster Manual 3 on. You have several different solutions for multiple actions for boss monster types. It's pretty noticeable because the lack of interactivity was often cited as a problem when the game came out, so it was fixed with later additions.

>>43855007
Describe the hit to hold their attention. Act it out if you really want to grab em. Keeps em entertained while they wait their turn

>>43855708
>That's what I meant by health sponges, where damage to the boss dictates how the fight happens.
Ah, this is true, but the ideas behind them might be interesting. In your game you can obviously just insert them when it's appropriate and/or interesting.

>>43855007
Not clear from post if you're willing to change systems, but gurps and ecipse phase have turn which represent much smaller amounts of time and some entities may be able to act more than once before another gets its turn. I know other systems do this but off the top of my head I can't remember what they are.

Don't a lot of games give someone who is being attacked some chance of hitting back in response?

Especially systems where all rolls are made by the players or one where it's a contest of skills to see who hits who rather than making an attack and defending against it.

>>43855007
This guy has a article series all about this. I love his stuff, it's changed the way I would DM.

angrydm.com/2010/04/the-dd-boss-fight-part-1/

>>43856535
That's a really interesting article and it outlines all my issues (glad it's not just me), I'm on part 2 now and he's outlining "Different statblocks for the boss for each phase", has anyone tried this?

>>43855007
>and he gets to smack one of the party in return
And Warhammer a dragon means to 98% your death. It can throw fire and has more than just one attack.

>>43856535
he's such a shit writer

there needs to be a angrydm cliff's notes