The Boss Battle

So here you are- the boss battle. You roll his first toughness save and -oops, he's dead!

How can you liven up your boss battle?

First, see the combat complications and minion tactics for ways you can make the combat itself more difficult or utilize minions to provide as much chaos as possible. Also try unkillable enemies for enemies you can't just beat up.

But sometimes you do need to beat up the boss, and you don't want him to just go down.

• Power Level: Well the simplest way to drag out the fight is to make the boss a higher power level than the party, or by simply making him immune to the party's favorite tactics. While this can stretch out a combat, it usually comes down to team attacks or playing "mother may I" in order to beat the boss.
• Hero Points: Well, that's what they're for, right? Give out hero points to give the boss a few extra saving throws? You could give him second chance as an alternative, at least giving him a better chance of not dropping all at once- but still, you're just skirting their powers.
• Broken Tactics: Like the entry here, but you can have the boss use the broken tactics himself.
• Transformation: Give it to Dragon Ball Z to really show you how to drag a boss battle out for half a season. Frieza is a great example. The guy had like 4 different boss forms, and the destruction of each form let out the next. Video games use this sometimes too, no matter how much damage you do to a boss, it merely brings on his next form, which could be justified by having triggered powers, or just a nifty cut scene. This way you can also play like two or three different bosses in one, each time raising the stakes until he comes crashing down in party victory. This could also include him whistling and calling in cohorts, or him being a simulacrum you defeat before the real boss.

Frieza has to be killed like 4 times!

• Multiple Bosses: For some reason, this gets overlooked sometimes- but if there's no ONE boss, then all the PCs won't tend to beat up on him all the time. If you've got a team of bosses, each with different types of powers and unique in their own right, the party won't necessarily look at one as the "boss" and they can do interesting things in the combat and not drop at once.

Who's the boss here?

• Multiple Actions: Maybe the boss can take multiple actions to make him more dangerous. There are ways in game to justify this, from having his armor be a separate "creature" or having him have multiple personalities schismed in his head, each with it's own actions.
• Ablative: The opposite of transformation, and perhaps a subset of multiple bosses or multiple actions, but pieces of the boss get stripped away during the combat, perhaps making him weaker (or not), but showing progress as you fight him. Perhaps his arms fall off during combat, rendering him unable to use certain powers, or you beat down his force field, or the boss is a hydra who is losing heads- the boss can't be killed straight out, but you can rip pieces off him until he's completely beaten.

Just when you thought you won- he's still fighting

• The Boss isn't the challenge: Sometimes the obvious boss isn't the true target. Maybe he's possessed by an amulet or his sword or something, and destroying it breaks the spell. Or perhaps you need to destroy his doomsday machine, and destroying him isn't really important at all.

Nicholas isn't the real villain- it's his Book!

• You must first fight the Dragon: There are multiple bad guys- but instead of fighting them all at once, you fight them in sequence, with several boss battles in a row. Luke fights Vader before the battle with the Emperor, The Turtles fight the Foot Clan before the Shredder, and when you get to the end of Final Fantasy VI, you fight a series of bosses on the way up Kefka's tower before fighting the three statues, then Kefka himself (who also has multiple bosses, multiple forms- some with the ablative quality). In many cases, the main boss is not able to be challenged until his dragon is destroyed.

Okay, first you'll fight Bebop and Rocksteady, then Krang will come fight you- then you fight Shredder.