2500 HP Dragons

This post is in conversation with two spectacular blog posts discussing boss monsters, number crunching and making truly memorable encounters. (One of them is even up for a Bloggie and you should definitely go vote for it >.> )

The gist of "A 16 HP Dragon" is: A boss doesn't need a lot of health to be scary. They can instead do a lot of damage (true, palpable damage like leveling cities or ripping apart limbs and equipment), uniquely affect the world and have such high armor that barely any mathematical damage truly touches them. 

The gist of "The 1 HP Dragon" is: It goes over making monsters more of a living breathing puzzle box that emphasizes conversation and problem solving over throwing numbers at the problem. (While talking about a really neat conversational system for doing so!~)

Both of these are worth your time to read if you want to create monsters that feel like true threats to the world, and both of these work from a similar perspective of "You don’t need 2500 hp to make a fight scary or hard."

Enter the number sicko's 2,500 HP Dragons.

Cutscene of Riven of a Thousand Voices - Destiny's iconic dragon

Alright, alright some preface is probably necessary here. If there's two things I've tried to make apparent on this blog it's that I have a sick fondness for ameritrash dungeon crawlers (that often involve throwing numbers at a problem) and also played far too much Destiny back in the day. These aspects not only inform my taste, but also my design - I enjoy combat to be a little crunchy. I like rolling dice and seeing how much damage gets thrown out. I have a natural aversion to too many "Immune" phases. I like things to be more than a little gamey. However I'm also a very big fan of the emergent worlds and open-ended problem solving capabilities that tabletop games offer. How to square this circle?

Sometimes I do something like the 16/1 HP Dragon - For example I ran a boss who dodged every attack flung at her until players disabled or destroyed her spotter drones with great success! It was a neat little puzzle, with an albeit still very "throw numbers at the problem" solution.

However sometimes I want to have monsters in the world give a sense of scale, wonder and sheer unkill-ability. An "Immune" pop-up telegraphs that you haven't figured out how to kill something, yet. A "you've done 26 damage this round out of 2,500" telegraphs that you are not above this thing on the food-chain and victory may be bordering on impossible.

In that same session I was describing above, players were tasked with stealing eggs out of a nest. Upon reaching out to the eggs, they found themselves blocked by the psychic shield The Wet Nurse - a bundle of eyes and flesh, punctuated by an almost human figure reaching down for the ceiling. After some experimentation (and mild panic at its psychic attacks) players figured out the shield blocking both the Wet Nurse and the eggs could be dropped by either dealing enough damage in a round, or hitting the Nurse with fire. Simple enough right?

After a round or two, players had loaded on a fair number of eggs into their cars and dealt about 50 damage to the Wet Nurse (far more than any enemy they'd encountered could take). They were hurting but feeling confident they could kill this thing and take the rest of the eggs if they just held out for a few more rounds. Seeing this resolve, I took the player who'd been psychically attacked the most and told him I'd be willing to tell him how much HP the Wet Nurse had left in secret in the hallway. Upon hearing the number "over 300" he promptly returned to the room with a firm "alright, time for us to go!"

While (if sheer luck were on their side or they'd brought literal tanks to the encounter) it was theoretically possible to simply chip the Wet Nurse's HP down, the player's definitely got the impression that both the boss and the world was bigger than them or their 12 HP pools would ever be, and now was the time to prioritize survival (especially when they had plenty enough eggs to complete their mission and then some).

To put it another way; I wanted the world to feel like one where everything was working on the same number crunchy "you can throw attacks at it and it can die" logic, and then use that logic to apply pressure and terror when the number of attacks becomes improbable. To put it another another way: How much HP does a whale have? What about the ice burg your ship is stuck in? If you had unlimited time and canon ammo surely you could break through, but players are usually all too well aware of the limitations of their resources.

Now this comes with some caveats:

• Firstly this works great with "recurrent" enemy types. The title uses "dragons" plural for a reason. As players start to learn how bloated the HP pools of such creatures are, the prospect of slaying one if asked seems (appropriately) daunting if not impossible. Which brings us to ~
• Secondly if players are ever expected to kill such a thing (and let me be clear, I think it is very cool to have 2,500 HP dragons just roaming around your setting as only theoretically killable hurricanes without ever being part of a quest) that's where you really need to start pulling in ideas from the 16 and 1 HP Dragons to add the potential for weakness and generous hooks. [[Or maybe not! There's something neat about keeping the "HP" logic and letting players try causing a nuclear meltdown or leveling a building to kill something - All of a sudden these bloated numbers start weaving desperate stories [*1] that can equally bring out interesting decision making.]]
• Thirdly you really need to be transparent in telegraphing how much HP these things have, even giving numbers if you're comfortable with it. There's nothing worse than players thinking they're chipping away at an enemy like they're any other, only to learn after the party wipe that they barely scratched the surface of its HP.

In a way 2,500 HP Dragons are the "blorb" approach to boss monsters, attempting to create a larger than life world where you can feel how ineffective mortal weapons are against titanic foes. Do you think they're a good fit for your setting and playstyle?

[*1 : As an aside, the 2,500 HP Dragon is incredibly effective in trad games where you want to force the players to choose between doing something horrible / dangerous / self-sacrificing to get through that HP bloat or run away to find another solution. I've applied this pressure twice to magnificent effect in my Steel Hearts campaigns.]