LIKE A BOSS

We don't have a giant thread full of random RPG boss ideas? Really? This is a problem that we need to solve.

But man, I've seen these threads before on other sites and some of them are kind of bad! Like hey, a boss that paralyzes the player as a counterattack! THAT'S TERRIBLE. That's not even a boss, that's just a single goddamn skill. You can do better than that, guys!

So I don't want you guys to post skills that bosses could have. Because that includes every skill ever. I want you to list whole designs for encounters. And then I want you to tell me why they work.

I know (or at least hope) that each of the elements you include in your best bosses is there for a specific reason. Tell me how to beat it, tell me what it's designed to prevent, tell me what it's designed to teach, tell me why you're doing it, tell me what skill you're testing. Give us some context, so that the boss MEANS something to us. (I mean, that's what I think would be best, but it's up to each poster to decide how much detail to give, obviously.)

They don't have to be great bosses, or endgame bosses, or bosses you've actually coded yet. They just have to be something you think is worth sharing.


HERE ARE SOME OF MINE GUYS.

Martec, lord of all demons
- At the beginning of battle, the Holy Guardian locks all of Martec's abilities except his weakest attacks and the Slow spell. He'll use these at first. Slow can be healed by a healer or a rare item; in this case it's probably worth using the rare item if your healer's turn isn't about to come up.
- After a certain number of turns, Martec will start to break free of the Guardian's bindings, regaining access to his spells.
- After about 5 turns, he gets his area attacks back. No big deal.
- After about 10 turns, he gets a healing spell back. This would usually be trivial, but in this case, buying time is exactly what he needs to do. There's no particular way to deal with this except to deal lots of damage.
- After about 15 turns, he gets his status effects back. He'll start to poison, blind and silence you. Poison will hurt, but the best strategy is to ignore that one. The others limit the skills that certain characters can use, but depending on how much time you have left, you might need to just use physical attacks with magical characters and have blinded physical characters use ki attacks or become your designated healers, instead of taking the time to heal them of the effects.
- After about 20 turns, he gets his instant death spell back. This is resistable with the right equipment, which you're probably already wearing on exactly one character, but not on the other three. If you haven't killed him yet at this point, you're already taking too long, so I don't feel bad about it.
- After about 25 turns, he gets his ridiculously powerful dark magic, which is unresistable and deals 9999 damage to a single target. If you can't kill him before he casts it four times, you lose.


Operative Vadak
- Vadak uses spells that you're familiar with. Most of his spells are ones you can also use.
- If you go below 50% HP, he'll use Giga Blast, which can only be used once per battle. He saves it until it's worth using.
- Twice during the battle, once at 70% HP and again at 30% HP, he'll summon two protective circles. The circles don't attack, but buff Vadak to make him invulnerable. Kill the circles and he can be damaged again. Earlier enemies in this dungeon introduced the concepts of both invincibility buffs on enemies (which force you to target a different enemy) and enemies that summon reinforcements (which force you to target the summoner). Vadak combines the two ideas, testing your targetting skills.
- If the second pair of protective circles is killed, Vadak will immediately use Giga Blast if he hasn't already, as a last-ditch effort.


Volcanic Crystal Dragon
- Uses some typical damaging attacks.
- Summons a lava elemental every round. They attack the lowest HP party member. Once there are several elementals out, you're probably going to need to use multiple characters to heal.
- The lava elementals explode after five rounds if they haven't been killed yet. The explosion hits the whole party but doesn't do any more damage than a normal attack. Worth using area attacks to kill them? Depends how good your healing is.
- The Volcanic Crystal Dragon will occasionally use a very powerful area attack; after using it, a crystal pillar rises from the ground. The crystal pillar is an enemy, but doesn't attack or do anything at all.
- Destroying a crystal pillar releases a sonic wave that paralyzes and lowers the defense of all enemies for a round.
- The Volcanic Crystal Dragon will occasionally use a channelled attack that causes damage to all characters. It starts out weak but deals more damage each round he continues doing it. After a few rounds, it will kill you. Destroying a crystal pillar will stop the attack. If there are no pillars left, he will use the pillar-summoning attack instead of this one.


(if this topic is popular, I will populate it with dozens more bosses, but for now it's time to post your own)

When I said it was time for other people to post, I lied. It's always my turn. JUST TRY TO STOP ME.


Professor Valing
- One character has to fight him. Every turn that he's alive, he summons enemies into a second area where the rest of the party is fighting simultaneously. The enemies are weak, but there are a lot of them.
- The enemies he summons move towards the player's base in the other area. The rest of the party has to kill the enemies before they reach it. The character fighting Professor Valing can flee if needed and teleport over to the other side to help fight the enemies, if they become overwhelming. However, doing so will reset Valing to full health. (This is in a multiplayer game, but would work just as well in a tactical RPG.)
- You can choose who fights Professor Valing. You can only send one person at a time, though.
- Valing's main attacks are a drain attack, a firebomb, and a defense-lowering attack. They're not a serious threat for anyone but a glass cannon.
- Valing will buff himself with a variety of buffs. He increases his offense, defense, speed, and maximum HP. You can dispel these buffs if you really want to.
- Valing has permanent regen status: he regains a small percentage of his HP every round.
- More often than you want him to, Professor Valing will use pretty strong healing items.
- The only status effects he's immune to are ones that prevent him from taking action. Since he uses regen and heavy heals, an obvious choice is to cast zombie on him, so that he'll hurt himself with the heals. However, if he's zombied, he'll use the Panacea skill to cure the zombie status instead of healing himself.
- The usefulness of zombie status is limited, but not nullified. Zombie is still worth using if your willpower is high enough that you can hit him reliably with it, because it keeps him from using potions and makes his regen status hurt him for a round or two. This is the most effective way to kill him; a glass cannon type character is the second most effective way.
- He'll also sometimes just use Panacea even when he's not zombied. Panacea heals all negative effects on him. But being affected by zombie status makes him use it more often.
- Dying to Valing doesn't cause a game over; he just heals back to full. If the enemies on the other side reach your base, then you get a game over.


Silteryl, the rockworm
- Silteryl's primary attack on most rounds is a multi-target damage skill. However, it doesn't hit everyone - it only hits people who dealt physical damage to Silteryl this round. It's his weakest skill, but it makes Silteryl very much a boss you want to fight with magic if possible.
- The boss also picks a random player on which to use a very strong, very fast damage over time spell. It deals more damage than you can possibly live through, spread out over three rounds. You need to heal the person affected by it.
- Periodically, the boss applies a status effect to the entire party that nullifies the next healing spell cast on them. If you don't heal the entire party after this, the next damage over time spell that your party gets hit with will be a killing one.
- Silteryl dives beneath the earth at 75%, 50% and 25% HP. When he does so, he summons four small worms that attack the party. They are weak to physical damage; this balances out the anti-physical aspect of the rest of the fight.
- Two rounds after going underground, a cloud of dust will visibly appear under one party member. On the third round, the boss will emerge and deal ridiculous damage to that character. You can survive this attack if the character who gets hit is fully healed and uses the defend command (or has multiple +def buffs in place). If any of the small worms are still alive, they might kill the character while he's at critical health, so it's important to kill the worms before this attack. The first time he uses this attack, someone's probably gonna die. If you're smart, you'll notice the cloud of dust and figure out what to do the other two times.


Dr. Jennifer Noveau, successor to Hojo
- Her name is Jen Noveau
- She is researching Jenova
- I'm so sorry
- Starts the battle off by sealing herself behind an impenetrable wall and releasing makonoids from their tanks.
- An NPC (Vincent Valentine, to be specific) fights alongside you. He is uncontrollable. He deals single-target and area damage, curses enemies to lower their offense and defense, and if the stars are aligned just right will very occasionally heal party members who are low on HP.
- Enemies will never target Vincent.
- A group of makonoids appears every eight rounds. If you kill all makonoids on the screen, the next group spawn sooner so you don't have to wait (giving you one round to heal).
- Makonoids mostly use reflectable magic of random elements. Reflect is an effective tool, but you have to sacrifice either a skill slot or an accessory slot to get it.
- Makonoids also use a powerful nonreflectable skill that deals heavy magic damage but exhausts them, lowering their mattack for a few rounds. They won't use it again while exhausted.
- Each makonoid absorbs a random element and is weak to a random element. Since you'll be fighting a total of about forty of them over the course of the battle, you're gonna have to use multiple elements.
- After eight groups, a piece of Jenova appears and joins the fight.
- Jenova-RESURRECTION uses holy magic, blind status, demi, and weak healing spells. If all the makonoids are dead, it's no big deal. If they're not, it gets messy.
- After defeating the piece of Jenova, the sealed door opens for a second. Vincent leaves your part to run in. You don't make it in time to follow him.
- More makonoids appear again. This time you don't have Vincent to help you, but you have an extra two rounds to kill each group before the next one shows up. Otherwise it's the same as the previous eight groups. If you were buffing and relying on Vincent, you now have to fend for yourself.
- After killing all the makonoids, the sealed door opens again, revealing Vincent, transformed into the Galian Beast, and in a feral rage. He attacks your party.
- Vincent is honestly pretty boring; he just deals physical and fire damage. If you were going all out offense against the Makonoids, you need to switch gears FAST.
- After knocking out Vincent, Dr. Jennifer Noveau finally appears to fight you herself.
- She uses poison and drain attacks, and summons more enemies called Single Cells; they're giant amoebas that blob all over you. She will summon one every single round. You need to either deal lots of area damage, or take down Noveau ASAP.
- When she's low on HP, she stops summoning and transforms into Helletic Noveau, gaining several extra parts that respawn if they die. Single target attacks are generally best here.
- As Helletic Noveau, she inflicts a ton of status effects, and has a massive natural regeneration each round. Because you had to gear for the other stages of the battle too, there's basically no way you're going to be able to be immune to these status effects, so you have to deal with them instead. This is the final stage of the battle.

@Jude:

Heh, I wasn't subtle with that one, no. To be fair, only one of its moves is actually the same (the damage over time skill). But the overall flow is still very much inspired by that fight (and by about ten other near-identical fights in WoW), and it's still a giant rockworm that burrows under the ground.

It's not on my list of bosses to actually use, but it was kind of worth posting here.

All those things are definitely similar, but I did change how they worked to make them work in a turn-based battle system with no tank and no movement. But I mean, I'm not denying that in my boss ideas document, that boss is labelled Corboros, RMXP Edition. They're the closest possible equivalent skills.

At one point, I was actually trying to make an RMXP adaptation of some of World of Warcraft's better dungeons, which quickly turned into abandonware as my "research" turned into me just playing WoW nonstop for several months.

Here are some more bosses, of the less blatantly unoriginal variety.

Operative Nalia, the summoner
- A long fight in which she summons lots and lots of things. You have to find a balance between killing the things she summons and dealing damage to her.
- Nalia herself rarely attacks. When she does, she uses an area damage over time attack, which your character immediately learns as a blue mage. This is actually your first area attack spell.
- Summons a Circle of Assault every single turn, which is a vortex of energy that deals minor damage to the player and can be killed.
- At 75%, 50% and 25% HP, summons two Circles of Redemption, which cast healing spells on Nalia or on other circles.
- At 66% and 33% HP, summons two Circles of Protection, which cast invulnerability buffs on Nalia or on other circles.
- This battle is fought with only one character, which means there's no reactive targetting for your healing or buffs. So I used the different types of summoning to create lots of reactive targetting for offense.


Thepanda
- Not just Apanda, it's Thepanda
- Cannot be hurt by characters above level 100 (max is 200). L100+ characters can still heal and buff allies, and can still absorb hits.
- Can heal itself, so whittling it down gradually while ignoring the primary gimmick will not work.
- Deals heavy damage to a single target and randomly inflicts either poison, petrify or zombie status.
- Attempts to inflict a single target with poison, blind, silence, zombie and polymorph (which makes the target unable to use skills and take triple physical damage)
- All those statuses are resistable with accessories, but you can't possibly be immune to more than three. They also have lower hitrates against higher level characters.
- Randomly summons Apanda demons to the battle, which fight alongside him. Apandas, like their boss Thepanda, cannot be harmed by characters above level 100.
- Periodically, Thepanda will use Curse of Shrinking Might on the entire player party. This halves everyone's level for one minute. While under this curse, players who were above level 100 can now deal damage, while players who were under level 100 are now extremely weak and fragile. You need to swap who is doing what at this point, letting the stronger characters deal damage and the weaker ones defend and heal.

She summons one every round, up to a maximum of twelve, at which point the screen is completely full of red energy vortexes and you are dead and it doesn't matter that she can't summon any more. So yes, that AOE spell is key to winning. But at the same time, the fact that it's a damage over time spell that doesn't stack with itself keeps you from casting it more than once every third round.

Having him weaken himself when he's at 10% HP seems a little pointless. You're almost guaranteed to win at that point anyway - the more interesting thing to do would be to have him make a comeback and halve the stats of all the player characters.

Having him weaken himself if you can drop him below 50% HP in the first two and a half rounds is interesting, though, since it breaks the typical boss mold of the player buffing up to the max as soon as possible. But it's hard for the player to predict, or even to realize why it happened. If you really want that to be something the player is trying to do, you'll need to clue the player in to the pattern somehow. (Preferably something visible in the battle, and not just a random drunk in the town pub telling you the pattern, though that's always an option for the uninspired designers among us)

...also if you're gonna have a hammer-wielding that uses a freeze move and an evasion-boosting move, the freeze move needs to be called Stop - Hammer Time and the evasion move needs to be called Can't Touch This. These things are sort of just non-negotiable.

The combination of Grip, Cover and the self-reviving claws creates a pretty effective way of making the player really respond to the boss's actions instead of just dealing damage and healing through them. I like that.