Remembrance Beast

Howdy. It's been a minute since, uh, my first post, but I'll likely be using this thing more often in the near future. That's because I'm about to begin GMing a campaign using Spire , Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor's fantastic 2018 TTRPG about playing as drow revolutionary cultists fighting against oppressive high elf gentrifiers/colonizers in a massive tower-city. Check it out if you haven't--seriously, 5E wants what it has. My campaign won't be using any pre-existing Spire campaign modules, but will instead be using my own original stories. I say stories, plural, because I'm also taking a West Marches  approach to running the game. The party is huge but players will drop in and out session by session, multiple story arcs could occur at once, and I'm generally just taking a collaborative approach to storytelling. Hell, I may even move over to Spire's  Heart  sister title every once in a while if the story calls for journeys into a body horror-f...

Recently (by which I mean, like, months ago), a game dev I follow on Twitter, Kai Tave (whose work you should absolutely go and check out and whose Patreon you should support if you're a Lancer fan) discussed the difficulties of putting quality boss fights into tabletop games. I had never really thought about it before, despite the fact that I insert bosses into my games all the damn time, so, after reading the brief thread they posted, I went back and looked at my own fights. My boss fights were, to put it lightly, fucking terrible. The vast majority of the bosses I had pitted my players against in my campaign were incredibly easy, missed most of their attacks, and often had some incredibly lame gimmicks in their movesets. The ones that did turn out fun were basically just extended setpieces, during which I had players primarily make non-combat rolls with some brief fighting sprinkled in. My boss battles sucked, and I'm upset at myself for making my players do them. N...