Making Solo Encounters Solo

Hark, the first post! Here I shall cover a topic that is probably the most intriguing to me; monster design. Speicifically, solo monster design. I've spent a good deal of time learning how encounters work in 4th edition. One of the only challenges that remains is making a good solo encounter. Once the players reach paragon tier (maybe even upper heroic if they're min-maxers and tacticians) solo encounters shift from being deadly to being boring.

I play D&D through Maptools, and I keep monsters' HP and defenses out in the open. The characters, being hardened adventurers and combatants, would be able to pick up on, at least in a general sense, what a monster's strengths and weaknesses are. This does have the drawback of leading to metagaming on the players' part. As soon as they see the monster with 600+ hit points they immediately switch to "solo" mode, and unload absolutely everything they have on the baddie. As a DM, there's nothing I like less than seeing what should have been a scary monster become trivialized, and even if I'm always rooting for the PCs, there should be a definite fear for their characters' mortality. This has prompted me to design better solo encounters, and so I first looked to Enworld for some ideas, and came up with a few simple points that will make any Solo encounter a challenge again, without having to add a slew of other monsters (which, in my mind, reduces the sheer bad-ass-ness from the solo monster). Here are the points I have used on solo monsters to make them more challenging.

Break the Players' Focus Fire

This is goal number one in any solo encounter. In standard encounters, focus fire has less impact, since there are other baddies to smack the players around. In a solo fight, the solo doesn't have ways to punish the players for focus firing.

Breaking up the party is a very viable tactic for this. Placing patches of difficult, impassible or hard-to-cross terrain between the players make it difficult for them to coordinate, along with making it easier to pick on a single character. To this end, walls have become a new favorite of mine for solo-design. I love the idea of a solo summoning walls in between the players and splitting them up. If you think back on memorable boss fights in video games, you'll probably come up with a boss who uses this sort of tactic (Personally, I think about the giant plant-boss from Metroid Prime [Flahgra, I think it was called], and remember the walls of plants that blocked my movement).

Dynamic terrain is a great way to break up focus fire. It's also a bit more difficult to come up with than ways for the monster to do it (generally). I have yet to master the art of utilizing terrain to its fullest, so you can expect a blog about that when I have it down. This also really depends on the setting, since you can't always make terrain maleable. That said, there are usually little things you can do: crumbling walls blocking a common route is a well-used trope. I've also got an encounter planned where unstable ground (can also be ice, mud, or sand) will change at random (like a floor falling through, or sand turning to quick sand) and prevent the PC for attacking for a turn.

I think a good idea for any encounter, but especially for solos, is to give the players other things to use their standard actions for, that doesn't include attacking the solo monster. For my most recent solo encounter (against a really big ice elemental), the monster creates walls and spikes of ice which only go away when the players do enough damage to them. This forces the players to use their attacks on something other than the big baddie, and also serves to split up the party.

Threatening the Whole Party

Any DM who has a defender in his party (especially a fighter) knows that solos are punished by marks more than regular monsters. The whole job of a solo monster is to threaten the party, but a well-made defender can put all the focus on them. To this, I have a solution that has worked quite well: Give the solo an alternative mode of combat that significantly boosts single target damage. My reasoning is that if a monster is marked, they will focus entirely on the marker without holding back an ounce.

If a fighter gets up close and personal, have the solo start dishing out lots of damage and status effects to make marking seem unreasonable. Close, area, and multi-target attacks get around the problem, but they make the defender in question feel cheated. His job is to pull focus on to him, and those attacks get around it easily. Instead, give the character what they asked for ten-fold.

Once the defenders realize that they can't really hold up to the solo entirely, let them back off and switch back to "group" mode, where it does moderate to high damage to the whole group. Here is where your multi-target, and AoE powers come in. This breaks up the monotony of most combats by giving the defenders something else to do (in my case, break players out of spikes of ice and smash ice-walls).

Better when Bloodied

This idea has been touched on a lot by WotC in PHB2. I liked what they wrote, but I took it one step further. Don't just make the monster stronger at bloodied, but make the way they fight different. In my example, my ice elemental is fine just sitting in the center of the room and throwing around bursts, blasts and walls to hit the party. Once it hits bloodied, it starts moving around the room and becomes much more offensive. This gives the players something to react to besides damage and conditions.

This can be hard to do with more normal monsters, but there are usually ways you can manage this that involve terrain. For example, I have a fight with a nasty white dragon coming up. For the first half the fight will be on ground, like a white dragon would fight. Once it gets bloodied, however, it moves to the air where the players have to keep up with it on motes of floating crystal and ice in an area where gravity is lessened. The monster didn't really change (except for getting more powerful), but the style of the fight changed.

Tweaking Stats

This is for the more adventurous of DMs who are comfortable with the inner-math that D&D has. This can also be a great way to shift around how the fight will go down. In my experience, solos made using the math in DMG2 have the bare minimum health to challenge the party. A lot of times I'll go back and change the HP to what it would be using the DMG1 rules.

Whatever you decide for HP, it has to be balanced with defenses. The higher the monsters defenses, the lower its HP should be, and vice-versa (to prevent grind). Defenses are a tough one to tackle. Yes, you can use the DMG2 guidelines, but I like to raise one of the non-AC-defenses (NADs) to nearly un-hittable, and then lower the other two to a point or two below average. AC is usually average for me, unless I have some sort of gimmick to the fight.

Using gimmicks can be a fun way to throw a wrench in your players' standard mode of operation. I haven't experimented with these too much, but one I'm using my ice elemental fight is to make its defenses pretty high (so the players hit on 13 through 15), while giving it a vulnerability to fire that reduces its defenses. When this debuff is combined with combat advantage, the defenses achieve your standard "hit" range of 8-11.

Tweaking damage is another common way to manipulate a solo's effectiveness. I generally follow the rule of adding half the creature's level to its damage. For AoE attacks, I'll usually add half that value (1/4 the creature's level) to compensate for multiple targets. If I'm feeling particularly adventurous, I'll make an attack that has low static damage, but pretty scary dice damage (e.g. 5d12+4), but that's only if the creature's attack, fluff-wise, is supposed to be random.



The real trick to making solo creatures work by themselves is to know your group and what makes them run over normal solo encounters. If they do lots of damage, try breaking their focus fire. If they have too much healing, introduce obstacles that break line of effect (invisible walls are really fun in that respect). Once you know what they're really good at, you can come up with measures to reduce their effectiveness in that area. You don't want to completely remove the ability to do damage or heal, but you should make the players have to work to get things to work.

In a solo encounter the odds really need to be stacked against the players, to the point where they're not only facing a big bad enemy, but they have to do so at a disadvantage so that getting to their normal combat state requires constant work. It takes a lot of work to create a memorable encounter, but its definitely worth it and it'll have your players chewing their nails off and on the edge of their seat the whole session, and that is worth it.

Question for you: What tactics and strategies do you use for your big-baddies and how does it work out?