Bosses Can Break The Rules

 One of the challenges you can come across as a GM is how to make a boss character stand out mechanically or feel like a boss in a fight. There are some obvious ways to do it such as the bag of HP and high powered attacks. They're tried and true for a reason, they work, and every boss has to be able to absorb enough damage to feel like a challenge to take down while doing enough damage to feel like a threat. The thing is how does the boss do that, and how can you do it in a way so that a good round doesn't just blow up a player and take them out of the game while starting the death spiral for the encounter?

Keep It Simple, Stupid. And yes, in Combat Encounters too.

 KISS is a standard rule of design. Often though we forget about it when designing our encounters. It's a natural thing to happen. You want a fight to be cool. You want the big NPCs to be cool. And being cool means being able to do special stuff. I mean, all the 'cool' stuff your PCs can do comes from abilities they can do that trump or otherwise modify the normal rules of combat.

Where Is Your Villain Strong? Where Is Your Villain Weak?

Strengths and weaknesses are common things we talk about when making characters. All the best characters - heroes and villains alike - tend to have both in spades depending on the genre or medium of fiction. However, I've noticed when it comes to RPGs that I don't often spend a lot of time thinking about my villains strengths and weaknesses. At least, not directly.

Puzzle Mechanic Boss Fights

Boss Fights tend to come in one of two flavors in the world of videogames: stat checks and puzzles. In a stat check boss fight there is nothing particularly special to the mechanics of fighting the boss. It is just a question of if you can avoid or tank the boss's damage while doing enough damage to get through the boss's defenses before you lose.

In an RPG like Final Fantasy or Dragon Age this means healing your people, potentially positioning them well, and managing your resources to do your damage and keep your people alive through the fight. In a more action game like Devil May Cry this involves the player having to avoid the damage combos of the boss while dishing out their own damage combos in the windows of opportunity.