Minions in a boss fight

The final boss fight of any campaign can be a challenge. After months of back and forth spanning the entire game, my players finally reach the end and come face-to-face with their recurring villain. It’s time to finish this. The villain laughs and sends their minions to tenderize/terrorize the party and… The players bypass the minions and dog-pile the boss.

Not exactly what I was looking for, but that’s because there are two sides to this fight scene. From the player perspective, the boss is the most dangerous enemy. Those minions are chump change and the sooner they take out the big bad, the better their chances of success and/or survival. I can hardly fault my players for being practical.

But the other side is the narrative one. The final defeat of the recurring villain is supposed to be the dramatic climax of the chapter or whole campaign. If the PCs skip the minions and whoop the boss’ ass as fast as they can, then they’re left with several rounds of anti-climactic minion cleanup. Narratively, just not very dramatic.

I could skip the minions, and often do. But sometimes, it’s just needed to balance out the fight, or makes too much sense to the story or boss. So let’s assume that this is a fight where both the boss and the minions are necessary.

I’ve tried lots of things to get my players to “save the best for last” as it were, and here’s what I’ve come up with.

First, I can just hold the villain back until the minions are out of the picture. The ultimate enemy is in another room, behind a force field, or otherwise just not part of the battle until I’m ready for the player characters to climactically put them down. That’s fine sometimes, but as soon as the villain steps onto the stage, then the dog-piling begins and they may not get in some of the shots I hoped for.

So if I want to make sure the villain causes some pain before going down, I need to put them on the battlefield. But there’s some things I can do to ensure the party will still clean out the minions before going after the main villain. For instance, the minions might give some defensive bonus to the boss. If the PCs have a hard time putting a dent in the villain while the minions are protecting them, they will be motivated to clear them out, giving the villain some longevity in combat and a chance to land my big hits.

That’s not a trick I can use every time, though. My players are sure as hell going to notice if every villain is magically strengthened by their minions or if all the soldiers carry force field projectors shielding their boss. And I can only come up with so many plausible ways that minions can give a defensive bonus. Magic… force fields… Yup, I’m tapped out for now.

I forget which system I first encountered rules for having NPCs act in groups. It might have been White Wolf — a lot of neat rules come from that system. But since then, I’ve house-ruled some version of group-fire in every game that doesn’t have it.

In case you’ve never encountered group-fire rules, they’re usually pretty simple. Between 1 and 5 minions are grouped together on the map, and they roll as a single unit — one hit with a single blast of damage. But they gain a bonus to hit and to damage based on how many of them there are. As they’re killed or are otherwise removed from the battlefield, those bonuses drop. It’s a great way to amp up their little minion hits and make them really count for something.

So I can put a bunch of minions down around the big bad boss, and a large group of soldiers can temporarily become as big a threat to the PCs as the boss itself. If the minion army doesn’t get whittled down, then they’ll eat the PC party alive.

Of course, once the little NPCs are reduced to small enough groups that they’re not as much of a concern, the player party may ignore the few survivors and start focusing on the villain, but that’s okay. It still buys me an extra round or three of the villain getting some hits in before they are dog-piled, and makes their minions really count for something.

I’m sure there are tons of ways to balance that climactic fight without asking your players to make tactical blunders in the name of narrative arc, but this handful of tricks have worked for me for years.

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