Intro
The last thing any of us wants is for our players to spend a year and a half in a campaign, grow attached to their characters, care deeply about the world — and then be handed a wet noodle of an antagonist at the very end.
No more wet noodles. We are building rock-hard villains today.
Six tips: three for how your BBEG works in combat, and three for how they work in the story. Let me get one caveat out of the way first, though, because it colours everything else.
The caveat
I run very narrative-focused games. That is what my players like, and it is what I like. But the goal is always a strong narrative that the players are part of — not one they sit and listen to.
So with every tip below — narrative or combat — the rule is: do not take anything away from your players. Do not remove their opportunities. Do not force them into anything. These are tools to increase a villain’s narrative weight and mechanical impact. They are not tools for railroading.
I love writing stories. But the reason I love writing stories for D&D specifically is what happens to them when they leave my hands and go into the players’. That gap — between what I wrote and what it becomes at the table — is the whole point. (Devised theatre and D&D go hand in hand, and I would love to make a proper video about that one day. Not today.)
Right. Let us get into it.
Three Tips for Combat
1. Design the boss with a pick-two triangle
We want our bosses to be cool. We want them to be mechanically impactful in the fight. What we do not want is for them to be stupidly, ridiculously overpowered, because that is not fun to fight — it is infuriating to fight. Infuriating is good sometimes. Not this way.
So here is the tool. Picture a triangle. At each corner:
- High mobility
- High damage
- High tankiness
When you build your villain, you pick two. They are highly mobile and hit like a truck, but fold under pressure. Or they are tanky and deal enormous damage, but they are slow and the party can kite them. Or they are tanky and mobile, but they do not actually hurt very much.
The reason this makes a fight fun is not just that the boss is not overpowered. It is that the boss now has an exploit — something the party can find and use to win.
That is the whole game. If we look at boss design in video games — and yes, I know tabletop RPGs and video games are not the same thing, you can put the comment away — they share a lot in how they make the player feel like they accomplished something, like they had a hand in the victory.
That is what makes FromSoftware so good at this. Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Elden Ring — those are different from D&D, because you learn a boss by dying to it five or six times. But think about how it feels to beat a boss on the first try in one of those games. It feels incredible, because you figured it out. It clicked.
That is what we want our players doing in a boss fight.
D&D has an advantage video games do not
Combat takes a long time in D&D, and final bosses take a very long time. But that gives us something no video game has: between the villain’s turns, there are five, six, maybe seven player characters acting.
That is six or seven chances in the first round for the villain to show what they can do. Which means the party gets a whole round to observe, talk, theorise, and figure out the weakness — and then spend the rest of the fight exploiting it. They work it out early and use it to win.
This is something Matthew Colville has said, and I believe it is a cornerstone of FromSoftware’s design too: players have the most fun when they struggle. When they get their teeth kicked in, when they are almost beaten to a pulp — and still succeed.
Anyone who has played a video game, or played or watched a sport they care about, knows exactly what it feels like to nearly lose and then win. Now think about how much sweeter that is when the reason you won is not that you slammed your head into a brick wall until it fell over — the default state of most tabletop combat — but that you used your brain. You figured it out. You are so smart.
If your party has reached the levels where nothing you build seems to threaten them any more, the exploit-based approach is doing double duty. There is more on that specific problem in how to actually challenge high-level players.
2. Give the fight secondary objectives
I am not going to spend long on this one, because there is an entire twenty-minute video about it — and a full write-up of all ten types here: ten secondary objectives to make your combat better. Go read that one after this one. It is good, I promise.
Secondary objectives are the spice. They are what guarantee your players are engaged in the encounter.
Think about a normal combat: everyone taking turns at the brick wall. That can be fun, and there is nothing wrong with it. But the moment you add something else the party is trying to accomplish, every player becomes engaged on almost every turn — including turns that are not theirs. Nobody is scrolling Reddit. They are watching what happens, because what happens changes what they are going to do.
In fact, the group chat they have without you in it is probably on fire right now as they try to work out what to do.
Some examples for a boss fight specifically:
- There are villagers being sacrificed to the BBEG, and the party has to free them first.
- The BBEG cannot be destroyed, so the party has to perform a ritual to seal them away.
- The party has to place three holy anchors inside the BBEG before the killing blow will land.
This is especially good for martial classes. Your fighters and barbarians often experience combat as: it is my turn, I guess I swing, oh — I missed three attacks, cool, I will sit here for another two hours and hope I hit next time. You cannot be mad at the dice. Well, you can, you are entirely within your rights, but it is part of the game.
Giving martials something else to do during the fight is one of the most reliable ways to head off that disinterest and frustration before it sets in.
3. Put the fight somewhere worth remembering
This one might be the most important. They are all equally important. Well — maybe this one is 34% important and the other two are 33% each.
Do not do all of the above — the connections, the music, the secondary objectives, the careful design — and then have the fight take place in the woods. Do not throw it all away at the last step on something mundane and unremarkable. There is no reason the climax of your campaign should happen in just a forest or just a throne room.
If this is the final boss of a campaign, get crazy. Go wild. If your players get to use the Rule of Cool, so do you.
Here is what I mean. The party goes to confront the archmage king. He says, “Ah. Very well, then. You have resigned yourself to your own death” — and he reaches up, Arcane runes glowing in his hand, and pulls them down. The rune detonates. The party is torn out of the throne room and dropped into a liminal space between the realms of life and death.
Now there are boulders tumbling through the air. Floating discs. The mage drifting above it all, hurling beams of raw magic. The players are leaping between platforms, dodging, with the constant threat of falling off into the void of nothingness and having their souls consumed by the great shadow demon of Karros.
That is cool. Why would you not do that?
Map resources, if drawing is not your strong suit — and it is not mine. Czepeku have fantastic maps on their Patreon. And Inkarnate’s community-made maps are a genuinely great free option; you can clone them and edit them to fit what you need. I have used Inkarnate for years and I recommend it without reservation.
Three Tips for Narrative
1. Connect the villain to the party in several small ways
This means the BBEG is responsible for your players’ misfortunes — either directly, or by a couple of degrees of separation.
The key word is small. We are trying to weave a complex pattern, so we want lots of small threads rather than one enormous one. Most of the time you do not want your BBEG to be a family member of a party member, because that creates main-character energy and we are trying to avoid that. One player’s story quietly becoming the campaign is a cost, not a bonus.
Here is the shape I like. Your BBEG is a lich. Two thousand years ago, that lich killed an important historical figure — the person who founded a holy order. In the present campaign, your paladin is a member of that order, and partway through the adventure they find out.
Suddenly they have a reason to hunt this lich that is not just my paladin detects evil, I smite. Which is fine! But if you want your game to have narrative drive behind it, small things like that go a very long way.
The reason this works is the same reason cosmic stakes so often do not: personal beats universal every time. That is the whole argument in why cosmic stakes are not enough, and connecting the villain to the party is the most direct way to act on it.
These threads also make excellent fuel for the big character beats later — several of the five character evolution moments every campaign needs are just this tip, paid off at the right moment.
2. Give your villain a leitmotif
I will tell you what, ladies and gentlemen: I am a mess for symphonies. I love music in my D&D game more than you can possibly imagine.
Give your villain a leitmotif — a piece of music that represents them and their ideals, which you play whenever they come up.
I do this in my campaigns. The villain of mine is an entity called the Dark One: something that exists outside space and time, an eldritch horror. Any time he comes up, or some great natural disaster happens that turns out to be his doing, the music starts as I describe it.
For the curious: the track is “The Beast” from Sicario. I cannot play it here without getting the video copyright-struck, but you have my permission to steal it. It is genuinely wild.
Separately from motifs, give your bosses proper boss fight music. FromSoftware games have banging boss tracks. So do plenty of others.
But there is a real failure mode there: if your players know the source, they will synonymise your boss with the game it came from. You pick a track you love, and someone goes “oh, is this from Elden Ring?” Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is. All right, let us keep moving.
If you want to avoid that, the composers I actually use are Monument Studios, Michael Ghelfi Studios, and Ivan Duch. I give all three a resounding endorsement. Great tracks, no baggage.
3. Let the BBEG shape the world — actively and passively
Long name for a segment. It is the best I have got.
We want the decisions the BBEG makes to trickle down and affect the party. And we want the party to encounter the BBEG, or their generals, while they are still low level — in disguise or not.
The reason is that it gives the players an impression of who this villain is: what they care about, who supports them, who does not, and what they can do in a fight.
We had this happen recently in Tales of Everend. We were level 13 and, in a drop-of-the-hat moment, we had to fight Demogorgon — with a secondary objective, and not to the death. We were trying to save someone and get out. But we still had to face our endgame villain long before we were remotely ready for it.
It showed us exactly what Demogorgon can do. And just as importantly, it gave us a very clear picture of how we needed to grow and what we needed to prepare before that fight came for real.
Robert Jordan does this beautifully in The Wheel of Time. The way his Dark One and the Forsaken influence Rand, both actively and passively, is a masterclass — and yes, I am aware I named my own campaign’s villain the same thing. Draw your own conclusions about where I get my material.
If you want the rest of that reading list, it is all in the stories that shaped how I DM.
Past actions count too
Here is the key point people miss: the influence does not have to come from decisions the villain is making now. It can come from things they did centuries ago that are only now landing on the party.
I keep reaching for a lich, purely because they are the longest-lived option. Say that before supporting the current tyrant, the lich usurped a king and installed that tyrant some hundred years ago — and that single act had a huge impact on one of the players’ homelands. When they learn that, it is an enormous deal to them.
And it hands you a crossroads, because now you get to choose:
- The BBEG does not regret it. They are a monster. They do not care. They were getting what they wanted.
- The BBEG does regret it. They wish they had not, for specific reasons — which means the party might be able to redeem them.
I am not saying every villain should be redeemable, and I am not saying every villain should be irredeemable. I am saying vary it. If your last few villains have been pure evil with nothing to grab onto, build one this time who has something good in them that can be embraced and drawn back toward the light. And if your last few have been decent people in terrible circumstances, it might be time to drop an absolutely despicable murder-hobo of a villain on the party to shake things up.
That variation is worth protecting deliberately, because a table that has learned your villains are always redeemable will meet the next one with a negotiation instead of a fight. If you want the swing to land as a genuine turn rather than a cheat, there are rules for subverting expectations without robbing your players.
And if you need the villain to have reach — supporters, cells, generals moving in the world while the party is still low level — a cult is the most efficient delivery mechanism there is.
Closing Thoughts
That is the six: three for narrative, three for combat.
The through line is that a great BBEG is not just mechanically tough. They are relatable, they are fun to watch, and their actions unfold inside the story rather than waiting patiently at the end of it for the party to arrive.
The combat tips and the narrative tips are also doing the same job from two directions. The pick-two triangle, the secondary objectives, and the arena all exist so the final fight feels like something the players solved. The connections, the music, and the trickle-down influence all exist so that by the time they get there, they desperately want to.
Do both and the ending of your campaign will land. Do neither and you have a wet noodle.
And one practical note: the villain’s first real move is often the best inciting incident you will ever get. If you are still at the very beginning of a campaign, that is worth setting up properly.
Would a full video purely on boss design be useful? Or a document or roll table of small BBEG-to-party connections like the paladin example? I genuinely do not know which of those people would want, so tell me in the comments and I will make it.