Build Epic Boss Fights with Lair Actions!
Build Epic Boss Fights in Dungeons and Dragons with Lair Actions
Guest Writer: Devlin DM
Are you sick of your epic villains dying in just a few turns as the party surrounds and splats them?
Do you get frustrated that your boss fights turn into boring slug fests where everyone involved just stands still and wallops each other?
Do you want to fill your players with dread anticipation with only two words?
“Lair Action. Skeletal hands burst from the floor and walls around you grasping and clawing.”
“Lair Action. The cave ceiling cracks, covering the ground with uneven rubble, it looks like the section above your head is about to collapse.”
“Lair Action. Maddening whispers fill your mind, urging, demanding, screaming that you turn on your allies and kill.”
Welcome Dungeon Masters, enter my domain and in this 3-part series, I shall impart to you the secrets of lair actions. I’m Devlin DM, part of the creative team for the bestselling Home-Field Advantage: A Compendium of Lair Actions. This Mithral product contains 250 unique lairs covering over 320 creatures and is available in PDF and print at DMsGuild.
In Part 1 I talked about how a monster’s lair makes a great hook for adventure. In Part 2 I showed off how to Make Monsters Scary Again. In this article, the grand finale, I’m going to give you a checklist to build your own epic boss fights using lair actions!
What’s a Lair anyway?
When you think of a monster lair, you think of a sinister fortress silhouetted against the moon, a cavern filled with sinister shadows, a temple built around a dark, bloodstained altar. All of these are correct, but what really makes the lair is the monster inhabiting the space, otherwise, it’s just a crumbling castle, a damp cave and a building with a fancy table. The monster creates the lair, and the space should feel like a natural extension of it, as should the effects within the lair.
Sometimes the lair action stems from the monster, sometimes it is from the environment itself, but always it should feel connected to the monster and the space around it.
Leveling the Playing Field
It’s common knowledge that action economy wins fights in D&D. The side with the most turns usually has the upper hand, which is why boss fights can often fall short in 5e, as the party gangs up on the solo boss monster, who maybe gets 1 round to do a cool ability before getting overwhelmed and resorting to multiattack (looking at you dragons).
By producing an appropriate suite of lair actions, we can give the boss tactical options and most importantly, breathing room.
Tactical Repositioning
Combat in 5e is often very static, once the distance has been closed, combatants might not need to move for the whole fight. This can be very frustrating for DMs, who get tired of grinding through the barbarian’s enormous pool of HP and never landing a single hit on the squishy wizard. Your two options for getting around this are 1) Move the Boss or 2) Move the players.
Moving the boss might be teleportation if the monster has magical abilities, or be as simple as a bandit captain rolling over a table or swinging from a rope. Moving the players might be an enchanting compulsion, or a blast of wind. One of your Lair Action options should cause a shift in the positioning of the combat to the advantage of the boss, either directly (“the mage casts thunderwave”) or indirectly (“that barrel is about to explode!”).
Crowd Control is King
Our first step to escape the slug fest is to do horrible things to the adventurers that aren’t just damage. Poison them, terrify them, restrain them, make their lives difficult. Show them whose domain they’re trespassing in.
I’m going to talk about two types of Crowd Control here, Hard CC & Soft CC. Hard CC is anything with “incapacitated” attached to it (stunned, paralysed, etc.), and should generally be avoided as getting people to skip turns isn’t fun. However, for suitably scary monsters or high level parties, single target debilitations can be really ramp up the tension.
That leaves Soft CC, which covers anything that inhibits but doesn’t incapacitate (grappled, poisoned, frightened, etc.). At least one option on your BBEG’s Lair Actions should be a soft CC. Single target for strong CC or low CR monster, multiple targets for weaker CC like grappled or for higher CR monsters.
Effects that obscure such as smoke, fog, or magical darkness, are part CC and part movement. One way blinding effects (e.g. magical darkness the boss can see through) disable the party and give the boss advantage on attacks. And you don’t get opportunity attacks against creatures you can’t see, allowing repositioning without wasting an action disengaging.
Reinforcements!
A Boss should have minions to absorb some of the party’s ire, being able to summon a few more disposable goons can keep the party busy just long enough for them to complete their evil ritual…
Adventurers delving into a villain’s lair.
Lair Action Checklist
Now we’ve broken down some lair action design philosophy, I’ll leave you with a quick checklist for building your own:
Tactically varied. Try to give each lair action a different strategic purpose. If a creature’s lair actions all do the same thing with a different coat of paint, the battle risks getting stale fairly quickly for the players. Here are examples of things lair actions are good at: dealing damage, protecting minions and/or the boss, making allies and/or the boss stronger, making enemies weaker, creating obstacles, moving creatures around, calling for reinforcements, creating obstructions to vision, etc...
Interactive. Try to come up with lair actions that the players can do something about. D&D is at its best when players are presented with problems that they must solve creatively, and lair actions are a perfect excuse to introduce such problems. Avoid effects which take agency away from the players, such as the stunned condition, unless you give the players a way to end the effect themselves in one way or another.
Synergistic. Try to come up with effects which synergize well with a creature’s mechanics. For example, if a creature has blindsight, creating areas of magical darkness is likely to be a good lair action. Not every stat block lends itself well to this, but if you see an opportunity to make a creature’s unique traits and abilities shine, make sure to seize it!
Simple to run. It’s inevitable that adding lair actions where there were none before adds some complexity to the game, but making sure the effects are easy to run at the table ensures that combat won’t get bogged down. Keep the effects to one or two paragraphs, reduce the number of dice that will need to be thrown, use the same save DC and damage dice from the creature’s stat block, etc...
Narratively coherent. Some effects, such as summoning minions, giving the boss a chance to hide, or healing the boss, are likely to make combat noticeably longer. They would be great for encounters that are designed to feel like a marathon, but would feel out of place in high octane combat encounters designed to last only 2-3 very intense rounds. When designing a creature’s lair actions, make sure to ask yourself whether or not the mechanics produce the desired narrative effect
Bolster don’t Overlap. Reinforcing a creature’s weaknesses in its lair (e.g. low hp - add minions, low mobility - add teleportation) makes it feel like it’s fighting on its home turf. Also many boss monsters have special abilities and legendary actions, so generally don’t give them a lair action teleport if they have a legendary action teleport (or lean into the theme and drive your party mad)
And that’s it for this short series on lair actions! If you’re looking for more, grab yourself a copy of Home-Field Advantage: A Compendium of Lair Actions and give your party boss fights they’ll never forget.
Build Epic Boss Fights in D&D with Home-field Advantage
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