Hello today! This is Torchbound aka Reven, and this is my devlog! This game is something dear to me and I will not stop updating it until I'm satisfied and have no other ideas, but because of the nature of it being a Tabletop, scheduling and writing QA sessions being a difficult task and applying changes learned in those sessions twice so, major updates will take time. Months. But they will not stop. I was never good with putting my work "out there", but I like the idea of having almost this kind of "blog" to fill the time between updates and get some feedback, so please leave comments with suggestions if you have any! This also assumes you know how the system works already, there will be minimal context given. With that out the way, welcome to my first "devlog" - discussion about boss fights and how to run them.

Let's start with the an idea I had for a long time to revamp the Fight the Boss move (rough draft):

Fight The Boss - The move is not allowed to be rolled until the Boss is open for attack. When attacking a boss, roll +Force. On a 10+, the boss is either defeated or changes to the next phase. On a 7-9, a boss gets 1-2 reinforcements and you get a +1 to next FTB roll. On a miss, you fail, boss damages you and refreshes their defenses.

I was trying to emulate the games - evade the attacks, until the weak point is open and strike. Condensed the actual battle into one successful roll and have it be the culmination of the fight. That was made to remove boss sponges and prevent players from building for Force and Damage only, because boss is the only threat of any kind in the game (don't tell them that). The main thing I wanted to escape was a session where players are just rolling Fight the Boss multiple times in a row. Problems with this draft version is that the Damage system would be gone, meaning that too many of the moves need to be retooled, plus players will miss the great feeling of building up a high-damage combo. That's no good.

Also, I want to underline something - making rigid rules for PbtA is not a good idea in general, especially not for the GM. The point of the system is for the GM to tell players a story that they can affect with dice. You can provide notes, and minor guidelines, but in the end none of them matter as the GM should actually be able to do whatever they want way more than in any other system. "Creative freedom". At least from my point of view. 

Thinking about that made me understand that I can actually totally do the draft FTB already, with no need to change anything - all I need to do is force myself to give the boss like... 2 or 4 HP max. It's not like players even know these numbers. This is not a D&D game with a Monster Manual, and even if it was the GM is always the only person that "actually knows". And now I have 2 conflicting thoughts about this - on one hand, I'm having doubts that every boss that had this problem is just my bad GMing at the time, but on the other hand one of the best boss fights I ran had 60 HP (3 is the max base DMG a hero can have).

Here is what I decided - I will challenge myself. Starting from Jan, we're running a heist-themed campaign, so I want to limit myself with these conditions:

• Bosses HP needs to be within 4 to 14. Where 14 is a Perfect Chaos and 4 is an Egg Walker. 
• Bosses can have up to 3 armor and/or 1 way to negate an attack and/or an immunity or two.   
• Every success FTB needs to change its behavior as much as possible. 
• If a hero is too "aggro" on the boss, they need to pay the consequences, even on a success. 

So if this works out, I will try to put these conditions in the Game Master section of the rulebook as advice. I also might update these rules as the first QA bosses start coming in, in which case I will add an "EDIT" to this post with date and changes. I was also thinking about restricting GMs to give boss HP mechanically, like breaking all the bosses them down by weight classes like 6, 10, 14 or something, but writing this whole thing out I realized I don't want to do that anymore, since it will reduce the "Creative Freedom" mentioned above.

That sounds like a solid conclusion. Except there is one thing remains that will completely destroy the entire exercise, which I will be working on in the next week or so - Boss Weaknesses System. Think of it as the opposite of Boss Aspects, mainly researched via Smarts rolls. I will try to keep the above methodology in mind when designing those, but that's a topic for another devlog.

Either way, thank you for reading this. I hope this was some interesting insight. If you have any thought to share or a discussion on the top, please feel free to talk about it in the comments! I will read and respond to all of them!