I’ve been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XVI recently. If you’re wondering, I’m really enjoying it. I’m also over 40 hours in, and wonder how people with normal lives will take to play it.

I’ve been on holiday this week, which has allowed me more time than normal.

One of the features of the game is that it has really cinematic boss encounters. The balance of the game is also that, for me, I can complete them. You don’t need the reflexes of a Soulslike fanatic to play them. (There is an argument for the encounters being too easy. I do not make that argument, as I’ve lost – several times – but rarely twice to the same encounter).

But when I bring it back to considering how Dungeons & Dragons plays, it reminded me how D&D is not designed for good boss encounters.

D&D comes from a time where players sent their characters into dungeons filled with dangerous monsters. Some they fought, some they tricked, others they escaped. But, in the old “mega dungeon” form, D&D does not have planned boss encounters. Boss encounters imply a narrative story, which the early form of the game mostly lacked.

Final Fantasy has its roots in D&D. I recently played the first three of the series (in their Pixel Remastered version on PS5), and was greatly amused by all the borrowings from the game. White mages are clerics, with healing and abilities against undead. Black mages are wizards, with fireballs and similar damage-dealing spells. The monster list, in particular, draws heavily from the AD&D Monster Manual. You get oozes, goblins, and – one of the most interesting borrowings – the Gas Spore, which in Final Fantasy is renamed the “bomb”. And yes, it looks a lot like a Beholder. (In AD&D, a gas spore looked exactly like a beholder, but exploded when struck!)

The Bomb has survived into Final Fantasy XVI, I’m happy to say. In the early FF games, you had gray oozes… and Black Flan. I suppose Flan is a type of Pudding? And yes, there’s a Flan Prince in FF XVI!

There are two major difference between boss encounters in a computer game and boss encounters in a homebrew D&D game.

In a computer game, if the boss is too hard, you reload your save and replay it. You don’t have that option in a D&D game.

In a computer game, plenty of people of play tested to see how tough (playable) the encounters are. In a homebrew game, you’re the first ones to see that combination of monsters, characters, and DM.

In theory, you can take the challenge ratings of the monsters and determine if it’s a good encounter. In practice, this doesn’t work. There’s too much variability. Honestly, in computer RPGs, it tends not to work either – some combinations of abilities are overpowered, and others are weak. (If you’ve followed Elden Ring at all, you’ll have seen a LOT of patches changing the abilities of monsters and attacks).

But that “we can make the encounter harder because people can replay it” is such an important strategy for computer games. In D&D, you get one shot. And, with the rise of story-based campaigns, getting good boss encounters becomes more important.

Challenge Rating isn’t useless, I must say. It’s a good starting point. But personal DM experience begins to matter a lot more – and even then, you can miss.

The one edition of D&D that attempted to make boss battles a lot better was 4E. The very structure of the game was all about making those big set-piece battles interesting. And it did a pretty good job of that. I had a lot of fun running them.

Unfortunately, the smaller battles didn’t work well with the same structure. They often took too long.

Why then have the smaller battles? Why not just include big boss battles? It’s an interesting question. D&D sessions tend not to be long enough to run many battles, even of the smaller variety. (You can get a LOT more battles in a quick session of a computer game). However, smaller battles often give the players a chance to shine. If you want the big boss battles to be significant life or death ones, then only having them means the players never get a chance to say “we’re heroes”.

They also help pacing of the adventure. In some campaigns, they also make up the bulk of the XP awarded. They provide life to wilderness areas – if you’re told that the wastelands are swarming with orcs and never meet an orc war band, it feels odd.

(In the early Final Fantasy games, there are a LOT of random encounters. Take ten steps, another encounter! But that’s how you gained XP. Yes, they were very based on D&D tropes).

If there’s one thing that 4E did well, it was divide monsters into minions, standard, elites, and solos. This is an interesting design strategy which says “4 minions equal one character”, “1 standard equals one character”, “one elite equals two characters”, and “one solo equals four characters”, with hit points and (especially) action allocation to match.

5E took some of that technology when it made Legendary creatures, but it missed rather hard with most of them, as their Legendary actions don’t make up for the extra actions a party can do.

For all this, you can still have great boss battles in Dungeons & Dragons 5E. It’s just that not all of them will go as you expect. At present, there isn’t a magic formula for designing encounters. And, given the range of player skill levels, character builds, and combinations of abilities, I’m not sure that a perfect – or even near-perfect – solution is possible.