How to not Legendary?

[Maxilian]

I guess I'm just a realist in my themes when I try to imagine fights. I find it hard to suspend my disbelief when this (hypothetical) wizard is casting spells like crack addict with Haste and Time Stop going.

I can see it's appeal in certain scenarios with multi-limbed monstrosities or big dragons, but for most creatures I feel there should be a better solution in these 6-second moments of combat that don't involve an unattainable level of power just to balance the fight.

Well... i think you should talk this with your DM, not to change the actual mechanics but how they are presented, for example: A Wizard could activate glyphs in his turn to cast extra spells (That is possible my RAW it just need a lot of preparation and an X place, if you are fighting in the Wizard tower it makes sense for them to have something like this).

Sometimes Mobs will have things that PC will never get (like the Lizardfolk shield that work as a weapon -Not Improvised-)

[Spore]

What evil wizard has 500 HP?

Spoiler: Curse of Strahd spoiler

Show

Strahd has 144 HP and regenerates 20 HP per turn if not hit by radiant damage. He is more of a Vampire than a Wizard but he casts as a 9th level mage. He is CR 15 so if we were to extrapolate CR 20 wizard we could at least end up at 200+ HP plus various magical defenses. Baba Lysaga is another high level spellcaster with 120 HP (and a more pitiful CR 11).

[Sabeta]

Snip

Came here to post Paragon, so instead I'll just shorten what Angry GM wrote. He's a man not good at being concise.

A Paragon monsters is a monster which, in all ways except spatial, is more than one monster.

Let's make a Paragon Orc. Cool, grab three orcs. You're basically done already. Now, make these three orcs share one square. When one orc moves, so do all of them. Each one is treated both as a seperate monster, and as the same monster at the same time. (ie: a CC effect on "one" orc hurts all three, but only one health bar is attacked at a time)

The Paragon Orc therefore
-Has three healthbars
-Takes three turns of initiative
-May use an Action, a possible bonus action, and a reaction on each turn of initiative.
-His xp is calculated as if he's three orcs, instead of one super orc.

I've done a number of things with the Paragon System to further refine it. Such as: Giving a creature a large health pool, and then giving limbs their own HP stat. Hits to the limbs count against the total HP of the monster, but if the limb hits 0 it "breaks" and weakens the monster. I also like smashing mismatched monsters together. Ever see what happens when a Living Armor, Animated Weapon, Animated Cloak look like when encasing a Fire Elemental? It looks like a burning black night who explodes into a pile of living weapons when the Elemental's HP hits 0.

As for TCs actual problem. BBEG's have to be special. That's their nature. If the evil archwizard isn't more powerful than the PCs and capable of doing things they can't do, then there's no hope for any villain ever. You're forced to run encounters other than solo encounters, because otherwise the action economy completely screws the wizard over. Hell, the Paragon system itself is a way to run horde encounters that just look like solo encounters. Legendary Actions give BBEGs the means to break action economy so that they're actually a posable threat. Paragon does it pretty well too, but no matter what you do, Action Economy has to be broken or you can't run a solo encounter.

(I suppose you could, in theory just give him infinite health and resistances and just let him die right before the players do, but that's pretty much the definition of boring. Trading blows back and forth infinitely just plain sucks. It's when the boss does cool things the players can't that the pressure is on)

[PanosIs]

To be fair, most legendary creatures ARE multi-limbed monstrosities and most legendary actions ARE stuff like "make a tail attack" which does make a lot of sense considering.

But at the same time I do think a lot of it comes down to poor encounter design. Yes an end boss that is a fighter is gonna need some help to deal with 1v5 action economy. An archwizard in his lair/tower though is an almost impossible challenge for the unprepared no legendary actions needed whatsoever.

Think Glyphs of Warding, and Symbols and Contingencies and presummoning an Earth Elemental and all that stuff along with terrain manipulation via Walls and similar allow for a huge array of options. This does allow for a well designed encounter to be run even with no tweaks to a PC or NPC build with a few different spell choices.

In the end it all comes down to options, an NPC with a lot of options will have the room to be optimized and tweaked to fight a party of five, a character whose options are "hit people" and "hit people more" (see Tarrasque) will rarely be an exciting encounter without some short of "legendary" thing about it.

Although even then I don't think a MM Dragon or a Tarrasque makes for an exciting encounter, they're too plain in my taste for supreme magical beasts, that's a discussion for another time though.