Legendary Creatures in Baltia

Legendary creatures in Baltia operate differently than both standard enemies, as well as the legendary creatures as presented by D&D 5e. Simply put, these enemies are far more dynamic and capable than others, with more options available to them during combat. The first section below will cover the actual mechanics of these creatures, while explanations of why these changes took place will be in the “reasoning” section for those with the interest in it.

Legendary creatures use Legendary Actions and have Legendary Resistance just like standard 5e legendary creatures. However, both operate very differently in Baltia.

All creatures with Legendary Actions share the Celerity legendary action. This legendary action allows the creature to immediately take an action, a movement action, and a bonus action (if available). The creature also regains the use of its reaction, if it had used it.

The creature may also have additional Legendary Actions. If it does, these additional options will generally grant abilities outside what is typically possible for a creature - some may even “break” standard rules of D&D. Examples of other possible Legendary Actions may include:

• Regaining spell slots
• Granting a powerful temporary ability to all allied creatures
• Casting a particularly powerful, non-standard spell
• Summoning additional allies

All abilities that cost Legendary Actions will typically only cost a single action, unless the ability is particularly powerful. Additionally, the creature's number of legendary actions will typically change as the battle continues.

A creature with Legendary Resistance no longer has a fixed number of resistances, which it can use to pass a saving throw that it had failed. Instead, Legendary Resistance takes the form of a special feature that requires no action (or even conscious effort) to use. If a creature would be unable to take an action due to any condition or effect present on it, such as being Paralyzed, the creature can ignore the part of the condition or effect that prevents it from taking the action. All other aspects of the condition still apply.

To use legendary resistance, the creature must typically take damage which cannot be reduced in any way, the amount of damage dependent on the condition or effect being overcome. If the condition or effect originates from a spell, the amount of damage the creature takes is equal to the roll of a number of its hit dice equal to the level of the spell. Otherwise, the damage is equal to 2 rolls of its hit dice.

The above is the “standard” way Legendary Resistance will work, but some creatures may have unique twists on it. This legendary resistance also has no limit to the frequency it can be used, or the number of times it can be used.

The health of a legendary creature will likely change in more unique ways that would be the case for a standard creature. For instance, a legendary creature may have the ability to fully heal itself and remove all conditions on it when reduced to zero hit points, though only for a limited number of times. The number of legendary actions the creature has may also increase or decrease as damage is dealt to it, gaining or losing additional actions when it is bloodied or reduced to 0 hit points. Whether an enemy gains or loses legendary actions depends on how many it had to begin with: a legendary creature may start with none and gain more during the combat, or start with several and be reduced to none by the end.

The idea behind how Baltia handles custom boss enemies draws heavily from the Angry GM's articles on the topic, the first of which can be found here. To abbreviate the general thought process of these articles, the idea is that D&D is built around the idea of combat being built around combat between two separate groups of creatures. As a result, enemies intended to be solo bosses struggle to hold their own against an entire party. In order to resolve this, enemies intended to be bosses need special consideration that makes them act more like a group of enemies:

• Solo creatures need access to additional actions, so that the action economy is not dramatically weighed against them.
• These additional actions should change as the creature is damaged, similarly to how slaying an enemy monster would decrease the number of actions an enemy group could take.
• Solo creatures should be difficult to completely “lock down” - it would be difficult to prevent an entire party of hostile creatures from acting.

The issues solo monsters have with the action economy are why Legendary Actions were included in the first place, but they generally don't do enough on their own - they're typically single attacks or movement actions that fail to have enough of an impact to balance the action economy properly. For example, in a balanced encounter with hostile creatures, there may be multiple enemies with multiattacks and all of them would have movement options. Meanwhile, a legendary creature that calculates to the same difficulty could move and make three attacks on its turn, but only have 3 additional attacks until its full turn comes around again, and might need to sacrifice one of those attacks to move if it even can.

By allowing Legendary Actions to simply be used to take the equivalent of an additional turn, that makes the action economy more equal. By adding or removing these actions based on health thresholds, it rebalances the action economy as slaying enemies would during a standard encounter. The changes to Legendary Resistance also help to maintain this more balanced action economy, while also being more satisfying. Also, notice that the phrase “turn equivalent” was used, rather than just calling it a turn. This legendary action does not count as taking a turn, mostly for reasons of predictability and consistency.

Many spells that leave lingering effects on creatures allow the creature to attempt to make a saving throw against the effect at the end of its turn. From the player perspective, it would be frustrating if you successfully place such an effect on a creature, only for it to take a Legendary Action after your turn and make the save against the spell before any of your party can take advantage of it. If the creature also has benefits based on turns, such as regenerating health at the start of its turn, this feature would likewise trigger multiple times a round and be more frustrating to try to overcome.

In standard 5e, Legendary Resistances exists to prevent an unbalanced action economy as well. If you have a single creature that is suddenly paralyzed with a spell, the remaining encounter becomes laughably easy as the sole enemy is unable to act. However, the implementation is lacking - an ability to simply handwave a player's successful spell away can be frustrating. This means that legendary resistances become a resource to “trick” the creature into expending completely before casting the spell that you actually care about - with this desired spell being one which will, again, remove the solo creature as a threat entirely in some cases.

Allowing the creature to “power through” these spells at the cost of health, while still leaving parts of the effects on them, results in a more satisfying result. The creature is still hampered by the spell in some way as long as its present, even if it's just taking extra damage each turn.