That One Boss / Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition starter adventure The Lost Mines of Phandelver has Klarg Clawhammer, a bugbear mercenary and boss of the first real dungeon the players will be exploring. Due to his Bugbear abilities, if he attacks first during the first round combat he can easily deal enough damage to drop most first level characters in one round, 2d8+2d6+2, or an average of 18 damage. Due to Phandelver being part of the starter set, Klarg is the first real high damage enemy most players will encounter, and while his damage goes down after the first round, it is a hell of a wake up call in a mostly easy warm up dungeon.
• Exalted second edition's Deathlords are hugely overstatted and obnoxiously powerful, to the point where people can wonder in all seriousness why they haven't destroyed the world yet all by themselves. They were nerfed multiple times, most notably when their wtfhax perfect defense that didn't count as a Charm activation was clarified to only work a handful of times before having to be reactivated, but they remained ridiculously powerful. Third Edition has largely solved this problem, rendering them extremely powerful, but ultimately are beatable with cooperation and heavy stat focus.
• Sentinels of the Multiverse:
  • This game has The Chairman. 15 of his 25 cards are minions of one form or another, and the deck's mechanics mean the field will start out heavily populated and the swarm will only grow. The heroes have to defeat a certain number of minions before The Chairman's card flips and he can even be damaged... but each one defeated provokes a high-damage counterattack from The Operative. Even when The Chairman finally does become vulnerable, he counters almost every attack made at him for heavy damage. Even if The Chairman is defeated, the heroes don't win until they can bring down The Operative as well; if this happens, The Chairman goes into the discard pile like any other defeated target... which means if the Villain Deck is reshuffled (and considering he starts with 10/25 cards in the trash and you need to defeat a lot of minions to get this far, it probably will), there's a chance he can be played like any other card, return to the field invulnerable side up with full health.
  • Wager Master, Miss Information, and the Ennead can also fall into this, particularly Challenge MI and Advanced Ennead. Wager Master has a deck of random nonsense that can, depending on order, either lose him the game before he even starts or utterly wreck your shit, particularly since What Do You Really Know is an indestructible Ongoing that will deal obscene amounts of damage to you. Miss Information takes forever and is a huge pain in the neck who keeps trashing your field and causing tons of damage to you, particularly on her Clue-spamming Challenge version. Finally, the Ennead can dish out a lot of damage, and the Advanced version is essentially guaranteed to get their full numbers out quickly, at which point they become extremely hard to shift without the exact right options.

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