phrankygee
I don’t know what Bordier butter is, but my wife and I get really fancy Irish or Amish butter, and I have recently had to start insisting that we keep some regular non-premium butter around for just this reason. It feels wasteful to grease a pan with super-fancy premium butter, or to use it in certain recipes.
I mean, it’s not why atheism is the right choice, but it’s a nice perk.
This particular end-boss seems very specifically designed to be “rescued” instead of killed outright. I don’t think it will feel like a letdown at all to play it out like the book recommends. It starts out as a raging monster, and gradually comes back to its senses.
Imagine you are the Avengers, and the Hulk is the end boss. The goal isn’t to kill the Hulk, the goal is to survive him long enough to get Bruce Banner back. Part of the team has to distract him and keep him from killing Natasha while she tells him that the “Sun’s getting real low…”
It doesn’t matter that one of you has the guaranteed soothing words to calm him down, you still have to survive and coordinate to even get him to listen.
So I just went and checked out the specifics of this battle, and the key phrase is “speak with empathy and compassion”. If the player doesn’t approach the character in question with actual “empathy and compassion”, then they don’t get to make the persuasion check.
If your party actually figures out that someone needs to talk to this guy, and HOW they need to talk to him, then it’s perfectly fine that they automatically succeed on the roll, as long as they let the most eloquent person in the group do the talking.
I imagine most parties will go into default “boss battle” mode and not try diplomacy at all. If you want a party to stop shooting, smiting, and casting, and instead start talking about feelings, in the middle of a boss fight, that’s going to probably take some pretty big hints by you that it’s even a possibility. If they figure it out, then they deserve to win that way.