GM Techniques – How to Convince Players the Fight Wasn’t Rigged

The biggest key to creating interesting boss fights (in my experience) is to introduce an element of surprise or guess work. Fights are boring if they're just constant dice rolls back and forth where everything goes as expected. But you can make mechanics which keep the players guessing and on their toes, which force them to constantly be thinking about what's going on or what to do next.

For example, in the culmination to one of my campaigns, I had the final boss have a "shifting immunity". Each round, I would roll on a table to see what type of energy or effect he was immune to that round, and each immunity had an associated color. So each round, the boss would change colors and have different things it was vulnerable to.

This forced the players to be paying attention and didn't allow them to just sit back and spam the same moves over and over. ("What? That fireball worked last time...") It also made it interesting for them, because, in addition to being a shifting immunity, it would grant a different power to the boss.

That's the basic premise. If you want a fight to be long, keep it interesting with different mechanics. This can be something like I've described above, or a "phased" fight (i.e., the boss has several different stages or modes), or something like a very specific effect he/she/it is vulnerable to for a killing blow. It forces you to get creative, but there's no way around that; if you just rely on what's in the source books, well... the players have read those just like you have.

You should talk with the GM. The GM should kick the player out. The situation is clearly beyond the 'talking to people' point and several intermediate measures have been tried. The person the group unanimously doesn't want to play with is an jerk and you shouldn't play with them. Further intermediate measures will only allow him to damage the game further.

In a non-in-person RPG group like you are playing in, kicking players is hard but it still occasionally needs to be done and it is the GM's responsibility. Consider sharing the 5 Geek Social Fallacies page with your GM, as he may benefit from it. Consider having a group discussion on how bad someone needs to be for your group to kick them to give the GM some space to talk about why he or she hasn't kicked them in a non-defensive manner and you some space to explain that the group expects them to kick people like this if it comes up again in the future.