Jazzing up the environment of your combat encounter; exploring player and creature objectives; beefing up boss encounters; learning how to pronounce wyvern; it's all here on episode 2 of Outside the Dice!
Episode Transcript
Hail traveler and welcome to the podcast where I give all my tips, thoughts and suggestions that you didn’t ask for on how to make your D&D game better! Better how? More role play, more immersion and more story-driven-ness. In D&D, there are three main pillars of gameplay: exploration, social interaction, and combat. In this episode, I’m going to focus on that third, blood-spattered pillar and offer some ways to hopefully enhance the way your table handles combat. I’m your podcast master, Allen Niles, and this is Outside the Dice.
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So after completing my first episode, I had a realization; I never properly introduced myself. I just sorta started ranting about D&D almost immediately after you learned my name! Which honestly, isn’t too different from how I am in real life, but, still, that was rude of me. I mean, it’s a D&D podcast, so obviously that’s what you’re here for, but it made me think that you may have listened to that first episode and thought: “Who the heck is this guy? Why should I listen to him? Is his last name isles or niles?” Assuming you did listen to the first episode, which if you didn’t, what are you insane? What kind of psychopath starts a podcast with the second episode? Go start at the beginning and earn it like the rest of us!
If you did listen to that first episode and wondered about my credentials and last name, then here you are.
I want to start by saying that I am by no means an expert. Please take literally everything I say with a grain of salt. I don’t work for any company that deals with tabletop gaming, and I have no professional affiliation with D&D. The ideas that I’ve come up with have not been put through rigorous play testing and balancing, and really they're simply ways to introduce a bit of innovation to a campaign in interesting ways. To be quite frank, my credentials are: I’m just a guy who likes D&D. I started becoming largely involved with Dungeons & Dragons just around the time fifth edition was developed and released about 6 years ago. I’m also an actor, which might indicate why I prioritize the story of a game above the mechanical aspects, and why I feel so strongly that a player’s connection to their character leads to a more rewarding experience than playing it like any other game. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with preferring to play with a disconnection from your character, but if you are a DM who feels there’s something lacking in your campaign and desire that deeper sense of immersion, hopefully I can help provide a solution. I DM’d a campaign with my close friends for several years, I’ve played under multiple DMs and been a part of games that were both homebrew and in official Adventure League settings. I’ve played enough that I’m familiar with the rules, but also notice areas where I’m left wanting, and where the repetition can become stale. My thoughts come purely from a place of trying to get more fun out of a game that I already love and enjoy. (and sharing those ideas with you!) So for those of you who were skeptical of my intentions and background, hopefully that offered some insight into who I am as a person. But enough about me, let’s talk about stabbing stuff!
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When it comes to the elements that makeup a session, those three pillars of gameplay, I think that combat just might be my favorite.
I’m a big fan of Exploration, which is evident in any video game where I’m told I’ll advance the plot by going left, so I head right and spend an hour looking through every room and treasure chest possible. I also love Social Interaction, which my fondness for probably sprang from playing through franchises like Mass Effect and KOTOR. But combat in D&D holds a special place in my violent, bloodthirsty heart!
It is so much fun because it’s the pillar where the player is completely in charge.
Other aspects in the game have a sense of mystery surrounding them. Even as you explore through a crumbling ruin or tiptoe through social nuances, the whole picture typically alludes the player. But the one thing the player has control over entirely, is their own character. Combat is the pillar where a player can approach a situation with absolute confidence because a player knows the capabilities of their own character.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun to unravel those bits of minutia in real time, and there are definitely variables and discoveries to be made throughout combat, but there’s something great about that assuredness in a combat encounter.
All of that being said, it’s those discoveries and those variables that keep encounters fresh! The player should feel secure in knowing the capabilities of their character, but if they’re not kept on their toes every now and again, encounters can quickly become predictable.
The good news is, boring encounters can be avoided, and it starts with the DM.
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Combat is an excellent tool to break up monotony in your session, but just like any other part of gameplay, it requires careful planning if you want it to stay interesting. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been at a table where the DM will throw in a half-baked combat scenario in a featureless field just for the sake of distraction. Hell, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve DM’d and had to improvise a combat encounter to appease my table of murder hobos. The function is effective, it soaks up time and allows players to throw down some dice; but trying to improvise combat every single time it’s utilized in your campaign will make your encounter.. I don’t know… suck? No that’s harsh. How about.. Less than ideal. So what’s the first and most simplistic way to shake up your combat? Make the setting of your combat anywhere, but in a featureless field.
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I love the simplicity that 5e offers, and I’m not about to try and turn your combat scenario into a full fledged strategy game, but there are some great and easy ways to make your combat more dynamic. Think of what sort of terrain the characters are in. Are there hills that offer better vantage? Trees or boulders to offer cover? Water, tall grass, anything flammable, ledges to shove enemies off of? There are tons of features to choose from and insert into your battleground to easily add some pizzazz! What’s not so easily inserted are the benefits and drawbacks that would reasonably be applied to those environmental features. I’m gonna refer to that as the razzmatazz.
It’s hard to improvise the razzmatazz for your pizzazz into a game off the cuff, which is why just a bit of planning can go a long way. Decide what kind of bonus or penalty each of these features offer ahead of time, so you can easily drag and drop them into improvised combat as it comes up.
Small stump? Half cover. Big rock, full cover. On a hill? Plus 1 to attacks with ranged weapons. In a fire? Take fire damage, probably, I’d imagine. I mean, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. Once you’ve created a few features and written them down, just keep a list nearby for when your players inevitably start a brawl, and voila! You’ll be talking with the flare of a magician in no time.
There’s a video game on Steam that I love playing called Enter the Gungeon. It’s this fantastic bullet hell style game, where literally all you do is go from room to room dodging and shooting bad guys, and collecting different guns. The art style is also as cute as it is brutal and jam packed with puns, so obviez I’m a fan. The game would lose most of its replayability if it didn’t have a feature that added flavor to the rooms you fight in.
Enter the Gungeon uses that same simplistic idea and keeps the rooms fresh by offering interactive features in the environment. Tables can be flipped over and used for cover or pushed around, chandeliers can be dropped on enemies. It’s a quick fix that allows the players more variety in their choices. The same thing can be applied to your combat sessions. Create a few environmental features to have on standby, so that even your improvised encounters have the illusion of organization. For a town or city you might decide there are merchant kiosks and fruit carts that provide cover, a blacksmith where a weapon can be grabbed, or an alchemists shop with a rack stocked with bottles of alchemist fire! For a forest, you might just have trees that provide cover, and paths crowded with vegetation or deep mud which count as difficult terrain. Just a couple elements sprinkled into the setting will help it stand out amongst other encounters.
So now we have a proper setting for our fight! It’s a good start, but an encounter against a gaggle of bandits isn’t going to win any awards for originality. Which brings us to our next item of focus: what parties are present?
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In a typical encounter, there will be two sides in a fight: the players side, and the baddies. There maybe a few different enemy types that make up “The Baddies”, say orcs and goblins and ogres, but they usually all fight on the same side. To break out of this 2 sided battle format, find ways to incorporate a third party that has separate goals than the first two. The players maybe facing that bandit gaggle in a forest, for instance, but what happens when we add another party to the mix? A scouting party of centaurs might be watching nearby, and care little for either side. But once either the players or the bandits start actively harming the forest, that might be enough to get the centaurs involved!
The third party might even be comprised of creatures that would typically be hostile toward the players, but incorporating an element of temporary enemy of my enemy can usher your players to interact in ways other than “violence will solve this!”
Maybe the party comes across a camp of orcs and goblins playing cards, when the players stumble in.
As each side gets ready to attack, an ace falls from the sleeve of a goblin, and suddenly the orcs are not so concerned with the players as they are with doling out some whoopass on those tricksy cheating goblins!
Having another team to offer some opposition is a great way to enhance an encounter, but even if your battle only has two sides involved, there is still an important aspect to consider here: planning and knowing each party’s objective in combat, and how devoted the enemies are to completing that objective.
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The players are facing a pack of dire wolves? Yeah great, that’s easy enough! But what do the dire wolves want? And is that objective necessary enough that the wolves are willing to die for it, or even engage with the players in the first place? If the wolves are motivated by hunger, it might be worth deciding if that means they’re hunting for easy prey that won’t fight back, or if these wolves are starved and desperate. Or are the wolves trying to keep the players away from their territory? Are the players on the outskirts of Dire Wolfville, which means the wolves have room to retreat, or are the players standing in front of their den, where there are young pups that the parent wolves must protect? Will the pack retreat or submit if the players slay the alpha?
The more intelligent the opponent, the more complex those hypotheticals become. If the party runs into a group of thugs, why exactly do the thugs bother messing with a group of tried adventurers in the first place?
Have these thugs been commissioned to kidnap the players? Are they trying to strong arm the players into leaving the town or city? Can they be bought off? Are they willing to retreat, or is their boss so frightening that they would rather die in combat then face the wrath of their master? Having a sense of the enemy’s objective, even a loose sense of it, can help in understanding how that creature would act in the situation.
And finally, consider the current objective of the players as well.
If the players are trying to retrieve some magical object, the goal of their opposition maybe to prevent the players from getting that object. Or if the players need to escape, their opposition may just be trying to detain them.
These are simple details, but having an objective for the players other than “kill everything,” can do wonders for shaping an encounter. Those slight adjustments in priority will give life to the enemy, instead of another faceless baddie in the players’ way.
This objective based approach makes me think of the rescue scene from Star Wars: A New Hope. Han and Luke went to save Leia and were confronted by squadron after squadron of stormtroopers. Their objective was to escape the Death Star. They were met with combat but instead of facing off against every single stormtrooper thrown at them, the trio prioritized their objective at the time and escaped through a garbage chute.
Exploring objectives for both player and enemy sides can add new levels of dynamicsism to your combat and can even be a sort of puzzle for your players to solve if the enemy agenda is a hidden one. Which brings me to my final piece of advice on sprucing up combat. I love puzzles. If the players at your table are anything like me, they’ll agree that puzzles shouldn’t be confined to the exploration portion of gameplay. Getting through a section is expected, but solving a section, finding the correct path, that feels good! This might come in the form of a literal puzzle in a room of a dungeon, clicking the proper tiles to deactivate all the traps. This might come in the form of social interaction, finding a note in the bedroom of some desperate NPC, and using that information to successfully interrogate or get through to them. But when it comes to combat, how exactly does one go about incorporating a puzzle? Two words, my nerds: boss battle.
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When I first heard about the release of Storm King’s Thunder, I was super excited to play! The idea of facing off against towering giants sounded awesome to me, because one of my all-time favorites growing up was the video game Shadow of Colossus. The problem was, the enemies in Storm King's Thunder are not like those in Shadow of Colossus. The colossi each had different weaknesses to exploit, puzzles to solve in their undoing and steps and phases throughout the fight!
Without any other elements applied to the encounters in Storm King's Thunder, the giants that you face are just big ol’ bags o’ hit points. And that’s no fun! So I learned something from that campaign:
It’s fine to populate a standard encounter with run of the mill enemies, but if I want to have a particular encounter be made interesting and really stand out, I like to add a little more detail to that area boss.
There’s a couple of ways to accomplish this. A simple way to make a particular baddie slightly more formidable, is to give them a resistance. The party might be axing and swording their way through a bandit camp, (sorry bandits, you’re just my favorite bad guy example apparently) and you want to shake things up a bit. Not too shaken up! Shaken up like a margarita. The leader of this camp might have an entourage of specially geared bandit fighters, wearing extra padding that grants resistance to slashing damage or something. This can at least force your players into seeking an alternative method to defeating their enemy, which might mean switching to a weapon they’re not used to using all the time or utilizing nearby razzmatazz we’ve so thoughtfully littered throughout the pizzaz!
So the specially geared entourage stands out from the common bandits, but now we need to go even further for the leader, because we want the leader to stand out from the specially geared entourage. So we’ll go from shaking things up margarita style to like.. little baby tremors style. And I mean “baby tremors” like a little rattling, not an actual baby having tremors. That would be horrible…
In the players guide, there are feats available for players to learn instead of their ability score improvement. Why not apply a feat or two to your big baddie? The sentinel feat in particular has a benefit that only works if an enemy doesn’t have that feat, so it’s not like Wizards wasn’t expecting players to modify in this way. Applying something like this or like the Elemental Adept feat to overcome resistance are great ways to toss up the players’ understanding of encounters by differentiating this encounter from others just ever so slightly!
But now we have an even bigger fish to fry than this puny bandit camp leader, and we want to really really shake up the encounter. We want to upgrade from baby tremor to full on adult-ass-grown earthquake style shaking this mother up. Now that is where our puzzle building skills are gonna come into play.
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The first thing we’ll need to decide when creating an enemy based puzzle is how exactly the player will benefit by solving it. Will this allow the player to deal extra damage when the player would normally be dealing normal damage or less? Maybe it allows the player to do any damage to the boss creature at all! Or would solving this puzzle allow the player to avoid taking damage? Or lastly, maybe solving the puzzle would open up a plot point or other reward. (And that’s just lastly for me! I’m sure you’ll find many more reward systems you can develop for something like this.)
After picking a benefit the player receives for solving the puzzle, we now need to create some descriptions to flesh out the situation. Once we’ve done that, we can decide on solutions and obstacles for the players!
Let’s go through some examples, starting with the players solving a puzzle to circumvent an attack. Let’s say the players are faced against a dragon, but we want to make the dragon more interesting than what’s provided with standard stats. Let’s give it a feature where it can breathe a cone of flames (or any other element of your choosing depending on the color of its scales), but instead of the normal amount of damage, we want this attack to do three times as much! The drawback for the dragon is that, if it wants to perform this special attack, it needs to spend a whole turn doing nothing but charge up that attack. It then performs that attack the next turn.
So we’re setting the player up to take a lot of heat if they fail, or minimize it if they succeed.
Well now we need some hints to our puzzle. The dragon might dish out some standard breath attacks, but once it prepares its “super roast attack,” offer some dialogue like “the dragon appears to take a deep inhale, embers dancing about its nostrils, yet the dragon doesn’t release any flames upon you. However, you notice its throat begins to glow a deep red...”
The idea is offering information similar to what they’ve already discovered through this session or area. If dragons always take an inhale before releasing their breath attack, the players have a chance to deduce that something similar to a breath attack is about to occur. This makes it so rather than taking an attack each round, the players are forced to adjust their tactic to the given situation.
Solving this puzzle might be simply to duck and cover behind a fallen pillar, or to make sure they get close enough or far enough from the dragon to avoid its attack. Or possibly hitting the dragon in its now glowing gullet and breaking a certain threshold of damage is enough to interrupt the “tri-burnation.”
Here’s another example, this time for a puzzle that takes a more defensive stance. The players are pit against an earth golem. The golem is made up of hard stone and boulders that make up bulky limbs, and soft moss that connect the stones like joints. What the players can find out through trial and error, or ability checks, is that the golem has resistance to all damage types on its rocky exterior, but aiming for the mossy joints allows the players to get around that resistance at the price of a higher armor class to hit. The moss might even have vulnerability to slashing damage and fire damage, or, similarly to the last example, the players might spot a large crack on one of the rocks, and if a player gets over a certain amount of damage in one attack, the rock splits open and reveals a weak spot.
If you want to make your boss monster even more intricate, consider making tiers where the monster adapts and changes as its health hits certain thresholds!
When I do this, I typically create 2 or 3 thresholds, with the first tier beginning at the start of combat until the players have hacked away a third of its health. Then continuing with a second tier, and finally it’s third tier begins once the monster has only its last third of health remaining.
Example!
My table of players has nearly finished their quest, when they encounter a wyvern as they try to exit the area.
Wyvern. Wyvern? Wyvern.
The wyvern begins combat by flying past the players’ characters, snapping or clawing as it does. But we’re going to make this whovern especially tough, by saying this particular bugger is extremely difficult to hit while maneuvering in the sky. Anybody making an attack that is not ranged or with a melee weapon that does not have the Reach attribute, does so at disadvantage. The whatvern is also vulnerable to attacks if the player states they specifically target the whenvern’s wing.
Once the first third of its health is lost, the howvern crashes to the ground before continuing to fight. It does not fly during this tier, but instead makes use of its stingered tail. Any player who manages to get behind the weevern or readies an attack on its tail rather than making an attack to the creature's front can discover the tail is now vulnerable to certain types of damage.
When the wayvern has hit its third and final tier, the creature loses its Multi Attack feature, making only one swipe or bite per turn. If the players took advantage of attacking its tail, it may have even lost the ability to use its stinger and enters a crippled state.
(Hopefully that was easy to follow, even with my pronunciation changes! That bit played out a little bit better in my head. I’ll just pronounce it correctly from now on…)
Fixed tiers of combat can be tricky, because a DM needs to consider what happens if the players don’t solve the puzzles you’ve added. Does the wyvern still crash if the characters never made an attack on the wyverns wings? What if players specifically attack the wings of all creatures they fight in the future? Would similar results be applied? When coming up with solutions to the puzzles, consider why this creature would be different than others the party would face. Maybe this wyvern had torn and battered wings to begin with, and that bit of dialogue serves to clue it is vulnerable to attacks there.
Though it calls for some extra prep, health thresholds that lead to multiple tiers of combat can add a seriously cinematic narrative to the encounter that is enjoyable for the players to listen to, and feels epic for them to take part in. Just make sure to stay aware of how your added conditions would increase the creatures challenge rating. If the party is facing a monster with an already challenging CR, it will be especially frustrating trying to solve a puzzle on top of that! Also, be sure to keep an open mind to solutions, and make your puzzle related to the context of your narrative. It would not be a fun time, for instance, solving how to get past a Minotaur who can only be defeated by a limerick, unless it’s explicitly stated earlier in the dungeon or revealed by some wily elder. With that, be careful to also make a condition necessary to defeat the monster and consider the possibility that the puzzle won’t be solved by the players.
Remember, the root of boring combat encounters is monotony. Shake it up by adding interactive objects or conditional terrain to your environment. Consider what the enemies want and if the players can utilize knowledge of an enemy's objective to their advantage! Play with boss battles and how you can make this bad guy special, not just with their aesthetic, but by messing with special attacks and weaknesses the players can exploit. But, as always and most importantly, keep finding new ways for you and your players to think Outside the Dice.
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And if you do run a campaign with a Minotaur who can only be defeated with a limerick, please record that combat encounter and send me the link!
Credits:
Written and recorded by Allen Niles
Logo design by Karolyn Moses
Intro music by Louis Rabago
Photos by Megan Abbott
Music transitions found on Youtube Audio Library:
Sneaky Business by Biz Baz Studios and Tip Toes by Myuu
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