Combat that Serves the Story || D&D with Dael Kingsmill

i've got a lot of badges on i'm gonna jingle jangle throughout this whole dang video the the noise not the fictional drug from riverdale hello humans my name is dale kingsmill got another dnd video for you today i've been thinking about narrative combat again specifically the fact that i've i've done a video talking about how i design stat blocks kind of with um the the narrative purpose of the monster in mind and i've also done a video where i've talked about how to run combat with kind of a mind focused on narrative rather than on numbers i've done both of those things but i've not really um done the big picture between those two which is sort of the broader place of combat encounters in a narrative centric dnd campaign so if if you run a game of dnd that tries to put narrative at the heart of everything that you're doing uh hopefully this video will be useful to you it might cover some of some of the same ground that i covered in those two other videos but hopefully on the whole it'll be coming at it from a different perspective and and maybe get you to think about it in a different way or not we've yet to see none of us can tell the future okay so where i'm coming from i kind of believe that a combat encounter for narrative purposes serving narrative purposes is all about stakes you need to decide what the stakes are for this particular combat encounter and you need to ride with those stakes you you need to let those stakes stand and that doesn't just apply to high stakes situations you can you can decide that a combat needs to be low stakes needs to be filler that the players need to blow off a little steam you can decide that it should be a tax before a bigger combat that's coming up you want to tax their resources with a smaller combat so you can have low stakes combats you can have high stakes combats where everybody could die which ps just keep in mind that if you want to go full-on highest of high stakes every person in the party could die you should really only commit to that if you are willing to go all the way if this would make a good ending because it could be the ending still very high stakes but not quite so final uh you know maybe maybe the stakes are that one or two members of the player party could die maybe what's at stake is injury or or lasting consequences there's a whole spectrum to choose from but whatever you choose make sure that you are committed to that path i can sense some of you getting worried don't worry because the actual stakes that you decide on they can be a different thing to the feeling you're imparting to the players decide if you are actually willing right now to put death on the table as a very real possibility because if you want players to feel like they are fighting for their lives that doesn't mean that you actually have to let the stakes the real behind-the-scenes stakes match that feeling there are techniques that you can employ to force perspective on the matter we'll get more into that in a minute but uh for now just to touch on it you think about my redcaps video if you've watched my redcaps video there's a part in that where i said that i wanted my players to feel like they were really outnumbered and surrounded and like the situation was dire because there were so many red caps and only five of them but of course action economy is king if i'd really put 20 red caps up against five players the players would be dead so what do you do you cheat your angles it's like the theater it's like it's like presta digitation and stage magic i gave the players a ton of redcaps to fight but i used wave combat i only gave them you know four or five at a time that they actually had to fight and voila the feeling of a knife edge with actually low stakes i didn't even want anyone to get injured in that combat i decided my stakes and then i forced perspective to match what i wanted the players to feel now there are a couple of things that can help you that can influence your decision of where to place the stakes for a given comeback consider this encounter's place in the wider story arc of either the campaign or even just the adventure that you're running at the moment you're going to want to use different techniques from your toolkit if you're running just a run-of-the-mill simple complication compared to if you're running the big bad right you you get that you already instinctively get that not every single combat encounter not every single battle needs to be deadly or even memorable sometimes you're just going to be wrestling a bunch of sewer rats while tracking a green slatty that's okay that encounter is allowed to be a simple resource tax because it's not what your players are going to remember about the session when all is said and done assuming of course that you've done your job right and that um everything goes relatively smoothly five nat ones in a row can make any battle memorable whether you want it to be or not on the other hand when you're fighting an ancient red dragon that encounter needs some narrative wait it needs to be a bigger deal and this plays into those high stakes that i was talking about before the really high stakes the end of the world stakes you really only want to pull that out at the very end of your campaign don't you probably i mean i i'm not you i don't know what you're about high stakes encounters where one or two players can die that's an interesting one for me i really don't like to bring out combats at that level if i'm in kind of the final run-up towards the end of a campaign because it feels wrong unless unless the player is looking to leave the group like i don't know they're moving to new zealand or something then you can kind of get away with it but but for me if a character dies and is replaced introducing a new character when you're in the middle of ramping up to the end of the campaign feels wrong narratively also resurrecting a pc that close to the end of a campaign somehow feels wrong they should have just died at the end in the final you know what i mean to me there is a certain narrative rightness that that precludes me from using that level of stakes that close to the end of a campaign so the battles place in the wider story arc of your game can have a huge impact on what stakes you decide to pull out for a particular combat encounter also important is the timing uh consider the placement of this combat encounter within the individual session pardon my gardening neighbor i should know better than to try and film on the weekends i'm gonna move this closer to my to my mouth and hope for the best if this particular combat is not likely to take up the majority of the run time of the session then whether the encounter takes place near the start the middle or the end of the session has an effect on the flow of the story if you're setting your stakes at deadly will that work near the start of this session and maybe it will maybe it won't it depends on a lot of things context is absolutely everything here but you need to be aware of how it's going to play within the scheme of the sessions story okay so stuff that goes into the encounter to actually reflect the stakes that you've set you have a ton of techniques to pull from here i'm only going to touch on a few of them off the top of my head number of rounds time and the flow of time and the point in time have been a big theme in this video already and and you can see that in number of rounds again if you want a combat to feel small and feel low stakes the fewer rounds the better more rounds will give an impression of a grander scope although be wary not to let it get to the point where it's just a boring slog things still need to be happening i make monsters in a vaguely similar way to colville's action-oriented monsters i've actually been doing it that way since uh since before he did that video so just saying i do it slightly differently but um but what does kind of stay the same is that you plan ahead cool sort of cinematic moments of the battle that can um really pick up the pace again and get players back into being interested one of the things that i do that is actually very similar to action-oriented monsters is that i give um any any significant combat that's going to happen i give the bad guy or one of the bad guys a signature moment by which i mean this is the thing that i want the players to remember later when they look back at the fight that they had with kindred more the giant crocodile i want them to remember orvin getting death rolled they won't remember the nitty-gritty but they will remember the signature moments and depending on how important the bad guy is you can scale up and down how many signature moments you give often i'll only give one but if i'm dealing with like a big villain i might give them you know up to three signature moments that you can pull out at key points in the battle to shift attention keep things interesting and make the fight a significant moment in the broader narrative of your game it'll stick in your players brains think like uh think like the dilophosaurus from jurassic park actually right it's signature thing is that at some point during this encounter it's going to spit ink or tar or whatever the hell that was into nedri's eyes and blind him it isn't the only thing that the dilophosaurus does but it is the thing that we remember it for this gives you another dial of control as well it lets you decide to some degree which battles deserve to be memorable and which ones don't i think it's also good to keep in mind when making signature moments preparing signature moments for a particular combat don't plot exactly how it's going to happen but have a general idea of which round you would like it to happen in probably also which of your player characters you would be willing to target with that particular move if your signature moment is something that's going to deal a lot of damage but you want the stakes to be lower than death right maybe you want to target the barbarian you still get across that this is a big damage dealing thing the players all still go whoa oh no but you've hit the barbarian they get to halve the damage they've got a bunch of hit points anyway they're gonna be fine just another tool that you can use to force that perspective ah yes beware of stolen vibes death yoyos the the bane of every dm's existence can really rob the narrative impact from a moment of death or injury or unconsciousness even if you house rule that the character takes a level of exhaustion the very act of them getting back up and fighting again kind of undermines what you're going for there is a drama to someone falling in battle if someone falls you want the game to be about them just for a little bit and so you need to aim your strikes know who you're hitting with what when i don't mean this in every nitty-gritty aspect i don't mean like down to the detail because that's never going to work you can't plan what your players are doing so you can't plan your plan counter plan i just mean that it's all about timing again for example you've planned a special signature moment for your ghost combat her signature move is that she will possess one of the party members and force them to leap from the parapet that's the moment that you want your players to remember that's cool but what happens to that if you trigger it too early julia gets possessed at the start of round two and she leaps to her doom for illustrative purposes let's assume that she hits zero hp she's fallen she's unconscious oh no it's really dramatic okay tick but then inevitably one of her party members rushes down after her or uses a ranged spell and they heal her and she's back up and ready to fight by the time round three starts and she has to spend her turn rushing up all the stairs or whatever to try and get back into the fray it just it it sucks out some of that cool factor it steals some of the magic whereas if you make that move at the beginning of the fourth or the fifth round later on in the encounter when the ghost is already nearly dead suddenly it makes more sense for the party to focus on killing the ghost instead for now or even if one of the party members does go to heal julia her being saved will be one of the last things that happened in the combat it keeps the party's attention on the fact that they nearly lost julia it lets the story be about that for a second it lets the story be it doesn't have to be death either one of the reasons i built my injuries mini system the way i did is that it frees me up to use more signature moments earlier on in a combat encounter while still getting to have that narrative impact that weight so in brief for people who don't know my injury system is basically that if a character takes enough damage in one blow that it is equivalent to half of their total hit points then they run the risk of getting a major injury so if i feel like the stakes of a particular encounter should have at risk serious major wounds then i can work that into my signature moments because on the table that i use if they do happen to get badly injured because it might not happen unless they roll a nat one they're going to get a minimum of three more rounds of combat before they fall unconscious that is not a coincidence most combats last about four or five maybe six rounds maybe so i can have that player be badly injured struggle through the end of the fight and then collapse just as it's about to finish or just after it's finished it's like that moment in movies where someone's like oh i'm fine we won the battle and then they look down and they're bleeding and then they collapse yeah give me that drama so i said earlier play around so like i was saying earlier i think it's important to know how many rounds of combat you want this so i think so like i was saying earlier i think it's important to know how many rounds you want this particular combat to last and if you match your desired stakes to the number of rounds you design your baddies to last i think you'll find that the narrative clicks much more nicely into place and both of those you know death and injury are both still very dramatic takes on the idea of the signature moment right but it doesn't even have to be that serious remember my red caps again okay where i wanted it to feel dire but for the stakes to be relatively low i gave the main bad guy from that it was this this spell slinging red cap in the center i gave them two signature moments so already that feels more dire right when they remember the battle they remember multiple beats so it feels like it was a big deal but one of those two signature moments was just the red cap picking up a helmet casting darkness on it and throwing it into the midst of the fighting it didn't do any damage but it added to to the feeling of the stakes being higher and it played into the flow of the narrative with its timing because if it had happened too soon it would have been kind of the only memory of the battle and if it had happened too late it wouldn't have had any impact on the battle either of those options would have robbed it of its narrative weight so instead having it happen in the middle of the combat it gave the fight a little more oomph and it gave the players more of a story to tell about it later it's the memorability of it it's the story that your players will tell later what is that thing it's it's d isn't the game that you play at the table with the dice it's your friends chatting about it afterwards and remembering the story of what their characters did of course fate is fickle probability isn't always going to work with us any combat can get out of hand if the rats roll enough 20s or the heroes enough ones but what you can do is try to balance for the narrative stakes that you are actually willing to follow through on when in doubt scale back the stakes to something that feels safer and just use the other techniques that you have available to you to try and force that perspective to make it feel more dangerous than it necessarily is keep an eye on timing and placement and targeting so that if the worst happens for your party if you do have to follow through on the stakes that you've set it will feel dramatically appropriate and that's that on that them is my thoughts that i have it just felt like there was something missing from my talks on uh combat and narrative and how they mesh and how they can work together so i hope that you found something interesting therein apart from that i i really hope i'm not forgetting something that i have to tell you apart from that i do believe that's it i'm done email this to your grandma i'll see you some other time i just kicked a bottle that was on the ground okay look look i'm gonna roll i'm gonna roll uh i got a 16. was this close to getting in that one

Channel: MonarchsFactory

Views: 38,331

Rating: 4.9787698 out of 5

Keywords: MonarchsFactory, Dael Kingsmill, Geek and Sundry, Geek, nerd, australian, Greek mythology, myths, mythology, Dale Kingsmill, story, storyteller, story teller, funny, dnd, d&d, dungeons and dragons, dungeons, dragons, pathfinder, 5e, rpg, ttrpg, fairytales, grimm, dungeon master, dm, running, combat, narrative, campaign

Id: dHPvBrA_j2Q

Length: 15min 56sec (956 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 06 2021