Creative Combat Tactics in Dungeons and Dragons 5e

welcome back to war school basic training is over and it's time to think outside the grid we're looking at creative strategies for combat in dungeon and Dragons fifth edition [Music] welcome warriors my name is Monte Martin and I'm Kelly McLaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes and today we're taking a look at the creative narrative and role-playing elements that you can add to your combat encounters now Dungeons and Dragons as a role-playing game has so many narrative elements that can play a factor in your battlefield tactics this is what distinguishes Dungeons & Dragons as a role-playing game rather than just a video game where you're restricted to the game mechanics in battle we're gonna take a deep look at how you can use the environment work as a team play off of your enemies emotions flaws and bonds make clever use of equipment and more to emphasize on using your wits and intelligence to carry the day in battle rather than just your raw combat prowess so let's get rolling in the first part in this series we looked at some of the game mechanics that are in play in Dungeons & Dragons that are really important for understanding in any combat encounter these are the basic things like target priority making good use of your abilities in positioning but in contrast in this video what we're gonna be looking at are the more creative and storytelling side of every combat encounter some of these things can be a little bit situational and they often rely on DM interpretation and they can short-circuit combat encounters this is not a handbook on how to fight fair this is a handbook on how to win but using the most creative and interesting narrative ways and the results are awesome in a cinematic way rather than just grinding out every battle to the last hit point so the strategies that we're gonna look at today start with working as a team then we emphasize focusing on the objective of the battle rather than just grinding out all the hit points and then we're gonna talk about assessing the environment we're gonna talk about how you can understand their foes and use their strengths weaknesses and social conditions against them and then finally we're gonna talk about using your equipment we're gonna start with probably the most important option and we mentioned this one in a lot of our videos and that is working as a team yeah and teamwork is your biggest advantage in Dungeons and Dragons the one constant in every single combat encounter that you will face in D&D are your party members they are your friends your allies maybe your rivals but it's up to you to work together if you're going to survive your combat encounters knowing what your character is exceptional at and knowing what the characters around the table are also exceptional at allows you to build a cohesive team and work together within the combat environments it's also gonna help you avoid those circumstances where one characters flaws or bonds or personal goals might conflict with the objective of the battle I'm always looking for ways that I can encourage player characters that might be more reluctant or cautious to fall prey to their flaws and engage in the battle in interesting ways as a DM I love nothing more than really causing tension in the party by using their flaws against them so it makes it harder for them to work as a team generally speaking you want to be careful about things like splitting the party or focusing more on your own goals than the goals of the party these things can lead to very interesting encounters and they can build story but you just want to be cautious about how you affect the game and you want to be careful not to derail things it's never okay to break the flow of a combat encounter with an excessive tactical discussion or an argument about how one person's creative solution might potentially derail things or send things off on a wild tangent that not even the dungeon master is capable of providing a good ruling for when you're working together as a team and you're all on the same page though it really helps increase this cohesion everyone can agree on what the plan is going forward whereas when everyone's going off on and doing their own plan it's very hard for the dungeon master to keep things coordinated and also to keep the narrative focus that makes the game so interesting part of the reason why working as a team is so important is because of how much it plays into our next point which is focusing on the objective combat encounters in Dungeons and Dragons don't have to be fought to the point at which everyone in is sleep the the main question that you want to ask yourself is why are you fighting what's the goal of this combat encounter what are you hoping to achieve just as monsters might flee when the when several of them have been cut down by the player characters on the flip side of this you might have an objective that cannot be met simply by defeating your foes by strength of arms if you have to disrupt an evil ritual hold ground open a gate or even capture a specific foe it doesn't matter how many of your enemies have been slain as long as you fulfill that core objective yeah not every encounter is about you standing toe-to-toe to the enemies and killing them all you might need to escape you might need to get to a certain location find a certain person and these should take precedence over just fighting every single monster that steps into your path not only does this raise the narrative stakes of the combat encounter and give purpose to your actions it makes many combat encounters and faster and in a much more satisfying way um I can't tell you how many times I've seen a combat encounter where one player is absolutely fixated on dealing the most damage to their enemies and that was completely meaningless because the other players were focused on disarming the bomb or disrupting the ritual or making sure that the prisoners were able to escape and those things were more important and meaningful not only to winning the battle but even interesting in terms of the narrative of the campaign as a whole be aware and be on the lookout for scenarios that could end the fight if there is a certain objective or goal that you're looking to accomplish if you can see that goal in sight then that should be your main focus having objectives and having goals within these combat encounters also stops you from falling into the trap of what D&D players call the murder hobo which is the crazy adventurer who just travels around killing everything they see and solving all their problems through violence sometimes it may be possible to win the battle without ever fighting in the first place and this is true mastery in battle if you're fixating on your objective what your characters want to accomplish you may realize that coming to swords and slinging spells wasn't even necessary in the first place and in fact might have been the easier way to solve your problem just because the situation for combat presents itself to you doesn't mean that needs to be the immediate reaction look for opportunities for stealth or even social situations that you can put yourself into that may even diverge the entire combat yeah this can be really unfortunate because sometimes as a player this might be completely beyond your control hopefully your dungeon master is willing to engage with you in this way because sometimes you will run into dm's that just want to present combat encounters for you to grind your way out of and will really shut down your creativity in focusing on the objective it doesn't matter you have to fight this out to the last hit point if that's the case you probably wanna discuss things with your DM because this way of engaging with combat in a creative way where every combat encounter could turn on a dime because the focus is on the objective and not just on killing everything in sight the next point is observing your environment because D&D combat rarely occurs in a featureless void unless you're fighting in the astral plane or perhaps certain parts of the shadow fell well in which case that's a really interesting combat because you're in a featureless void yeah that's actually the point right but in any case there's so many things to consider in the environment around you and asking questions of your dungeon master what's on the ceiling what's on the floor how many levels up are we what do I see around me that you might be able to interact with and use in interesting ways in the middle of a combat encounter my favorite thing to do in a combat encounter is notice things that might explode I completely agree with you on that nothing makes a combat encounter more interesting like a fire or an explosion that immediately raises the stakes and sometimes the DM might not have set up and encountered it could be a set piece battle like that but the players decide to make it that by the way that they've used their environment I always as a player I'm always interested in ways that I can cause explosions and cause massive amounts of damage to the structures around me because not only are they often brutally effective ways of destroying my enemies but they really just make the combat encounter way more cinematic and interesting on their own you can bet that if I walk into a big creepy Manor and there's a chandelier hanging there I'm gonna wait for the opportunity for enemies to be under that chandelier so that I can knock that thing down on top of them but it doesn't even have to be explosions and chandeliers simply kicking someone down the stairs or throwing them off a ledge or finding ways that you can climb up a tree to jump down on top of them not only are these things that are cinematic interesting and evocative but they can also be brutally effective Dungeon Master's never forget that on the inside of your dungeon master screen is a whole table that helps you improvise how much damage environmental effects can deal that will help you decide what saving throws to use and what difficulty classes you might want to throw in front of your players that attempt acrobatic athletic stunts or that try to use their magic in interesting and innovative ways that's not to say that you need to allow every spell to be used in completely game-breaking ways like as we mentioned in one of our prior videos you don't need to allow your players to transform into ants climb inside a monster skull and untransformed to explode them but be on the lookout for ways that they might use their spells in interesting and creative ways anyways that might slightly stretch the bounds of what's possible as long as it relies on the environment because any environmental factor is usually a one-time or unique thing and it prevents the players from necessarily finding a game winning strategy that they can apply to every single combat encounter yeah that's the really interesting thing about using the environment is if somebody abuses the use of a spell then that's something that they can do in every combat but if somebody chops down a tree in a forest and crushes a bunch of goblins that's something that they can only do in a forest where there's trees and only when they've lined up the circumstances in that way right that makes it interesting and that makes it okay for those environmental moments to be powerful and effective because they rely on serendipity and chance and as a player you want to look for those opportunities try to exploit them try to find them because it's going to make a more memorable combat encounter when you say hey guys remember that time I chop down that tree and that rolled down a hill and crushed 30 goblins that's way more memorable then remember the 25th fireball that I cast now when you are interacting with the environment I find that one of the things that players do when trying to set up these hairbrained schemes is they are very cagey with the dungeon master in explaining them they'll they'll say like I want to you know how thick is that rope over there how heavy is that log rather than say would I be able to chop this rope and send the log running down the hill to crush the goblins it's often okay as a player if you notice something cool in the environment ask the question to your DM and communicate your intent rather than necessarily being cagey and trying to take things one step at a time - thus entrap the situation and then the dungeon master is thrown for a loop because now the situation is harder for them to adjudicate and they might have offered you something more potent or more interesting hey you just said right from the beginning kind of what you were hoping to do you have to remember that the DM is in this to have fun as well for me as a player if I'm thinking of something crazy like causing an avalanche and then we surf down the mountain on an avalanche I remember having this idea and another player saying well what if we all just died out right and I said well it's gonna be really fun to try it and we're all here to have fun so sometimes those crazy ideas even the DM probably won't want to kill you outright just because you've thought of something that's awesome if you can discuss it enough amongst yourselves as a group and come up with this really cool idea to use the environment as long as you all agree on it it could be awesome this is why it's important as a player to ask your dungeon master really good questions about the environment so that you can make sure that you're properly assessing your expectations in the case of the avalanche I totally thought it was awesome and I was totally willing to go with that as a viable solution to the problem some dungeon masters might not agree with that and they might have said well actually the Avalanche that you're thinking of in this scenario is gonna be far more deadly you were anticipating and that's where it's important as the DM to communicate to the players that if they have a harebrained scheme that is not gonna work double check and make sure that their perception of the situation is correct especially if it sounds like they're gonna be taking in action or interacting with the environment in a way that would lead to their immediate and horrible grisly death it's probably not the players intent to do something that suicidal so make sure that you're clear with them and say I might not have described this properly you do realize that that a thousand town brick actually encompasses the entire room and will crush you if you try to drop it on the beholder another thing when you're observing your environment is looking for elevated positions or looking for places to take cover we talked about this a little bit in the prior video from a mechanical sense but from a creative sense these are really really useful and again they make the battlefield come to life you can chop down those trees or you can hide behind them you can use those awnings to your advantage you can always make the battlefield larger too than what's laid out for you it's a it's always makes me grown as a Dungeon Master but every time I set out at a battlefield or mat for my players and they immediately ask well what's not on the map it's always a problem but it does show a level of creativity and an understanding that the world is larger than what's necessarily laid out in front of you and be thinking about that fact when you are in combat that the world is bigger that you can always run away that you can always flee that you can distract your foes use that environment age your escape if your objective is to slay or capture a particular foe you really want to watch out in the environment for potential ways they could escape or ways that you can entrap them or surround them also the amount of times that the Ranger at my table has used finding cover as a way to completely make the battle go in their favor is outstanding if there's ever a corner or a corridor that they can run around a corner and hide they can always pop out shoot and then they move back behind that that's a great tactic to use using the environment as a way to give yourself an advantageous position and if you are lucky enough to ever a combat encounter where the DM has you fighting high in the sky on a flaming airship or deep in the bowels of a volcano with lava flows or in other fantastic places where there are tons and tons of hazards and dangers make sure you're packin awesome ways to knock foes around like thunder wave or even just pushing attacks or telekinesis or Big B's hand because you want to make sure that your abilities are gonna play off that environment and you're the one to seize the advantage rather than your foes speaking of foes let's talk about how to understand your foes psychological warfare 101 play on their emotions if you can learn some information about the antagonists in your game you can exploit what you've learned in combat there are all sorts of ways that the NPC's monsters and villains that you come into combat with have their personalities desires their goals their bonds find them out and explore them and exploit them not only does this make the world deeper and richer and increase your understanding of all the characters that you're facing and their motivations but it's fodder for you to use against them yeah we're not talking about knowing their stat block front-to-back and as a matter of fact it's pretty taboo to read the stat block while you're playing the game as a player but we're talking more about who is your enemy what do they care about and how can you mess with them exactly some villains might have personal relationships I've had combat encounters with groups of bandits who were friends with each other maybe even lovers and the players would knock one of the ones out and threaten to slay that character if the bandits didn't stand down and sometimes that works because if someone's holding a knife to the throat of your friend you're gonna be compelled to act in a different way sure you might not stand down your actions in that moment are definitely going to change and I find as a DM I love to embrace these opportunities because they let me tell these little stories about all my characters DMS love it when they've got an opportunity to expose the inner workings of their NPCs mind and you as a player can use that to your advantage and as a player I love finding these things I love looking for these strings that I can pull on when the DM announces that this antagonist is clearly in love with this other NPC and I have a way to exploit that or or get into a situation where I can use that against the antagonist it means that I have an upper hand now that maybe is more interesting than just blasting them with spells if you can't play on your foes relationships with their allies or even the other player characters you might be able to play on their fears their flaws or even their objectives what does your enemy want in the combat encounter do they want to merely survive your onslaught if that's the case if they just want to survive you might have the opportunity to let them go to let them surrender if they're afraid of something can you use that against them if they're trying to slay you specifically well then you might have to fight it out but maybe they're after for after a specific item and as soon as they get that item or slay that particular enemy they're going to flee and it won't matter how much damage you were able to deal with them because they just wanted that specific thing so be on the lookout for these things because an enemy that wants something specific might go for it single mindedly and not care about even slang you or all your allies now we mentioned that reading the monster stat block is slightly taboo at the table pretty poor form yeah actually yeah as a player it's it's bad if the month if the DM is like hey you're fighting a zombie and you're like zombies what can they do opening up the Monster Manual at the table as a player is that's like a one-way ticket to getting asked to leave I actually at my table very often every once in a while I'll describe a monster and somebody will go oh is this the and then I say don't worry about it and then we carry on yeah I always say that don't worry about it it doesn't matter what it is but if you visually look and ask for a description of the monster and you have an idea on what type of creature it is you're facing that can give you a lot of information on how combat it yeah DMS are still probably gonna weave useful hints and into what a monstrous strategy and tactics might be simply by communicating their appearance it's very easily easy to tell that the one in the dress and carrying a staff is probably a spellcaster whereas that heavily armored foe might be uh planning to hit you in the face with that great sword on the other hand if you can see that a monster is clearly on fire and not being harmed by it you might not want to hit it with a fireball spell acting on this visual information and making good choices based on it isn't metagaming it's actually role-playing your character in a really smart and intelligent way it's interacting with the non player characters in the monsters in the same way that you're interacting with the environment what's even great is building off of previous encounters to influence the way you combat that next time the next time that the party faces a troll they're gonna say we need to hit it with fire because we know that that's how you kill a troll that's not metagaming that's just smart playing any monster worth using once is worth using twice it will be a different experience the second time around as the players are able to capitalize on their knowledge of the prior encounter and they get the satisfaction that comes with being able to refine their tactics if you fought hobgoblins once in the past and you find yourself facing them again you're probably gonna remember how their martial discipline ability works and allows them to deal a ton of damage and also the way they're organized around leaders take out the leadership deny themselves the advantages of the Phalanx style fighting and you will carry the day against the Hobgoblin horde the final point that we're gonna talk about today is assessing your equipment and how to use it in combat I think the players have a single-minded focus on finding the best equipment that gives them the most passive Universal bonus those things that improve their spell save DC they're damaging combat make their defenses higher and really ignore all those quirky and useful magic items or mundane pieces of equipment that can really yield interesting results in battle one of my favorite ones is the a movable rod which when we first got it seemed like something that we would not use in combat but have used it so far twice in combat - hilarious and awesome effects that are very memorable the Hardy was riding down a mountainside our high-speed sled only the fine a troll had jumped in the end of the path this was a massive dire troll which could easily slay a single party member as they rushed down the hill the Paladin took out the immovable rod activated in front of the trolls neck and slammed them away into the distance it was a fantastic culmination of knowing that a foe using the environment and using your equipment all together to produce a spectacular and cinematic slam dunk against a dangerous foe our favorite one was very recently fighting a dragon in the middle of a town square when the Paladin again who loves the movie about most of the way through the combat jam knee a movable rod into the dragon's mouth and activated it getting the Dragons stuck there just long enough for them to cast what spell was it that was cast on the dragon was affected by the petrifying ray of prismatic spray so the dragon stuck in midair trying to deal with this a movable rod stuck in its mouth then slowly turned to stone and is now hanging in that Town Square forever as a giant statue and testament to us saving that town it was a really cool and memorable moment but there's more pieces of equipment that yield interesting results than just that that it can be as simple as using alchemists fire to start the affer mentioned fires that we talked about early in the episode that's might be all you need to start a raging inferno or you might be able to buy bombs or use Scrolls oftentimes player characters hoard their consumable items and don't use the useful potions like potions of invisibility flying and heroism be on the lookout for these useful items because they could play out in interesting ways yeah there might even be mundane things in your equipment I find that many times there's something that I haven't looked at for example I always forget that I have a crowbar and there are many times that something's come up where I'm like I could use a crowbar to do this and it's just looking at your equipment and knowing when that can actually give you a slight advantage in a combat scenario crowbar I wouldn't necessarily use as a weapon but hey if I need to pry open a locked door and I don't have the key for it and I don't have time to pick the lock crowbars pretty useful in the middle of battle players may scoff at the idea of a never smoking bottle until you realize that it's effectively a smoke bomb if you're dealing with a group of zombies that are mindless and you're hiding in the dark could you light a torch and just throw it and have them be like oh look a torch and chase that you can create fantastic distractions with your equipment you might be able to break things in the environment you might possess something that you could use to bargain with the enemy as well who knows maybe your foes are just a bunch of hired mercenaries and offering them a bag of gold is a great way to distract them long enough for you to stab them in the back I actually think knowing your spells even the ones that aren't just directly combat oriented is also important for manipulating the environment a lot of spells people will just kind of wave away especially people who are new to the game they'll wave them away because they don't immediately do damage when I was very early on in this game and I was becoming a DM and Monty was playing in my game he taught me the good use of many spells that I had just said oh I would never use control water because it doesn't immediately damage until Monty drowned one of my antagonists in a piranha pool a fantastic example of using the environment was a battle that we had recently in one of our campaigns that was fought on a giant barge in the river and the druid used control water to wash all the enemies overboard because that spell had such a huge impact in that specific environmental case normally completely useless spell but because we were fighting over water it completely changed the game there's other spells like wind wall or control weather that you don't think about until you realize that you're fighting an aerial battle if you know that a battle is coming there's a lot of equipment that you can use to set up the battlefield make traps the use of rope is endless the amount of things that I have used rope for in a D&D campaign is incredible it's the most useful thing you can tie up enemies you can make traps even make like alarms for your camps set up some ropes with cans or something hanging on and there you have an alarm one of the scenarios that I love throwing my players into is it is a defensive battle where they get to set up the battlefield in advance and this is where all the brilliant ideas of how to use equipment come out because you get players that are like we're gonna dump flasks of oil down this hallway and set fire to our arrows and as the enemy's approach they'll slip on the oil will shoot it with a flaming arrow and turn that hallway into an oven my number one tip for like fighting dirty and D&D combat is like find the way to start an explosion or a fire it always makes combat more interesting without you don't need to set everyone on fire but if you set everything on fire it really does just make everyone focus on the objectives at hand and what really matters which is usually survival and each other yeah and I do find it like that that whole survival impulse like it's it really isn't necessary to fight down to the last hit point sometimes as a player you have to fit think about how can I create this overwhelming victory condition how can I force my enemy to surrender or give up the fight entirely and that way I get to conserve all my resources in D&D let's let's not mince words player characters are gonna win combat more often than not in D&D that's the idea pretty much a foregone conclusion but the real measure of it all is how flawless of a victory did you get did you take a single point of damage and for me that's the mark of a ultimate combat skill is winning a battle without anyone in the party having to take a single point of damage and barely having to use their abilities so this has been our second video on combat tactics in Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition we hope that you feel inspired to outwit your enemies and of course we just scratch the surface of all the creative strategies you can employ to outplay your foes we'd love to hear your favorite tactics in the comments below and if you want to see us play Dungeons & Dragons you can check out our live play dungeons of dragon hime the campaign airs every Tuesday night on Twitch at 6 p.m. Eastern Time and if you want to get inspired for your own play style with your class you can check out our class guides right up over here and of course we love using the rules of DD in creative and narrative ways and how this whole series explaining the rules of fifth edition great over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 587,744

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book, combat, tactics, narrative, creative, monsters, monster, environment, equipment, objective, teamwork

Id: MHOIcWVL4Bw

Length: 29min 18sec (1758 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 15 2018