Hello friends! I'm Ginny Di, and I get so
nervous running D&D combat because I feel like it's always so boring. My players just get into
a little flank sandwich with the monsters and we
all just hit each other until somebody is dead. Nobody ever moves, because nobody wants to take attacks of opportunity, and what good would moving do, anyway, if everybody else is staying put? I can't even be annoyed
if somebody isn't paying attention because frankly I wouldn't be paying attention either! My players have assured me that it's not as bad as
I think it is, but like, it's bad enough to fix. (lofi music) What am I doing wrong? The answer is probably a lot, honestly. Let's be real, I don't
have that much experience! So this video is not going
to be me teaching you. Instead, this video is
going to be me learning. I've recently done a ton of reading and watching and research to figure out how to make my combat more interesting, and in this video, I'm going to share the four takeaways that I
personally found the most useful. Hopefully, if you're struggling
with the same problems that I am, this will help both of us. Make interesting maps. One of the things that
was really bothering me about my own combat was
how nobody was moving. After all of my reading, I've determined that this problem lies squarely on the shoulders of my settings. It doesn't matter if I'm
using a physical map grid or theater of the mind. The point is, I need to make the space where combat is happening interesting. If my players are in a rectangular room with a door in and a door out, there's really no incentive
for them to move during combat, and it's very easy for squishy characters to just hide behind the melee fighters and safely throw ranged
attacks from a distance. Yawn. So what makes a space
interesting for combat? Stuff: if there's stuff in the space, players and monsters can interact with it. Furniture can be tipped
over to make barricades, or create cover, just get in the way. A rope bridge can be cut to plunge anyone who's on it into the abyss below, or to stop someone from
following or retreating. Horses can be spooked
in order to create chaos or prevent escape. Cover: it's not just players who benefit from having a place to hide. Columns, walls, trenches, foliage, all of these create
opportunities to force movement. You can't just lob ranged
attacks from the doorway if you can't see the target. Zones: I never seem to have
trouble leading players from place to place outside of combat, but it's like once it starts, these mental blast doors come down and trap everyone in the room. Note to self: Combat
doesn't have to be limited to a single chamber! A fight can range between separate rooms or up stairs or down
tunnels or through a portal. Entry points: It's so tempting
to make everything linear: Enter through one door,
leave through the other. But that makes it way too easy for the squishiest fighters
to hide at the back while the melee fighters
get up close and personal. Instead, I need to create some maps where there isn't a back! Where monsters and bad guys
can come up behind players, where allies could arrive at any moment from a surprising direction. Change. Even a pretty interesting space can start to get dull after
many rounds of combat. I can correct that by
allowing the space to change. Maybe a monster sets something on fire, or maybe part of the
architecture is destroyed and it blocks a passage or
creates difficult terrain. I can introduce new
challenges to keep players on their toes and maybe even
turn the tide of combat. (suspenseful music) (whisper) -This video is
sponsored by Kobold Press. - Who's there? whose voice is that? - They have a new Kickstarter
for the Book of Ebon Tides, a complete guide to the Shadow Plane. - Is someone playing a trick on me? This isn't funny! - There are a lot of tricks
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Shadows adventure book. I have the strangest feeling... like it contains 14 adventures
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voices! Whispering to me... that I could get these
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link in the description. - And also do some murders. - Wait, what? - Speaking of keeping
players on their toes, it's pretty obvious that the setting isn't the only thing that
needs to be interesting. The opponents should be, too. Give bad guys a why. I love a good, interesting
monster stat block. You can only hit your
players with a short sword or a bite attack so many times before it starts to feel a little stale. Or, so I thought. But after all this research, I'm starting to believe that I could make nearly any creature into
an interesting opponent if I ensure that they make sense. Here's what I mean by that. One mistake I've made a lot is that no matter what monster
or villain I'm playing, I often end up basically
playing them the same way. But there's no way that a bandit would fight the same way that
a Displacer Beast would fight, and neither of them
would fight the same way that a powerful sorcerer would fight. They don't just use different tactics, they have different goals! Turns out that making
my bad guys interesting starts with asking myself some pretty basic questions like, why are they here? What brought them to this space, and what were they doing
before the players arrived? Because in most cases, it shouldn't be waiting for some adventurers
to walk through the door but that's often kind of how I treat it! Let's say I have a pack of winter wolves. They're gonna handle themselves completely differently in combat if they're starving and hunting for food,
versus protecting their den. What do they want? This is, embarrassingly, a
question that I have forgotten to ask myself more than a few times, which has led to me just having creatures attack players for no reason. My bad guys need a goal, which could be anything
from kill the players and eat their flesh to
escape this encounter alive. Maybe the bad guys need
something from players, and they'll kill in order to get it. Maybe they're just following orders. Maybe they're defending something, or trying to steal something, or distracting players
from something else. Having a more complex goal
than just kill the players can introduce new variables into combat. Maybe players are trying
to kill the monsters, but the monsters are just
trying to get past them, or buy time, or scare players off. This should change how I play them. How important is it to them? Once I've decided on my
monsters' or villains' goal, I should also ask myself
how far they're willing to go to achieve it. Honestly, most living beings are not willing to fight to
the death over very much. If three of the four
harpies have been killed, why on earth would the
fourth one stick around waiting for her inevitable doom? Why wouldn't she try to run away? If she's gonna go down swinging, she'd better have a really good reason. I feel like a little bit
of a idiot being like "Oh, as a dungeon master, "I guess I should be telling a story!" but I think for me,
it's more that sometimes the monsters can feel a little
incidental to the story. Like, I'll realize that
we haven't had a combat encounter in a bit, and
I wanna throw one in. So I'll pick something
relevant to the setting, but sometimes not think
much further than that. But even though not every
combat needs to be critical to my core plot line, it should still have its own narrative, even a simple one. Plus, giving my opponents a why could also give me some fun ideas to make them less predictable. Sure, bandits usually carry a scimitar and a light crossbow. But what if they robbed somebody last week who had a plus one longsword? Or a dagger of venom? Or maybe the bandits tried to steal from camping players because they noticed that
the party included a caster and they're trying to steal a spellbook. One of the bandits is experiencing weird wild magic surges and wants
to learn to control it. Now that would be an unpredictable combat! Which leads me very neatly
to my next big lesson: Fight smarter. D&D isn't a video game, and one of the ways that's
imminently clear is the bad guys. They're not robots, programmed to do a set number of things. They're being run by a
thinking, strategic creature which means that they can also be thinking, strategic creatures. My bad guys should be doing
everything that they can to win! And I'm not saying this in a "mwahaha, I wanna kill my players and
drink their tears" kind of way. I'm not saying the bad guys should win, I'm just saying they should
act like they want to. For intelligent creatures, this means thinking tactically, the same way my players do. Even less intelligent beasts and monsters should still follow
basic survival instincts, like seeking cover from ranged damage, and not letting themselves get backed into a corner or flanked. And in most cases, this should apply to
their environment, too. If my players stumble on
a monster in its home, that home would suit the monster, and the monster would know it well and be able to take advantage of it. If my monster can tunnel through rock, they should live in a rocky
area where they can tunnel. A dragon should live in a
place where it has room to fly. When encounters are just deal
damage until somebody dies, certain classes will inevitably end up doing most of the damage, and I think this can make other players feel kind of useless. But if I can play my monsters smart enough that the players have
to be smart right back, that makes room for strengths besides just hitting really hard. Like, yeah, the rogue
can deal an unbelievable amount of sneak attack damage. But my bad guys don't have to let them! Wow, that rogue keeps
hitting me really hard because I'm so distracted
by their ally nearby. I should separate them. Suddenly the rogue's turn
isn't just another stab, they have to figure out how
they're gonna get advantage on their attack in order to get that sneak attack bonus back. Here's another example, one strategy that's often
pretty easy for players to use is to focus their damage
on a single target. It's just basic math. Because of action economy, the party will take less damage overall if they kill one monster at a time rather than get two monsters
down to half hit points. As a DM, my strategy needs
to be to divide that focus. If the villain has minions, they should present an actual threat that makes it worthwhile
for players to take them out instead of just ignoring
them to focus on the big bad or taking them all out before
they try to hit the big bad. And if my bad guys notice that the party is picking on a single target, they might move to defend them. This whole section might seem
really obvious to some people, but I think I get wary of
being too strategic as a DM because I'm afraid that if my
monsters are too effective, I will kill my players. But I'm beginning to think that I'm doing my players a disservice by basically dumbing down their opponents. I suspect that if I
stop pulling my punches, my players will step up to match. Which leads me to the final lesson: Put the pressure on. Sometimes I feel like a
combat is pretty good, but it just drags on too long. And I've seen a lot of
complaints about combat dragging in general in D&D. I think a huge part of my feeling of boring my players comes from those quiet moments when somebody is checking the details of a spell or musing on where to move, and it just feels like
there's no forward momentum. In real life, if you were
in the middle of a battle, it would be intense! It would be terrifying,
it would move quickly, everybody would be stressed. And I'm not saying that I want
my players to be stressed! But I do want them to feel
at least a little urgency! Because that's what makes this stuff fun. Otherwise we're just doing a
two hour group math problem. I did my research, I
took a bunch of notes, and I've boiled it down to four ways that I can put a little
healthy pressure on my players to keep the energy up throughout combat. Time limits. I'm cheating a little
here by mentioning this because this is something I already do or at least, it's something
I already believe in. But I don't always put it
into practice like I should. Basically, I don't wanna
give players too much time. Not only would their characters not really have time to strategize, sitting around mulling over an action just drains the life out of the game. So I warn them when they're up next and if they don't make
their move quickly enough, there needs to be a consequence for that. One that I saw online that I liked was that if the player
doesn't have their move ready within a few seconds, they just take the Dodge action. From what I heard, most players do not allow that to happen
to them more than once. Narration. Nothing feels less like a dramatic, life-and-death fantasy battle than saying stuff like "Your attack hits. "You deal 12 damage. "Does that conclude your turn?" And obviously there's a
certain amount of numbers and mechanical stuff that
does need to be communicated, but a lot of that can be
communicated through narration. I can say, "That hits," or I can just describe it hitting. By making sure that combat
is still part of the story that I'm telling, I may be able to keep
players in the moment, even when it's not their turn. Goals. In most of the combats I've run, the goal is just, kill the bad guy. And unless players are
really getting hit hard, it honestly doesn't
really matter that much if the villain gets one more turn. Which is, the opposite of urgency. One tip for this that I really liked is to give players another goal in combat besides just survival. I recently played in a game where the room was filling with water, and there were monsters in the water. So yes, we had to fight the monsters, but we also had to flip the lever before the room completely
filled and we all drowned. Other ways to complicate combat might include freeing hostages, protecting an NPC, or preventing a villain from completing some multi-round task,
like a spell or ritual. Threat, okay, I know I'm
supposed to threaten my players, but one thing I'm learning is
that I should legitimately, like threaten them. I should throw things at them that I'm not 100% sure they can handle. What I'm trying to remember
is that, as the DM, if I hit players with too much, I have the power to scale it back. I can choose to make the
wrong strategic choice, to provoke an attack of opportunity, to use a defensive move
instead of an offensive one. Even have an NPC step in and rescue them, or have the bad guy choose
to keep the party alive for some reason. I have the power to be less
powerful, if I need to be. But if players feel genuinely nervous about whether or not
they can win the fight, they won't just be focused, they'll feel so
accomplished when they win. As a player, I would always rather have a super intense, risky combat than a bland, easy combat. So, to recap: I'm gonna do my
best to make interesting maps, give bad guys a why, fight smarter, and put the pressure on. I'm sure I won't be able to execute all of these things
perfectly for every combat, but that's okay! I'm gonna work on it, and hopefully it'll make for more interesting encounters even if I only check a few
of those boxes at a time. I'm curious, what's the
best combat encounter you've ever run or played in? And what do you think made it so good? I wanna hear about the battles that you were still
thinking about in the car right on the way home. Tell me all about 'em in the comments!
