How to Select Monsters for D&D Encounters

in this video I'm gonna explain how to choose monsters for your encounters so they'll be fun and dynamic for your players hey Luke Hart here just in case you're new to my channel I create weekly D&D videos with information and resources to help Dungeon Master's run awesome games let me tell you why I suck as a dungeon master now let's say that I'm reading the Monster Manual or mourning Kane's tomb of foes and I find a monster that's even somewhat remotely interesting to use in one of my games well then then I get all excited I'm like Jojo the idiot circus boy with a pretty no pet the pet is my new monster oh I love you a little pet I take my naughty pet and I go and that ladies and gentlemen is what happens when you just grab monsters randomly from a book and toss them into your game so for the sake of yourself for the sake of your players don't be like Jojo the idiot circus boy instead consider carefully choosing monsters to make your encounters more fun and interesting for your players so what I'm gonna do now is go over several steps for doing just that arias step number one is to build your encounters using more than just one type of monster you see if you have an encounter built solely out of orcs or just out of hobgoblins that's fairly boring and one-dimensional instead take those orcs and put some wargs with them or take those same hobgoblins and put a Hobgoblin wizard with them that's gonna make things much more interesting and dynamic having more than one monster type makes your players think more about tactics and possibly strategy for instance if you have those hobgoblins and a wizard in the back lines nuking your players characters well then they gotta think about things like well how do we get to that wizard how do we get past the cob goblins that are on the front line blocking or imagine a front line of soldiers with archers in the back like shooting arrows at your players characters and assassins darting out of the shadows behind trees to stab at them encounters are just simply more dynamic and tactically engaging when there are multiple enemy types on the field Araya number two is to choose complementary enemy types when you're building your encounters most monsters do have other types of monsters that they're well-known for working with that makes sense for an adventurer to have them together you can definitely check out Volos guide to monsters for that sort of thing where to Kansas - what foes probably has it and I know the Monster Manual mentions it from time to time and of course as the dungeon master you can always just say the two monsters work together because you're the dungeon master and your world is your world and you can do what you want in order to help choose complementary enemy types it really does help to categorize them and I like to use the categories from fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons now I know I know fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons doesn't exactly have the best reputation and I've ever I've never actually played it but I do like to steal little bits and pieces from it that I find useful let me know by the way if you also do the same thing steal bits and pieces from fourth edition that are useful for games things like minions and stuff like that and if you think that fourth edition should burn in the ninth house then leave me a comment down below to that effect alright let's talk about the six different types of fourth edition monster categories the first one that you have are brutes now brutes you can think of as having really high damage output fairly low armor class and relatively high hit points these are the monsters that are going to get in the PCs face and just beat them to death with tons of damage output ochres and Giants are really good examples of brutes the next category is soldiers they have a high defense with average damage and average hit points and what a soldier does is it kind of like holds the frontline against the player characters so that other enemy types maybe in the back lines can kind of do their thing maybe got a wizard nuking people or something like that examples of soldiers are hobgoblins and giffy Yankee all right your next category is artillery now artillery do crap loads of damage from a range but have really low defenses low armor class low hitpoints that sort of thing think of a wizard perhaps throwing fireballs from the back or even archers that are perhaps shooting from the back doing these amounts of damage say with flaming arrows but once you get up close to them they're gonna go down pretty darn quick all right the next category is skirmishers they have relatively average like hit points and defensive stuff like that maybe a little bit low however they do have the ability to get fairly high damage output and their whole stick is sort of running circles around the enemies they might have the ability to take a bonus action to disengage or dash and then they just do like really good damage output spies are a good example of skirmishers all right the next category type is lurkers now a lurker has fairly low armor class hit points in that sort of thing but their whole thing is the ability to hide or stealth that kind of lurk around unknown and then they jump out and bam they get a PC do tons of damage to him maybe leave him dying dead on the ground maybe have like crap loads of poison damage or some like that the assassin is a good example of a lurker all right the next category is controllers controllers basically control the battlefield they prevent the players characters from moving they might lock them down maybe give them bad saving throws things like that mine flares and wizards are clerics are fairly good examples of controller types a mine flare obviously has this like psionic blast that can totally incapacitate you wizards and clerics can do things like hold person or hypnotic pattern or wall of force that will lock you down now there is also another category called leader but I don't feel that that crosses over to fifth edition' super well so we're just gonna skip that one and somebody right now is like I'll bet you skip the leader Luke well dude it's my video I'm gonna skip the leader if I want to so basically what you want to do with all these categories is when you're choosing creatures monsters for your encounters you want to choose creatures from different categories for instance you might have a soldier type combined with an artillery and the whole idea of the soldier is that they lock down your players characters while the artillery types kind of blast them from afar or you might pair up brutes with controllers that controllers might do something like hypnotic pattern on the player characters not allowing them to do anything or maybe hold person even worse and then the brutes doing tons of damage just go up to them and start whacking them then you have a bunch of dead player characters on your hand and you've won dandy right now I don't think that this whole idea of categories always works super super well in fifth edition obviously fourth edition was kind of designed around the idea of those categories and fifth edition is a little bit more noodle you kind of got to figure it out and kind of figure out which monster is in which category sometimes as obvious sometimes it's not and the reason we're mixing this up is that it makes the encounter much more interesting when you have say for instance the hobgoblins in the front that are locking the player characters down and then the wizard in the back that is throwing fireballs at them and then the players have to think about oh crap if we if we don't get to that wizard we're toast he's just gonna keep destroying us and so it makes your players to think about tactics makes them think about things rather than just there is nothing more boring in the game in my opinion than just a surrounding pound your players characters simply surround the enemies and just beat them down it's simply a war of attrition who can beat down that the person's hit points the fastest that in my opinion is the culmination of boring tactics strategy at a larger scale those are the things that make encounters and combats interesting all right now what I'm gonna do is give you a bunch of examples because in my opinion a bunch of the theory without examples is pre lame however before we jump into examples I just want to give you a quick shout-out to one my young dragon patrons your pal jinx so as part of one of his patron benefits he gets a shout out in one of my youtube videos so yeah dude this is your shout out and thanks as well for signing your life over in warm blood I mean for joining me on this video creation journey all joking aside seriously thank you dude I do appreciate it alright yeah examples so I recall this one time I was designing this adventure around like if Yankee and mind flayers and I placed a mind flayer all by himself in a room and after one mind blast my player is pretty much sir founded to him and beat him into oblivion it was rather boring and pointless in my opinion so the next time around I gave that mind flare well it was a new one obviously because the other one was dead I gave the mind flayers some Minotaur slaves they could go in front engage the player character sort of lock them down get them busy and then have the mind flayers from the back blasting them with their psionic blast thingies and throwing spells at them that sort of thing turned out to be much more interesting than simply one mind flayer who gets in the first round or two all right now here's an idea for some Hobgoblin so we already talked about the Hobgoblin wizard and all that kind of bullcrap so we're many of you something different here give your hob goblins some glades so that they attack at range but don't stop there give those hob goblins the Sentinel ability so that when the player characters enter their range the hobgoblins can immediately attack them and also it stops all of their movement so your player characters can no longer get any closer to them and the hobgoblins keep on OOP attack them back up player characters come to their range Boop attack them and the hobgoblins back up and you just keep doing this the entire line of hobgoblins slowly retreating as your player characters like like morons keep walking forward and getting attacked they obviously got to figure out a way to get around that strategy but at the same time there are words that are darting in and out attacking your players and tripping them dropping them to the ground so there you are giving your players lots of different things to think about and they have to adapt tactics to overcome that challenge okay now wizards are a tricky business because if you put a wizard in a room or wherever by himself alone your players are going to obliterate him they're going to surround and pound him he's gonna go down so fast you're like well this wizards supposed to be a CR 12 and they just totally destroyed him you gotta give Wizards and minions imagine giving your wizard some clay golems and the clay golems obviously attack the players first keeping the players off from your wizard and then let's let's not have your wizard on the ground let's have your wizard be flying and let's also give him greater and visibility on himself as well so he has to obviously concentrate on greater invisibility so let's give your wizard wings let's say he's at a fling with wings or maybe a half dragon or something cool like that and then your wizard is flying above the characters invisible nuking them with spells that the clay golems are immune to and so now you have an incredibly dynamic interesting and fun well I mean at least it's interesting and fun for the dungeon master but your players are stuck with this sort of puzzle of how to figure this out what to do do not get totally obliterated I think that sounds pretty cool another great example a single Rock Shasha is just a big friendly kitty just waiting to be like domesticated and declawed so instead give that rock Shasha some cultists minions some front liners some caster types and then throw them all together and you're gonna have a much more interesting encounter and if you're catching the general thread of all of these examples that I'm giving you the main idea here by introducing these different monster types and giving them even special abilities and stuff like that is so that your players would start to think tactically about the encounter and think of ways to overcome the challenge they go beyond just simply engaging and rolling dice and doing damage give them a challenge that they got to use their brains to think about use their cleverness use their imagination to overcome and once you start doing that and you get the hang of doing that then all of your encounters are going to be so much more interesting and fun than the standard old throw a few monsters in a room you go up and you beat on them you roll some dice and they die rinse repeat go on the next one blah blah blah blah blah alright now if you're thinking that all those examples that I gave you are fairly complicated and that you can't possibly go that like in depth on every single encounter well you're probably right I wouldn't spend tons of it that much effort on every single encounter maybe just a few encounters in an adventure make them super special and super awesome but even if you don't go to do that just mixing your monster types is going to make just that alone is going to make your encounters much more interesting and fun for your players now it's time for the DM bonus tip if you follow my advice I've just been talking about about using different creature types than what you're verily gonna find is that they are on different pages in the monster manual and at flipping back and forth between different pages of the Monster Manual during a fight is a real pain in the butt so what I recommend there are a few things I'm gonna recommend you the first one is that obviously you can use little sticky note thingies here little post-it notes to mark the pages that the monsters are on that's the very first thing that you can do now failing that that still involves like flipping back and forth although the post-it note obviously makes it easier to find the other thing you can do is you can use these little handy dandy monster cards now these monster cards right here I created myself I just find images and then I like you know cut and paste the what you want to call it step blocks from the monster manual and stuff like that obviously from like PDFs which exist and make those myself now you could go through a lot of effort to make them yourself there are also little monster cards that are available on Amazon there's a link down the description to some monster cars and Amazon now just be forewarned that they don't include all of the monsters so if you you know get it and you're like hey what the heck it's missing this side or the other just before warrant doesn't include all of them but it has a lot of them or you can just make your own the whole thing here is that having these sorts of monster cards allows you to just simply lay them all out in front of you during the battle obviously with the back side up and then you refer to their stat blocks as you play without having to flip back and forth in the pages now failing this what you could do as well if you have a PDF of the Monster Manual or mourning keenan foes or whatever is simply print off the page with the monster on it and then at least at that time you would have the pages in front of these you do can refer to without having to flip back and forth if you oughta learn more about building encounters check out my encounter building playlist it is gonna be in this little video thingy that's gonna pop up over here if you're interested in joining a community of Dungeon Master's who each other out check out my discord server there's a link down in the description smash that thumbs up button if you found this video helpful click here to subscribe and over here you can watch some more fine videos and until next time let's play D&D

Channel: the DM Lair

Views: 95,536

Keywords: d&d, d&d 5e, dnd, dnd 5e, dnd 5th edition, dungeons and dragons, dungeons & dragons, rpg, roleplaying game, dungeon master tips, DM tips, dungeon master advice, DM advice, the dm lair, luke hart, how to select monsters for d\&d encounters, d\&d encounters, d\&d encounters tutorial, d\&d encounters 5e, d\&d building encounters, d\&d encounter building, d\&d 5e encounter building, d\&d monster selection, d\&d creature selection, d\&d NPC selection, d\&d combat

Id: spIMpd9hyL4

Length: 15min 46sec (946 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 05 2019