Tips for Running Combat in D&D 5e - DM Advice

the Baron scoffs is your proposal and says you wouldn't dare fight here in the war room I've had enough of this talk I draw my weapon face me you fiend roll for initiative [Music] greetings Dungeon Master's my name is Monty Martin and I'm Kelley McLaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes so on today's episode we're taking a look at running combat which is a very difficult part for new DM or any DM running their game at the table yeah Dungeon Master's running 5th edition as the dragons are really blessed because the rules for combat are quite streamlined nevertheless there's a lot of things to manage between initiative and hit points all the monsters statistics and all of them things that your players can do keeping on top of all that at the same time as trying to roleplay and make this really cinematic descriptive battle can be a really big challenge for new DMS so we've got a couple of tips and tricks for you so that you can run combat like a pro so let's take a look Sumati we're playing Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition and combat is about to break out how do we know when and where is the right time to start combat this is actually the most difficult question sometimes um it's not always as simple as saying roll for initiative which is a classic term that we all love to hear but yeah sometimes combat can just spring out of nowhere sometimes it's well thought out and planned but when to say roll for initiative there's sometimes a big challenge yeah and I like to always keep in the back of my mind whatever I'm going to have a combat encounter what are the stakes what's the dramatic question of the fight because this is going to help guide all the role-playing that's gonna occur over the course of that battle not every battle has to be fought to the death in fact with many humanoid enemies and intelligent foes they should be running away as soon as they start taking a little bit of damage because most people in the world are not as crazy as the player characters that was one of the most interesting interesting lessons that I had to learn as a DM was not to fight to the death all the time sometimes my villains needed to run away and it's actually improved the combat a lot it made it more interesting to have villains that might flee or might try to hide or would use things for their advantage in combat other than just standing there and fighting mm-hmm I think the most clear-cut thing to bear in mind with starting combat encounters is really take it from the beginning um as soon as that initiative his role kind of the world kind of flips over you get out the battle mats there's a lot of prep that you can do in advance for starting combat I like to print outs cards with the monster stats on them to have handy at the table so I'm not flipping through the monster manual and I like to be sure that I've kind of made a few notes of my own before the game session about where combat might happen so that I'm always prepared for those crazy situations like at the beginning of episode when the player decides to draw their swords in the midst of a negotiation now sometimes players can instigate combat and assume that they get an advantage by being the first ones into the room or something of that nature but that's not always the case well that's called surprise and that's the next thing that we're gonna talk about surprise can be one of the most difficult things to adjudicate as the dungeon master of when it should be awarded and when you should get and when it shouldn't be used a really common thing that both experienced and new dungeon masters do is you'll have this social interaction scene that breaks it into combat and one player immediately says I draw my sword or I throw a fireball and that action is resolved and then initiative is rolled but that's not always the right way to do it technically if you think of it like a draw if one person reaches for their weapon the other person still has a lot of time to react an initiative actually takes place of can act first and so it's not always about who moved first it's who's the fastest to move yeah I like to remind my players and as a rule of thumb any declaration of hostile intent a player saying I want to attack or cast a spell or a monster or non-player character deciding to you that is the moment in which you should roll the inish initiative and then the instigating action is resolved when that belligerent gets their turn the reason for this is is that in real life if you are talking to somebody if you're standing face to face with somebody it is actually surprisingly difficult for you to punch them in the face without them getting the opportunity to react unless you've done something to distract them in some way or you're just naturally faster than them what does this mean well you should be asking players to make deception or stealth checks if they're trying to reassure somebody so that they're caught off guard or use the initiative system because the dexterity score is added to the role which represents people's natural quick yeah reactions don't be generous with giving out stealth there should always be some sort of stealth or deception before surprise is just given out because it's a massive advantage yeah and it doesn't this means that you don't automatically get surprised if you yell out I attack surprise needs to be a little bit more interesting than that you need to sneak up on the enemy you need to be hidden you need to gain that advantage strategically not just by yelling I attack so when you're the DM at the table and your player yells I attack don't award them surprise let initiative handle how fast their attack hits versus that of the opposing people and I will say like to that note is if you choose to say I cast fireball and you resolve the fireball then roll for initiative what you've effectively done is given the player support like the advantage of surprise for that first fireball so if you let fireball out go off and then give your players surprise you've basically given them double surprise so don't be surprised when they completely demolish that combat encounter um generally speaking players are gonna have a really easy time in any battle that they get to act with surprise over their enemies with so be stingy with giving that out trapping initiative is one of the most important parts of combat because it's going to determine the order in which people take their turns what are some of the options that we have for tracking initiative well I have seen a ton of different ways that this is done over the years I've seen some dungeon masters will hang little little cards over top of their DM screen with the order of the attackers in there's a ton of accessories and products that help you track initiative with like magnets and stuff like that and in the past we used to use playing cards with the players names written on them and stacked up but I'm gonna tell you right now what we're gonna show you is the fastest way to get all the initiative results from your players and track it on a sheet and unfortunately it is dead simple to do this all you need is a blank sheet of paper and you might be thinking you're just gonna have me write a list and yes I am just going to have you read a list but the thing about initiative is that when you often go around you're usually going around the table being like Kelly what did you get for initiative monster 1 what did you get for initiative player 3 what did you get for initiative and so it gets difficult to like make a list in order you might see like Matt Mercer goes like who has an initiative between 20 and 21 and then writes those people down first um that's even slower than this right so the way that I do it is this Kelly what did you get for initiative I got six so then I know take my piece of paper and I'm gonna write six and Kelly towards the bottom of the piece of paper and then what's gonna happen is the next person who gets a 12 I just go a couple spaces up write 12 and write monster to write in there and the result is I get this list that I'm building out of order but I can just go around the table and write those in as I go it's really fast and the result is a handwritten list that goes from top to bottom that you can very easily keep track of and you'll never forget the order that people go in after that it's really just as simple as keeping it checkmark as you go down the list and making sure that you never miss anyone's turns we've done other things in the past like we used to take playing cards and write them in and make a stack of paper and then flip them off and that way we never missed someone's turn yeah and there's some cool magnetic accessories out there but this is so much faster and the great thing about it too is if you use a piece of graph graph paper like I do it's really easy to count out enough spaces between each of the turns as you make your list the other piece of advice that I like to head for DMS is I often pre roll initiative before the game session for all of my NPC's and I start writing down these sheets in advance so and sometimes I'll even just assume that they rolled a 10 or a 15 like I'll put give the boss monster a 15 plus their decks mod as their initiative just to make sure that they go earlier in the combat and don't get ganked and yeah yeah right and some people might be like you're just cheating as a DM and I'll be like well I can do that on the DM so another great way to track initiative is actually from acts and shield who I saw on Twitter and he sells his own initiative trackers that I believe is a poll with little pieces that you put on that have the character names on them just another yeah this rule this is similar to the the way of like having it over the screen and people like that because it lets the players see exactly where they are in the order yeah um I used to also have one of the players at the table track initiative for the entire thing I've since stopped doing that because I actually felt that as DM a being able to keep secrets in the initiative order and B being able to have the control over the pacing in combat was really important yeah the the next biggest task you're gonna have in combat is actually tracking monsters hitpoints and this is another area where things can really really slow down with both the addition and all the math I have two solutions for this the first one is a tip that Kelly started doing before I started doing it but I've adopted it and I love it and that is running standard damage or static damage yeah so having monsters deal the average damage listed in their monster manual entry as opposed to actually just rolling it every time will save you a ton of addition and subtraction mainly because monsters tend to roll way more dice than players do yeah and it can really slow down the game especially if you're me and you're really bad at doing calculations at the table so when my dragon does a breath attack rather than rolling all those dice I just take the average amount which is written in the monster stat block and just apply that and tell the players that that's how much damage they're taking if you want to have a boss monster you can actually or a critical hit just double that for a critical hit or a really dangerous creature could deal max damage with their attacks it's way faster another quick thing that you'll want to do is obviously track damage that's applied I make my players do this individually and I trust them some DMS don't and they like to track all the hit points for their players themselves that's your prerogative entirely but for tracking damage on monsters I recommend using an addition method rather than subtraction so rather than writing out the entire monsters hit point total and subtracting from that simply write down in a column each piece of damage that the monster has taken and keep a running total of basically the player's score and as soon as that number exceeds the monsters hit points they're dead easy addition for me at least is way faster than subtraction so I find that adding up the hit points is much easier I actually do it on the scrap piece of paper where I'm tracking initiative so there's even less for me to worry about when I'm preparing my that's ahead of time I have that scrap piece of paper and I write down the names of all the different monsters and all the different combats and I'll bring up the page up into those sections so when it gets for the combat I do just that I just write down all the damage that's being dealt yeah can go from that my final piece of advice with this is don't uh don't be afraid to minion eyes your monsters when the combat is dragging along if you've got a combat encounter where all that's left are ten zombies and the necromancer has been killed I just like to say the next hit on that zombie slaves it no matter what so when I we use this term minion which is borrowed from 4th edition D&D which referred to monsters that only ever have one hit point which is really really useful if you're running a swarm of creatures generally for myself if I'm running a combat with more than six enemies um you can bet that the vast majority of the monsters beyond those korsak's are gonna be minions of some kind that will just die in one hit so another big part of running your combat is a lot more than just the the battle that's going on with attacks this way and that there's also a lot of other effects that can happen around your battlefield yeah like uh a monk might come up and use stunning strike or someone might be heavily damaged and you want to mark that they're bloody to use a fourth edition term or you might want to not mark who's knocked prone or dying or even under the effect of the Warlocks hex or the the hunter's mark or who's charmed who's like any effect really yeah we have two examples here the first thing is one that I've been using for years years and years and these are just glass beads um you can get these at any craft store they come in a huge range of colors purple red blue green everything and you can get a huge pile of these at a craft store for like a dollar sometimes even less you can get a multipack for like $5 and really if you have like five of each color that's usually enough to track most things and then I just like to remember them really easily so I'll usually use things like purple for the warlocks and stuff like that red is always blood yeah um and whatever they need to be on the moment and sometimes you can just write that down on your notes and just say that purple marker means that's the center of the cloud kill effect or something like that um if you want to spend a little bit more money gale force nine who makes the spellbook cards have these really beautiful tokens that are marked with words like incapacitated and dying and all the different status conditions and effects and they even do some ones that let you write with a dry erase marker on top of them as well so those are about ten dollars for a pack of each of them I got three packs to make sure that I have multiples because you only get one of each status effect in those I've also seen people do really creative things with different colored bottle caps oh yeah and sometimes even just putting a slip of paper underneath the miniature is enough I've also found like printable online status cards that you can just like hand to the player that like has a status effect on them I I come from a wargaming school so I really like being able to like put the marker right beside the miniature on the on the field yeah I find that that's really handy um and of course if they're just getting knocked prone I always just took the mini right over but sometimes you need to differentiate between someone who's prone and someone who's just a corpse last but not least we have improvised actions which can be a whole number of things in combat so sometimes what's gonna happen is a player is going to want to do something that you're completely not expecting they might want to back flip over the dragon's head or kick a minecart down the rail to knock goblins off into a pit below and you need to figure out like how much damage to that deal what should the attack modifier be or what what actually can handle that yeah and it's important to just ask yourself how difficult of a task is this for the player character yeah and and how much you know damage should it deal what kind of skill checks are gonna be needed this is where the dungeon master screen is really really handy especially the DM screen reincarnated because inside the screen is a table that's on page 249 of the Dungeon Master's guys so it's tucked way back in there uh and it's uh it's called the damage by level and severity table and what it tells you is how much damage an improvised action should deal based on whether you think it's a setback a dangerous occurrence or a deadly one right so for instance if you wanted to improvise like a players like I want to throw my torch in the trolls face how much damage did that deal right let's say that's uh would you say that's a setback I would call that a set yeah right then what would and then there's dangerous and deadly yeah so what's an example of a dangerous like if I kick a flaming barrel into a goblin is that more than the torch I think so because that barrel might explode yeah I often will roll randomly to find out if it does because that would be the difference between a dangerous and a deadly one another great example of that might be of a dangerous thing is maybe there's a weak wall that the player that a strong character can knock over and spill over onto somebody right so that would be something that's dangerous something and that's where a cool way of using this table is maybe the player wants to stun whoever they're hitting and I like what I like to do is I'll set back one level for that so the damage on a improvised action that would stun somebody is a setback damage but it needs to have a dangerous threshold of improvisation and then a deadly one would be something like I'm trying to think here I can do a vat of acid I was gonna say pushing a statue on top of somebody a statue I would probably make that a dangerous one or I think that's going to depend on the side the statute that's also my good example of the deadly one would be the bell tower coming down or cutting the bridge out anything with like rubble like rubble and broken things are always really really good of course if you do have like siege weapons on your battlefield that would be another thing where you can use the tables in the Dungeon Master's guide Oh remember the time that you had a rogue that got knocked off a wall into a horse cart and the horse cart ran away and then crashed into a river yes I remember that would be like uh I gave you a couple saving throws for that all of them yeah and like if you want to have like a series of events you could actually say well if the player makes three saving throws it's just a setback but if they keep failing they're saving throws it gets more and more the damage piles on yes your drop kicked me off a wall onto a cart the cart ran into a flaming building and then into a river it was great I think you were like bleeding out after yeah yeah that was pretty bad so some great tips about running combat at your table one of my favorites is what I call having a plan B and that is that I will I will orchestrate my combats with the monsters that I have and then I'll always throw one or two extra monsters just behind my screen off to the side just in case the party gets a really good upper hand and there steamrolling through this encounter and I feel like I just want to give them an extra little punch or if I want to add a dramatic effect and they're halfway through the combat or like oh this is a breeze but they didn't know two more trolls we're hiding in the in the room off to the side just about to burst forward there's the element that the party actually doesn't know how screwed there yeah and they also they have no idea what is and is not in existence technically the entire dungeon is sure dingers dungeon yeah until the DM says it exists my tip for this is um I like to use a six-sided die and I'll usually roll a d6 and in that many rounds I'm going to change circumstances so I'll never run combat that just proceeds the same way unless the players have already created a massive plan like if your players have made a multi-phase way of like attacking a keep which is what happened at our last game which is a changing circumstance but I'll roll that six-sided die and that's when either the reinforcements or alerted or the bomb goes off or a fire starts like when in doubt you can always make a combat more dramatic by starting a fire or adding a an explosion that's one of the key rules that Monty taught me very early on when in doubt add an explosion it will just make that combat much more interesting and add a level of stakes and danger to the whole thing yeah another quick tip for adjudicating combat if you're doing a combat outside of a dungeon and you are playing with a map and miniatures I like to roll to d6 and multiply that by 10 and that's how many feet the combatants start part even I'm not if I haven't mapped the dungeon or if I'm coming up with an area randomly that's usually the point that the combat will definitely start and if the players like well wouldn't it we have noticed that a little bit sooner then I'll just roll another die and add another 20 30 feet and say okay well then you could be further apart and they're not aware of you now you can try to get surprised the other thing that I will say for players is players get a couple different colors of dice and roll your attack rolls and damage rules at the same time yes that's a helpful tip for any player is if you yeah yeah if you are gonna roll to attack and you do to t2 d6 damage roll it at the same time and you missed but if you had hit yeah that's kind of the depressing part you can see when you would have done a lot of damage yeah and then that's is also where it's handy to have 2d 20s of the same color so you can still roll with advantage and as well I like to have 2d 20s of the same color and then another set of xx of another color and that way if you're a player with extra attack and you have advantage you can roll everything all at once which is really handy for when you're you want to dig deep and brutalize that dragon so we hope that all these little bits of advice really help you run a smoother combat at your game table yeah and Dungeon Master's we would love to hear your tips and tricks of ways that you've found to make your combats run smoothly efficiently and keep down on all the extra math that you have to keep in your head so you can really focus on the role-playing action at the table so please tell us about that in the comments and for you players out there we have a video and all the actions you can take in combat right over here and if you're interested in the new dungeon master screen reincarnated we've got a full review of it showing you what's inside right 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: 595,874

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, running combat, combat, initiative, tracking, conditions, turn, attack, bonus attack, cast

Id: VKx1QG86wbo

Length: 25min 4sec (1504 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 15 2018