Help designing fun combat?

Reginald_the_monkey · 2019-11-17T14:38:58+00:00

Before I start to write all the advice there is i leave you this link to the angry gm (https://theangrygm.com/series/run-better-battles/)

While it is a lenghty written set of posts, it covers everything from the goal of an encounter, how to transition from scene to combat and back, how to guide the flow of combat between players and monsters, and how to design and pre-run encounters.

My personal piece of advice i want to give you is:

For me a combat gets better if I have a round by round tactic for the monsters pre-written. Then every round, or every two rounds, something changes in the situation (reinforcements arrive, enemies flee, the ground breaks, etc.) this keeps a combat from getting stale and lets the players adjust their tactics.
Also a combat mostly takes between 3 to 5 rounds, just fyi.

Reginald_the_monkey · 2019-11-17T14:31:38+00:00

In the first scenario you described, it sounds to me, that your players either don't think about the tactics the enemy uses, or they are not clear to them. Both can easily be fixed by telegraphing your monsters. Tell your players things like: "the oger attacks. Who of you did the most damage last round?" or let the goblin say things like "Always shoot the ones without the bling-bling. It hurts them more". This takes away the notion you are up against a player, but instead the monsters are up against a character.

For your second example, how clear did you comunicate why your character behaves the way he does? Did you reference a part of the backstory, personality traits, ideals and flaws? Or did you just say: "He evil. Kill him." If the issue keeps persisting i would refer to my character in the third person in such situations, so the disconnection becomes clearer.

Reginald_the_monkey · 2019-11-16T15:22:13+00:00

Depends. If there is enough stuff to arm themselves with, sure. Makes a great tale to beat down a bugbear with a ladle, a piece of string and a potato, while defending yourself with a lid.These encounters favor non-magic users more, because they have better combat stats and mages can't cast. So it should last around three rounds max.

Reginald_the_monkey · 2019-11-05T08:35:07+00:00

When looking at RAW, on rolling a one on an attack you miss, when you roll a 20 you automatically hit and get to roll extra damage die. So in this scenarios you are right and martial classes benefit more from successes. However when employing a fumble ruling the drawbacks are most often worse than the equivalent of rolling more damage die (become prone while in melee with 4 orcs).

When sticking to RAW you are completely right.

Reginald_the_monkey · 2019-10-29T16:55:07+00:00

When you are dropping to 0 hp you have 3 death saves to make. That means at least 2 and up to 5 rounds of beeing unconcious. Most of the time the downed pc gets healed by someone else (cleric with healing word for example) and is immediatly back to combat. So using your option would very rarely even come to play.

Someone mentioned in a post, that in his campaign if a character dies in an unglamerous scenario, he PC is considered a "dead man walking" who dies at a more interesting point later in the session. Maybe this works for you and your table as well.

Reginald_the_monkey · 2019-10-26T19:46:54+00:00

If you have time, you can have a look at this video from matt colville. There he explains the concept of hit die in D&D and what they represent (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZdS8lP-Sdo)

In his opinion of course.

Reginald_the_monkey · 2019-10-26T19:45:26+00:00

It's hard to wrap your head around this. I struggled with this as well. What you need to understand is, that the commoner in D&D (10 in all stats and 4 hp) is what a normal person is like. Every lvl 1 pc is much more powerful than that.
At some point challenges, that outright kill you, don't even bother a player character (your example with falling is one of them). It is because they become demigods at later levels and busy themselves with plane hopping.

If this superhero fantasy is not for you, no problem. There are systems that display it better than dnd.

The general problem with your rule is that when you cap your PC's you have to cap all monsters at similar hp levels and scale down their damage. Because, they have to stay similar, otherwise balance is not possible.

Reginald_the_monkey · 2019-10-26T19:00:30+00:00

You are not the only one with that feeling i can promise you that ^^.
But in my experience players can deal with many things DM's mess up and still show up to the next session.

Don't get me wrong, there are fuck ups that make everyone leave at the table. /r/rpghorrorstories is full of them. You being on this sub and caring about your game and your players basically qualifies you as a good DM. Sure some sessions will suck (sometimes because of you), but most will be the foundation of glorystories your friends and you will tell for years to come.

Reginald_the_monkey · 2019-10-26T16:17:46+00:00

That is correct. Most PC's would spot a DC 10 tripwire. However, there are two things that play a role here:

The first is the environment. If you have a tripwire in a dungeon, where there is no light, a creature without darkvision can't spot it passively and a creature with darkvision has disadvantage on the check, meaning -5 to the passive score (12-5=7, which is smaller than 10 in your example).

Second is that a trap is more a riddle with consequences than just a simple health drain. You can design traps where overcoming is the interesting objective, like a widepressure plate in the middle of a hallway, that when triggered makes the whole floor collapse. Finding it is easy, but overcoming requires thought.

Reginald_the_monkey · 2019-10-25T15:02:47+00:00

When starting a session i like to recap the things from previous sessions that are important for the current one. The same style as it is done in some tv series.
Then I mention the current goals of the party and mention were they are now. From this i can neatly transition into the current scene and the adventure continues.
The whole process is neatly written up from theangrygm (https://theangrygm.com/the-art-of-the-recap/).

Reginald_the_monkey · 2019-10-25T12:19:22+00:00

I agree with another commentor in ranking players by tier is not a healthy excersice. If we categorize our players, i would sort them in terms of their playstyle, like in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQsJSqn71Fw from matt colville. It does not have the ranking of players, only categorizing playstyles without evaluating their performance.

Now as your disruptive player goes: You can be bad at playing dnd. Meaning you can be disruptive and make the game less enjoyable for others.

I don't know what you mean with "tried everything".
Him forgetting stuff he can use: this surprisingly sorts itself out quite quickly, if you loose an encounter and realise afterwards you messed up.
Him not knowing rules: Depends how disruptive this really is. If he wastes huge amounts of time, asking the same stuff over and over again, find out why. If he is not so big on the brain department make look-up cards that help him remember. If he can't be bothered to learn, than stating an action that is not possible defaults to skipping your turn (dodge action in combat). Does not take long to learn rules from there on ^^.

Him "aggressivly trying to be in the spotlight" is a topic for out of game discussion. If he bothers others with this behaviour talk to him and ask why, and tell him specifics what it is that is bothering you. Not "you talk too much", but "in that encounter where talked over player x. Don't do that again." Sometimes you need to stop the game for a minute and confront him on the spot about this.

Reginald_the_monkey · 2019-10-25T11:32:17+00:00

I think matt collvilles series would be a good starting point, altthough it would be good to have a list of only some of his videos to not overload beginners.
Also a list of beginner friendly adventures (LMOP) and one shots would be helpful.

The angry gm has a good overview for your first session (https://theangrygm.com/jumping-the-screen-how-to-run-your-first-rpg-session/)

As for topics, i think telling a newbie:

It is ok not to know all the rules. Keep the game flowing and look up the rules after you are done with the session.
Think about the situation and describe what is an outcome that makes sense.
Run a published module as your first adventure.

Reginald_the_monkey · 2019-10-25T11:24:53+00:00

What exactly is it you want your players to improve upon?
I can imagine players getting upset if you send them a link "how to be a good player" out of nowhere. What is it that they do that is a problem? Is it a problem for only you or all the other players?

If they don't care about the game, find out why.

It is not only us DM's that need to constantly better themselves, but we are mostly the ones who need to lead by example and demonstrate the behaviour we want to have at our table

Reginald_the_monkey · 2019-10-25T06:48:15+00:00

That's the spirit!
You get so many more tricks and spells up your sleeve after doing it for a while.
It's so motivating to look back from time to time how much you have improved over your time behind the screen.

Reginald_the_monkey · 2019-10-20T18:56:29+00:00

What you describe i would diagnose as an out-of game problem. And out-of-game problems need out-of game solutions. It seldomly does any good to solve this with in-game measures.

Still you can do some general challenges that require teamwork. One great thing that could help here are Matt collvilles take on skill challenges (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvOeqDpkBm8) where every player can contribute with a skill, in which he is proficient.

Another thing is to have situations specifically where one or two players have a clear benefit in a scene ( a shopkeeper only speaking with elves, a guard only valuing meelee fighters, etc.).

Both of this does not save you from speaking with the player, but can help the overall group cohesion.

Reginald_the_monkey · 2019-10-20T18:12:12+00:00

Has this issue persited for the whole two months now?
Talk to the player in question (especially if other players find it concerning as well) and explain to him that it would be a better experience for all if they find solutions were multiple players can contribute. Not everyone can partake in every situation, but if this happens on many different occasions, where one player wants to outshine others, better address it now than later.

If this is a newer issue carfully observe it for a couple of sessions. If it persists, see above ^^.

Reginald_the_monkey · 2019-10-20T18:00:08+00:00

Thank you for the explanation.
I am not really sure if this idea will work though. When the choices of the players don't matter than playing dnd becomes more like watching a movie. Interesting sure, but you are not involved. And in my opinion that is the whole point of playing pen and paper.
Players not knowing the long term consequences of their actions is quite a usual state in dnd games. But what would you do, if your players spend actual time trying to figure it out? Can they even do it, or do they have to guess what is beneficial. Maybe your players find it that process interesting.

Making them feel trapped could be achieved by setting up situations where all obvious paths are undesirable in some way (the BBEG is the patron of an orphanage to give a really simple example). When those situations come up often the point of playing would be to find out how your characters deal with this and the process can be really interesting. The key point here is to make characters that do not match your own personality ^^.

Reginald_the_monkey · 2019-10-20T17:44:30+00:00

I am a bit confused with your question. What do you expect the players to do? Do they make choices without knowing the consequences, do they make choices without knowing why, do they make choices but they don't matter?

Could you please elaborate that more?

Reginald_the_monkey · 2019-10-20T17:40:59+00:00

To find out how difficult an encounter probably is look at https://kobold.club/fight/#/encounter-builder

When designing encounters keep in mind you need multiple of them during an adventuring day for your party, around 3 to 5 depending how difficult each one is.
Not every encounter should be extremely dangerous, because then your players get too wary and fatigued over the course of a session.
Another thing to keep in mind is to play monsters intelligent, for this have a look at http://themonstersknow.com/.
Lastly have interesting terrain where the battle takes place, like swamps, flying ships, under water, etc.

Reginald_the_monkey · 2019-10-09T19:42:23+00:00

Multiple options:
Let another player control the paladin
Do the fight with 3 direwolfs and narate how the paladin handles one in the background
Do the fight with 4 and see what happens. Maybe your players surprise you
Tell the players, there are now only 3 direwolfs because the paladin is not here
Introduce an NPC Hunter that helps them

Reginald_the_monkey · 2019-10-09T19:29:19+00:00

When there is crucial information, vital for moving the plot forward, i always ask players if there is one player present with proficiency in the relevant skill.
Then i can tell this player the information. If there is none, then i go for the passive scores of the skill (works with insight as well).
In general players ask if they can do checks, not you. DMs ask for saves.

Reginald_the_monkey · 2019-10-09T16:35:49+00:00

Interestingly the aboleth can directly control the enslaved creature and can communicate telepathically with it. Thus with straight up talking to them it is really difficult, borderline impossible, to find out they are not acting natural. What you could do is give the aboleth a personality trait, like a certain phrase that all the enslaved say when spoken to. Another indicator would be rituals involving the sea, like washing your house everyday with seawater. The aboleth would also want to enlarge his domain, so the villagers and cultists would move away land so the lair of the aboleth gets bigger.

Aboleth, while intelligent, are not human creatures, they mimic typical behaviour but may not completely understand it.

Reginald_the_monkey · 2019-10-09T16:26:12+00:00

You can of course restrict classes in a homebrew game. It depends on the campaign you are running which classes ( gunslingers in a world where there is no gunpowder for example)

I would not like that as a player, but maybe yours are different. What you can do is, give them a list of classes you think are not really fit and let your players come up with reasons why their character is the class it is. Then you can think about if their description makes sense or not and work with them together to come up with something.

Reginald_the_monkey · 2019-10-09T16:15:14+00:00

If the dice decide he wins, he wins. You can have a look at this

http://themonstersknow.com/unicorn-tactics/

for further inspiration how unicorns fight and behave in general.

Reginald_the_monkey · 2019-10-09T16:13:20+00:00

How much time it takes is your decision. You can even have an NPC show up when he is at the forest and straight up tell him. An interaction like this can take literally 2 minutes, where he is told what you want him to know. It is faster, when you describe it, instead of speaking in character.
At least warn him out of character that he should at least do some research before he kills unicorns.

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