Designing encounters, my final boss

This week, I'm here to ask for your advice as a game master.

One of the things I find most difficult as a DM is managing combat, and I feel like I still have a lot to learn.

I'll tell you more about my struggles below.

But first, I'd like to remind you that my offer on my website is still available if you'd like to get a print of the Mighty Nein or Curse of Strahd with a free dice.

Remember, you have until 23:59 on 13rd February! When you place your order, you must write the password I KNOW THE SECRETS OF THE GRIMOIRE

Out of my comfort zone

This week, I set myself a personal challenge with my D&D game, which was to try to make combat more interesting.

My group is really into the story and role-playing their characters, so those are always aspects that I try to take care of and that I think I'm good at.

But combat... oh, combat.

Sometimes I feel like the enemies in the campaign are very repetitive and too gratuitous in general (I know the vampire spawn's stats by heart).

This week, we were nearing the end of a mini-arc, and I didn't see the group getting very excited about it, and to be honest... neither was I.

According to the manual, they had to face the same enemies as in previous sessions, only this one was meaner, bigger, and had more HP.

I wasn't thrilled about it, to be honest.

So I turned to my best ally in these cases... Reddit!

My secret weapons

When I'm short on ideas and not playing in my comfort zone (as is the case with designing combat), I look to see what other people in my situation have done.

I came across a campaign guide that had incorporated some of the things I usually love in combat for this particular confrontation.

-Countdown: stopping a ritual, escaping from a catastrophic area... giving the characters a sense of urgency is great when you want to avoid analysis paralysis.

-Alternative objectives: saving an NPC, recovering an object... there are many ways to incorporate this, but it greatly alters the way players interact with the setting and enemies.

-Setting elements: sometimes this is hard to think about when looking at the flat combat grid. But elements of the environment can be a great ally for you and the characters, adding a more strategic sense to combat.

With all this, we went from having a combat in which the goal was to hit many enemies without much else of interest to having a confrontation in which they had to overcome terrain obstacles, think strategically, and take big risks to reap great rewards.

A minor inconvenience

The truth is that the game was great, but we ran into a problem.

The effects. The areas. The calculations.

In this confrontation, whether it was because of the terrain or the spells, there were so many cubes, cones, and spheres of effects that in the end we ended up with our heads in a mess.

And to be honest, the combat was a little less fluid than I would have liked with so many elements.

That's why I'm thinking about how to fix it for future games.

My initial idea is to buy colored acetate sheets and cut them into different sizes so we can use them as needed. Right now, we can draw on our grid, but it gets a little tedious when there are more than five active effects in a round that can also be moved.

But since I really like getting ideas from the community, I'd like to know what ideas you use to make your battles more fluid

With all this and more in mind, I'm going to keep making screens and polishing dice, because they're not going to do it themselves (unfortunately).

Successfull quests and better rolls!

🦉Irene the Wizard

🦃Saul the Bard