Dungeons and Dragons is built upon three pillars, Combat, Social Encounters, and Exploration. Now, these pillars don’t always evenly share the load, nor should they. I talk some about why and what the basics of these pillars are in Part 1. But now I am diving into each of the three pillars starting with what’s often the biggest pillar, Combat.

Combat is often just looked at as swinging your sword, shooting an arrow, a spell or two and you beat the bad guy. It’s a chance to roll dice and use most of your character sheet that’s focused towards combat. And that’s certainly some of what you’ll be doing. It does give you a chance to show off your character and what everything on the sheet says that they can do. But when it’s just that, even though it’s the generally the pillar supporting the most weight, it can be a fairly uninteresting pillar, unless you’re just there to be the best fighter that you can be.

Instead, combat should be part of the story, not a break from the story. Though, there may be times with random encounters that a combat doesn’t have a big story element to it, it should always be informing something going forward. Even a random encounter should be used to highlight how dangerous an area is, if there’s a chance of an encounter popping up. It should be a reminder to the players that the world isn’t safe, and while it might not progress the story, not getting in a long rest is going to stress out the players.

So, to build up Combat as a pillar you can do several things to keep it from just being the same thing over and over again, or from feeling like combat for combat’s sake.

1. Make the Combat Encounter Important To The Story
2. Use Alternate Combat Objectives
3. Use Smart/Engaging Monsters
4. Don’t Over Use Random Encounters

1 – Make The Combat Encounter Important To The Story
Already started talking about that a bit, but this is one of the biggest things that you can do to make combat interesting. I ran a one-shot recently where the players had to fight a group of bandits. Now, that wasn’t all that interesting in and of itself, they were just level 1 characters, the bandits didn’t put them in that much danger. However, they found, in the merchants wagon that had been stolen, some interesting documents. Combat was simple, but the documents are now something to lead them further into a story if we decide to continue that game. It’s nothing massive in terms of changing up the combat, but it makes the combat feel like there was a reason for it greater than just killing the bandits. And that bandit fight, since there was a new player to D&D, was mainly to give them a bit of all three pillars not because it was going to be super exciting, but because it was a combat. Only because there was a payoff at the end did it make it all that interesting.

2 – Use Alternate Combat Objectives
This one is one of the biggest, possibly as big as it being important to the story, things that you can do to improve your combat pillar. Not all combat has to be about killing everything. And most of the time you don’t want to kill everyone is because of some story reason. An example of this that you see in Video Games as well as RPG’s is the escort mission. Technically your goal is to get Ms. X from point A to point B without her dying. Now, you can do that by killing everyone you encounter, or you can do that by sneaking herself and your self around. That’s easier to avoid most of the combat in an RPG that way, but you still may have to fight to create a path for Ms. X to get through to complete the mission. Or it could be that someone might escape with something you want if you don’t get through their goons in a certain number of rounds. Or you may need to kill the High Priestess in a certain number of rounds before she can complete the ritual and summon a monster, end the world, whatever it might be. While the players are still using their combat skills throughout, it is going to feel like it’s different than just a hack and slash until everyone is dead.

3 – Use Smart/Engaging Monsters
You can always just do combat as mob of goblins attacking and then mob of bandits rushing in and attacking, and then mob of hobgoblins and so on as the players go up in levels, but that’s going to cause the combats to feel similar. It is kind of a blank canvas fight where you have two sides meeting in an arena or an open field, rushing at each other, fighting, and then one side wins when the other is dead. But goblins, bandits, and hobgoblins should all be smarter than that. In fact, even animals will often attack more intelligently than that. If they are facing off against an Owlbear and it takes down one of the PC’s (player characters), that Owlbear is probably going to try and take that body somewhere safe so it can eat it, not attack the players. So allow the monsters to do smart and interesting things, like run away. Now, maybe the players will shoot the fleeing goblins in the back and none will make it away, but what happens in your story if the goblin escapes? Do they come back with more goblins, do they try and set a trap after a straight forward assault doesn’t work, do they move on somewhere else and now the players are responsible for goblin infestation somewhere else? You can do a lot of interesting things, not just in combat, but after combat with smart combatants. Even in combat, the PC’s are in a bar fight, have whom ever they are fighting hide behind tables after flipping them over, swing from the chandelier (there’s always a chandelier), take a drink in the middle of combat or spit alcohol into a PC’s face. Basically no intelligent combatant is going to just rush straight in to their demise, so don’t run them like that, make the players have to get creative in their combat to beat them.

4 – Don’t Over Use Random Encounters
I already talked about this some, but random encounters generally have more of that animal stalking you while you sleep, rushes in for a kill, and then gets slaughtered, or dragon shows up randomly now PC’s need to run away or turn into ash. However, there are reasons to use them, and that’s because you want to show off what the players might be coming up against on the mission that they’re on currently. Or that the players might need to run or be worried about going through a certain area. I, in the Dungeons and Flagons campaign, used a few giant random encounters, they were meant less as combat but to show the players that they were taking a very dangerous route, shorter but more dangerous, to get to where they wanted to go. But if you’re making the players set-up traps, guards, and anything else they can do to protect themselves each night and it’s more about survival of the night than progressing the story, that might be too many random encounters, unless they are very meaningful.

So, I said I was going to give some examples to steal. Things you can do in your campaign, or interesting combats that you can possibly work in. And I’ll admit it, combat isn’t my specialty so these are going to be a little bit vague. That’s also so you can adapt it to your own game as well.

Combat Encounter 1 – Death of a Salesman

Set-up: The shop owner the players always go to has had something important stolen from his shop, in fact something that was very important to an important client that they’d ordered in especially for that client, the PC’s need to get it back. If not the client will have the shop owner killed.

Combat:
I’d set this in a thieve’s guild or some sort of organized crime set-up, give the players a house to explore and kill the bad guys in the rooms. But since the shop owners life is on the line, they can’t just kick the door down. This is a sneak from room to room and kill as quickly and quietly as possible so that the MacGuffin isn’t moved somewhere else.

This is a chance to do a longer combat where the players never really drop out of combat because it’s such a contained space. They might never be fighting more than two or three thieves or guards or whomever at the same time, but it would ratchet up the stress. Also, with there being a MacGuffin for them to get at the end, there is also an alternate objective. And they are fighting on the mob or thieve’s guild’s home turf, so their combatants would be smart in what they do.

Outcome: Either they get the MacGuffin or they don’t and the shop owner dies or is seriously injured. I’d also use this moment to let them find, no matter what, some information that helps them on their main quest.

Combat Encounter 2 – The Witches Circle

Set-up: There is a coven of witches (hags) who the players need to deal with, mainly because they’ve kidnapped someone for a sacrifice or an animal. This works well for a one shot, stop this thing or something bad happens.

Combat:
I’m throwing undead in here, I think that the witches have raised zombies or skeletons and the players need to fight through those to get to the circle of witches to stop the spell that they are trying to cast.

The witches themselves are in a circle, and killing a witch just makes the circle smaller and the spell have less of a chance of going off. But the main goal for the players is to stop the spell and rescue the person, let’s say not animal in this situation. So the players are going to need to fight through the undead, kill some witches, and all of this should be timed. Give them a certain number of rounds, and after that the spell happens.

Outcome: Either the players save the person, or if they don’t and they haven’t killed any witches, the spell goes off without a hitch. But for each witch from the circle that they’ve killed, say there are ten to start, there is a chance, and an increasing chance that the spell doesn’t go off. So I’d set the target number as rolling at or under a 20 to start, every witch that’s killed, subtract 2, and if all are killed, that means you’d be rolling to get under a zero, but if there are five of the ten left, that means if the witches roll over a 10, the spell fails, though the person still dies.

Combat Encounter 3 – The Beasts

Set-up: Players are out exploring on their way to some mission and they start to notice a presence stalking them. But not just one presence and not just once, several over several times.

Combat: This is an animal ambush, I’m thinking use something like Dire Wolves if that’s an appropriate level for your PC’s, and make them a little bit smarter. Have the wolves run in and out of the shadows and of the woods biting at players, make it so that most of the players clear shots at the wolves are going to be reaction attacks, so pretty mundane attacks. And have the Dire Wolves, beasts, focus on the smallest character first. Not the weakest, it might be that you have a gnome fighter so they can handle it better, but whatever looks like the smallest prey to the beasts, once the beasts have taken their prey down, the smallest prey, they’re going to try and leave with it.

Outcome: Players defeat the beasts who are clearly hungry or the players lose one PC to the wolves.

You can see how in none of these are the players just fighting for the life of their party. Yes, in the first encounter, they might very well all die, but that’s not the only losing condition. For both the Death of a Salesman and Witches Circle, the bad outcome isn’t death of the player characters, it’s death of someone else. In the last one, it’s about losing one player character. So even though they’ll be fighting, we have all sorts of different styles of whom their fighting, the end goal of the fights, and how they should go about fighting.

And that’s what good combat can really be in a game, instead of just hacking and slashing. Now, I don’t think that hacking and slashing is always a bad idea, but it can be lacking and it more so can get old. So be creative as the DM and create interesting combat encounters for the story that aren’t always just about killing everything.

What are some of the best combat encounters you’ve taken part in, either as a player or a DM?

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