What do I mean by this? Well, a warrior tribe might fight to the death but an owlbear might only fight until it’s gotten some food or until it knows it’s been out numbered. What is the motivation of your monsters?

Fight Or Flight

When things go poorly for a monster, what are they going to do? I gave two examples above, but think about it before you get into combat. Every monster will have a motivation for what they are doing. A group of bandits might want to intimidate and rob, a mama dragon will want to protect her young, a zombie wants to eat your brains.

So when you plan a session, and combats, think about what they want. Will a bandit surrender if the rest of their party is killed. Will they run away? Or maybe a bandit leaves the party for dead and steals their stuff if they beat them. What makes sense for your story and for the monster you bring into battle?

On the flip side, a monster that is dumber, like an owlbear, what do they do? Most wild animals don’t want to fight. They will run if put in a situation that is dangerous to them, or until provoked. But back them into a corner and they fight. Maybe the owlbear spots your gnome and is hungry, do they continue to fight the party if they knock over the gnome, or do they pick up the gnome and run? I would say that the owlbear probably plans to run and separate the gnome from the party.

How Long A Fight?

Like I talk about above, this is another question to ask when planning. How long will something fight. Let’s go back to that mama dragon protecting her young. She won’t stop fighting. On the flip side, bandits will most certainly run if things go south.

This becomes an assessment of how long a creature will fight. Think about it before the session but also during the combat. An owlbear won’t fight for three rounds and run. If it is getting hurt, it’ll run. A bandit won’t fight until it’s at 1 hit point. If half the bandits die, the other half will run. So it’s less about the timing of how many rounds of combat versus what is happening in combat that makes that determinations.

And like I said with that mama dragon, she won’t ever run. A zombie, they won’t run. But the big bad of your campaign, they might run before combat even starts. A smart bad guy tries to avoid getting killed. And if they have a plan in place they want to enact, why wouldn’t they run immediately. Now, the players might not be a threat. In that case, the BBEG would not run but would they fight?

Target Priority

Finally, I want to talk about target priority. I think this is where DM’s, including myself, trip up often. We like to go after the tank or spellcaster, but I don’t think that is how it should always go. Some monster target based on other things.

I want to go to my game. The last session, you can read about it here, I put an arcane stalker in the parties way. The arcane stalker prioritized spellcasters. Why, because that is the arcane stalkers job. They kill spellcasters for the Winter Court of the Fey. And with a teleport ability, they didn’t care so much about the fighter. It made sense for them to ignore the tank to get the casters.

On the flip side, an owlbear, they will go after who they think is the biggest threat. And an owlbear threat isn’t going to be how humans maybe perceive a threat. The larger the character, the bigger the threat. Or, on the flip side, if the owlbear just wants to grab a snack and get out, they might go for the smallest. Either way they do not prioritize based on abilities, but on a simpler system of size.

Going back to our bandit example. Think about the composition of the party and of the bandits. If the bandits have a spellcaster or ranged fighters of their own. They might send two or three members to engage the tank. Then the ranged attackers will go after the healer or a spellcaster. Basically trying to keep the tank occupied so they can’t get to their own weaker members. Target priority is really something fun you can play with in Dungeons and Dragons.

How Do You Handle This In Your Games?

I want to know what you do in your games. Leave a comment below. Or let me know over on Twitter or Facebook, information down below.

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The Session

Things don’t go like they hope during the night. After dealing with two parties of goblins they were hoping that it would be an uneventful rest, but they still had Fukuro Kuma, the owlbear that the goblins had previously used and who Bokken had since adopted. And the goblins wanted it back. Using the distraction of a siren the goblin boss and two goblins sneak up on the camp and try and take down Bokken. It doesn’t work, but they do manage to get Fukuo Kuma knocked out again.

The battle doesn’t go well for the goblins. Barrai, near death yet again, thunderwaves the three goblins who were creating the ruckus sending them flying through the air and to their deaths as they wonder why they had done this in the first place. Thrain casts darkness on the Goblin Boss’s armor and with only Thrain really able to see through that darkness, he just slowly Eldritch Blasts him while Bokken and the Goblin Boss swing wildly at each other in the dark and generally missing.

Once that battle is over, the rest of the night is quite restful. At the morning they continue to the ford. On the way they cross paths with a group of four gnomes who said they had camped at the ford that past night. They had seen a trunk go floating by and one of them who had been quite drunk that night and was suffering for it this morning, claimed to have heard the trunk singing something about a “pirates life”. It had continued to float down the river towards the waterfall they said.

The group rushes to the waterfall and they see the trunk, battered and broken, but still floating, not too far down the river. They surmise that it had gotten stuck on some rocks for a little bit and was now drifting further. Since there was a cliff to climb down, Bokken uses a rope to let Barrai and Thrain down while he watches Fukuro Kuma, the donkey, and the wagon.

Sure enough, they find Dorin in the trunk. He has thrown up in a corner of it from his bumpy ride, and now firmly believes that he is a feared pirate captain. But his old ship no longer meets his needs or sanitary requirements. So he gives the trunk a proper sendoff pushing it into the river, borrowing Barrai’s crossbow, and shooting a flaming rag into the side and watching it burn as it floats down the river.

They head back up the cliff with Barrai grabbing Dorin as he starts to fall while climbing the cliff. At the top Dorin knights Barrai his first mate and claims the cart as his new ship in his quest to become the terror of the seven seas. They had over to the ford and it isn’t too bad, they are making a plan when Dorin, still standing in the cart like a captain of a ship decides to send it ahead into the water with the donkey still attached to it. Bokken is able to stop it as the donkey isn’t too keen on swimming while attached to a cart. At that point in time they decide to go to the ferry. There is also a mutiny as Dorin is slapped in the manacles that Barrai has.

They make it to the ferry with no problem and get passage around 5 in the evening. It is an uneventful trip, through Dorin tries to get Barrai to do another mutiny so that he can get the ferry as his new ship to sale the seas in. Barrai instead uses words of terror and causes Dorin to become deathly afraid of krakens that might be living in the water. So much so that he’s afraid to drink his own water. That helps them get across safely. Dorin also decides that the sea has too many pirates, so he’s going to become a land pirate.

The group pushes on further until they find a spot on the road that they think is a camping spot, it turns out to be a scenic overlook. But it doesn’t have many entrances and they decide it’s probably a pretty solid spot to camp anyways. They settle in for the night and Bokken sends Fukuro Kuma off to hunt for their dinner. They bring back a deer which Dorin wants to eat the heart of because he thinks it’ll give him powers if he eats the heart of a deer that he killed, which he didn’t. Then they settle in for a peaceful night.

Behind the DM’s Screen

We were down Kip again this week. The whole siren thing at the end of last session was actually a way for me to bring Kip back in if the player could have made it. Kip previously has made the siren be attached to Bokken. So the thought had been that the players would recognize it. Instead, it worked nicely as a goblin distraction. Since I didn’t ever say it was Kip, I had the possibility to change it up.

The goblin battle was interesting. Thrain used darkness to very good affect and definitely changed the dynamic of what happened. I like a good use of a spell like that.

And a lot of the Dorin stuff was made up on the fly. I decided that I wanted to make it obvious that Dorin was in the trunk. I think had he been looking out of the trunk, those who saw him would be likely to try and rescue him. But having a drunk gnome claim to hear singing, that worked. The pirate song made sense and then I just decided to run with it. It turned out to be really goofy and now Dorin is scared of dragons, dragonborn, and kraken.

What is something weird in a campaign you’ve played in that you have just run with?

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The Session

It was finally time to bring Dorin back to his home. After a few days of carrying him around with them everywhere that they went, and trunk becoming more and more disgusting, they all decided to take him back. They rented a wagon for the trunk and hooked it up to Thrain’s donkey. Assendial, however, had questions to be answered and they decided to leave Kip, Karl, and Kraig behind, maybe to catch up with them later.

The travel started out pretty uneventfully as the group was just heading towards river that they’d have to cross. It was early in the year and the snows had just melted from the mountains. Their choice was to add a day or so to their journey in able to find a ferry to take them across the river instead of ford it. They figure if the water levels don’t look too bad, they can always follow the shorter route on the way back.

They reach a glade near a small brook where they decide to stop for the night. Barrai cleans out the clothes that Dorin had packed and cast mending on them, Bokken cleaned out the trunk down stream and Dorin was rinsing himself off. An owlbear with a rider on it charges out of the thicket and grabs at Thrain with it’s beak. A fierce battle ensues as Barrai tries to keep Thrain up, and Bokken charges in to stop the fight. Meanwhile Dorin rushes for his trunk and flips into it and starts floating down stream. The donkey spooks and runs back towards the town. Barrai heals Thrain and heals the owlbear which Bokken decides to keep as a pet, naming it Fukuro Kuma.

It takes them a while to realize where Dorin has gotten off to and knowing that it’s going to take some effort and that the ford is in the direction that Dorin will drift, they decide to go after the donkey. They take the owlbear with them, and they find the donkey a little ways down the road in a meadow where it’s headed more directly towards the town, but having pulled a wagon all day it has stopped to eat. As they get to it another group of goblins get there as well.

The party again faces off against goblins. This time Bokken and Barrai take the brunt of the attacks, which works out fairly well, though Barrai starts to get low on hit points. The two of them, mainly, manage to slash through everything and eventually, the time being around 10 PM decide to take their cart, donkey, and owlbear back to the road. Bokken keeps watch since he can just go into sentry mode, but comes out of it when he hears a siren off in the distance. He wakes the others but they aren’t sure if it’s a dragon siren off in the stance or maybe it’s the sire Kip has used before, but they decide to go back to sleep.

Behind the DM’s Screen

Honestly, not much for this time. I’m experimenting with something I normally don’t do. Since we’re not in the town, it’s less about social encounters and more about possible combat. So I wanted to see what stringing together a number of combats might be like. It’s interesting to do that and to see how quickly players spend resources.

How do you string combats together? Do you have a lot of little ones, a few medium ones, a little and a big one per day? Or do you do less combat encounters and more social encounters?

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The criminal background is one that in a game where you want to be the heroes, needs to be worked with carefully. There’s a thin line between being a hero and being a villain. In the Curse of Strahd game that I’m running, they were in a shop, the rogue character (don’t even think with criminal background) steals something, gets caught because they rolled a bad stealth check. Happened again when the rogue tried to flirt their way into getting a free drink from the married bartender who’s wife then promptly kicked that character out again.

When thinking about playing someone whose background is criminal, think about how you can play into the trope in some ways, but also it might be more interesting to play against type. In the case of the rogue in Curse of Strahd, hopefully she’ll start playing against type so that her character then realizes that they kind of suck as a criminal and reform their ways. Think about a criminal as someone who has come from a past of crime and is now an adventurer. What changed for them, are they still indebted to anyone, are they still an active criminal? There are a lot of ways that you can go beyond, I just like the looks of shiny things so I take them.

Now, I’ve just given the example of the thief criminal, but that might not be your thing. Maybe you don’t ever steal anything, but you’ve been a smuggler for a little while and you get caught up having to rescue a princess from a man in a black suit who then turns out to be her father. I might have heard that one from somewhere else. You can also a be a blackmailer or an enforcer for the local thieves guild. These probably set-up more interesting stories a lot of the time than the standard burglar who steals rings off of rich women in town because the rings are shiny.

I love nature and I knew that when I grew up, I wanted to protect nature. However, that wasn’t making a lot of money for me. People don’t pay you money when you save the rabbit caught in a snare from certain death, and they think that you’re driving off the goblins in the woods so that they are safe (still won’t pay you), not so that there are fewer creatures trying to kill the deer. One day, there was a band of brigands who came into the woods. They injured an owlbear and placed it into a cage. I could see it was gravely wounded and I went to release it and help it. I’m not that sneaky, however, and they caught me, but not until I had bandaged up the owlbears wound.  They kept  me around to keep the owlbear alive for the collector whom they had captured it for. They saw the work I had done and offered me a choice, keep helping them smuggle animals and keep them alive or they’d kill me. I knew that they wouldn’t stop smuggling animals if I was dead, so I agreed to help. It wasn’t until they got in over their head fighting a roc that I was able to make my escape, and that was a decade later. Now I’m going to get revenge on that collector and release his collection back into the wild where they belong, but I need some help doing that.

Class: Druid
Alignment: Neutral Good

It’s a silly life, but it pays way better than you’d think. That’s what I told my friends when they wondered how I lived so well, while I was a hairdresser. I have the gift of gab, and the court ladies love to have their friends over and talk, and I talk with them, but mainly I listen and I remember. I’m just the hairdresser, why would they be worried about little old me. You wouldn’t believe the gossip and rumors and scandals that you hear about as a hairdresser, but  I’ve found that it’s good to believe and remember them. When you know something really juicy, you can get a lot of money. The wife whose husbands position will be ruined if the king found out that he was fixing horse races, including the one at the royal tournament. They won good money from that, and I got good money from them. They tell you to quit when you’re ahead, but this seemed like the perfect con. An anonymous source threatened to ruin them, they paid that anonymous source money, and I kept cutting their hair. Then, whoops, my gift of gab got me in trouble with a duchess, accidentally spilled a detail that she really didn’t need to know. Now, it’s off with my head, if they can catch me.

Class: Bard
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral/Evil
This maybe should be an alignment that’s chaotic evil. It’s a little bit Loki like in just being someone who is out for a good time and doesn’t really care about others. However, if you run this as the characters only scam/criminal activity and they are doing it because it fell into their laps, it could be chaotic neutral.

I’m the wheel man. When there’s something shady going down in town and they need a fast and effective getaway, they call me. My rules are simple, no kidnappings, no killing, no stealing from those in need. If you meet those requirements, I’ll deal with you. I guarantee that you will get away, if not, it’s going to be my head on the block too. One night, I’m doing my job, waiting along a side hill, just out of sight from the mayors house. I hear some screaming up at the house, guess that someone caught them and they would be booking it back to me. Sure enough, five minutes later, the two toughs who hired me came crashing through the woods, though, I knew this was different than normal. In my torch light, I could see that one had their sword drawn, and there was blood on it and on them. I didn’t bother waiting for them, that’s my rule, no killing. I road down the one guy who was injured and shouted a warning what I would do to the other if he told on me. Turns out, he was more scared of his boss than he was of me, if I’d known who his boss had been from the start, I wouldn’t have taken the job. I heard within hours, he squealed to the cops and not only that, but a crime boss from the big city was coming out to our little town. I booked it and now I’m on the run. I hope with my mask that I’ll have remained an unknown and harder to stop, especially traveling with these goody two shoes

Class: Fighter (they commonly get access to steeds that would make them a solid option)
Alignment: Lawful Evil
I’ve said that I try and avoid the evil alignments because if you’re running a campaign with a bunch of heroes and one person is evil, it can make it tough. However, I think this offers an interesting role playing option for someone who is p laying this background. This character is clearly evil and clearly has well defined rules, if you’re up for it as a player, make this your characters redemption story. Slowly change them from evil into a lawful neutral so that instead of just being worried about their own skin, that now they are worried about more and have put their past behind them. It could offer some really awesome role playing moments if you get into it.

As a kid, my parents and everyone in my town was afraid of me. That was fine with me, I liked being on my own. I was playing in the woods one day by myself, creeping along following some of the hunters who were in the woods when I realized I’d picked up my own tail. There were some bad men following the hunters and I decided to get the drop on them. It was easier than I thought to kill a man, but that made people in town even more afraid of me. They sent me off to the temples, hoping that one of them would be able to fix me. Then I found the temple of the Raven Queen. Her priestesses told me of how there were those who had lived past their time and who needed to die. They were bad people who had made unholy deals to stay alive, and they needed someone on their payroll to take out these men. I became their hired killer and I was good at it, until I ran across the one who they only called the ancient one. None of their other hired killers had managed to get the ancient one, and I thought I could do it. I quickly realized that I couldn’t and I ran away, now I’m trying to find those who can help me take care of the ancient one before I return to the temple of the Raven Queen.

Class: Paladin
Alignment: Lawful Neutral
Just a little bit of information, the Raven Queen is the Goddess of death, and sees death as a natural thing. She really frowns upon it when those who should be dead aren’t dead because of some nefarious means in this example, and because of that, she’d be sending out someone who isn’t evil to do this work.

Have you played someone with a criminal background before? What are some interesting twists on the criminal background to make a more fully developed character than someone who is just greedy and wants to steal shiny things?

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

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So, how do you pick what you want to use in a way that doesn’t make it seem like you’re just picking from the book at random or what looks like it’s the coolest?

One helpful tool is that in the Dungeon Master’s Guide they have different monsters and creatures split out by habitat, so you can go ahead and pick out what works for the area that you are in. If you are in the jungle, you’re probably not going to see a frost giant, if you are in a freezing cold mountain and there’s a dragon, it’s probably a white dragon. That’s one way to help keep things focused in, but what if you really want to pick crazy monsters from the book?

My suggestion there would be, instead of having an obvious story reaching over everything, be a group of big game hunters who are paid to go around and find these wild and exotic creatures. You could need to bring them back alive, or maybe someone really want to have the horns of a minitaur, the shell of a flail snail and the beak of a owlbear for their collection. It would be an interesting game to play, and if you have a group where sometimes people miss, it would be easy because you don’t need everyone there to play, you just need enough people to kill the beast (hopefully) and birng it back.

But what if you’re already in a game and you’ve bounced around the world and you have a big story going, but you want to bring in something that wouldn’t make sense?

You have a few options, maybe you have the creature get loose form a cargo ship or a zoo. You can try and fit the monster into your story some way, there are a ton of different options. For example, in Dungeons and Flagons, the group has faced off against human pirates, Yuan-Ti, goblins, hobgoblins, a red dragon, elementals, devils and/or demons, and are now facing off against a beholder. They’ve been hopping somewhat all over the globe, but each of the monsters had their part to play, including the hobgoblins who were mainly there to be a distraction.

Finally, what do you do but the monster is too powerful or too weak?

Goblins are puny, if any of the characters in Dungeons and Flagons were to attack a goblin, it would either be killed a single sho or they would use their second attack on a turn ot kill it. How do you make your goblins scarier? You bring them in large numbers. When each player has four goblins attacking them, that is scary, even if they can dispatch one per turn, they’ll still get attacked a minimum of six times. Or maybe you don’t think that would be that much fun, well, maybe you have the goblins be a scouting party and signal another group of goblins who are a distance away, after the adventuring party has finished off that first group and is starting to think about looting the goblins bodies, you bring in that second group.

But sometimes you really want them to face off against that one really strong boss, and that boss is supposed to be a goblin, but the toughest goblin in the book isn’t tough enough. My first option would be to have other goblins with him, but sometimes that doens’t work or that isn’t what makes sense for your story. The second option would be to find a creature that makes more sense to face off against the characters (aka. is stronger) and call it a goblin. They have, in the back of both monster books NPC stat blocks for different types of people. There is a necromancer back there, it doesn’t say that it’s a goblin necromancer, but you’re in charge of your game, so you get to decide. Grab that harder bad guy and pu them in front of the players. Then instead of describing your necromancer as a pale human with a guant face who is wearing dark robes, describe it as a goblin who has a staff and who has raised the zombie horde that you saw in the courtyard. He has dark tattoos of demonic symbols across his body, roll initiative. And there you have two characters who would be the same stat block, have the same skills, and might even have the same evil plan, but ones a goblin.

That’s an easy conversion, but sometimes conversions make less sense. You want a really strong brawler to come up and challenge your group of adventurers and take a swing at them in a bar but you don’t like any of the options in the back of the book. Well, depending on what level they are, look at an owlbear or bugbear or some other creature. Sure an Owlbear is a bear body with an owl head and has a bite attack, but just don’t use the bite attack, use the claw attack and call it punches. Simply by reflavoring the attacks and calling them something different, you can take on creature and make it into another.

D&D, at its base, has a lot of rules for combat. And that is one part of the game that players often enjoy.You get to role-play a fighter who wields a giant hammer, or a ranger hiding in the shadows with a longbow, or a wizard who is slinging around fireballs. You can tailor your character to your preferred style of fighting, and you can really get into it, telling a story with your actions and trying to do as many crazy things as possible.

On the other hand, some players prefer social interactions with NPC’s, and enjoy that aspect of role-playing more than the combat side of things. But no matter what way your group enjoys playing, you are going to have some combat. For a group that loves combat, the DM might want to try to have a combat of some sort every session. Maybe the group gets attacked by some random bandits in the woods, or there is a group of goblins that raid the town, or they stumble into a cave that has some giant spiders — all of these are scenarios that could happen and that might be fun to play out with that group.

But for the other type of players — those who don’t care for combat as much — you as the DM will have to come up with another reason for them to get engaged in what is going on. The group will still end up killing all the bad guys, but not just because they are bad guys. I’ll share two examples from Dungeons & Flagons (one that you’ve heard and one that you haven’t yet) of this sort of combat to show that when an extra element is added to a battle to raise the stakes, players who aren’t normally invested in the combat are much more on edge.

The first example is from Episode 14, when Nim, Tate, and Finja fought the Yuan-ti who were carrying an angel skeleton that was needed for a ritual. Two of the Yuan-ti took off running with the crate that held the angel, while the rest stayed to slow down the adventuring party. So while the party had to fight through the four Yuan-ti who were facing them, the emphasis and tension was built upon whether or not they would be able to stop the Yuan-ti from getting the angel to the Yuan-ti town and prevent the mysterious ritual from happening. There was additional tension caused by the time constraint, as the limited number of turns until the angel would be gone from view meant that they had to get the fight over with before then. And it led to players worrying they might be killed as more reckless story-driven actions were taken.

The other example is from Episode 19, which will come out in just over four weeks. The players are attached by a gang of hobgoblins in a forest. They don’t have any real connection to hobgoblins or a reason to hate them, and other than some insults being traded back and forth and the hobgoblins wanting to steal their stuff, it would just be a boring fight. So I had to come up with something to ratchet up the tension a little bit, and lo and behold, the gang was riding on horses. I thought I’d take a couple of swipes at a horse, they’d hop off it, and the horses would be just fine; however, that became the battle’s plot hook. The players were not on board with the idea of the horses dying, so I went after them more, and the players rallied into the depths of the battle to try to save their mounts — both because the horses make the journey easier, and also because the horses have names, and they had already formed a bit of an attachment to them.

There are other possibilities as well, some of which I’ve heard done in other podcasts. Such as: Is there some sort of trick to defeating the bad guy or making it easier to defeat them? Will the bad guys flee at some point? Or even, is it actually possible for the group to win? I used the last example early on, when my group faced off against the pirates while they were on the ship. They didn’t have a chance at winning that battle, but it increased the tension of what was going on, and was a plot point to move the story forward.

Finally, there is the matter of building an encounter. How do you do that? First, let me say that there are some handy tools to help with this. I generally use: http://dhmholley.co.uk/encounter-calculator-5th/; on this page, you can enter in the number of character and their levels, and, using the results from the site and the D&D Monster Manual, craft an encounter. I would really recommend using these tools, or simlar ones, as doing so makes it a whole lot easier to figure out if the players can actually win, or if it is going to be too easy or too difficult for them to win.

While you are doing this and thinking about what creatures you want to include, pick out creatures that make sense for the current area. For example, if it is a tropical jungle, there probably won’t be any fire-based creatures around; it would be too humid for them. Owlbears and the like very well might attack a group that can defeat them easily, if they feel like they are cornered, but a single goblin is going to stay hidden and not attack a group, because goblins won’t attack until their numbers are high enough that they think that they can win. And when some goblins start to fall, it wouldn’t be all that odd if the rest start to flee to save their hides.

So to sum up, a quick checklist:

1. Use a tool and/or the appropriate D&D books to calculate out a battle strength that works
2. Know why your creatures or people are attacking, or know why the characters will attack the creatures/people you put in their way
3. Consider adding an extra objective to increase the tension and suspense
4. Play your creatures/people attacking the party in a way that makes sense for those creatures to attack (would they run away, do they have tactics, do they target the weak, etc.)

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