Hey all, Ian here again - hope your holidays went well! Today we’re back with another GM Tip Tuesday, this time focusing on Combat.

How much of your combat looks like this?

• Everyone rolls initiative

• Melee enemies and ranged players run up to each other, try to flank, and start whacking each other with their weapon of choice

• Ranged characters pew-pew from 20ish feet behind everyone else, and Mages cast a combination of buffs, debuffs, and blast spells

• Rinse and repeat, until one side or the other collapses

Hopefully not too much of it, but probably still a good chunk, right? Well, today I’m here to give you some ideas for spicing up your combat. 3 ideas, in fact - as implied by the title!

But, before we jump into the content, be sure to hop to our Twitch page and subscribe if you haven’t already, so you can catch these ideas in action on HNEW - streaming Wednesdays @ 5:30PST.

Anyway, without further adieu, lets jump into it!

1. Give the Enemies Personality

Sounds obvious, but early on as a DM I struggled to create enemies even worth fighting to begin with. You know the first thing wrong with the combat described above? Everyone’s doing almost the same thing every turn. Most DnD systems heavily encourage sticking to the core formula for your monsters & NPCs:

• Melee monsters use their full attack action or maybe a grapple (sometimes both at once)

• Ranged characters stay behind and sling arrows

• Casters try and improve or remove bonuses from their friends and enemies, or hurl big blast-y spells at their enemies.

5E improves on things considerably, giving many monsters interesting stuff to do outside of their turns as well as various bits and bobs to change how they fight - even still, though, there’s a good chance you won’t stray too far from the core formula, especially in early levels (looking at you, Pack Tactics).

But think about it: Just because “full-attack in melee while flanking with an ally” works out as the most numerically optimal thing to do, that doesn’t mean you need to play all your enemies this way. Maybe your bowman’s an angry drunk who decides to throw down his bow and go at it fisty-cuffs style. Maybe your Kobolds posses more craft than appearances suggest and fake a retreat, taking some attacks on their way out so that they can lure the party into a deadly ambush. Maybe your Ghost doesn’t care so much about actually killing the players, so much as scaring them away from its sanctum with haphazard shock-and-awe tactics. Whatever the case, as the GM, you wield plenty of power over how enemies behave. On top of that, unlike players, you know that your enemies will probably find themselves 6 feet deep at the end of the day regardless of whether they play the game well or not, so you have a lot of room to play around without risking changing the results.

Rise of the Runelords, for instance, did a fantastic job of this with their characterization of Goblins. During the first chapter of the adventure path, the players face a Goblin invasion in the town of Sandpoint from the nearby Goblin fortress in Thistletop.

The book spends a good amount of space characterizing goblins as insane, brutish, greedy, and impulsive - while also providing ample prompting to the GM to help these traits shine through to the players in combat.

Goblins get caught off guard while throwing stones at gulls for fun, or try and jab players with pokers tipped with molten glass, or move around recklessly to try and get minor tactical bonuses (e.g. gain the high ground by climbing on a chair). To quote the “Combat tactics” section from the first combat:

You should take care to present these goblins’ tactics as scattered at best … Each time a goblin takes an action, he should interact in some way with the environment, even if doing so wastes an opportunity to hurt a PC. The point of this battle isn’t to test PC resources, but to set the scene and flavor for the insanity that is the goblin

This led to a really fun, dynamic combat - filled with hectic action that definitely instilled the fear of god into the players, and really helped the Goblins stand out as their own unique “thing” in the game world.

2. Give the Space Personality

It’s easy to create bland, boring spaces in DnD - especially if you’re crunched for time. Be careful though! Spending even a small amount of time to add some tactical flavor to the landscape can turn a “meh” combat into something really fun and interesting for your players! In particular: Avoid large boxes (e.g. larger than about 30x30ft), avoid massive open fields (unless there’s something else tactically interesting about it), and don’t be afraid to keep combat mobile.

One of my favorite examples comes from a West Marches campaign I ran about a year and a half ago. In particular, the players were hunting down some treasure in a distant area, with a weird cat-lady leading them to the spot (as in: She wore a full lolita-goth cat getup (ex) and spoke in an endless string of bad cat puns). The players knew something was up, but basically had to get strung along until the jaws of the trap snapped shut due to the format and situation.

So, they endured a tense walk through the forest with this weird character until they finally “just happen” to run into a dilapidated castle in the middle of the forest, of which the dungeon “just happens” to still be in reasonable condition. The character invites everyone down out of the elements for some tea amidst rusty chains and a rotting iron maiden sitting in the corner, before they all decide to turn in for the night.

So here’s where we get to the relevant part: When the cat lady offered to have players sleep in the dungeon over night, some non-zero number of characters choose to sleep in the cells, while some stubbornly decide to wait outside. Of course the ones that stay in the dungeon get locked in overnight, and, in the morning (assuming they don’t start trying to escape immediately) they find themselves waking up to zombie cats dropping from the ceiling and making a nice new scratching posts out of their faces and legs.

This leads to a lot of interesting scenarios: The cell block itself is a series of 10x5 foot “rooms” separated by thin walls and a 5 foot wide corridor running down the middle, making melee combat awkward and halting. The enemies they’ll face drop in from the ceiling over time, and there’s only one obvious way out, so players feel pressed to head in that direction. There’s an enemy in the complex that the party now definitely needs to fight given the newly-dropped pretense, which adds tension while they perform the search. Finally, player decisions split the party in two - with one above-ground fighting their way inward, and one underground in a locked room, fighting outward. You can see the maps below:

Both of the times I ran this, players scrambled - clearly thrown off by the sudden change in pace and the unexpected payoff for the long buildup. Players inevitably manage to take care of the zombie cats (although not without a significant number of injuries and spent resources) and then turn their attention to rejoining eachother and tracking down the newly unveiled necromancer. Characters spend a lot of time moving around, figuring out how to deal with the constraints of the environment, and overall trying to figure out how to deal with this garbage situation they suddenly find themselves in - in short, player reactions both times I ran the scenario were priceless~

So what made this work?

• The space presented an aura of dread because of how much it tied in with the circumstances and the players

• The separation of the party into two groups forced players to change their tactics and think on their feet

• The zombie cats dropping in from the ceiling added pressure and uncertainty, prompting players in all situations to GTFO of the cell block as soon as possible

• The tight enclosure forced players to think carefully about their movement and any AOE effects

• The pressure to keep combat rolling between spaces made the situation feel more dynamic and interesting, with players needing to think carefully about where and how they moved in order to position themselves as best as possible for their next steps

So, when thinking about your next encounter, try to figure out if you can add in a little flare by thinking more about the space in which the combat takes place

3. Give the Situation Personality

Last but certainly not least, when creating combat, you should make sure that it feels special - like something more than another stop on the way to achieving a broader goal. While this can mean adding in alternate objectives, you can also achieve this end by couching the combat in some context, or by throwing in complications mid-combat.

When it comes to adding context to a fight, Boss encounters present the most obvious example - after all, the campaign spends a great deal of time building up to those fights! But of course, characters beyond the BBEG can still gain meaning with the party. For instance, during our Alacrity days, Vivian (a PC) spent about an episode getting harried by an assassin after she caught him dumping a body, before finally getting attacked out of the blue. This added stakes by making it clear that this character had it out for her specifically, while the history between them added a new level of chaotic intimacy to an already tense situation.

You can also try leaning on stakes to lend depth to an encounter. This means giving the players some goal or objective beyond “Kill the thing on the opposite side of the field” to care about during play. For instance, later in Alacrity, the players fought some Ogrekin in the heart of their dungeon to save an ex-crush’s new-lover, who found themselves currently interned as said Ogrekin’s plaything (yeah, the show got a little soap-opera-y near the end there; no regrets).

While the Ogrekin family already stood out as a seriously messed up bunch, by adding in stakes via a prisoner the characters presumably cared about, the whole situation became noticeably more salient and pressing.

But what else can you use to add personality or flare to an encounter? After all, you can’t always throw in a hostage, or spend 6 hours playing up an NPC before you get into combat. If you need something (else) to add some drama to your combat, consider using Combat Intensifiers - a term that, as best I can tell, Johnn Four coined. Basically, right when victory seemingly hangs on a knife’s edge, find a way to make things even worse for the players:

• Maybe their enemies desperately start trying to uncage the giant 3 headed dog who’s been watching the battle with a hungry look in its eye

• Maybe the floor falls out from beneath the battlefield and - oh boy, look at all those spikes! Hope those goblins don’t think to tackle the players down into the pit

• Maybe some traps suddenly appear, each with a 1 or 2 turn timer that needs to be turned off, or else…

What do all these ideas share? They all force the players to do something right now or else something bad will happen to them. They break up the flow of combat, throw in some drama and excitement, force players to think on their feet, and add in a dash of stress to the whole situation. By dropping these right when the players already feel insecure, you’ll magnify the desperation of the players and really put them on edge.

There are plenty of other examples of intensifiers (e.g. maybe some minions show up, or maybe a hostage gets dropped into the fight from a ceiling) but I find intensifiers which serve primarily to draw focus away from the same old combat loop work best at bringing texture and personality to the encounter.

So, in short, figure out how to bring some depth, tension, and dynamism to your combat by:

• Grounding your combat in the context of the larger story and campaign context

• Adding stakes to the combat by introducing something for the characters to care about beyond “Killing that thing”

• Throwing in Combat Intensifiers at moments of uncertainty to really kick combat into overdrive

So, how do you plan on spicing up your combat? Or maybe there’s one encounter that really stands out in your mind as dramatic or intense? Let us know in the comments! Also, don’t forget to follow us on your social media of choice so you can keep up with the latest (buttons below). Finally, once again, don’t forget to tune in Wednesdays @ 5:30PST on Twitch to see these ideas in action, or catch the VoD on YouTube the following Saturday!