Making Exciting Encounters - GM Tips
If you’ve played many RPGs, you’ve probably had to draw a sword, whip out a laser pistol, mumble some arcane words, or cracked a few knuckles as you punched someone out. Combat, or really any encounter, can be an exciting moment at the table though even it can get stale and old. If you end up punching the same nameless goblin, casting the same spell, and talking to the same king over and over - it gets a bit tiring and you crave something different and fresh.
The secret to any fun encounter is for everyone to remember that they aren’t fighting in a blank void, that they aren’t talking to the king in a void, that they aren’t walking from one town to the next in a void. The world is alive and is constantly changing and morphing. When you challenge the king’s authority, it should be done in front of an audience of nobles who can chime or challenge the party. When you take on a mass of goblins, there should be more to the combat than simply killing them all. When you travel to another village, it should be more than just endless hills and forests with nothing happening.
While I’m going to be focused on spicing up your combat encounters, a lot of this can be carried over to any encounter and should be. Encounters are exciting parts of a game and, if they start to get boring and samey, make the game lose its excitement.
Spicing up Combat
Much how spices in food help bring together a dish, it can do the same for your combats. Not only does it provide flavor, but if you add too much spice to something, it can make the food nigh inedible. Combat needs a dash of flavoring as well to keep it exciting and interesting, if you go overboard on doing too much with combat, it quickly becomes overwhelming and unenjoyable. When first spicing up your combats, start small and work your way up. You wouldn’t immediately force your players to eat a ghost pepper, just like you wouldn’t immediately make them jump into a convoluted and confusing encounter. You work your way up, first with a pepperoncini, then a jalapeno, serrano, cayenne, and then you can start getting spicier with ghost peppers, carolina reapers, and anything else you can think to throw at them.
Alright, I’m done with the food analogy and now I’m hungry.
Mixing It Up
So let’s say you got through my analogy, got yourself a snack, and ready to learn how you can add this great spice to your own games. I’m not going to go everything you can do, but I will be going over the basics and general concepts to help liven up your encounters.
There are three basics that I use when trying to make combats a bit more exciting. Not every encounter I make will use even one of these concepts, just as some might even use multiple in the same encounter. Most of the time, though, I am going to use one of these to help switch up the combat and keep it exciting.
The three main elements I use are Environment, Protection, and Time.
Environment
Characters do not exist inside a vacuum. When my players tell me they are going to attack the kobolds in their underground warrens, even when I tell them that 100 mini-dragons are glaring at them with hunger in their eyes, the environment is going to be radically different than if the party is forced to fight on demi-plane known as Frostburn out in the Astral Plane. Each location, or environment, is going to act differently in a fight and it is up to the GM to determine how that affects not just the flavor of the fight, but also the mechanics.
Let’s say the party is in a swamp and a gator attacks. You could draw a small pool of water and then begin the fight. But that’s not the environment. Instead, draw the small pool of water where the gator is, draw in several more pools of water, sprinkle in large and small trees on dry land and water, and then add some shrubs. Tell the players that it is difficult terrain if they move through the pools of water, and make sure you have a winding path cutting through the pools of water that doesn’t provide a straight path to the gator. The players now must decide if they stick to the paths, if they charge through the pools of water, or are forced to use valuable resources, like spells or ki points, to bypass the hazards.
This forces the players to be not only in combat with their opponents, which are just walking sacks of hit points for all intents and purposes, but also the environment. They can’t treat the environment like a monster because it (typically) doesn’t come with hit points. It’s not trying to kill them, but rather change how they approach a challenge.
When building your encounter, take your environment into account and how it could affect your player characters, your monsters, and the challenge. A few points of inspiration are provided below:
Darkness - There isn’t always sunlight shining above when the dragon attacks. A red dragon could swoop in during the dead of night, turning the inn into a massive bonfire with a single breath. Darkness makes it hard to see. Many adventurers choose to sleep during this time as well, so the lack of armor and normal protections is a huge problem, as well as reduced resources from the day’s adventure. Darkness hides creatures, makes it difficult to make out specific details, and creates a terrifying dread of the unknown. Also, think about the range of how far your characters can see, sure 60 feet is a large area to be able to see in, but some monsters have a longer range than that. Take the sahaugin with 120 feet of darkvision, they can easily hide in the darkness and throw projectiles and cast spells from the safety of darkness where the characters can’t see them, slowly drawing them out into the darkness.
Lair Actions - Give the lair abilities to affect combat during the combat. Not every lair action has to deal damage, and many of them don’t. Some are simply to provide greater control over the battlefield and keep creatures from attacking a boss. Lair actions can be given to any creature in their lair, not only those with them in their stat block. These can be used to augment the terrain to raise them high above the melee fighters, throw walls of stone to stop spellcasters, or to create slick spots of grease to slow down those charging at them.
Rain - From strong gusts of rain to small pitter-patters, rain can have a huge variety of effects. It can make the ground slippery on steep hills, making characters have to make Athletic checks to climb up. It can cause light and heavy obscurity, providing penalties to creatures who are searching for something specific or attacking from range. It can hide approaching bad guys in the distance, or create a fun flavor element to describe a sword-swinging through droplets on the final strike.
Water - Most fights happen on dry land, but water can be included in different locations. It can be used to slow down the characters by restricting their movement, force them to swim underwater and take the fight to some fish people, or use the water against a horde of fire elementals. Water introduces the risks of suffocation and drowning, adding additional danger to being knocked unconscious. Besides, certain weapons just don’t function well underwater. Fire is less effective, piercing weapons rule the depths, and spells and magical items are often required to stay down for long periods.
Wind - Wind comes in a huge amount of flavor, from light gusts to powerful wails that could knock a creature over. It can cause arrows to miss their intended target, tear the sound from a wizard’s voice, or cause trees to topple and rocks to tumble. When including wind in a fight, think about where the party is fighting and how fast it might be moving. You can have powerful gales from a hurricane, but it might not make sense for there to still be a city standing around them if you do so.
Protection
This can work in a few different ways, but the goal of this encounter is to defend something from attackers or destroy something being protected. In this type of encounter, it doesn’t matter how many minions are destroyed, as there are always more coming, but getting to the focus of the encounter and destroying it. This could be a singular entity that is summoning a great portal to Cthulu or a giant diamond you must protect from a horde of demons hoping to destroy the last McGuffin of Good.
When planning out this encounter, think of what changes the encounter if the object is destroyed, or what the fail condition is for the object to be destroyed. If it’s an object, it might have an average amount of hit points for a creature of an appropriate challenge rating fighting the party, it could have break stages where different effects happen when it reaches certain hit points, it could fight to save itself, or it could create a spell-like effect where its difficult to reach.
If you can remove it from the battlefield, and nothing changes, then it isn’t a meaningful or exciting fight, which holds true for everything. If you remove an element from the fight, and nothing changes, then it either needs to be removed or increase what it does during the fight.
Defense
If your party is trying to defend and protect something important, tell the players they have a minute, 10 minutes, an hour, or a day to set up safeguards. This could mean they use powerful magic to make it almost impossible to reach the McGuffin, they set up traps using their thieves’ tools, or throw buff spells on themselves and stack a few powerful spells to help push them over the edge. The choices here that the players make are important and the GM should try to make as many of those choices have an impact on the encounter to make the party feel special and like they had an effect on the outcome.
If the party throws a powerful spell over the McGuffin making it impossible for demons to make their way toward it, they don’t automatically win the encounter but rather gain a few additional rounds to set up something big while the spellcasting demons show up to dispel the magical effect. Or the party sets up several tree traps outside in the jungle and instead of giving the demons a chance to see the trap, they just automatically go off and the party gets to destroy a few demons. This means in the first few rounds that there are fewer demons at the start of the fight, and tell the players that their efforts made the first wave of monster that much easier to deal with.
Offense
If your party is tasked with destroying a guarded element, think of ways that the element can fight back. Maybe it doesn’t get a turn in the initiative, but whenever it is struck by an attack, it pulses out damaging the party as well. Then again, it could simply provide a large buff to the horde protecting it, and as it is damaged, the buff begins to disappear until it is easy to destroy the horde.
The object could also be part of the lair actions of whatever creatures are protecting it. They could be using its strength to augment the world, creating walls where there were none, or simply fly around on a magical throne that provides an aura of invisibility while they are on it. Destroying the object makes it that much easier to defeat the big bad at the end of it all.
Time
Our last way to spice up your encounters is to throw a time requirement. Time requirements can be used for and against your party, telling them they have 2 minutes to get out of a mummy tomb whose ceilings are collapsing, or that they have to defend a powerful item for 5 rounds. For those really clever out there, you may notice that in those examples we are blending the other two elements into this. Time often requires you to include other elements, but it doesn’t have to. A horde of monsters is charging you, but if you can outlast them, then your reinforcements will arrive. Or you need to destroy the circle of cultists inside of a round or two before they call forth a great demon prince.
These scenarios put a time constraint on you either to move quickly or to act quickly. It calls on the party to use their resources fast, there is no point in saving your 9th-level spell slot when the world is going to end in 3 rounds and there will be no ‘later’ later.
Time is used for burning through resources fast. When you want the party to have expended a few resources before the final fight, you can throw a time trial in front of them. It doesn’t have to be only a round or two of time for them to accomplish something, but rather minutes, hours, or even days.
Rounds - The party has to act immediately and burn through resources at an incredible rate that can’t be sustained for very long. This option shouldn’t be used too often as it can be annoying if the party is forced to go through multiple round-based time trials in a single day as they just won’t have the resources to keep up with the encounters.
Minutes - If you have a time trial of minutes, then it means that the party is unable to take a short rest and must keep moving on, making it difficult to fully heal or to regain some resources. This time trial is best used for dealing with two or three encounters at a time and the last encounter is often the ultimate encounter to close off a campaign.
Hours - If you make a time trial into hours, then this gives the party a chance to take one or two quick rests before the end of it all, allowing them to be a bit more careful with their resources and save a few larger punches for the end game. This can be great for sieging a city when you have very clear objectives for different stages across the city map and still want your players to feel like they can’t just hide out in an inn for a night and regain abilities.
Days - A character is cursed to die in a week, the king is 3 days travel away and an assassin has been sent. Days mean that players can get a chance to fully recover multiple times a day and that a single encounter isn’t going to slow them down to the point of failure. There is less inherent risk in each encounter, but multiple failures can make it so the party fails. Days have less adrenaline-pumping action, but are best used for long term threats that have a clear deadline and is something you should remind your players about. They don’t want to reach the last day of their time trial and still haven’t left the tavern and finished their first quest.
Finishing the Encounter
Every encounter you place before the table should have an objective. Defeat the bad guys can be a fun challenge for a group so long as it isn’t the only thing they ever get to do. If a pack of goblins is facing them, and the players have fought a dozen other packs of goblins, then that isn’t exciting gameplay. If you adjust the environment, it can start to make more interesting, and challenging, gameplay that is more than just running forward and hitting the monster until it is dead.
Objectives are important to motivate the party forward. If there is no motivation to move through this encounter, combats can begin to drag as the party decides to play it safe and not use their big resources but rather using a bunch of tiny resources that make combat last longer. While just casting cantrips over and over allows you to save all your big spells for later, it makes for boring gameplay when you never use your resources for big flashy events. It then becomes the GM’s job to make sure that players have a reason to use their resources and to add more excitement to the encounters.
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