Shoot Your Monks - A Guide for Highlighting Characters
A common refrain around the internet is to shoot your monks, not because anyone dislikes monks (alright, a few people do), but because they get a cool ability to catch missiles and then launch them back in certain circumstances. But what about other characters? Are there things you should be doing for them to utilize those cool class features they get?
Let’s go ahead and look at a few of the classes and see what we can do to get them more involved at the table.
Artificer
This class is focused on support and out-of-combat utility. They can provide buffs to their allies, or send in a mechanical pet to help their rogue get that sweet sneak attack. Game Mastering an artificer requires you to think about challenges and encounters outside of combat, as well as throwing quite a bit of downtime on them.
Tools
Artificers gain a lot of proficiency with tools, so you should keep track of what tools they are good with and then find ways of working that into your campaigns or as fun little sidetracking missions. For adventure ideas, check out a d100 list of quests for tools! Also, if you want to expand the role of tools in your game, check out our series on tools in D&D 5e.
Downtime Days
Regardless of how prevalent magic items are in your world, artificers can benefit from a lot of them, more so than other classes. They can also create them much faster than a normal character, but they still need downtime. Give your players a week or two of downtime in between quests, this allows the artificer to work on magic items for their group.
Cleric
Probably best known as a healbot, the cleric gets blamed for TPKs, being a goody-two-shoes, and for the party’s inability to sneak in somewhere. Clerics can easily accumulate abilities that they never use since many of them can be situational at best, especially for how few abilities they get.
Undead
All clerics get access to Channel Divinity which allows them to turn undead, unfortunately, undead don’t always pop up when planning a campaign, especially if you are going for a political thriller or on the high seas. A cleric that doesn’t get a few chances in a campaign to use their base ability can be rather sad, so make sure you include undead hordes. Beginning at 5th level, they’ll even be able to destroy CR 1/2 undead, so now is the perfect time to include a horde of crawling claws, skeletons, zombies, and shadows to attack the party. This doesn’t even have to be a balanced fight against the party, loading down the encounter with a few too many skeletons will give the cleric a chance to truly shine and prove that they can do more than just heal, they can also turn their undead enemies to piles of ash.
Magic
The cleric spell list can be pretty lackluster when a player only finds their healing and damage spells useful in encounters. Looking through the list, you can directly use what spells they have access to and use that to fuel what challenges and encounters the party might run up against. Remove curse is a 3rd-level spell, which means that you can add in a few cursed objects or set curses on your players - while the cleric may not have that spell prepared for that day, they can in the future which means the party can suffer for an in-game day with the curse, before the cleric comes along to break it. The same goes for locate object, a 2nd-level spell, while the cleric probably isn’t going to have to find a needle in a haystack, they can prep the spell for when they have to start an investigation and help the party find whoever murdered the count.
A spell list provides a ton of adventure ideas if you just flip your thinking a bit.
Fighter
Martial characters often get short-changed when it comes to doing stuff. When an obstacle comes up, everyone just looks to the wizard who will probably have a spell they can cast that will trivialize it, like dimension door, disintegrate, or even just fireball. By creating obstacles and challenges that require strength or dexterity to bypass, like tight ledges or heavy objects to life, you can start getting your fighters more involved.
Lots of Encounters
Fighters, barbarians, rogues, and other martial classes can all shine when it comes to endurance. While a wizard will eventually run out of spell slots, a fighter doesn’t run out of sword until it somehow gets destroyed due to shenanigans. By ensuring that an adventuring day is full of encounters, you can help ensure that the fighter feels special as their combat readiness doesn’t decrease, unlike the spellcasters who quickly fall off.
Click here for more information on creating Adventuring Days.
Battle Master
This one is specific to only battle master fighters, but they get an ability to size up their enemies before a fight… so long as they get a minute to study them. There are a huge number of opportunities to use this feature, like if the fighter is talking with a monologuing villain, they can then get information about the creature’s specific ability scores - which is super valuable for spellcasters to know! By taking that information, a spellcaster can infer if they should use spells that rely on Dexterity, Constitution, or maybe Wisdom (even if that isn’t an ability score the fighter can discover).
This is a great ability for letting the party work together as it can also reveal information about hit points, armor class, and even class levels, encouraging the party to work together to figure out ways of taking down monologuing villains, charming quest givers with nefarious plans, and other NPCs the party might want to murder and steal all their valuables from.
Monk
With all their speed and flurry of blows (sorry), a monk is a great skirmisher who runs into a fight, slams the target a few times, and then flees so they can hide behind the front-line fighters. A monk plays a game of cat-and-mouse, except they cheat by just spending ki points and locking down the mouse, or spam so many hits that the mouse forgot what game they were playing and what day it was.
Distance
As mentioned above, a monk has a ton of mobility, including the ability to not take damage from falling and can run across a wall or body of water on their turn. What this means is that your encounter maps can be so much more interesting than a simple room, but rather create pools of water that are difficult terrain (unless you can run on top of it), large ledges that will normally deal damage unless you go slow (or can use slow fall), and wide pits that require a monk to run the wall to reach an archer firing from what they had previously assumed was a very safe position. By creating more interesting encounters with difficult terrain, cover, different levels of elevation, and more - the monk can really shine as they run in and out while the fighter is wheezing behind them.
Click here for more exciting ideas to spice up combat.
Long Rest Attacks
We already talked about shooting your monk with lots of arrows, which would normally go in this spot, so let’s look at something not talked about as much. A monk relies largely on short rests, with a couple of the subclasses only regenerating a few resources back on a long rest. This means that a monk is, largely, ready to fight whenever they want so long as they have had an hour to rest, like if they had slept for 2 hours and were suddenly awakened by an ambush on their campsite. Unlike the paladin or fighter who can’t simply slip on heavy armor, as even light armor takes a minute to don, a monk is always armored up (as well as the barbarian) and has all the weapons the monk will ever need… its fists. With a sudden attack while everyone else has their figurative pants down, now is the time for the monk to shine as they quickly leap to the attack, not having to worry about a horrible Armor Class, where did they leave their weapon, or that they don’t have any spells back because they hadn’t yet finished a long rest.
This shouldn’t be a tactic used all the time, but every once in a while, the party can be thrown off their game by simply attacking when they least expect it… which is when the monk is at their best. A monk’s guard is never down, just like their fists can never be disarmed… well, that’s not totally true, but hopefully, the cleric has regenerate prepared.
Rogues
Sneaky, filthy backstabbers who can only hurt people by utilizing tricks. At least, that’s probably what some people think about the rogue, not me, of course. The rogue is a wonderful example of how to be a lurker, hiding until the time is right and then dealing lots of damage.
Thieves’ Cant
The rogue has a very specific language that it shares with all other rogues. You can leave markings around a city, have someone talk ‘gibberish’ to the party but only the rogue understands, and more. This semi-secretive language is a great chance to let the rogue take the lead when it comes to negotiations, being the face of the party, and more - this is especially handy if your rogue player lacks the confidence to step into roleplay situations.
Obstacles
To take the hide action, you need to have cover or be obscured. A rogue is typically always looking for a way to gain sneak attack dice on a creature, meaning they are going to want to be hiding, attacking with an ally, or any other maneuver that could grant them advantage. By adding in obstacles, like upturned tables, columns in a throne room, large bushes, and more, you give rogues wonderful chances to gain that advantage they need to bring down their opponents.
Wizard
Maybe the best in show when it comes to classes in Dungeons & Dragons, the wizard can do pretty much anything if they put their spells to it. While your wizard has plenty of chances to shine in and out of combat, there are still a few things you can think about when it comes to having them at the table.
Spell Scrolls & Spellbooks
This class feature is often overlooked by many, but it’s the chance for the wizard to find scrolls, spellbooks, and other slips of magic that they can translate into their spellbook and gain access to more spells! Part of the fantasy of being a wizard is finding knowledge and learning new things, and by giving them spell scrolls or spellbooks, they get the opportunity to live that out. Plus, this is a great time to give them access to custom, homebrew spells that you have created! Not only will they not, ordinarily, get the opportunity to learn that piece of magic, it also gives you the chance to present the spell as them uncovering a bit of lost magic or coming up with a new spell themselves.
Lots of Mooks
A wizard is most effective when they can unleash spells that hit a large area of effect, either to cause damage or to twist the battlefield to their will. By having lots of mooks attack your party, you give the wizard the opportunity to destroy them while the rest of the party focuses on the big boss or control the battlefield and protect their allies. By having plenty of low-threat monsters, you don’t have to worry if one or two of them are completely shut down in the encounter because you have plenty more where they came from and it gives your wizard a chance to show off their fireball spell without hitting their party members like usual.
Pay Attention to Class Features
Every class has unique ways of using mechanics in the game, giving them a unique outlook and playstyle. By taking a few moments to look through class features, you can find all sorts of inspiration needed to create more exciting encounters (be it roleplay, traps, combat, puzzles, and more) and have the spotlight shine on different players. This doesn’t mean you have to memorize the class features, but it does help to just familiarize yourself with the options that your players have at their disposal.
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