The Lunar Lands Guide to Combat, Part 1

It doesn't really feel like this.
But it should.

First, let's address the elephant in the room. Yes, I haven't updated this blog in months. Call it a
combination of being busy with work, being busy with a move, and general laziness - but most importantly, I've also had a long post I've been meaning to get out there next, and that's what you're reading right now. I hope it makes up for the wait! 

What is there to be said about combat in 5e? I've seen discussions on numerous sites involving numerous people that have all identified it as one of the weaker parts of the system. And a lot of that boils down to the fact that combat in 5e...just isn't that interesting. There's not a whole lot of room for tactical manuevers, and most PCs are going to take the same actions time and time again - trying to hit and hoping for the best. Rinse and repeat ad nauseum until someone finally drops. And when you take into consideration how much HP some creatures have compared to their damage output, and the fact that your attacks aren't guaranteed to hit at all, it's no surprise that gameplay tends to slow down as soon as combat begins - and when gameplay slows down, you run the risk of players getting bored and tuning out of the action.

In my opinion, a good game should never be boring. That's why we play games in the first place! The good news is that, when you're dealing with a TRPG, there's infinite room to adjust the rules to your liking through house rules, homebrew, and DM decisions. If we want to make combat less boring, there's plenty of options out there. A few bloggers have written guides on the subject - and here's my addition to the pile. Here's a list of tricks I use to make combat interesting and engaging.

Making Combat More Exciting

Perhaps the most obvious way to solve this issue is to provide combatants with more things to do - other actions they can take, more elements to interact with, and more things to be prepared for. If combat requires more thought than taking the same action and rolling the same dice every round, you're already well on your way to making it more engaging.

Terrain

Take a moment to think of your favorite action movie. Pay attention to how it portrays its fight scenes, and the environments they take place in. Chances are, unless it's a one-on-one duel, you'll never see the characters squaring off in an empty, featureless room, facing each other and blindly exchanging blows. Instead, these movies take care to portray varied settings for their action sequences, using the environment to their advantage in playing into the choreography. Heroes duck fire from elevated walkways, charge down stairs, and kick their opponents off of ledges. There's no reason why your games can't be the same.

There's a reason this scene still gets talked about

There's plenty of options for terrain that can be exploited during combat. The next time you design a combat encounter, consider the environment it will take place in - and try to include at least one (more is even better) features that can be utilized in the fight. For instance, you could add a balcony to the room where enemies could fire down from (or be kicked off of), or a pit that the combatants should be wary of avoiding in the chaos of the brawl, or rubble that provides cover. This will give the players more options in terms of actions they can take and add another layer to the tactical planning that goes into their approach when they have to keep their surroundings in mind. Games like Dark Souls have some really good examples of this - most fights in that game (at least those with generic enemies) are in three-dimensional environments with ways to strike from above or knock enemies off ledges, and more often than not they'll have cover available - unless they're taking place on narrow pathways that restrict one's ability to withdraw, which itself is a factor that dynamically changes how combat is conducted.

Come on, I had to.

You can even add some mechanics to encourage combatants to use terrain to their advantage. The 5e-compatible Adventures in Middle-Earth RPG has some great rules for this, which I may need to do another post on, as they're really easy to lift wholesale and can add a lot to combat. For instance, attacking from high ground grants a combatant advantage. Dust on the floor can be kicked up to blind opponents. Fighting in deep mud counts as difficult terrain, and grants a level of exhaustion every three rounds. And so on.

Of course, you may have players accustomed to blindly exchanging blows who may be slow to realize the features you describe are more than just set dressing. It may be helpful to introduce this idea to them going in so that they can plan their actions accordingly to make use of what's at hand for them. And if you have an enemy shove them off a ledge (remember how the Shove action exists? Your players probably don't), or hit them from atop a rock, they can get the idea fast!

Alternate Actions

One big factor that tends to make 5e combat uninteresting is that, for most groups, there's really not a lot of choices to be made with combat. Every round, each participant rolls to hit, and rolls damage if they succeed. That's about it. But it doesn't have to be that way. An easy fix for this is to change up what happens on an enemy's turn. They don't have to attack every time!

A boss-type enemy might spend one turn gearing up for a strong attack that it will land on the next turn, for example - this helps to build suspense, and gives the players a chance to prepare. Enemies might use crowd-control attacks, like throwing bombs at the PCs that force them to manuever around and chage positions (again, I credit Dark Souls with imparting this lesson on me). An enemy might pull out a horn and blow a signal to draw in reinforcements, forcing the PCs to take them out first before they can gather aid. Or they might heal allies, once again making them a target worth prioritizing.

You can use this in conjunction with terrain to have enemies try to set up advantages, like disengaging from combat to try and seek cover, or running to higher ground to draw a bow and start shooting (or preparing an attack with advantage) - once again, this can also help clue PCs in to what tactical options might be available to them.

There are, of course, more combat actions provided in the rules as written, like Dodging and the aforementioned Shove. Some DMs might find combat to be livened up by throwing in some of these on enemies' turns, though I would use Dodge with caution, as it can make fights drag out longer, which is the opposite of what we want.

PCs could use alternate actions as well, of course. For another example stolen from Dark Souls, a combat encounter taking place in a room with a rope bridge could give the PCs the option of using their action to cut or untie the bridge, sending the enemies plummeting to their doom, or at least preventing them from closing into range. Of course, now the party has to find another way around!

Using Timers

In many battles I have run - which, I've found, tend to be the ones I find the most memorable - I include a timer at the bottom of the initiative track, keeping track of how many rounds have passed since the battle began. Sometimes, this is known to the players; sometimes it isn't. At a given number of rounds (usually three to five, depending on what enemies I'm using or the context of the battle), I'll have something happen that introduces a new element to the fight.

For example, if the PCs are assaulting territory held by enemy forces, it stands to reason that there might be reinforcements waiting in the wings. If you're using a dungeon laid out in advance, these could be drawn in from neighboring rooms, or just go with a good old Quantum Ogre. After a certain number of rounds, if the battle is still going on, more enemies arrive. Granted, this can make battles go on longer, but it also gives the sense that the battle is dynamically changing and staying in motion, which can make things more engaging.

You can also flip the script. Perhaps it is the PCs who are waiting for reinforcements to arrive against an attacking enemy force, and they need to hold the line for a given number of rounds before aid arrives (which could be anything from giving them NPC allies, or having an army sweep in and resolve combat altogether). Or maybe after a given number of rounds, a door will open, giving the PCs an escape route. Not only does this help wrap the battle up in a timely fashion, it also helps recontextualize the players' goals. Sometimes, holding out long enough can seem more practical - and more dramatic - than killing everything in sight. It can also allow you to throw enemies at the players they'd ordinarily never stand a chance against, since surviving a given number of rounds can be a more achievable goal than being the last one standing.

But there are plenty of other ways timers can be implemented. You could have the terrain change after a certain number of rounds - say, a giant slamming the ground with enough force to topple some rocks and trees, providing more cover or restricting escape routes (or necessitating that those falling rocks be dodged!) You could have a boss change phases and start using new tactics or attacks after the battle goes on for long enough. They don't even need to be based on rounds! Perhaps things start to change up when an enemy is brought down to a certain level of HP (like 4e used with its Bloodied condition), or when certain enemies fall, or when a certain condition is met a given number of times. Once you start using timers, you'll find there's plenty of interesting ways to implement them.

Alternate Goals

Art by Trevor Stephen Smith

Not every battle has to be about being the last living (or undead, or constructed) thing standing when the dust clears. One particularly effective way to make combat more interesting is to give it some alternate win condition - which not only makes things feel fresh and new, it can also lead to quicker resolutions if the goal can be accomplished before the last enemy falls.

Sometimes, these goals can be tied to the act of combat itself. For example, the battle might not necessarily end when every enemy is dead. It could be as simple as dropping an enemy to half HP, or even just dealing a blow that exceeds a certain threshold of damage - for instance, a duel or an instance of trial by combat can (usually) be resolved if one's opponent is sufficiently impressed with their prowess to yield. You might need to take out certain enemies but not others, such as defeating a leader and causing the rest of their allies to rout.

Other times, you can have a win condition that isn't related mechanically to combat at all. Maybe the battle will be decided once one side reaches a specific point of the area, and the exchange of attacks is simply a means to slow the other side down. Or the PCs might be protecting an ally or stronghold against the enemies and need to prevent those enemies from getting too close.

One of the most memorable combats I've ran had the PCs tasked with blocking a tunnel that an invading army was using to launch their attack. There was a crank they needed to operate a portcullis, which would block the invasion if they spent a certain number of rounds turning it (timers!). This one combined a number of different ideas I've discussed here. The PCs had to face incoming waves of enemies that were introduced each round (more timers!). There was one boss guarding the crank, which was more important than the rest of the encroaching hordes. But once they managed to drop the portcullis, the battle was over; their allies could handle the rest. Mix and match these ideas as you please to create combat encounters worth recounting!

Damage Types

There's a lot that can be done with damage types, and I don't think a lot of DMs use them to their full potential. I don't even think that they're used to their full potential in the rules as written. There are many creatures in the Monster Manual with resistances, weaknesses, or immunities to certain damage types, but when this information is tucked into the corner of the statblock, it's often easily missed. When designing your encounters, it's definitely worth taking a moment to think about how an enemy would be affected by certain damage types, and taking that into consideration while running combat.

This can make combat feel more interesting and tactical if players notice that their weapons might not be as effective as they thought, and require them to choose different approaches to deal with different enemies. It makes deciding their course of action in battle more involved than simply choosing the same attack actions every turn. As a bonus, this way, you can also move battles along faster if the PCs have attacks their enemies are vulnerable to, since it'll make them drop sooner if they take more damage.

You don't need to be too punishing with this, though. An enemy that the PCs can't hurt, or can only barely scratch, can quickly become a chore to fight, and ideally, players shouldn't feel it necessary to carry multiple weapons around they have to switch between. I don't necessarily go with what the Monster Manual says, either. My werewolves only have resistance to non-silver weapons, not immunity, and my golems can be hurt by mundane weapons (it doesn't make much sense for something made of flesh to be immune to attacks that hurt something also made of flesh), although the iron and stone varieties should definitely have immunity to slashing and piercing. I also make skeletons resistant to slashing and piercing, like they were in previous editions - now that bludgeoning deals them double damage but hitting them with swords works perfectly fine, this trait feels kind of pointless, given that it was intended to simulate the difficulty in slashing something hard with no vital organs. Anyway, feel free to tinker with this as is best suited to your table.

If you're truly a madman, there are always tables that give certain types of armor different AC values against certain weapons or damage types - for instance, plate armor might protect more against slashing or piercing damage but be more susceptible to bludgeoning. These rules can make the game more realistic and give more importance to keeping track of damage types. They also can be notoriously cumbersome and require a lot of back-and-forth page-flipping to consult, so be wary that this might not do much to help with long, boring battles!

This post is getting long, so I'm going to cut it in half here. Tune in next time, when I'll discuss how you can speed up combat so it takes up less of a session.