What Your D&D Combat is MISSING

Make it pokemon, lol. Just set cards out for attacks, and roll for damage with different increases on different types of damage. /j

Having some unique encounters is cool but spicing up normal combat by letting players cut off hands, and do specific moves makes things much more enjoyable. As a player who plays OSR this seems to be the norm there, and it is sad it has gone the way of the dodo in modern dnd

We have had many great airship chases. Mounted combat can make for good running chases too. Non combat is me putting characters against nature. Like my Russian mountain climber disaster adventure based on a dozen true stories. My try at a no random no monster adventure. I just call it Terror mountain in some domain of dread. I rarely dm but usually a one shot nightmare in Ravenloft when usual dm not ready. Even gave some dragonmarks with the d' names in Ravenloft. Like the evil warden and the painter lich getting mark of death. The masquerade the red death don't because not heir but estate has dragonmark all over it. The monster hunters get mark of finding. Because names don't match the houses I just say the came from before the war of the mark or before the great houses waged war on the lessor houses. Or the fact that many surnames form a dragon mark house and said house is collectively known as this. I would rather play than dm. My dm style is like 1e don't go into a dungeon without a cleric.

I have to say I am disappointed. D&D combat has never been missing 'alternative combat objectives', some of which appear already in published modules - and all of which can be easily inserted by the DM. What I was hoping for was a discussion on how to bring the drama of actual combat (see any HEMA contest) into D&D. That is, how to make the combat itself a point of interest, without needing to rely on gimmicks.

Bro - that badass intro camera move and audio fade to your good mic 🤩🤌 - I don't know why I hadn't subbed yet as I dig your videos, but that sealed the deal. Very creative.

I ran an encounter in Shadowrun where one of the runners' cars was hacked by bad guys and kept ramming into the other one.

The runners had to fight the bad guys who were following them in another car, while evading attacks from the hacked car. The bad guys even managed to gain control of the cars turrets during the fight.

My party when we had to retreat, our DM would draw a square in our battle, if every member touches outside of that square, it was turned into a chase scene, but whoever touch it first got a head start, so instead of starting 5-10 feet in front of the enemies while running away, they would have a block or 20ft, and we had to use reactions to get away

The Dungeon Master's Guide, page 252, has pretty cool chase rules. Worth a mention, similar to your ideas, and it gives a ton of interesting obstacles one can put in the way. Really cool :-)

I think one of the best combat encounters I’ve designed—and this was born of anxiety about wanting to build a challenging encounter without a TPK—was where the party had been sent in search of a flower that grew on the back of horizonback tortoises (gargantuan creatures from the Exandria setting). When they found the tortoise, it was being restrained by a small gang of lizardfolk using ropes, and I had the momma tortoise with an escape DC of 20 plus two for each lizardfolk actively helping with the effort of restraining it.

What it meant in practice from the players’ perspective was that their object was not to kill the lizardfolk—they were just in the way—but to get rid of them and return the baby to its parent.

From my perspective, it meant that I could readjust the combat difficulty on the fly by having lizardfolk change duty—join the group holding the parent or fighting the party or flee.

I ran a chase sequence where the party was on horseback. They were chasing down a horse-drawn waggon driven by the baddies.

What I did was allow them to either attack or whatever skill check they could reasonably use to contribute to catching the baddies. If they succeeded, they got to move 5' closer to the waggon.

It went very well and finally ended when the druid cast Disrupt Earth right in front of the waggon. They basically killed the horses and upset the waggon. Then we broke out into traditional combat with the wagon and horse carcasses as cover.

I love playing on speed with the mobile feat. Just run, hit them, then move back out of range. Conversely you can always use shove and grapple to get the advantage on the opponent. There are plenty of ways to add flavor to martial builds and combat

Simple way to improve your battles use a more tactical and combat oriented games system.
That's the reason I went to pathfinder 2e.

Spoilers BG3



i'll never forget when my BG3 character got enthralled by the hags mask, i was so elated that i had picked up the sleep spell with Gale and wouldn't have to just kill myself.... and of course the spell just straight up didn't work because why would it.

I like involving 3D terrains in my combat. One of the best was a road with a slow, shallow part of a river a little way off the road. It was too deep for small characters to cross without swimming, but large characters could. Also, there were trees between the road and the water. We ended the combat with two fires in the trees, a goblin being held underwater (as like discount water boarding) and a tree fallen on one of the worgs that the goblins rode in on. Also, that was bait. They failed to save (or even notice) the kidnapping victim a little farther back on the road

A Star Wars RPG, not The Star Wars RPG. The Star Wars RPG was made by West End Games, not Fantasy Flight/ Edge. Thx.

I once had my party fight any enemy nobody of them could harm. It was an excident, because they split the party and the only one that could harm the werewolf wasn't there. However, it turned out super fun. With grapling matches, defensive tactics and creative utilizations of rope.

It is certainly a one-time-thing.

Well I run 2nd edition d&d I am alkemade a little bit of the combat and tactics and a little bit of a free-flowing system it works pretty good

Our DM gave us some awesome puzzle fights. We're inside a pyramid. We're trapped. The room is filling up with sand, making movement increasingly difficult and we constantly need to save against getting stuck then burried. All while skeletal snakes swarm us. Spread out in the room are 4 tall pillats. Atop each is fastened a bronze chalice. A riddle on the wall hints that we must fill each chalice with blood to stop the sand. The DM does not tell us ahead of time how much HP each requires us to sacrifice. Do you use your tank to hold off the undead, while the wizard sacrifices HP for the trap? How would you get your tank all the way up each pillar? My bard character was leveraging up the pillars while calling out inspiration to the team as she attacked herself atop the pillars, loosing concentration from the pain. Our paladin being burried alive while holding off the snakes. Our wizard summoning minions to help. Our sorcorer grabbing the paladin and explosively teleporting him to the final pillar with thunderstep. It really felt like a desperate battle.

Combine Dual Wield with unarmed combat and allow this attacker to make at least 2, d8 unarmed strikes. I'm experimenting with combos like in Soul Calibur and Tekken and MVC2. Basic idea here is you say if you want to combo then the defender choose block, dodge, or counter attack which like in Tekken punishes the attacker with more damage or another effect. And even though stats are meant to stop at +5, allow character weight like +1 STR per 50lbs over. Basically watch a Rey Mysterio Jr match and try to math it out for dice rolls.

There are a lot of ways to add flavor to TTRPG combat. Sticking to "roll your dice in initiative order" is boring AF. One of the best examples I've seen of funning-it-up was in original Shadowrun, where they had a sample scenario of a fight in a convenience store, where you got to roll for things like, "Red, sticky ice-gloop splatters all over the place as your attack rips through an iced-drink dispenser," with combat effects from slippery floors, sticky stuff on your hands/weapons/face, or things like a can of bug spray exploding and now everyone has to deal with what happens when it gets in your eyes. Or I once ran a rooftop chase scene, where characters could parkour their fancy moves for bonuses or to avoid penalties, and where anyone at any moment could end up with a face-full of laundry from a drying line. (The consequences of a six-floor fall straight into a hostile city-watch patrol, while unable to see the edge of the building because someone's half-dry underwear is on your face, are hilarious - but only when it happens to someone else.) There are a LOT of ways to sizzle it up. If you can't think of any, go watch any action movie you like. Jackie Chan can inspire some of the best scenes you'll ever DM.

When I was running 3.5e I had a rule where if a player wanted to do something extra cool that would otherwise take several rolls to resolve, they could just roll “awesome dice” a flat d% roll to see how well their antics paid off. For example, in one fight, the monk PC was trying to catch a wyvern rider that had just snatched the captain of an airship off the deck. He wanted to vault off the ship’s crane and stab the wyvern in the back. Boiling down a bunch of skill checks and an attack into a single roll-damn RAW-made for an epic moment when he rolled a 99.

Okay, that intro was pretty well executed.

There is no way you called brigandine undead leather armor. Like to get art that accurate you would have had to at least look it up, you have to know it's rivited sheets of metal underneath. So you're just intentionally spreading misinformation. Like it even has a hook for helping with holding a lance.

I once had an NPC hire my party to protect his caravan of merchants. offering the party 100 gold minus a percentage for each cart raided. There were 15 carts(decided arbitrarily)
When the encounter on the road happened, I had two weak enemies per payer and two extra enemies raiding the carts with a cart becoming raided every two terns. This also helped when one of the player characters went down, the enemies he was fighting ignored his downed body and started looting carts too! A compelling reason for the enemies not to just stab the player characters to death!
This caused some difficult decisions where the Artificer cast grease in front of the enemies slowing them down instead of attacking the enemies right in front of him!
After defeating the enemies the players had a chance to go find the stashed loot in the woods nearby and return it to the merchants.
This combat allowed for a "timer" to be placed on the combat with the risk of losing rewards from the merchants for protection!

I’ve not run chase rules before, but if I did, I’d say that I’d probably make things a series of turn based contested Athletics/Acrobatics checks depending on the the obstacles in the way and how the characters or getting through said objects.

Past that, to give characters that invest in movement speed and movement utility abilities, they would get advantage on the check for abilities like cunning action or anything like, as well as a modifier to their roll equal to the difference of their speed from the base of 30. So if you have 50 speed, you have a +4 to your base athletics check, or if you have a 25 speed, you get a -1 to the roll. And yeah, no opportunity attacks.

The truth about a lot of combat is that if you don't keep moving, you get hit. So what you see in the movies is basically accurate, while what happens in ttrpg's is often unnaturally static. Even in boxing, for example, there's a common trope of two heavyweights standing toe to toe slugging it out, but it just doesn't ever happen that way. Fighting is all about stance and mobility, balance and movement, maneuver and counter-maneuver.

While somewhat useful, I feel that having the dm come up with nigh infinite new scenarios to cover up the fact the the base rules are lackluster is quite unfortunate.

id love to see a video about these kinds if encounter designs!!

Some GREAT idea's here!

I don't think you should make adjustments to the combat system itself. It's too much work for too little payoff, and it's a lot of work for you and your players. Instead make everything around the combat interesting. Locations, artefacts and abilities, monsters, battleground effects (like rain made of magic potions or zones where time runs faster or slower, depending on your location), story and lore around this battle, intractable objects, traps, verticality etc. Don't make your life harder by inventing what is already invented and somewhat working, i tried and it nearly killed my campaign on multiple occasions. Put your mind to new ways of making combat encounters memorable.

If you've ever played a super hero RPG (such as Champions or Villains & Vigilantes ) then it'll be easier to implement some of these. Inside any village, town, city, etc you could always implement protecting the NPCs, as well as preventing or mitigating property damage.

In a 'stereotypical superhero bank robbing scenario' the heroes would not only have to 1) stop the villains and 2) protect the innocent bystanders, but they would also need to 3) prevent wanton property destruction and decide 4) which villains get to flee and which do you capture?

After players have matured past their murder hobo stage, you could 'train' them on not having to chase down every single enemy NPC who's trying to escape. If they prioritize capturing "lackey #4" over rescuing "NPC child," then their actions could have consequences either immediately (NPC injury or death) or later (public disapproval). If an NPC uses an AoE spell, make sure you note all the damage it causes. A fireball can catch buildings on fire and was there an innocent bystander in the area?

as long as a timer is round/turn related, and not real time related, it can be very fun! having to really put thought into ours actions because every turn matter can really make the situation more tense!

I personally can't stand timers based on real time (like the famous "you have X-time to choose what you do or you waste your turn"). because it overwhelm me so much that I either can't think of what to do (panick or something), or rush my actions and will feel cheated if it bite me back (because it wasn't my clear choice).

I have a big battle coming up for the second half of my (supposed to be) one shot. It's supposed to be 3 factions (PCs and 2 others) fighting for control of the machine.

fights that last longer than 2-3 rounds are usually a waste of time. Sure, once in a great while the party needs to battle the balrog or ancient dragon, but all other fights should be fast and dirty.

Play pathfinder 2e. All the issues with 5e fixed. Literally all of them, every single one. Objectivly.

quarterstaff polearm master + shield master :)

My level 4 or 5 party (I cant remember) was traveling through the underdark while trying to escourt 80 or so prisoners of war that they had just rescued. When they got to the final chamber, they realized they were deep into an ancient deep dragons layer. They had to survive a couple of turns, moving 200 or so feet to the exit, all while javelins were being hurled at them and the prisoners from the dragons kobold minions, and the dragon ominously flying overhead, blasting large stalagmites with its breath weapon to kill as many prisoners as possible. The party got creative, using eldritch blast and shatter to send stalatites crashing down onto the dragon, stunning it. They got out successfully with minimal casualties, and I applauded their creativity to handle the dragon.

I don't know if it counts as a mechanic switch, but giving players a way to stack effects could produce some truly broken builds.

I'm trying to learn how to DM so I can run games for my friends, and I struggle to understand when something is official or if I'm just misunderstanding things. This has led to a build that I'm not 100% sure is "legal" in the D&D world called the 'Thunder cat monk', a Tabaxi monk player that can be boosted with another players help by having the player cast hasted on them and then being able to run up to 300ft in a since move every other round.

If I have it right a monk can move 45ft of basic movement, hasted doubles that movement to 90ft, then the Tabaxi race has a racial trait that lets them double their movement for a round, then they can do it again if they don't move at all on the next round. If I'm understanding everything right, a hasted Tabaxi monk can use its movement for 90ft, it's action to move another 90ft (180ft), it's bonus action to move another 90ft (270ft), then can use its racial trait to move another 90ft (360ft) in a single turn. Paired with the fact that at some levels monks can just run on water and up walls unhindered, I have a few ideas as to when this feature could make for some truly epic moments (moated castles/ship to ship combat on the high seas).

Thoughts like this led me to ponder of a way to fix the barbarian issue of not being able to get into combat range. The 'rage charger' build would allow a raging barbarian character to run around the combat zone triggering attacks of opportunity from enemies on purpose while then letting them use the charger feat to either ram an enemy back 10ft or be able to attack them. So long as none of the enemies have something that would stop the barbarian in their tracks you could use your action and bonus to add distance to your movement then so long as your last 20ft of movement is in a straight line at an enemy you can attack or shoulder check them.

Just some thoughts that might be wrong in principle, but cool to try.

I created one boss where it was a duo called Credita and Debito that used ‘balance sheet magic’ (it was an IRS audit themed adventure, don’t ask) where whatever you did to one would be done to the other in reverse. Damage Credita? You just healed Debito. You just ensnared Debito? Credita just got a massive movement buff.

You managed to kill Credita? Debito then stabs himself, bring Credita back to life at the damage dealt.

It’s supposed to be a combat puzzle where players realize attacking both at the same time counteracts the magic, and using shenanagins with maximum health to bring them down.

Basically making combat a puzzle with gimmicks I think can make it more interesting.

I did a 3 stage chase in a star wars game. The players had sprung a wookiee medic out of a detention center and went to escape in a speeder truck to their ship outside the city. Stage one was them racing through the streets, avoid obstacles and other vehicles while being chased by speeder bikes. Stage 2 was when they got near the outskirts, avoid a blockade and outrunning more speeder bikes before getting to their ship. Stage 3 is them on the ship racing into orbit to jump to hyperspace with TIE fighters from the base in pursuit. They were shooting out the back of the truck and the windows against the speeder bikes in the first stage, and in the second stage the speeder bikes were trying to take out their vehicle instead of them. Changed up the scenery and the challenge in each stage and it was tons of fun. :)

Y’all are still supporting the company that sent Pinkertons after someone? Absolutely wild.

I had my players get sucked into a dollhouse that had been long forgotten. There was a sentient doll on the inside who wanted someone to play with since it had been so long. If the party did not play with or distract the doll, she would attack them dealing minor damage. The doll could not be killed, but could be slowed down or delayed as the party tried to get out of the doll house. To get out of the dollhouse, the players would have to find keys and other trinkets in various rooms that gave them access to other rooms, until they found all four colored orbs to put in the mouths of dragon statues. The doors would have notes on them written by the doll describing the room and who used to inhabit the room, giving a clue in how to open that door. Some things the party did were: make the dolls favorite breakfast, read her favorite book to her, and fish out her toys from the fountain. Since time worked weird in this dollhouse there was another person hiding from the doll in one of the wardrobes, who had been there for dozens of years, even though it only felt like a couple of hours to them. The doll was slow but could use secret small passages in the house to appear in different rooms around the house.

Your D&D combat is missing literally any company other than Hasbro/Wotc.

A great way to do a chase. We’ll say we’re in a market Aladdin style. The target takes off in a direction. Your players would then obviously chase the target. When you get to an intersection, you describe what they see in multiple different directions. They can spend extra time (in seconds game time) to get more descriptions. They can wait more and more to get a more clear picture but allows the target to get further. If they correctly guess the direction the target went, they can get closer to the target. Slowly but surely spending time searching and chasing, they inevitably either lose the target or catch it. Losing the target however isn’t necessarily bad. It can lead to an investigation segment where they try and find the target in a slower more Sherlock Holmes kinda way.

what about fragile surroundings and reloading traps?

Nice work on the video!