D&D Combat: Making It Fun, Exciting & Not Boring
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Published 2021-05-10
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All Comments (21)
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Thanks for watching! Let us know in the comments below if you have any other ways that you use to make your combat scenes more fun and interesting!
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The innkeeper asked why we carried weapons at the bar. I said “Mimics.” The innkeeper laughed, the party laughed, the table laughed, we killed the table. Good times.
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Now I want to add a goblin who dies at the beginning of the battle, but takes the whole battle to actually die, as he talks about it the whole time.
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Honestly, most of the problems with combat being boring don’t come from the DM not being a good narrator, but from players who take several minutes to do something.
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Letting the players know the target AC sounded so weird at first, but "what should they be excited about, hitting the target number or the combat itself?" is such a great point
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The longer you run games, the more important fluff gets.
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For warriors: - What's the name of your martial art? - What's your style known for? - What's your favorite technique? (for killing blows) - What's your most powerful/complicated technique? (for crits)
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One cool thing i allowed as a DM was - A fighter threw his javelin at the enermy and it missed, but our monk had a reaction ready amd i said why dont you use your reaction now and see what happens. So the player did and i said 'The fighter hurls his javelin, the enermy is almost hit but it flies past him, however the monk took to the air and kicked the javelin back towards the target and it plunged deep in the targets throat, with the Monk landing successfully with a flip'.
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Sometimes saying less is a way more dramatic. Some of the most tense and dramatic fights at our table were quite silent from our side, but the drama was definetelly in the air. Like two samurai staring each other in the eyes before a fatal strike. One fight which was quite memorable was not even to the death. It was a duel...but the loser would lose his pride and that was way higher stake for the character and the player than actually fighting to the death :)
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"The assassin lands, shattering glasses and sending those of weak constitution screaming in different directions.. ah."
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Saying nothing but, “I roll, I hit, I roll, I hit” definitely leaves much to be desired. However, paragraph long descriptions of every attack get old in a hurry too. A decent sentence with at least the type of attack (fire an arrow/swing my axe/cast
), one adjective and/or a sound effect is plenty to spice up a combat. This also has the secondary purpose of declaring what weapon you’re attacking with (for those who like to roll first and decide whether they hit with the higher-attack-bonus-but-lower-damage weapon later). With everyone hacking and slashing and casting, it all comes together into a nice symphony of combat, instead of 5 separate solos each trying to outdo one another and only succeeding in becoming ever more repetitious and derivative. -
5:02 is a perfect way to describe the noise a goblins makes just as they die. Great tip, Guy!
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I get my players to describe killing blows and critical misses. I don’t insist on them describing every attack in detail to avoid dragging the combat out. It also means they don’t end up saying they dealt a vicious blow to the creature’s neck when actually they did inflicted a small % of its hit points
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As a player, sometimes include tidbits about what happened the previous turn. "The ranger's arrow whizzes by me as I fire a volley of magic missiles at the ogre." This helps combat feel more cooperative and cinematic by emphasizing just how fast rounds are and adding more visuals for the imagination.
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You dramatically described the drama in a dramatic fashion, encouraged us to bring the drama to the dramatic combat. My games will now be a lot more dramatic!
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The i.t. crowd had a d&d episope with Moss (Richard Aoade) dming ... He was trying to pick the right music. So true!
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In the video you put up a dichotomy between "I roll a 12, I hit, I get 8 damage" and dramatic descriptions, and while it helps express your point, I wanna emphasize for the comments section that it is possible to do both, and that's how my tables go.
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The other week I was DMing a game including a couple Animated Swarms of Books, I described, "Your blade comes straight down through a number of the books swirling around, cutting them in half to land straight on the ground leaving pages fluttering in the air, and one last page (arm motions like paper falls side to side) floats to the ground, and you see it says "the end" written on it. There was great laughter at that point. The rest of the combat was pretty fun too.
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Ive been watching your videos for ages Guy - DMing really is an art and we are so sorely underappreciated. But the passion you have for it makes it all feel worthwhile, big love to you man!
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Now I have to include naked rabbits in my next combat scene
