What Your D&D Combat is MISSING

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I LOVE that teleporting McGuffin

a friend of mine describes DnD 5e combat as rubbing big numbers together until one of them hits zero, which honestly feels fairly accurate

Timers: it doesn't have to be represented by dice. Candles work well as a timer for a Halloween oneshot. The roleplaying game Ten Candles even uses it to full effect by having 10 candles (or tea lights) lit at the start of the session, then have them go out one by one as the horrors in the dark lurk ever closer. Timers are a tool of pacing for the players, not for the characters! So feel free to experiment with real world objects to represent each timer.

Oh hey, that's me at the end! Thanks for including me again, I love the name Koala KHAN lmao.

Timer dice definitely amped up the drama in a werewolf encounter. I had the werewolf howl, and threw down a d4 (number of rounds before a pack of wolves answered the call). They didn't know what it meant, and when it ticked down, they freaked out.

That was a fun and well-executed intro, it actually held my microscopic goblin youtube attention span

Having just finished BG3, verticality and environmental interactions would elevate any fight to the next level. A few points of high ground, covers, places where you might fall, destructible environment all give the fight a completely different feel. It is so much more satisfying to win an encounter by intelligently positioning yourself and creating chokepoints and giving yourself advantages instead of out damaging the enemy

The best combats end with snailshark becoming your long-time friend.

Wow. This was one of the very best videos I have ever watched on your channel. Yes, more ideas like this would be MORE than welcome. I am even upping my patreon to the builder level just so I can download this interesting one shot. Thanks, Bob!!!

Whoa! The teleporting macguffin thing is something I planned for a short game that never happened! Cool someone else had the same idea!

I'd love a whole series of these honestly.

Every combat, I put a gimmick, be it have dangerous terrain, difficult terrain, cover, a target to rescue, a challenge, a magguffin to get, have the fight be perticullarly hard or easy, have reinforcements etc. Anything more than HP sacs usually does it, and more than one gimmick usually make it too convoluted.

A combat I'd like to do one day that we see all the time in games and movies is one set in the middle of hazardous weather, set to a timer. When the timer hits 0, everyone not in cover takes damage/gets knocked down/gets blinded/etc, and then the timer resets. Could be a fun scenario as PCs and enemies struggle to stay in shelter while trying to push each other out of it as the timer ticks down. Could also be combined with a chase or some other objective for a very hectic encounter. Maybe even make the timer hidden to the players to really ramp up the tension.

Great video, Bob! In our last meeting, one of our players detonated an airship above the town and the rest of the session was spent putting out radioactive fires all over the town. Then having a lively, philosophical discussion about 'What is a military target?' and 'What constitutes a war crime in this world?'

The flying down chase and the koala khan encounter is cool

I've never felt so called out in the first 40 seconds of a video before

Yeah I like that teleport trick too. I think in R20, I would stack maps in the map layer and then move them back, so they would cycle. I think that would keep all the other layers intact. Maybe make a "medium" statue that needed to be grappled and dragged. Maybe the reward would be this controllable teleport device to travel to distant lands....

That audio transition from phone to Rode mic was so pleasing to my earbuds. Thank you, Bob. And I'm definitely taking the Koala KHAN idea for the climax of my campaign.

I loved that intro combat sequence! I was on the edge of my seat with excitement!!!! ❤