11 Tips for Creating D&D Encounters Your Players Will Love (and avoiding tedious combats)

LAIR MAGAZINE | 5e and PF2 resources (adventures, encounters, monsters, traps, puzzles, and more) you can use in your games! www.patreon.com/thedmlair ~~Links to all the stuff I mention in the video~~ D&D Monster Tactics Playlist youtube.com/playlist?list=PLo4-n9V0bKIWPLbpE0T0hks… The Monsters Know What They Are Doing amzn.to/3Y1u4xr Running Skill Challenges in D&D 5e https://youtu.be/rmtPVatFuUc 5e Skill Challenge System (Wishes & Waste, Lair Magazine June 2022 Issue) the-dm-lair.myshopify.com/products/wish-waste-lair… D&D Story: My Players Tricked an Ogre https://youtu.be/f42m_s7XOl8 10 Ways to Improve Combat Maps in D&D https://youtu.be/jcyWeFr-B0Q 12 Steps to Faster Combat Video https://youtu.be/9xpaJgZ5CBY

Mistakes are fun too. Have your NPCs make mistakes. Like a wizard that summons a demon to fight for him, only to loose control of it immediately.

I have played D&D for decades. I literally started on the first Basic set. I still reminisce about the campaign I ran that spanned about 15 years. While the original campaign lasted about a year, I would just keep spawning new stories and directions the players could go. Main Baddies get whacked, amazing a new baddie would start up, or we caused a ripple that caused something else to happen. My group would at times swap out DM's cause they would come up with an idea and we would play their stories for however long it took. Then would eventually fall back to the original story. It was awesome. These PC's retired at ridiculous levels, and designing high level games was both challenging and fun. We actually catalogued our PC's, let them settle down, found a city etc, then put then down in a 75 page softcover for each player listing many of our greatest adventures. We had a guy who drew our PC's with our descriptions which was awesome. Thx Jay. It was some of the greatest gaming times I have ever been involved in.

1. The Three Types Of Encounters 0:40 2. Open With Dialogue 5:43 3. On Designing Non-combat Solutions 11:20 4. Advanced Encounters: Compound Encounters 14:14 5. Creature Selection 19:07 6. Loot Placement 23:37 7. Terrain 25:36 8. Tactics 28:05 9. Beginning the Encounter 29:52 10. Running the Encounter 32:31 11. Ending the Encounter 35:26

One of the best DM advice videos i've seen in a long time. I hate how everything has become so broad and vague when it comes to DM advice on youtube and I appreciate you making a longer video allowing you to give more detailed advice. Looking forward to future content! Bookmarked for future reference

Yes dialogues before combat are good. My group has a fire giant as a companion now

I once had the players boot in a door only to find this door led to the bathroom and was currently occupied by a female cultist taking a dump. That was the single most hilarious moment I've ever run. She screams, players apologise and close the door. Then "Wait, we're here to kill them!" only for the cultist to demand they get the TP from the closet since the roll ran out. And she rolls a 24 on persuasion, so the PCs did... Expecting her to be gone when the get back. But she wasn't. And that's how the party decided to spare Tina the cult novis, who hadn't done anything because she'd been trapped in the bathroom out of TP for 4 hours.

you and a youtuber called pointyhat have helped me start this amazing campaign that all the players and myself love. thank you for the tips and i love your videos!

I once made an abandoned keep that had belonged to a transmutation/conjuration wizard. As they entered, they couldn't find any living creatures, so they started searching through the place. when one tried lifting the visor on an armor, the armor's hand snapped out and grabbed him. All armors in the room came to life and attacked them. As they progressed, they were attacked by animated armors, knives, halberds, brooms and a firespitting oven. plus a mimic that had a ring of spellstoring in it with a fireball charged in it, which it used to blast the player that opened it xD Safe to say, they grew extremely paranoid and didn't trust any inanimate objects for severel weeks afterwards >:)

It's good to have scenarios that can play out in vastly different ways. Lets players have more sway over where the campaign is headed.

My players talk to most monsters before killing them. They persuaded a minotaur to stand down and tried to persuade him to lead them through the maze. But that minotaur isn't too dumb, he saw he was outnumbered 6 warriors with glowing weapons in front of him so decided to let them into the maze while he went ahead to warn and prepare the other Baphomet cultists.

I absolutely love reading monster lore. It gives me so much inspiration. In my most recent adventure my players (2 player campaign) were on their way to a mine that was the suspected source of some zombies in the region, when they walked into a Falsifier Fog (TOB2). I played heavily into the part in it's lore that describes it as feeding on despair and not being out to kill. So my players got frightened by visions of their worst fears in the fog and they kept failing their wisdom saves, so we had a very roleplay and backstory heavy session that did a lot of character building. They had to come up with their characters worst fears on the spot and I as the fog played heavily into these visions with whispers in their mind sounding either like the people they were seeing or their own inner voice, adding to their despair. It was epic! I also did some horror stuff with my zombies, because the guy behind this is a sick little guy! 2 of the zombies were wrapped in Boneless. The reactions when their skin peeled off and tried to wrap around my players was priceless. I'm still getting vomit emojis in our group chat xD Another group had initially attached limbs and heads that took on a life of their own. Very fun. All inspired by reading into the monster lore. As a side note, there are very little tips and tricks out there for running a campaign for 2 players. Most boil down to: add more bodies to the party. But that's not what we wanted to do, so I've just been figuring stuff out as I go. Maybe an interesting topic to discuss sometimes?

First time DMing for a group and had a really great encounter. It combined puzzle, social and combat. My party were traversing the River Styx by paying a merronoloth to ferry them across using an enchanted ship wreck. They got ambushed by some merrow who were working with the merronoloth which ended up betraying the merrow due to the parties social interaction beforehand. The merrow then focused fire on the merronoloth to try and drag them off the boat which would cause the enchantment to vanish, sinking the ship and killing the hero's in the River Styx. It become a combat about defeating the enemies while also keeping the merronoloth alive and on the boat.

Ben's comment kinda speaks volumes, the "Really?" as in "Shouldn't we at least be able to try something other than fighting". The thing is, you can. RP doesn't stop just because you rolled initiative. The enemy may start the encounter off by attacking you, but that doesn't mean you can't get him to stop with your words.

In my current campaign, the party has been dealing with a cult of Orcus and one of the minions of the cult was a zombie hill giant they were using as a construction rig. In tracking down the cult's HQ, they encountered a family of hill giants (mother, adult son, child, and pet cave bear). They were worried that she (the giant mother) might think they had something to do with the disappearance of her mate (the zombie giant) and she did. The party was able to talk to the giants, aided by the fact that the fighter in the party is a Rune Knight and thus versed in giant stuff and wearing giant runes, and join forces to take down the cult.

I have to say, when it comes to rolls and stat blocks in encounters, the D&D Beyond Encounter tool has been a wonderful tool for throwing together bunches of monsters.

keep up good work

A DM who can backtrack a little to make things fun gets my thumbs up. I agree with everything you say. You seem like a cool DM.

I find some of the best encounters are just normal combats with some goal other than (or addition to) normal combat. Examples: 1. You are chasing a pickpocket who leads you through some lord's grounds. His guards intercept you. Do you talk your way out? Fight? Some fight while others race off after the pickpocket? 2. You are fighting some thugs in a market... only the market is make up of small boats -- aka. like old Hong Kong. 3. You are fighting some nasty werewolves... only the bridge you are on is slowly collapsing. Do you dive into the river? Try to collapse the bridge and grab the railings? Fight your way to one side? 4. You are in a bar when someone teleports in and starts using burning hands and scorching ray on the crowd. Fires are starting. He's clearly too powerful for you? Do you try to delay him? Get people to safety? Fight the fire? 5. You are in a room filling with water while fighting some undead. Your goal is only to climb out, but they keep trying to grabble you. 6. You get into some type of honor contest -- a knife fight while tied together, a fist fight, a joust, etc. 7. You are fighting in some situation where you aren't ready -- while going to the bathroom at the inn, while asleep, etc. 8. You are fighting in some situation where noise or some action might set off something worse. For example, fighting another treasure hunting party in a lair full of vines which might wake a massive giant or something. 9. You are trying to get to talk to some noble and warn him about an assassination plot, but this evil aid has told him and tells his guards you are the assassins. How do you deal with the guards without killing them? While the noble is running/hiding or the assassin might get the noble alone? Can they talk and fight? Can someone sneak off during the fight? etc. Sometimes just having something other than the combat itself really makes a difference.

36:30 Remember... the edge of the map is not the edge of the world. It's just the edge of what fit on the table.