 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy and in looking for a topic to talk about for this week's video I summoned the murderous carrion birds of Twitter to help me come up with an idea And I got a lot of insightful options, but one idea stuck out to me in particular So today we're gonna be tackling one of the three main pillars of D&D combat I'm gonna talk about how to set up meaningful encounters as a DM how to roleplay those encounters effectively What to do to avoid pitfalls and fights that make them drag on for hours And I'll even be throwing in a few examples from my own games So that you can get a good picture of what it's like to be in the workshop of DMing for yourself As always keep in mind that a lot of this is just my opinion So if you feel like throwing exactly 28 half-naked grease goblins at your party is somehow not a proper combat encounter Feel free to play your games however you want, but with that out of the way, let's begin So the story of your encounter should start with this Why? Why are you building this grid-mapped murder ball for your players to survive and slaughter their way through outside of the simple satisfaction of hurting the ones you love? This is a question asked on two levels the first layer being out of game Why are you setting this up for your players and also in-game what series of events has brought your party to blows with an Opposing force luckily for you these answers are usually solved around the same time as combat encounters generally spawn from a need to punch Stuff both in-game and out on the inside your goal is to write up a reason for the beating be it a group of bandits hunting the party a Flight of cobalt guarding a cavern entrance or maybe diplomacy has fallen through and now you have to resort to aggressive Negotiations as in negotiations with the Sunsword whatever the case may be in-game that explanation only serves to provide a narrative Throughline which don't get me wrong is important But generally less important than keeping with the flow of the game Which is where your out-of-game conundrum comes in out of game combat encounters arrive when the flow of the game dictates it often after a Decent stretch of following the other two pillars exploration and role-playing usually you don't want to throw a fight into the story Immediately after a previous fight and oftentimes it's better to let the party try to avoid the battle all together Perceiving combat to be a negative thing that is to be avoided unless the game is heavily implying It's unavoidable, but even when you've decided to plug a combat encounter into your next scene You can actually go in a bunch of different directions tonally with your encounter The most obvious is a serious fight to the death But there are also heroic battles between honorable knights wizard duels with an emphasis on smarts completely ridiculous fights where every other Action is a comedy of errors the tone of a fight is set up by the role-playing moments that often lead up to it So don't feel like battling has to be the same somber moment that undercuts the levity of the game Sometimes pixies pack a punch too for example My players were riding up a mountain pass one day when they found a boulder blocking the road ahead of them They immediately expected this to be a trap so everybody got out pulled their weapons and moved forward prepared for a scrap They had just reached level five after being stuck at level four for a long time And if you played D&D then you know that the difference between level four and five is a wide gap Martial characters get an extra attack spellcasters get their third level spells So the party was very excited to get a taste of their new toys luckily for them As soon as they stepped up to the rocks out of the shadows jumped a dozen bandits holding sharp objects and demanding the party's gold Initiative was rolled the wizard was up first and he casted fireball on some of the bandits And after the dust cleared and what was left of those bandits blew away in the wind It was then that the thugs realized they messed up What followed was a hilarious curbstump with the party cleared out the bad guys with very little effort the leader of the pack pleading Hey, hey, hey look clearly. We've had a misunderstanding. Here's my sword. Here's my coins. Here's my shot You have a very good day now So it was a hilarious moment that served to show off the party's new powers while also bringing a very light hearted air to The beginning of the next chapter of their adventure it obviously wasn't meant to be a realistic segment or Conversely, it was portrayed as a very realistic example of what happens when your everyday highway men encounter heroes with superpowers And most of all it made sure that the party had fun Which as we all know is the only thing that really matters now that encounter was simple because I just had to copy paste some low-level Bandits and beyond my way no thought required But if you want to get something memorable out of your fights without relying on role play go play warhammer I mean you have to take note of what your party's composition is made of like what their weaknesses are and what types of battles They've already fought so that you don't make things stale if you're DMing a party of level fives Then you can drop in some basic enemies with the CR that measures up to their power level if you're just populating a basic dungeon Or you can look more closely at what their main mode of combat is are they more melee or ranged are they more magical or Marshall do they have healers a big question is who their most valuable member in a fight is and how do you challenge that if you're Finding that fights are constantly won and lost because the barbarian is a broken tank that never dies Then you should add something with a special effect that uniquely challenges the barbarians so that a the players Don't become reliant on that one thick boy to solve all their problems and B So that the barbarians brain doesn't go stale from boredom if your party is almost Exclusively melee then you should create an encounter that caters to that fighting style and you can throw in a flying or a Long-ranged enemy into the bunch so that they have to find a way around the challenge that they've made for themselves What you should not do is decide hey my party's all melee So I'm gonna punish them for being so stupid by creating an encounter of all sharpshooter air cockras get wrecked nerd Because then you're being the worst person in the world and people should rightfully stay away from your DM table if they have any value For their own self-worth you aren't trying to make your players lose You're trying to make your players think if your goal is to prove that you're smarter than your friends by crushing them in One-sided conflicts that specifically target the weaknesses of the party with no way out for them And this isn't one of the very hard to do the party needs to fail for cutscene reasons scenarios Then fold up your DM screen and be a player again because you've forgotten what it's like if your party doesn't have a healer Understand that the normal cr might be a little too challenging for them run a combat encounter with weaker enemies and then adjust accordingly based on your Experience you should also recommend the players buy healers kits and or health potions because even if the almighty god of magic doesn't want to Help you that doesn't mean you shouldn't still go to ride aid for bandages Remember it's better that a combat encounter be too easy than too difficult because an easy fight will be disappointing and unfulfilling But an impossible fight will leave your party feeling hopeless and cheated when somebody dies or loses their gear to unfair odds And they will certainly remember that feeling more which is why when it comes to balancing my own encounters I have a secret ingredient Cheating now nobody likes to talk about it But everybody knows that DMs cheat not all DMs but more than enough DMs do it and their right to do it because at the end Of the day you're telling a story and while the idea of variables and rolling dice is a nice idea in practice bad roles ruin games So every once in a while the DM peaks behind their screen notices their boss monster just rolled a natural 20 and they say it missed So that the unlucky player who's been rolling awful the entire game doesn't let lady luck Continue to default dance on them. It's not something that you should make a bad habit of you shouldn't wipe away all the challenge from your Play as experience otherwise they'll start to catch on and once the table realizes that you are in fact the dice god That's it the experience is over for them as far as stakes go because they now can just eat themselves into Tiamat's maw And close her mouth for her and the plot armor will still somehow get them out of it now Obviously if a player goes that far they'll probably die But I did have an experience playing Call of Cthulhu where for roleplay reasons I tried to make a last stand and have my character suicide by cop Unfortunately for me before the cops could gun me down so that my teammates could escape the FBI rolled up in black vans And forced the police to stand down it was then that I realized there was no chasing there were no cops Everything was a lie and we were always just going to get away no matter what I spent the rest of the game Flandrizing my character and doing more weird and outrageous things not to test the GM's patience But because the stakes were off and I wanted to play Gravity Falls the RPG This will happen to you if you let your players grow wise your game will turn into it's always sunny in the forgotten Realms and the only way to bring it back to reality is to start murdering characters But that is what creates the vindictive vengeful DMs that end up on RPG horror stories and get narrated by crit-crab And I cannot stress hard enough that this is the wrong way to kill characters Which brings me to my next talking point the right way to kill characters at this point I hope I've convinced you of the idea that combat encounters aren't about winner-lose scenarios But are more about the story that can be told around them with the actual victory being an almost certainty in the grand scheme of things But that's not to say that failure is impossible And it should always be hanging above your players heads as they battle for their lives because as I've stated before the believability of Danger is the entire concept that the stakes are contingent upon in my experience the failure of the party members to Accomplish their goals at moments where the story can handle it are what make the heroes unique It's what makes the game unique because there's always the possibility that things go wrong The party gets captured and now a fate worse than death hangs upon their heads instead that fear makes the victories all the more worth it So having a plan to make those fears come to life is paramount to a good flowing narrative If your party can't handle the odds and fall in battle then unless your party has been very vocal about their dislike of character death The onus falls upon you to carry those deaths out and luckily for you 5e has an answer for how to do it built in as a DM I drop my players down to zero all the time But unless one of my players has done something to anger a particular NPC I simply have them decide that bleeding out is enough and then they move on to the next player because the system for bleeding out Puts all the question of will they die into the hands of the dice and if they do die They can't completely blame me because their party has three turns at minimum to save them And even then there's a 55% chance that they'll just survive anyway If it comes down to a total party kill the power of Yahtzee decides who lives and who dies And those survivors are dragged back to the enemy's version of a jail cell so that the story can continue If only one person falls and the party leaves them to die and runs away It's a brutal character moment and even more excruciating if the player survives and is captured alone Prompting a possible rescue operation By letting fate be the deciding factor I can punish what I perceive as quote-unquote bad plays With damage enough to knock the player out and the very real possibility of character death after that Is all that is needed to remind my players that yes, this is real The chase is real Any punishment worse than that is just excessive And creating a situation where it is practically impossible for the players to prevent themselves from bleeding out No matter what they've done is just as bad as saying rocks fall everyone dies And if a player looks like they're running headfirst into one of those scenarios on their own Then you can always ask them the patented DM question Are you sure you want to do that? Finally the last thing I want to talk about are some small tricks that I can use to spice up my game So that even within the basic mechanics of a combat that they've done a million times Your players can still count on some curveball to make things memorable The obvious thing is to add special hazards around the environment for your players to interact with That'll give them special one-turn bonuses Is there a chandelier on the ceiling? Then let them make acrobatics checks to grab onto one and gain movement without attacks of opportunity as a reward But if they fail then they'll fall and go prone Maybe it's a bar fight Then you should let a player grab a mug and try their sleight of hand to toss the drink in a bad guy's face But if they fail then they waste their action You can also throw some craziness into the mix by switching up the goal from kill everybody To something else like surviving for an X amount of turns Or getting from one side of the map to the other Or rescuing someone, finishing by a certain time limit The list is endless and it helps break out of the basic vibe of how fights are usually meant to go down By using these tricks and following the guidelines I laid out throughout the rest of this video You'll be able to keep your games memorable so that you can tell more stories in the future Buuuut that'll about do it! I hope you enjoyed this video Be sure to leave a like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell Check out my social media in the description below And maybe support me on Patreon so that I can pay the legal fees for combat encountering my landlord But yeah, Davi out