Summary
Alongside exploration and social interaction, combat is one of the three pillars of play inDungeons & Dragons. However, not all pillars are created equal. A cursory glance at the D&D rulebooks will reveal to even the novice player that the overwhelming majority of the game’s rules concern combat.
This is because combat is the single most important part of the Dungeons & Dragons system. Sure, there are games where combat is less important than the other pillars, but the D&D system truly excels in a game focused on combat. All of that being said, your combats will start to feel stale if the goal is always to simply slay the opposition. Here are some tips on how to spice things up.
7Secure The McGuffin
Nab That Item
A “McGuffin” is an item that’s important to the plot of a story. Whether it’s a spellbook containing the secrets to lichdom, an artifact rarity magic item, or the literal key to a city, there are typically many important items for characters to seek out during an adventure. One of the most exciting ways to incorporate said items in your games is to make retrieving them the goal of a combat encounter.
The party may not even be the only ones after the item. Perhaps the enemy is attempting to secure it for themselves as well. You could even make handling the item provide special passive or active benefits to its wielder, even further exacerbating the importance that the party gets their hands on the McGuffin.
Alternatively, picking up the item could cause an Indiana Jones style booby trap effect that makes the battlefield many times more dangerous than before someone touched the item. As with all of these objectives, there are many ways to skin a combat. However, it’s hard to miss with defaulting to the McGuffin beingsome kind of magic itemthat immediately empowers whoever nabs it.
6Disrupt The Ritual
No Tiamat For You, Cultists
Cultists, spellcasters, druids, and other god fearing humanoids are always getting up to some kind of party that will usher the next evil into the Material Plane. Combat that involves delaying or interrupting such a ritual is a classic trope, but that makes it no less exciting, especially when executed properly.
The ritual should be on the verge of success when the party stumbles upon its practitioners. This way, it’s up to the party to stop the ritual from completing in its final moments. If they fail to do so, they get to witness the ritual’s consequences and potentially face them in the very same combat. A good rule of thumb is to give the party three rounds to disrupt a ritual.
If the party fails to stop the practice by the end of the third round, the ritual is completed, and something dire occurs. Examples include the summoning of ademon, a curse put upon the adventuring party, or the loss of some of the party’s wealth, gear, or magic items.
5Save The Hostage
Because Adventuring Parties Are Great With Hostages
Villains love bargaining chips, and non-player characters the party cares about make for pretty damn good ones. Saving an idle hostage is a fine place to start with this objective, but things get a lot more interesting if the hostage is in danger of dying during the combat unless the party moves to save them.
They might be locked in a cage, slowly lowering into a vat of acid, in the hands of a henchmen who has a dagger pressed to their throat, or caught in a pit with a hungry monster. Bonus points if the hostage can actually help the party out with the combat after they have been freed. The whole damsel in distress deal gets old after a while.
4Survive The Onslaught
Engage Horde Mode
Sometimes, the party is up against an enemy with too many numbers for them to ever truly overcome. These types of scenarios are perfect for engaging a “horde mode” style encounter where the party’s only goal is to survive to a certain round count. Once that round comes, help arrives in one form or another that allows them to escape the situation.
This objective is a lot more fun if you start with certain monsters and ramp up the number and types of enemies as the combat goes on. For the first few rounds, the party might be keeping up with the enemies spawning into the edges of the map. By round four, things should start to be getting out of hand. By round six, it should be transparently clear that there is no hope of victory: only survival.
3Protect The Area
This Is My Swamp
Whether your party stands as the final line of defense between a horde of zombies and a defenseless town, they need to keep monsters from polluting a pool of holy water, or a friendly mage needs protection while he finalizes a powerful spell, protect the area objectives allow players to make the most of their battlefield control abilities.
This is a cool encounter because abilities that prone enemies, knock them back, orcreate areas of difficult terrainbecome especially useful. Often, moves like these are left by the wayside in favor of attacks that deal as much damage as possible. Encourage your players to try something different by using this combat objective.
2Divide And Conquer
Break The First Rule Of D&D
Speaking of trying something different, it’s common D&D knowledge that splitting the party is always a bad idea. That is, unless you provide an encounter that requires such drastic action. As powerful as they might be, no group of adventurers can be in two places at once.
Ideas for how to force a party split include the mysterious appearance of a wall of force, a death trap that can only be turned off by pulling two levers in different areas simultaneously, or the tantalizing time-sensitive pull of treasure or magic items in different places that will soon either disappear or be destroyed. Naturally, enemies will hound both halves of the split party along the way.
1A Mixed Bag
Finally and most difficult to pull off, you can mix and match any of the objectives above with one another. Perhaps part of disrupting the ritual means preventing the death of a hostage, the party needs to defend two different areas at once, or there’s a mcguffin beyond endless waves of enemies headed to the party’s current position.
By mixing and matching objectives, you end up with a slew of dynamic combat encounters that will always keep your players guessing. Next time you find your party in a boring combat slog, up the ante by presenting an intriguing objective. We promise your players will thank you forthe added challenge.
