Why Are We Fighting?

Is fighting to the death the only option?
👹Flee, Mortals! Can be pre-ordered now! Check it out here! | mcdm.gg/FleeMortalsPreorder
Get the Free Preview Packet | mcdm.gg/FleeMortalsPreview
💝 Support us on Patreon to get ARCADIA and other rewards! | mcdm.gg/patreon
📚 Enhance your game with 5e products from our Shop | mcdm.gg/shop
🐦 Follow us on Twitter!
MCDM - / hellomcdm
Matt - / mattcolville
💬 Join the MCDM community on our official Discord | mcdm.gg/discord
#RunningTheGame #MattColville #MCDM

[@helloMCDM]

It’s funny that everyone KNOWS, correctly, that D&D is built on wargaming bones. But, ironically, wargames used to focus on scenarios with victory conditions! D&D…DOES NOT!

[@SidewaysGts]

This video got released 2 minutes ago, and theres this comment from 3 days ago.

[@rayndeon1]

@@SidewaysGts It's the other MCDM channel.

[@kevindaniel1337]

@@SidewaysGts my guess is it was posted before being made public.

[@TheMinecraftACMan]

Question, when are the reprints of Kingdoms and Warfare going out?

[@dittrich04]

How about a discord channel to talk about victory conditions? That way we can think through them as a community? Thanks. Matt.

[@digitaljanus]

I still remember the scenario in my friend's 4e game where we had to save an NPC from an aboleth lair, and I said "Our goal here isn't killing everything. Our goal is to get the captive out of here." The fastest PC ran to snatch and grab the prisoner while everyone else ran interference; it was one of the best combats we had in that game.

[@DRida64]

I had a quite different aboleth situation in a 3.5e game that also ended up being different than the norm. Our party lost to an aboleth, in the way where 2 of us failed our saves against the enslave ability, and the rest of us could no longer breath air and escape. None of us were dead, but none of us could continue to act once the enslaved ones and the aboleth knocked out the ones who couldn't breath air. We then, with a fresh set of characters, went on a "save the heroes" mission, where our goal was to NOT kill the enslaved pc's, which were between us and the aboleth we needed to slay, to free them. It was a battle where the the goal wasn't to slay every hostile, but rather to slay the most important hostile, while keeping the other hostiles in check without killing them. It became a memorable experience for me. It was a good example of having an alternate wincon, as certain enemy hp bars were not allowed to go to 0. As well as showing off a form of the "falling forward" approach, where just because we had lost in battle didn't mean the end of our journey on the original characters. Likewise, it was one of the better scenarios in that game.

[@kaufmann4573]

I must ask, how much intel did you have on the lair before your party dove in? Sounds more like a heist than a crawl.

[@digitaljanus]

@@kaufmann4573 Fair question--IIRC the rogue managed to scout and get a rough layout of the cave complex, so we knew how many rooms there were. With that knowledge, it was a room by room search, running ahead of the aboleth's thralls the whole time, looking for the prisoner. When we located the aboleth's chamber, we stayed away and did not engage (luckily the prisoner was elsewhere).

[@bazzfromthebackground3696]

That sounds like a sick encounter.

[@rayfroklage3994]

When it’s clear the bad guys have been beat, I ask my players “have we smoked the best part of the cigar?” And they always say yes. I allow them to narrate how they defeat the stragglers without rolling, and we just roll forward to keep the pace up.

[@stonekarma]

That's a cool and easy idea.

[@Belegor]

I like it because u don't just declare the fight over that would be taking agency away from the players but instead u empower the players to make that choice and partake in the narration

[@kolardgreene3096]

I just remove a lot of the limitations of combat like some move restrictions and then I take away the bad guys' turns unless they are reacting to the characters' actions in a dramatic way. The way I see it, if the stragglers are wounded or surrounded and have basically given up, they have exited combat. They don't get a turn.

[@michaelthomas1916]

I like it!

[@You-is9tw]

"How do you want to do this?" On a larger scale, like this idea

[@discount701]

I doubt you will ever see this comment, but I just wanted to say how thankful I am that you made that first RunningTheGame video. If not for your advice, I don't think I ever would have played Dungeons and Dragons. I was always waiting for the game to come to me. I never considered that I could run the game I was waiting for. You are an inspiration and gave me a great reason to meet with my friends every week. Thank you, Matt!

[@JoshLG]

same for me

[@grime_monkey]

+1 Been DM for 3 years now, all thanks to RunningTheGame videos)

[@stevenisonline]

Same exact story for me!

[@TheEzzran]

I'd played D&D before but couldn't find people to run it now. Thanks to that first Running the Game video, now I run it, and I'm having a blast doing so. Even if I have no idea what I'm doing. So let that be advice for everyone: It's okay not to know what you're doing. Just do it anyway. If you're playing with your friends, it'll be fun!

[@davidanddragons5339]

Matt said in a stream that either he or his team reads every single comment

[@matthewbergdorf4108]

I think the Verbs video is also great for this! “Defend” the magic whatever machine; “Capture” the enemy lieutenant alive; “Rescue” the covert operative! My DM had our party owe a debt to the Bounty Hunters’ Guild, and those jobs came with bonus objectives. “You must fight the leader in a high-noon-style duel,” or “provoke a gang war between these two factions, so our assassin has the cover he needs.” And I remember those sessions very, very fondly.

[@paxtenebrae]

One of my favorite tricks for this is "bad guys make things worse in 5 turns". The ritual is complete in 5 turns, there's a ton of minions between you and them. Go. It's not the end of the campaign if they fail, just a bonus boss battle or something. The bad guys doing their thing not being a lose condition lets you make the timer much tighter. When the players enter the room and they see the ritual, I'll actually tell them they have five turns, crank up the tense music. Very fun.

[@vornsuki]

"If literally all we want is to fight monsters, well, go play Gloomhaven." Curiously enough, Gloomhaven is FILLED with missions where the objective isn't to kill all the monsters. It's a fantastic resource for GMs to browse through to find some objectives to inspire them and reskin for TTRPG sessions

[@EnrahimRPG]

I think the point he was making is that Gloomhaven has a strong enough combat game that it can stand on it's own without any more interesting objectives than kill them all. D&D 5ed does not have that, but instead has other qualities you can't find in Gloomhaven.

[@TabAtkinsJr]

Interesting point re:Gloomhaven is also that its resource economy, while superficially similar to D&D's, actually kills the slog part entirely because when you run low on cool abilities you're not just left with boring actions, you just straight up get a Game Over for the scenario. But you still get rewarded for such an outcome (or a TPK!) and can immediately try again, which D&D can't easily accommodate. (But Gloomhaven is indeed a wonderful source of inspiration for adventures.)

[@CobaltContrast]

Gloom Haven is great up until I have to set up and take down. Gloomhaven online please!

[@XOSkel10]

Came here to say this exactly

[@vornsuki]

@@CobaltContrast You are in luck! Gloomhaven is on Steam and it has the entire base game! I played through the entire campaign with three friends. There were some buggy missions from time to time but they were usually fixed after we reported them. It's been months since then so it's prob even better! I definitely recommend it.

[@jaddriscoll]

Part of the problem is that D&D and adjacent games are not systems where every fight can or should have narrative weight. The boss fight at the end of the dungeon may be the reason the party is there, and can have alternate conditions for victory, but unless you want the players to go nova on the bbeg then you'll need to have anywhere from 2-8 encounters beforehand along the way. It's a lot to ask of DMs to think of a unique story objective for each of those. I think this is one of those issues where we really are reaching the limitations of the system. Want to play d&d? Acknowledge that its bones are a resource management dungeon crawling war game. Want every fight to be a Indiana Jones scene? Look into other systems.

[@RaphPatch]

I love Colville, and as a DM I've definitely found his suggestions in this video to work. But I tend to agree with you here. I feel, communally, there's a lot of advice these days that basically revolves around putting in extraordinary effort to make your D&D game less D&D. It seems we'd all be a little happier of we turned to other systems for what we're trying to get out of D&D, and turned to D&D for stories that suit its design, instead of trying to make one game fit every mold. Of course, objectives make for great storytelling in the most important encounters, but to make every combat like that would be just as exhausting as the alternative at the pacing D&D incentivizes.

[@Belegor]

And even without narrative weight you can try to give small encounters you throw at your players something exciting. Like a basilisk that can turn players into stone, a tricky terrain disadvantage for the players (an archer with 3/4 cover), a potential ambush/trap. Or just a really cool/horrifying description for a monster. If the encounter doesn't get dragged out past the inital excitment by big hp bars things should be good. Also cutting encounters when you feel like they don't add anything is good.

[@Soitisisit]

​@@RaphPatch But then who'd give WOTC money?

[@petegiant]

The pillars of gameplay have shifted to heavily focus on character builds and combat.

[@sunshinejameth]

I had a great moment where once my players were in the "win state" my husband and wife bad guys who were the sun and moon in an evil organisation based on tarot. When they realised they were losing the bad guys came together and locked their wedding rings together to make a portal. It became a mad dash to not lwt them get away and it seemed drama was on our side because they managed to kill the husband but the wife got away and she became one of my best ever recurring bad guys

[@ggnorekthx]

It's amazing that after all this time, somewhat simple or straightforward advice can still result in "aha!" moments. This video is one of the best Running the Game videos you've done in awhile and has given me a ton to consider - I am definitely a DM guilty of too many "wipe them all out" objectives. I'm super excited for a design series. Thanks for continuing to share your thoughts on this awesome game!

[@katzekaiserin]

On the "waiting for your go" bit, the Genesys system uses initiative slots that can be taken by any player, which means everyone has to be thinking about what's the right time to go and talking about what's the best order to use their abilities. Makes combat much more engaging in my opinion

[@danacoleman4007]

Very interesting idea!!

[@EliJahTebbens]

That is a very neat concept; Thanks for sharing!

[@donkyoofficial]

I was just about to comment about the Genesys system! The Social Encounters alone buck the issue in this video. But part of that is because combat is not what Genesys is built around, and for DnD, combat definitely is the focus.

[@Squeekysquid]

@@donkyoofficial I think some of it is realizing that D&D isn't great at a lot of things other systems are. But there are a lot of things in D&D that people like. But there are some things they want to change in it without having to learn an entirely new system.

[@bertman4]

Take a look at Shadow of the Demon Lord. There is no locking players into initiative turns. Combat is in two phases, fast turns and slow turns. In a fast turn, players can use an action. In a slow turn, players can move and use an action. Players go first, then monsters, in each of the phases.

[@keorgefashington6349]

This put some serious clarity on my previous encounters. I had a juiced up frost salamander terrorizing my players while they navigated it's lair. The whole encounter was just about them trying to escape. After a few rounds they started taking turns drawing its attention while hopping across platforms to get out. They used resources and took some damage of course. Though the escape was exciting for them. They felt like they won despite not killing anything. Gotta try and capture that drama in more of my encounters.

[@Spec49423]

I think one of the things that made the fight against the Black Iron Pact so fun and memorable is that there was real danger to the PCs. The moment of victory and the moment all the BIP were dead aligned because each BIP member represented a real chance to kill a PC, and getting through the slabs of HP meant each character in the party was a little bit safer. The fight had *stakes* from start to finish, and so the players had fun. 5e needs better tools to balance encounter design, since most encounters either tip to victory too quickly, or threaten a TPK immediately.

[@nitehood108]

This is the key I've been missing. Wow. Already thinking about how random encounters in the wilderness could start not with an ambush, but with an enemy stealing a magic item from a party member. Now it's not about killing everything, it's about getting the item back, which once they do, that would be the perfect moment for the remaining bad guys to abandon ship and flee.

[@Bluecho4]

Of course, random encounters also don't need to be combat, either. At least not at the outset. The party might encounter a hostile army on the move, and need to Stealth or run away because they're hopelessly outnumbered. Or it might be monsters or NPCs who wish to challenge the PCs to some sort of contest, where they must use their skills, wits, and physicality to overcome.

[@FerreusDeus]

Just make sure the bandit steals the item fair and square, and could legit be caught in the act. Players have a 6th sense for when a DM screws them over unfairly because the narrative of the encounter hinges on it. Example; we were playing Star Wars and I was informed that my character was knocked out by poisonous gas and kidnapped but I wear a mask that filters gasses, so then my mask malfunction. Another time a villian was escaping in a fighter so I used Speed Bust to get to the craft and put my lightsaber through one of its two engines... DM still had it lift off, so I chucked a grenade in the other engine... DM just had the ship sputter and shake a bit but keep going... and I could have thrown my grappling line onto it, but I knew nothing would interfere with his narritive, lost hope, and didn't bother. I did feel cheated. As a DM I always run a fair game.

[@78Mathius]

Random wilderness encounters in my games are almost always significantly unbalanced. 1. It is likely thier only encounter of the day so they can NOVA if the need to. 2. Killing it gains one little so they have good incentive to run, hide, or talk. 3. They will often see an opportunity and want to take advantage of it. As an example, Roll perception: 22 You hear the sound of a few large creatures in the underbrush up ahead. They don't seam to be moving toward you. What do you do? We freeze and let them pass. Stealth 18. The sounds move off. We wait 5 min and move up to wear we heard the noise to see if we can figure out what it was. Survival 12. You find some really big feathers and bear tracks. Does not feel like a bear though. We track it. Survival 18 . You see two owlbears drinking water at a small creeks.

[@brettmclean2770]

My experience has been that plan A is typically to kill everything, regardless of the circumstances that led to the fight. In your example, it's not only easier to reclaim the stolen item if the bad guys are all dead, it also means they can't come back later and try again. Rather than waiting for the PCs to recover their stolen gear before the bad guys cut and run, why not have the bad guys escape once they manage to get to a specific location - a teleportation circle, a waiting boat/airship, etc. This way it truly doesn't matter how many opponents they kill, only which side completes their objective first - the PCs getting their loot back, or the bad guys getting to their escape point.

[@callethenalle]

I am currently running Red Hand Of Doom (cheers for tip btw), and the Battle for Skull Gorge Bridge was probably the best combat I ever run. I am not sure any of the enemies actually died. Just run in, blow up the bridge, survive, retreat. And it was tense, dramatic and entirerly badass.

[@ShadyInversion]

Running games has been a really interesting experience b/c I had some hardcore D&D types in my first game as GM and they all had surprised Pikachu faces when a last surviving miniboss turned and ran down a Vietcong style tunnel system to light a fire alerting the entire dungeon. They managed to hunt him down in time but boy does introducing real tactics and strategy take some people completely off guard. I'm awful at roleplay but the combat scenarios and objectives are what I love designing and doing. A recent example was a spaceship with zero G filled with water canisters. When the players missed water droplets sprayed everywhere making visibility nearly zero. I had planned the encounter to be a brutal melee encounter but a player asked to use a console to turn on gravity and despite never thinking about it during prep I said yeah you can try. A few minutes later my players attached to the floor with mag boots in a firefight with an enemy squad in knee deep water on the ceiling. The objective was to stop the ship that was running their blockade. They could've gone to the bridge and gotten intel and ordered the ship to stop, but instead they went to the engines to shut them down. When they succeeded I reminded them that there was a whole other half of the ship yet to explore they opted to blow the engines and drift out into space for pickup because the mission was done. It's why I became a GM in the first place. I run the games I wish I could play and because I easily get bored and distracted, as DM I'm using every available preplanned resource to realistically challenge, surprise, and subvert player expectations.

[@sethwilliams7311]

I love that every time Matt makes a video it immediately improves my games. Can’t wait for Appendix M!!!

[@chickendragon8526]

I think part of the solution is morale rules. This isn't a perfect solution but it does remind players that they don't HAVE to kill everything to win. Another thing that can help is XP for treasure rather than XP for Monsters. Last thing I can think of is just bringing it up in the first session. "Hey, fighting every monster may not be the best solution in my game. A fair chunk of the time it is, but you should be aware that it is worth looking for other solutions. DEFEATING monsters is what gives XP, not killing them. Defeating might be saving their prisoners or stealing their resources or forcing them to retreat. Occasionally it might mean killing them all to the last man, but I'll make sure you know explicitly if that's the case."

[@MedievalMary]

I like using environmental timers. For instance; The PC's have to retrieve a relic from a room in a evil wizards tower that resembles a magical artic wasteland. Every 5-10ft they move into and through the room they have to roll saves or take cold damage+ effects. The more failed saves the worse the effects, like halved movement or points of exhaustion, until they freeze solid. If they are frozen solid they can only survive so long without air, so they might have to choose between thawing allies or their objective. Add a slippery floor, some falling ice traps and a few frozen undead to slow them down and watch them start to fine tune their priorities. They will magically start thinking outside the box trying to figure out how to stay warm or thaw an ally or just avoid the monsters entirely, get their objective and get out as quickly as possible. Environmental obstacles are extremely underutilized.

[@DoTheDoop]

One of my favourite examples of this that I stole - and sadly don't remember where I read it - was using Jenga as an environmental timer. The party was trying to flee across a frozen lake. It was a combination chase and combat, and every time a player took a turn, they had to pull at least one block, with some actions requiring more blocks (like casting Fireball - why one of my players thought it was a good idea to detonate a fireball on the ice that was their only path to safety is beyond me). When the Jenga tower falls, the ice breaks, and all frozen hell breaks loose.

[@NathanPatrickLane]

@@DoTheDoop Dread is the most famous system I know for using a Jenga tower. Is that what you're referring to?

[@DoTheDoop]

@@NathanPatrickLane I got it from a D&D blog, that probably got it from Dread.

[@bertonpinkham3272]

Killing every last bad guy is a mindset. Almost every encounter I prepare in my campaign has the losing group running away when the battle meets certain milestones (leaders killed, a certain number of the opposing side goes down, etc.) I like the idea of objectives in combat. As always, great content and a means to improve the games I run.

[@tuomasronnberg5244]

Same. I hard disagree on that players only feel accomplished if they reduce the hp of every monster to zero. I run my combats like you, and the reaction I get from my players when some enemies turn and flee is mainly relief. Then again, I run my combats kinda tough as a default so there's that.

[@tuomasronnberg5244]

@@mogalixir Such is adventuring life 😌

[@chummer2060]

I ran a Lancer campaign a short while back. When I embraced objectives in encounters being the main focus, the combats got SO much better. Everyone was engaged and trying to figure out how they could contribute to doing "the thing".

[@aqbrooks7725]

I normally have most enemies run away when the heroes have won and now just need to finish the fight, but normally they don’t get away because as soon as they do I treat them as minions. But I like the idea of adding more variation with encounter goals! And other great video. thank Matt

[@cholulahotsauce6166]

I like that idea, the minions

[@DragonsFlame3476]

Ooh I like that so as long as they get a hit in they die…. I’m stealing this 💡

[@davidmc8478]

You don’t even need to treat them as minions. Because PCs have so many speed boosts and teleports they can easily chase down most enemies.

[@aqbrooks7725]

@@davidmc8478 but then this goes back to matts point about enemies running away being anticlimactic

[@davidmc8478]

@@aqbrooks7725 but it’s not, my players always hunt down and chase enemies. They never get away. It makes a massive change to the terrain and the battle continues

[@gunnervi]

In Torchbearer, you explicitly set the goal of the combat beforehand. E.g., Kill, Drive Off, Pursue, Capture, etc. And winning the fight explicitly *only* accomplishes the stated goal

[@EliJahTebbens]

Teaching game design one video at a time since 2016. Solid advice for tonight's session and next years new rpg.

[@nickjuchau1830]

My friend did this once ages ago, and we still talk about it today. He gave the players a visual puzzle, and they could spend their action to try and solve the puzzle (it was like a code-master puzzle, get the tiles in the right order). Every turn he'd roll a d4 for how many murloc creatures came through the portal. Great video and a great thought to have before you put the players in combat!

[@RPanda3S]

This is a good one~

[@VosperCDN]

I've used the surrender option for badly wounded NPCs before, and it's worked in my game, probably because I started it off in small fights so my players got used to it happening. Definitely going to keep the goal oriented encounter design in mind going forward though.

[@turnipslop3822]

I think the best example of this done in actual plays is Dimension20, almost every combat has another purpose or objective. It's really improved my combat design.

[@markfaulkner8191]

This is mainly a 5e problem. I am an OSR gamer, and I only DM for BX/BECMI. I have been a player in 5e, and I know from experience how tedious and complex combat is. It took two hours to fight three rounds. Action, Reaction, Contraction, and on and on and on. But to speak to the topic and offer a solution for 5e, I propose three simple "patches". The first is to adapt Reaction rolls from older editions. Sometimes the best strategy is to negotiate or intimidate. The second is to adapt Morale checks, also from earlier editions. Make surrender or fleeing viable and regular options, get the players used to it. And get them to accept it using the third idea I propose, which is to offer xp for treasure recovered and.or other objectives. Again, an idea taken from earlier editions. Sense a theme? And no milestone leveling. Experience points motivates players and can be used to encourage certain behaviors and actions the DM desires.

[@Jindorek]

Thank you for all the content you make. I no longer DM or play but i watch these videos religiously because you have a wealth of knowledge and "There is no knowledge that is not Power!" - Mortal Kombat

[@helloharr0w242]

The Inquisitor (specialist game) actually included a four or five page pamphlet about how to quick start one of six different objectives and build a narratively meaningful encounter. No one anywhere else approaches that level of “turn the crank for something fun” except maybe the rng mission creation for Battletech by HBS.

[@louisroy4911]

Thank you for putting my unformed thoughts into words again. My instinctual solution to fights getting boring was always making it harder, but then it just takes even longer. Tension doesn’t always equate to fun. One group I ran loved to be challenged, the other it drained the players. I feel objective based encounters would have pleased both.

[@Joker-yw9hl]

Hi Matt I was just literally at this very moment listening to some of your DM guides as I'll be DMing for the first time soon atter Christmas, and always enjoy listening to the Colville. Thanks for being a fun voice in cyberspace for us all

[@EliJahTebbens]

New DM! Hurrah!

[@Lozak]

New DM! Good luck! have fun, and remember, the path will become clearer as you walk through it

[@OlieB]

Doesn't matter how poorly you follow the rules or feel you do. As long as you and your fellow players have fun, you're doing it right

[@willfrancomb3203]

You got this dude! 50% of DMing is Brovado xD

[@ravencrovax]

One of my fav campaigns was about 15 years ago in a 3.5 game that my army buddy was running. It was an evil campaign (with no murderhobos) and each player had their own motivations which made it easy for the DM to have objective based combat encounters and promote inventive/alternative methods to advance our individual goals. It seems to be a lot easier to tailor towards individual objectives of a character than have a massive overall goal from the beginning. If each character is "Get this macguffin" and you have to kill this group because they have the item. Then you do that for each character and it just happens to be the same group or groups that have each item, that sounds like the beginning of a campaign to me.

[@sethwilliams7311]

I’ve been trying to teach some of my friends about this. Dimension 20 does a great job of it.

[@sirmonticus4319]

LANCER, a TTRPG about mecha tactical combat, has a chapter on SITREPS, which are essentially wargame objectives. I would recommend checking it out for some inspiration. Some of them can be fairly easily translated into fantasy situations: protect the NPC mages casting a ritual, while the enemies pour in from the cave. Fight your way through the lizardman nest to the safe room across the hall, etc. These situations also make the game feel more epic than just mindlessly battling enemies, like Matt said. I would recommend adding weather effects in to spice up the encounter. An old memorable encounter I ran was a gauntlet where characters could not see more than 10ft away from them because of heavy fog, meaning they had to call out to each other and call out enemy locations. Just my two cents if you are interested in a more tactical game that will draw in your non-tactical players. (Also make sure your monsters are also using cover. Have your melee monsters run back behind corners to get out of the Archer's fire, etc)

[@ryanhoward9381]

I did this in the first small dudgeon (Goblin Dungeon) I had ever run and for some reason forgot about objectives entirely after that. Thank you for the reminder!

[@willfrancomb3203]

I did this in an arc called 'The Siege of Phandelver'. The players were tasked with infiltrating a city that had been occupied by an army of dragons and plant a number of gemstones in cathederals to set up a field of banishment that would banish this army back into the astral plane. Now, half of the party was made up of Lizardfolk and the bad guy, he was Bromraim, Champion of the Black. An ancient black dragon that used to be a great wyrm, but was defeated 600 years ago and banished to the Astral plane as an Adult Dragon. This isn't something that is put in the monster manual, but I found it in some lore pages I was reading, Some black dragons have the ability to control the minds of other Draconic creatures, including lizardfolk! So after they had infiltrated 4 cathedrals and lost a character to an Adult black dragon (At level 7! Bearing in mind that the party was split and the other two players killed one in 4 turns) the party went to scout out the final location, the Keep. Long story short, just before Bromraim joined the battle that was there to distract him and his army enough to make it possible for the party to infiltrate the city (which had about 3 different factions pouring most of their military might into it and they were still outmatched), Bromraim controlled the minds of the two lizardfolk, turning them hostile against their fellow party members. If you'd like the full story, I have it all written up in a shortstory style format, I can grab it and send it to people who are interested.

[@remarkablysquare3216]

sounds EPIC

[@CoffeePaladin]

One reason I love this channel and company isn't just because the awesome Running the Game videos but it really feels like this community and company is growing constantly, producing new and amazing stuff that makes the hobby feel alive. Thanks so much, you guys. And great advice, it really opened my eyes and now I wanna run an encounter where the goal is more objective-based like pull the levers simultaneously or retrieve the special book in the obscure language, all while the bad guys try to stop you.

[@wortrihanha5731]

Matt, let's be fair. The players at your table (and mine) think they must kill all the monsters in front of them because, if they don't, in the least, they'll just have to fight them later with even less resources, or worse, those monsters will be bringing in reinforcements/ warning their team that the party is coming.

[@4freeedom]

I've started running LANCER, which has a list of SitReps in the book which give a set of win and loss conditions for the players, and deployment zones for either side, and the difference between victory and defeat often comes down to the final round during the course of combat. It makes combat much more interesting than in the 5e campaign I've been running, where the only interesting combats are combats that involve important villains.

[@vorgina]

Yeah I also immediately thought of LANCER when I saw this video. The only thing with the SitReps is they can feel a bit mechanical or videogamy if they're not contextualized properly in-game (e.g. why would the battle end at round 5). But I've also used them to great effect in my 5e campaign especially at higher levels when killing a bunch of enemies is not hard enough of a challenge.

[@JacksonOwex]

I miss Morale checks from AD&D 2e(haven't played much before that so I don't know if they are older)! Then at least the game told us that if things go badly enough the bad guys might run, surrender, etc.

[@therogueblade915]

I still use them! If the players meet certain conditions, they can improve their chances of forcing the enemies to either surrender or flee, depending on what they want. This is pretty useful when the players are fighting warbands or other large groups of enemies. Solo monsters is more of a "try to kill this thing before it kills us".

[@danacoleman4007]

YES!!! ☺️

[@jackalcoyote8777]

I was using cha saves in a similar way to 40k's leadership

[@Bluecho4]

@@therogueblade915 One way to create a good "morale tipping point" is to steal an idea from wargames, and have squads of enemy monsters include sergeants, banner bearers, and musicians. These may have abilities that directly contribute to the fight, but they're also walking anchors to the group's morale. If the party seize the banner, silence the musical instrument, or defeat the sergeant, the monsters may fold immediately. (This also means enemies are liable to try to run interference to protect their squad VIPs).

[@mightystu49]

You can still use them! When enemies drop to half HP or watch an ally die, they make a CHA save or have their morale broken is a simple way to port it into 5e.

[@chumpy5620]

Great vid as usual. Making combat interesting in 5e has been a recent obsession of mine due to all the problems you mention. I also recently did a post portum of my last nearly 2 year campaign, and this was one of the ideas I examined. In short, I determined the best way by far to make combat interesting - which you already allude to pretty heavily - is blurring the line between combat and roleplay via story context and more dynamic, interesting objectives than reduce enemy x to 0 hp. You mention retreat and surrender before somewhat handwaiving those ideas, but i've employed both regularly in more grounded scenarios involving other humanoids. I find that not only is dealing with the mess that those scenarios represent tends to be far more interesting than it otherwise would be with somewhat filler, less finely crafted encounters, but it's also a good excuse to end combat 1-2 rounds early when it's apparent to everyone at the table the outcome is all but decided, which helps because the last taste in someone's mouth is interesting roleplay and problem solving rather than attack rolls devoid of tension. Other than mechanically messier scenarios, the other thing i've toyed with a ton lately are the rest mechanics. I really think the current rest mechanics shove the expected adventure structure into a small box while also forcing DM's to do a ton of work coming up with contrivances to prevent players from spamming long rests in say, a dungeon. I'm more and more convinced the way rest should work is that a short rest should be "on the road" sleep (or sleep equivilant) of 4 hours or greater while long rests should be specifically 24 hours of non strenuous/non-adventuring activity in a safe, civlized area. I find this allows far greater varieties of mechanical and story challenges, and allows various characters to shine in different scenarios. Martial characters will tend to be relatively the strongest in long travel/high attrition situations like dangerous overland travel to a dungeon where 8+ encounters might occur before a true long rest, where spellcasters would shine in say, a surprise attack at a wedding where one can reasonably assume 1 or 2 encounters between rests. I've also toyed with a "baby rest" that automatically occurs after combat and allows for a bit of healing so i can do even longer treks without a long rest or raise the margin of error for players on a per encounter basis.

[@ActualDragon]

A system I've been playing recently, LANCER, seems to fix this issue pretty handedly. In LANCER, 99% of the time your mission objective is something separate from "kill everything". It could be an escort, moving someone from one side of the map to another- It could be an extraction, taking something from one point on the map to another- It could be defending an objective point, keeping enemies out of it for a specific number of rounds- Things like that. LANCER encounter design frequently uses reinforcements and round limits to apply pressure and give players different objectives, and it even helps encourage the players doing things they normally wouldn't, like fleeing from combat; You can always try again if you retreat to fight another day.

[@ivanhagstrom5601]

The DMG has a small list of sample objectives on page 81, for anyone who needs some inspiration. There's also a list of longer term objectives on pages 73-74

[@Bravebear333]

Giffyglyph's initiative looks nice. It encourages teamwork, tactics, positioning. As for the video a lot, really, A LOT of times my players took humanoid NPC monsters as prisoners to get information out of them.

[@RobTheJungleRat]

Thank you for spelling this out! I have been stuck in that combat 'slog' as both the DM and as a player. It is funny how something as exciting as fighting to the death can become boring.

[@michaelfinnerty7240]

I was(and still am) an amateur DM. But the longest campaign I ever ran had only really three memorable encounters(out of like a dozen or so): A save the hostage situation where they had to negotiate with the captor while holding the hostage by dagger point. A countdown scenario where I gave them IRL a minute and a half to figure out how to shack off an incoming Roc (Giant bird) while the hitchhiker they picked up had it's egg. But the last combat of the campaign we played was the most interesting. Which involved a group of relatively weak cultists trying to summon a glabrezu. the party had to interrupt the ritual and kill the cultists before the fiend was summoned. Pretty straight forward right? Except that the ritual was a blood sacrifice and that any cultist killed within range of these blood filled birdbaths (For lack of a better description) would accelerate the ritual. and if half of the cultist were killed within range of the demonic birdbaths. It was (effective) game over. The fact that it took place within a claustrophobic room meant that there was very little space for the party to work with. The party had to grapple the cultists and count how far they could move at half speed to drag the cultist away and kill them elsewhere. and contend with the cult leader who I gave a single legendary action (one point per round) to ceremonially slit the throat of one of his underlings. the party actually managed to stop the ritual quite easily once they figured out the gimmick. but it was so memorable that they still mention it to this day.

[@ianmcguire5231]

One old fallback I always rely on is to make the enemies do something dramatic. My players have knocked out the ghost king's skeleton minions and now King Andrias has all but lost the fight and he knows it. Well he pulls a knife on one of the player characters who foolishly wandered away from the rest of the party, and now suddenly its a tense hostage situation. The gargoyles' hitpoints are all but depleted? Suddenly the last gargoyle lifts one of the player characters and drags him higher and higher into the air until all they see is a spec in the sky. Doesn't work all the time, and often it feels like I have to do work to get my players out of the situations I've thrown them into, but so far I think they've enjoyed it.

[@BIZEB]

Amazing, I never really thought about how the fight does get more tedious the longer it goes because you have even less things to do. I suppose the drama of possibly losing or dying can mask it depending on the situation, but it really is less and less exciting the longer it goes. I'm wondering it a new mechanic could be added for players who've reached a certain threshold of HP + Spellslots spent, sort of like special moves in Fighting Games, where there's something interesting they get to do once at the very end of each battle.

[@jackalcoyote8777]

A lot of the enemies I homebrew have abilities they use at 50% and 25% hp. It makes things a bit more interesting.

[@Lishtenbird]

Sounds a bit like 4e with "bloodied" state?

[@RPanda3S]

@@jackalcoyote8777 I find this only makes sense to me if the baddies have severely overestimated the party or have some other reason to hold back. Much like players, I would think enemies are gonna go nova if they have no reason to do otherwise.

[@jonterry4968]

Bring back the 1E morale mechanic. Gives monsters a reason to run without being intimidated. Or, encourage players to make intimidation checks mid-battle. I let some players do it today, it worked great, shortened the combat, and got the players some answers. It really comes down to retraining both players and DMS. The game will never do it, we have to do it.

[@adamfuljer4901]

You dont need your monsters and enemies let fight to 0 hp. When you know, you would lose you ran and so enemies. Let them ran for their lives. Fight to death only with enemies who have nothing to lose. It taught me my Dm and Im using it now.

[@fakjbf3129]

My favorite DnD fight was when the DM put us in a museum looking for three artifacts and he told us that in three rounds he would have a group of cultists come in. So one character continued searching for clues while the others set up an ambush, and once combat started everyone was constantly chasing cultists around the building. It was a mad scramble of balancing dealing damage with stopping their movement while also looking for the artifacts ourselves. It definitely took our DM a ton of prep time because they had the entire building’s floor plan including exhibits and what various plaques said, but man was it satisfying when we managed to get all three McGuffins and jumped out a window while the last two cultists were caught in Web.

[@brittanislarp3850]

The fan wikis for basically any turn based strategy game like XCom or Phoenix Point are goldmines for mission objectives and ideas BECAUSE THATS WHAT WE ARE PLAYING.

[@courtney7483]

This is such a fantastic idea, thank you for sharing it! I've run numerous scavenging missions and rescue missions but I will for sure be folding the others into my metaphorical encounter deck.

[@Calebgoblin]

The players may THINK that they want to run in and fight to the death because of danger and stakes and all that, but I think what they Really want is the stakes of feeling that they are playing real people in a real world! A real world where you Do pay attention and creatures Do want to live to see another day.

[@derrmeister]

It's nice to see how topics you brought up in your twitch streams turn into those short and punchy videos! My players arrived in a seemingly empty city on a faraway island, discovered only one or two decades ago. The people that moved there to live new lifes were nowhere to be found... if you didn't count corpses. The group spent a few days exploring the city, until they encountered a group of armed lizardfolk. I was at the time very bad at encounter design and threw way to many enemies at them, but one of the players cast a fog cloud, so four of the eight enemies got disoriented. I rolled behind the screen what they would do: two of them found their way through the fog in the second round, but the other two fell into the river. When the two lost guys found their way to the fight, they just witnessed the last of their six brethren dying. They looked at each other in a moment of 'analsis paralysis', before deciding they should better be leaving. This moment alone was funny enough to my players to feel rewarded for winning that fight. A few sessions later I used an action oriented lizardfolk warleader to challenge them. He stated he wanted a 'fair fight, leader vs leader'. He was totally overpowered for a single one of my players, but one decided he was the leader of the group and entered the one-on-one. After he lost about half his health in one attack, the rest of the group joined in. The warleader was furios. The cheering crowd of lizardfolk got angry as well, started throwing spears, but the warleader ordered them to stop interfering, that this was his fight and he would crush those fools alone, being the one-man-army that he was. The fight was very dramatic, the killing blow and what came after was astonishing. The crowd wouldn't believe it, some ran, some didn't know what to do at all, some started attacking the group. The PC that got the killing blow shouted at them in draconic. They were so intimidated they lost all morale and ran. Both of those fights were situations where we could have just continued fighting until one side was no more. In the first one, I decided it was enough and in the second one they just felt like they couldn't lose, even though the numbers clearly went against them. They had also no way to retreat if the enemies decided to fight on, but every single one of the enemies would have to face the fact that they would probably die if they got too close in on the action, numbers or no. It's often hard to decide when the optimal moment to end a battle would be. In the second one you could logically argue the enemies should have kept on fighting, but I thought about that fight for a while before the session even started an I thought this was the most dramatic way to do it and I think my players had a lot of fun doing it like I imagined it would go, without them knowing I had planned it exactly like that.

[@shawngifford]

Good advice. Enemies that run away can be a good way of giving the players a win. It can’t happen all the time or it gets stale. We can look at it from the opposite perspective, that monsters and enemies have their own objectives that are not to wipe out enemies or be wiped out.

[@ferrumurbis]

I will never forget in our 4e game where we had a conspirator to the crimes of a subsect of the church of Moradin that was corrupted in our custody. The objective keep him alive to get to the hall of law in this dwarven city. The complication: we had an entire church worth of dwarves and their constructs against us, as we were the bad guys (no one knew of the corruption), and only one city official ally on our side, who couldn't support us out in the open at the time. It turned into a running game of survival first, killing only the things in our path, and keeping the party warden alive, as he was able to keep the conspirator alive, but he had to eat two hits for AOE attacks every time (they were trying to kill the conspirator at this point as he was a liability). It lead to one of the most tactically "stupid" moves of our warden leaving combat to get the guy out, while we held off the final encounter with no Daily powers left, it was amazing. That still lives in our party's memory fondly, and I think the clear objectives were a large part of it.

[@danvocals123]

My amateur solution I encourage everyone to steal is once the bad guys are mostly down one or two remaining grab a hostage and say "let us leave here or he/she gets it" suddenly your combat encounter turns into a roleplay/puzzle encounter. You've seen this in tons of movies players will have some idea of what to do

[@theeyehead3437]

Is the hostage a PC or do you only do this when there a friendly NPCs around?

[@wichhouse]

It's almost impossible to hold hostages with a knife to the throat in D&D.

[@theeyehead3437]

@@wichhouse When somebody says "Here's something that works for me" the least productive thing you can say is "That would never work." Especially when you don't give any reasons. There are a million ways to make it work. Target low HP players, target NPCS, use environmental hazards (this is my go to - a flying enemy grabbing a low-level PC and taking them up 100ft can be pretty much fighting ending. At high level pits of lava, portals to hell, and vats of acid have less counter play). Or you could hand wave the strict rules about damage and HP, resolving it narratively -- with the right players, that can work.

[@wichhouse]

@@theeyehead3437 I was trying to be discouraging. My point wasn't to encourage D&D hacks. There are a ton of RPG systems out there where you can hold someone at knife point, slice their ankles with your sword (or other body parts) as a way to end the fight, have interesting chases (where bad guys can actually get away), battle fatigue and being winded, morale loss, etc. D&D is good at dungeon crawls. It isn't good at interesting tactics, recurring villains, or cinematic action scenes.

[@kurtpearson2793]

A great list of objectives is better for encounters than great monsters.

[@pricerowland]

It's rare that I can watch a 12 minute video and think, "Implementing this will make me a more effective GM." Your insights have built context for a lot of my observations in-game. Thank you.

[@merck__]

One of my go to's when the objective is "kill all enemies" and I realize we are getting into slog territory, I have the enemies explode. Sometimes literally, sometimes not. Like the cultist rips out their eye, holds it up, and screams "Lord of Worms, witness our Destruction!" As they turn into a Pilar of Flame casting fireball centered on self. But even then, you can only do something like this so many times before players catch on. So don't do it every time. You want them saying "oh God!" Not "ugg, this again."

[@Somber_Knight]

Probably the earliest I've been to one of these videos and I know you read the comments, so I just wanted to thank you for your advice and the Running the Game series. Happy holidays.

[@alexpick518]

That gap between clear victory and the end of the fight is so important! A lot of people run very difficult combats every time because of this, which can get annoying, but I’ve noted the other side as a player more often, where it’s super obvious that these few monsters will get cooked by a couple spells and attacks. There have been combats that I’ve checked out of before they start because it is clear that it is just there to east spell slots.

[@JasonVDM]

OGL - the community needs you and CR and Kobold Press and Ghostfire etc- to bring the community together. If the 5e OGL is not going to support the community anymore we all need an alternative. Call a "conclave" and kickstart a d20 system the community can rally behind. Divided content producers face this cataclysm to their livelihoods alone. United we can make a solution.

[@Pirigo13]

My personal opinion is that the way turns and initiative works makes the player feel like a passenger when it's not their turn, and the DM feel like a waiter waiting for an indecisive client. I don't know if it would ever be viable, but I want to try a "all players act simultaneously" type of thing one day, as chaotic as it may be; It would present its own host of problems, I'm sure, but it sounds fun and I think it would incentivize the players to work together in a tactical way.

[@HD-ct2un]

I recently had a fight that was super popular with the players. They were killing demons and devils on a stage to entertain a crowd. The fight was real, the devils and demons came out of portals. The objective was to kill them in a flashy way to try and rile the crowd up. It was great!

[@chickenbane1872]

Love this idea. Stealing it!

[@Squin52X]

X-crawl is a whole setting based around this concept

[@KazisCollection]

Also reminds me of the Broadway fight in Dimension 20’s Unsleeping City. The bard had to roll death saving throws as performance checks, with the DC being affected by the way the play/battle was perceived by the audience

[@HD-ct2un]

@@chickenbane1872 Thank you! What made it even more fun was I had a death metal band (this was in starfinder, a sci-fi game) playing on a seperate stage under them, so playing that music helped sell the energy and concept. This was a two session survival fight fest that didn't slog AT ALL and all of the players still ask me to run a sequel fight for it.

[@suraine]

An adventure/encounter design series from Matt? That would be a treat!

[@EvanAnthony1812]

Thank you Matt for putting into words the exact thing I've been feeling in my recent games. An example of this from my own time as a player and as a DM: My friends and I are entering the last session of a heavily homebrewed Curse of Strahd, and the DM of that game has done this in a significant number of combat encounters. I would say less than half of the combat encounters we've faced were fights to the death, and the best ones often felt more like problems to solve. "Cast greater restoration on the insane wizard". "Rescue the innocent woman from the evil druids". "Escape Castle Ravenloft alive with the artifact you need". Contrasting this with my own Dungeon of the Mad Mage I run for my family, I didn't stray too far from the module, and it became a slog nearly a year ago, and hasn't lightened up. Every "problem" in the dungeon often has one solution: roll attacks and throw spells until everything in the room is a quivering pulp. It's not engaging to run, and only marginally engaging to play when the players change up that formula and go against the adventure's design. If only this video had come out two years ago, that module may have been salvaged. I'll be using this mindset for future encounter design in my games, and I think it will change how I run the game as a whole.

[@michaelfontana9321]

On this topic, I actually used a combat scenario when my players were getting bored during their travel to a prepped dungeon. They stumbled on a larger-scale conflict between a group of goblins and a group of kobolds. Their objective (to win) wasn't about fighting monsters, but was more about crossing the battlefield to make it the last couple of miles to their destination. They succeeded without killing all the monsters, and made it to the dungeon. After the session, a few of them even told me how much they enjoyed that random encounter, and after really thinking about it myself too, I could see how it made the world feel more real to the players as well; by showing them that even groups of monsters come into conflict with each other and not just the players or 'civilized races'.

[@des-trina]

Already going to put this into action with the hot open in my upcoming campaign. The idea before was to land on a beach and clear out a lighthouse of the undead minions of a lich, so it can be their base of operations in attack said lich's island. Now their goal will be to put up wards around the lighthouse that keep the undead out. I imagine this small change in frame of reference will make the battle much more enjoyable, and give a plausible the reason the hordes of undead leave them (relatively) alone afterward. Great video and already useful (which I know is why you do these).

[@Bryien]

Happy "early" holidays Matthew!

[@tonysladky8925]

I suppose the easiest solution that's slightly less unsatisfying than the bad guys surrendering or running away, but in kind of the same vein is to just hit that point of triumph (either, when the monsters' leader is gone, or when you can tell the PCs aren't going to be using up any more resources), is to just fast forward to the end. Let the players decide what they want to do with the leftovers. Kill them? Let them leave? Capture them? Whatever it is, you can handwave because there's no more resources being burned. Of course, that doesn't really solve the major problem, but it gives you a skip button. I think there's probably room for this video to pair very well with the one about adventuring gear and old school dungeon crawls. I'm not sure *exactly* how, but it feels like the best solution to either of those issues is going to be one that solves both.

[@wingedhussar2909]

Some other youtubers suggest adding timers to encounters, a barrel that explodes is 3 rounds, a bound prisoner slowly being lowered into an acid pit, an alchemist's potion bubbling over that releases a poisonous gas that begins to fill the room. Still, the main problem with combat is that melee creatures don't do nearly enough damage and aren't a threat.

[@stevenalexander6033]

When I feel the scale has tipped... I'll start asking for the "how do you want to do this" cinematic. Basically "okay guys this is the final round what's your character doing?" Sort of like right when the mighty nein defeated ukatoa matt asked for some cool thing they did. Wrapping up rounds like that has seemed to keep people involved. When you drop an inspiration die they seem inclined to participate as well

[@waynecribbs8853]

The DM should.... 1) Use more minions so that it doesn't turn into a slog. 2) End the battle when the "drama" is over. Tell the players they kill off the remaining goblins without too much trouble. Hand-wave a few rounds of combat. Solves the problem!

[@brettmclean2770]

Minions would make it more of a slog since the party knows they can defeat them relatively easily with enough rounds of combat. While hand waving the defeat of the last few enemies will reduce the distance between knowing you’re going to win and the end of the encounter, it can also be very unsatisfying for the players. It’s perhaps even more dissatisfying than just having the bad guys run away.

[@waynecribbs8853]

@@brettmclean2770 Your logic doesn't really make any sense. Minions make it MORE of a slog? That's just silly. The whole point is that combat is over faster with minions, meaning the combat doesn't have a chance to get boring. I have never had any players complain about winning a combat because the drama was over. There is absolutely no reason to continue hacking and slashing if the outcome is already certain. There is no drama there. So why drag it on and on?

[@brettmclean2770]

@@waynecribbs8853 Slog, as Matt defined it, it the difference between knowing you've won and when the combat actually ends. Since minions, by definition are an easy victory for the PCs, the entire process of eliminating them is "slog". I won't deny wading into a horde of faceless peons can be fun from time to time and that slog can be satisfying, but using it too much will make it boring. I mean, that sort of combat would just get hand-waved anyways. I'm not sure how to articulate my thoughts clearly here, so my point may not come across: There's nothing inherently wrong with fast-forwarding to the foregone conclusion of a combat; I've done it myself a number of times. But, if the goal is to reduce the gap between winning the battle and the end of combat, handwaving doesn't do that, it just sweeps it under the rug sort-to-speak. Once the player's have won, you're asking them to look in the other direction while the rest of the combat plays out. Additionally, there's no drama in handwaving either, maybe even less so. Of course, outlooks on this will inevitably vary from table to table.

[@waynecribbs8853]

@@brettmclean2770 Minions are more than just an "easy victory". They are still deadly in numbers and can add lots of drama if used correctly. See MCDM minions. Your argument is that if it's used "too much" it can be bad. Well, okay, so can anything. If there's no drama in continuing to slog on, and there's no drama in handwaving, then yeah: the drama is over. Why would I keep it going? Ending combat early doesn't have to be dramatic because the drama is over already. That's literally my point. I'm not looking to just "add drama" for the sake of making combats longer. That's kinda silly. In the video Matt lamented that he doesn't have the answer to his own question. My point is that these two things (minions and ending combat when drama is over) are not only effective, but directly solve the stated problems. These are problems I don't have at my table because I never let combat slog on last for rounds and rounds. I've DM'd long enough to have noticed and fixed this problem in my games. I don't claim to be a perfect DM, but I have pretty much solved this problem at my tables already. Why not share my knowledge here? Combat is RP with violence. If you treat it that way, then you're never just blindly hacking and slashing.

[@brettmclean2770]

@@waynecribbs8853 It's true minions can be deadly in greater numbers, but that also increases the length of the battle as the PC fight their way through them all. If it takes 5 rounds to kill one bad guy or 5 rounds to kill multiple minions, it's still five rounds of combat. The problem I see is that before those five rounds are over, the minions are going to diminish in number enough to obviously no longer be a threat. Reaching that point with a "regular" bad guys isn't necessarily going to be as obvious. And even if it is, in both scenarios you've got a situation where the PCs have won rounds before the combat ends. I certainly agree that whether you're fighting through the slog, or just hand-waving it away, the drama is gone and the hand-waving will get the players back to the drama quicker; I just feel as if there is the potential for other negative repercussions that it sounds like your groups have been fortunate enough not to experience. My take away from the video was that the win condition for a combat shouldn't typically need to be "defeat all the bad guys". Instead of saying combat is over because the PCs are clearly going to kill all of the opponents it's just a matter of time, declare the combat is over because a different win condition is met and it doesn't matter if the enemies are dead or not when that occurs. As I stated in my own post, the trick is to make it so that the PCs can't just remove the threat posed by the enemy NPCs before accomplishing that objective; otherwise the player tendency is to revert back to "defeat all the bad guys" so that they can fulfill their object in relative peace and safety.

[@Reformedhillbilly369]

At my table almost all the encounters I throw at my players is deadly/overwhelming. However, I would always put in something that would allow them to turn the tide. Whether that be “find and kill the enemy leader”, “Do (Blank) to collapse part of the building.” “Turn the enemy chasing you against the one blocking your way.” Etc. the first few times I gave them hints. Then they just started looking for the solution as soon as battle started. So the whole table was working together and strategizing the whole time. Often they would figure out solutions I hadn’t even considered. It was pretty cool.

[@ronwisegamgee]

The Sentinel Comics RPG utilizes a Scene Tracker for every significant action scene that goes from green to yellow to red to the PCs failing the objective and bad stuff happening. The amount of rounds the Scene Tracker will be in a certain color zone depends on the nature of the scene. When the scene transitions to the next color zone, something significant happens in the scene and the players may even use different dice and have access to more powerful abilities to denote the nature of the rising tension. Really cool stuff.

[@Ozai75]

"I suddenly remembered my Charlemagne, 'Let my armies by the rocks and the trees and the birds in the sky.''"

[@lucbrisson2]

The most awesome anti-slog rule I know is from Feng Shui. Sorcerers have access to a lot of spells, but if they have to look at the book when it's their turn (ie, they didn't decided what to do when it wasn't their turn), casting a spell takes two turns instead of one. So basically, the Sorcerer has a mechanical incentive to be invested in the battle and plan beforehand. I so much love Feng Shui.

[@NathanPatrickLane]

Cool to see people talking about Feng Shui here! I'm going to be running that game for the first time soon. I've run a bunch of games outside of D&D (Savage Worlds and City of Mist are some of my favorites), but I was wondering if you had any advice specific for running Feng Shui well?

[@lucbrisson2]

@@NathanPatrickLane At least at first, make sure the players have more than a few occasions to feel awesome. Don't limit their imagination and don't try to thwart their plans. Just let them have fun, then ramp up the opposition. Make sure they have a site that allows them to earn experience quickly as well. Part of the fun is to see your character grow.

[@Deliriumend]

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is also built on the Back 4 Blood/Left 4 Dead framework with the difference being that you're not just trying to survive/exfil, but complete an objective before hand. So your team is cutting a path through endless hordes of chaos cultists/etc to do things like: assassinate the traitor, cleanse the water system for the hive, raid an armory for resupply, etc, etc. In case anyone is looking for ways to use the structure where the PCs are pro-active in this situation.

[@coopmeister3000]

I'm currently running a West Marches campaign (thanks for the inspiration for that btw!) with an old-school megadungeon in it, and if there's something like a random encounter that reaches that point where the heroes have won but there's still enemies left, I have said before "ok we can wrap this one up and assume you guys kill off the few remaining guys without using any resources". It's a bit of a blunt tool, but it does help reduce slog and let the players get to more in one night. I do appreciate the advice to add objectives to combat as well - I am definitely too guilty of running only "kill everyone dead" combats, but if you're in one of those and it's a lower-stakes combat and you reach that point where the heroes have won, I don't think there's anything wrong with just saying "ok you guys are able to finish the rest of them off."

[@Kolchakk]

i think this is another case where the old school games kinda solved it already, but later editions broke it. In old school dnd, the objective was always the same: get the treasure. Enemies didn't even give XP, gold did! This made combat incidental; you fought to survive and get the treasure, so it was OK if the enemy ran away or you have to retreat, as long as you got the gold in the end. I think if dnd brought some of that energy back, it would help fix this problem a little.

[@BrawlerGamma]

I'm surprised you wouldn't at least mention, even if not focus too long on, the fact that earlier editions did XP for treasure and had the morale system. You've talked about it before, so maybe it seemed like retreading old ground, but I think it ties into this topic decently well; the objective in older editions wasn't to kill all the monsters, it was to get the treasure and get out alive, which, *could* be achieved by killing everything, but that was usually not feasible without a lot of risk or employing an entire mercenary corps to put overwhelming odds on your side, so usually you were incentivized to find an alternative to straight up combat, and you could kinda choose your own objectives as long as they served the ultimate goal of getting the treasure and getting out alive. Obviously the ethos in 5e tends to be pretty different, and the systems don't entirely support that without fiddling with a handful of things, but you could still look at that for inspiration--heck, milestone leveling is already more popular than XP for monster killing, based on what goals the PCs are pursuing, you could like, lay out for them some smaller objectives in service of a wider goal and be like, "If you do 3 of the things on this list, you get a level, doesn't matter *how* you get 'em done, and it contributes to the thing you're trying to do in the narrative/world anyway." But then, coming up with the specific objectives might be the hard part, though at the same time, usually if you've got a developing narrative already rolling, a lot of times it's kinda obvious what could be done next.

[@GallowglassAxe]

I agree with this. My favorite encounter of all time was from a the Dragon Age TTRPG with a homebrew campaign. We were travelling the Deep Roads and we accidentally triggers a Darkspawn swarm. As we were running we came up to a cliffside that we needed to climb in order to be save. Me and my gf at the time were being the tanks as the rogue climb to the top and sniping them from above. The mage was struggling because he had no strength or climbing ability. All the while each round more powerful darkspawn would appear and each time we took damage we had to make a save in case we got infected. It was extremely intense because we had an objective of we could get to the top of the cliff and each round we delayed it would up the stakes.

[@NikovK]

I introduced my kids to DnD with two combat scenarios. The first was a quest to go hunting breakfast down for their dragon overlord (they insisted on being dragonborn and kobold). They ended up ambushed by goblins while dragging a dead giant turtle back on its shell, and learning they left a blood trail back to the dragon's den. Their second battle was against goblins trying to raid the dragon's den. They had NPC kobold buddies holding the barricade while they ran to support them, and got introduced to death saving throws trying to help their wounded guard. It didn't matter that the goblin boss scraped himself off the cavern floor and escaped for later while they had their backs turned doing first aid; they saved all their fellow guards. They had emotional ties to the world that drove them to fight, rather than just killing for XP.

[@bacconiusursus5623]

Sorry Matt, not even you can get me to play B4B over L4D

[@jasonmountain4643]

Leaving 5e was my solution.

[@CooperAATE]

Glad it's worked for you

[@Junkyardproduxtions]

One of my PCs favourite encounters was a Bhaal ritual (pre BG3) where the deity stated "spill their blood" to his followers. Now there were 8 PCs so I knew this wouldn't be hard. The goal was to get out, i never told them there wasn't a limit to the enemies. With twelve to start and after they erased nine of them the ground rumbled for the ritual had been completed. This started a bonus enemy, suped up the rest, and suddenly the leader was like "OH, it didn’t HAVE to be ours."

[@valkyriebait136]

One of my favorite rules for this is from the New World of Darkness books. When combat begins, both sides have to declare their objective. Combat ends once one side achieves their goal.

[@SimonDouville1]

I like to put in a little "sub puzzle" to combat. Like first time they encountered Modrons, I placed a "respawn apparatus" in the room. yeah they could bash the modrons all they wanted but they would respawn to their lower self (like a duodrone would respawn in two monodrone, a triodrone would resawn in a duodrone and a monodrone). so the point of the fight was not bashing all the modrons but fixing the respawn machine.

[@xmateosx]

You answered the question that you said you wouldn't. I ran a 5e one-shot last year around this time. Everyone was engrossed while the game was on, but afterward they complained that it took to long and the fighting was not fun. After listening to this vid, I understand I gave them overall objectives, but not an objective in this fight. It was just a series of challenges, not really connected. They did ask me to lead a game this year, but they specified one-shot, meaning 1 - 3 hours, preferably 1 hour. My takeaway is, just keep DM-ing if it is what you really enjoy doing, just do it better. Thanks man

[@89Dienekes]

So, I don't know if this will help anyone else. But I've gone over this problem as a DM myself (though I framed it a bit differently) and I've come up with a method to mitigate it a bit that works for me. Though, it does put more work on behalf of the DM, which, yeah, that's not perfect. Anyway, I frame every combat encounter as a puzzle. Now sometimes the puzzle is the stuff that Matt was discussing here. Reframing the combat from killing everything to "survive for 10 minutes" or "get that McGuffin." And those work well, but sometimes the encounter just is "kill the enemies." And when that happens I try to set up the puzzle as something that the heroes can figure out and once they do the encounter becomes much, much easier, and likely ends fairly quickly afterwards. Some examples. I once had them face a monstrous homebrew bulette that would pop out of one of 6 holes in the ground do a ranged attack to hit one of the players, and then dive back into a different hole, until it's next turn. At first the players spread out, trying to position themselves to cover all the holes. But that meant that only one or two of them were ever really positioned well to deal with the monster. What they had to figure out, was that the holes each were connected to each other. If it went in Hole A they knew 100% of the time it would pop out of Hole E. Once they figured that out, they could surround the hole it was coming out of. The puzzle solved, within 2 rounds the encounter was over. The players still felt elated in the glow of figuring out a fairly difficult puzzle. Another I had was stories of an orc warlord that had taken three orcish clans that despised each other beyond all reason, unified them, and forced them to fight alongside each other. I gave them a little reminder of how much these creatures hate each other. So when the battle started, they figured out that the Warlord was the thing holding it all together. The puzzle became, how to kill that one guy in the middle of the enemy force. And once they succeeded, suddenly all the orcs were fighting each other as the three groups tried to get control of the others or simply kill those they hated. Again, basically ending the combat once they solved the puzzle. Now, this is not really in any way different from what Mr Colville is saying here. But I've found framing it this way, and making it really obvious to the players what they did/figured out was instrumental in solving the encounter helps with the accomplishment issue. They're ok with not killing every single enemy, because they feel satisfied doing "the cool thing" that solved the encounter. Even if walking into the encounter their only real idea was to kill everything until they win. Anyway, I hope that helps someone. Like I said, not really different from the video, just a way to frame the problem that is helpful to me.

[@DeltaEcho17]

Lancer's Game Master section has some really good examples of objective-focused missions (called "Sitreps" in that game) that could easily be repurposed for D&D; goals like "Take and hold as much territory as you can over six rounds" or "Retrieve an objective and extract it safely before overwhelming enemy reinforcements arrive," with suggested map layouts and mechanics for scoring so you can easily see how close each side is to accomplishing their objective.

[@JohnnyTightIips]

"Both cool AND adorable" - That's our uncle Matt!

[@bryanjohnston5856]

I just ran an encounter where giant rats, swarms of rats, and wererat's, led by a wererat warlock were destroying the food stores of a town's warehouse. Fight became to save the food over killing everything. Also had a minion generator (a couple tunnels where more rats come up each round or so) the group needed to seal during the fight. When the wererats ran away, it was still satisfying because they saved the food stores not killed everything.

[@vitorainmaker4653]

Though every table is different, so the following advice may not be applicable to every group of players: I encourage DMs to think about the environment of the combat. I've found great success amping up the stakes of a combat by introducing an environmental threat that lacks a statblock. For example, suppose your party is fighting one or two Frost Giants in the valley or a snowy region. There may come a point where you, your players, and perhaps even the giants know that victory is inevitable. Rather than continue the slog, maybe the surviving giant lets out a howl, causing an avalanche, to spite the characters. Now the win condition isn't "Kill everything", it becomes "Survive the avalanche". The downside to these environmental threats is that they're harder to balance, and you don't want to cause a party-wipe with snow. I think that while you're still developing a feel for these threats, it's best to make them easy to avoid; they don't have to be deadly for your party to feel excited by the additional variable. I'm not a very good DM, but I'm confident in two things regarding my game: - I'm blessed with very patient players. - They enjoy my combat encounters.

[@ckbooks]

The key I think is to have lots of different encounter styles like this ready to deploy. The odd war of attrition isn't a big deal as long as it's not happening in every successive combat. One of my favourite things about big boss monsters is that you rarely have that moment of "knowing you've won" (unless players have a way of determining monster HP in your game), so the tension can stay high right up until the final blow. Interspersing boss encounters with wars of attrition, rescue objectives, survival fights, or narrative-heavy combats where the goal might be something like *stopping* the fighting, is a great way to keep combat feeling fresh.

[@jollaffle]

One of the best combats I ever ran was the final battle of my last 5e campaign. The final boss was trying to take control of a power source granting a single, unambiguous wish, but it would take 10 rounds for the power source to be ready, and whoever was closest to it at that time would get the wish. So the battle was actually about fighting through a horde of githyanki warriors and commandeering their ships, to both get the boss *away* from the power source while also making sure one of the players was close enough to it that they could make the wish when the clock ran out.

[@edwardromero3580]

Great video, Matt. You probably know this already, but the game master section in ICRPG does a great job with designing objective based encounters, using timers and other cool techniques. It really changed the way I think about room design, encounters and yes, combat. As an example, in our last session, the PCs had to obtain a specific book from a multi-level library, guarded by a creature that could only be harmed by fire. Of course, attacking it with fire set the place ablaze and I gave them d4+1 rounds to grab the book and get out before the whole place went up in flames. All the while, they still had to contend with the guardian, who was now trying to avoid the fire as well. It was a blast.

[@HarmonicHewell]

Not being able to "beat" a combat was the best thing to ever happen to our d&d group. Our DM would frequently throw us into situations where we had absolutely no way of winning, the only objective being to escape with our lives. We had a situation where there were some anti-magical guards called spellbreakers. Our group's hideout was raided by about 8 of these spellbreakers (it took the three of us to barely take down one of these guys with cheese). And they tore our asses up. My barbarian went down and with some clever shenanigans from our warlock, we managed to escape with thunderstep. It was awesome, and super memorable, because the objective wasn't to hit all the things until there are no more things, the objective was live to fight another day. Also, when we got higher up in levels, we fought against the same spellbreakers agains, and when we did kill them, it felt like we'd really earned it.

[@Cybermaul]

2:54 in, and the answer to this problem is rolling morale for the NPCs. If they're losing, they probably know it and will break and flee if given half a chance. The DM them gets an opportunity to call in reinforcements, shift encounters around, have NPCs prepare for the party, other stuff like that