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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6781048" data-attributes="member: 1465">My opinion is that in 5e it is more up to the players to make combat interesting.And I do not mean through descriptions... replacing "I attack with my sword" with a long flamboyant description of your swinging and praising your deity, followed by the DM's Pulitzer-level description of the orc's facial expression of pain and blood pattern on the floor is entertaining once and already tedious the second time.I really mean that the player has to do some work to make combat more interesting from a functional/tactical point of view. It certainly depends on character build choices, clearly if you chose a Fighter/Champion instead of a Fighter/Battlemaster, or if you go with ability score increases instead of feats, it will be more difficult to try novelty tactics. And unfortunately the novelty tactics are often not the most efficient, to which point I am afraid we must admit that most times efficiency is boredom! If players keep only thinking in terms of "damage output", combat will keep being a boring task of maximization.The options are there, you don't need a flood of supplements for tactical variety, but you need to start using them. There's tons of spells for each class with not so obvious effects, but if you always focus on damage-dealers and buffs, it's your fault. Look for class abilities that aren't strictly related to boosting offense and defense, for example the Rogue's Cunning Action and the Fighter's Action Surge have a lot of potential for very interesting choices.As for the DM, the obvious thing to look for is to vary the encounters. It's true that the MM has a large bulk of samey monsters, but most monsters have at least one special ability. Focus on using that one! It doesn't matter if it would be once again more efficient to just let the monster do a regular attack, choose to use that monster's unique feature as much as you can so that the battle will feel different from the others. Besides that, scourge youtube for memorable movies fight scenes and steal ideas related to external/environmental conditions that can significantly alter a battle's dynamics.</blockquote>

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