D&D 5E 5e--combats are too "same-y"?

[Crothian]

I'm just curious if others have hit this in 5e and how to avoid it.

I have not noticed it but our games don't focus on the combats. Combat is something the party does when they failed at something else usually.

 

[Dausuul]

You need to liven up your combats a bit. Add difficult terrain, introduce fliers, have strange environmental conditions, place reinforcements near at hand, mix complimentary monster types together that create creative thinking to overcome, separate the characters so they have a harder time supporting each other, etc.

It's worth noting that these things were necessary to make 4E combats exciting, too. Otherwise you were apt to run into the dreaded Grind Monster. We had some long threads on how to avoid grind in 4E.

What it really boils down to is that D&D combat, in and of itself, is not and has never been terribly deep - no, not even 4E combat. It requires the DM to supply variety and excitement. Otherwise, it's mostly just rolling dice and doing arithmetic.

 

[Sunseeker]

Don't expect much in the way of tactics at level 3.

Levels 1-2 are the "starter levels" to introduce new people to their classes and the basics of the game. Level 3 is where you actually get to start making some decisions about your character and it increases from there.

There were a lot of complaints about 4E being too much of a "tactical miniatures wargame" then, well, whatever those people thought D&D should have been, so a lot of that was cut out from 5e (powers, measurements in squares, etc..).

The fact that 5E is also rules light also makes it less tactical.

So you're experiencing a conflagration of problems: Early levels have the least tactical elements. 5E was designed to be a much less tactical game, especially in comparison to 4E and 5E simply doesn't have the amount of rules necessary to support highly tactical play.

Solutions include: Don't play low-levels. Use a lot of the optional rules. Make overt attempts to be tactical with your party and ask the DM to play the enemies more tactically too.

 

[vandaexpress]

I've been playing one game and running another. Both parties are quite martial in nature (barbarian, ranger, fighter, warlock and barbarian, rogue, warlock, monk) and I'm finding that the fights seem to fall into a pretty standard pattern. Most have been a lot of fun, but at some point, everyone has no decisions to make, just dice to roll. Both parties are level 3.

...

I run a group of pretty well-organized PCs that are tactically quite competent and well-equipped. I find that the above scenarios you describe were starting to occur with increasing frequency as I ran them through pre-written modules - many of the encounters in these are extremely bland.

Here's what I did to spice things up, but first, an aside: take anything I say here with a grain of salt, I've been told that my DM style is... not particularly standard and I've conditioned my players to it over time. They love it, but you'll want to carefully consider whether or not these tips are for you and your players. I say this in order to ward off accusations that I engage in badwrongfun and that you would never play at my table, etc.

Tip #1: Amplify the difficulty. Substantially.

Far and away the best thing I did in my game to make combats more interesting was making them far deadlier. With the right group of players, this often puts them into "improvise" mode and they tend to make more use of the environment and all tactical options available to them. I first realized this when a party on the verge of a TPK had the paladin switch from using melee attacks to grappling enemies and pulling them down a trapdoor to get the enemies away from the squishier at-risk ranged attackers, or when another fighter spent each round shoving ogres back into a wall of fire another party member had cast. Or when a vampire was constantly doing hit-and-run attacks on the party, draining max hp, etc was once again fleeing in bat-form and a party member changed into a flying creature and grappled her mid-air. Or when the party was outnumbered in a tiny room and the bard grabbed a nearby brazier and lit the table on fire before tipping it over to provide cover and damage the enemies that were bearing down on her.

So how do you make the game deadlier without going into full-on cheese mode?

• If you use XP guidelines, add 1 or 2 to the party's effective level when calculating encounter difficulty.
• Roll for a random encounter on every short or long rest, all random encounters are at least "Hard" (using the above guidelines with a higher party level)
• Roll multiple times on long rests for random encounters unless extremely good measures have been implemented to prevent discovery. If Leomund's Tiny hut is discovered, it's surrounded and enemies have laid down traps and the like around it.
• Whenever the party takes a long rest, if they're fighting an organized foe with the means to call in outside help, reinforcements arrive. Additionally, assuming an intelligent commander, traps and ambushes are set up throughout the dungeon.
• Don't bother with medium or easy encounters unless you want to give the party some comic relief. Hard or Deadly only. Boss fights should be incredibly deadly and scary.
• Utilize alerts and alarm bells in your dungeons and enemy fortifications. Enemies that are alerted have advantage on passive perception and if a combat lasts 3 rounds or longer, reinforcements might arrive.
• Occasionally utilize waves in your encounters. Harder for parties to knock out the entire group with control spells or a surprise attack if reinforcements arrive on round x
• Once a location is on alert, monsters begin hunting the PCs, utilizing stealth against the PCs passive perception. Ambushes and sneak attacks all the way. Organized enemies should not be sitting around in rooms waiting to die without a very good reason. As a result, PCs may wind up fighting against several encounters worth of opponents simultaneously.
• Use flyers and highly mobile enemies to get around the front line and attack the squishies in the back.
• Make sure you're enforcing vision rules in low-light situations if your party has humans.
• Use spells like fog cloud and wall of fire to block line of sight to your NPC casters to prevent them from being sniped. Then have the casters lob fireballs, for example (which don't require LoS) at the party through the wall.
• Make sure that any mid-high level caster has prepared counterspell and uses it shamelessly to shut down high-threat spells. Casters are best if they have lots of meat shields and are absolutely terrifying if there are at least two of them with complimentary spell selections (like wall of fire and some sort of control spell like silence, sleet storm, etc combined with multiple counterspells per round).
• Use high strength creatures to grapple party members and start pulling them away from the rest of the group where they lose the benefit of things like paladin auras, bless, etc and can be more easily killed off.
• Prioritize anyone with a concentration spell going. If someone has haste running, focus everything on him, when he loses his conc, anyone who's hasted effectively loses a turn due to the spell's side effects.
• Throw out Silence Spells and Sleet Storms like its going out of style to mess with enemy casters.
• Play your intelligent monsters intelligently. Assume any non-surprised wizard has all of his buffs (mage armor, blink, mirror image, etc) going when the party alerts him and enters the room to start the fight. Have your meatshields use dodge actions and have ranged attackers ready attacks against the party's casters/archers when they peek out from cover. Make sure your own ranged creatures don't end their turns within LOS of party artillery.

Party has to be mature and trust that you, as a DM, have their enjoyment and best interests as your primary goal if you utilize the high-difficulty approach. If they just think you're a jerk, you'll lose your players.

Having said that, high difficulty against smart players leads very memorable fights and much less metagaming once the party realizes that you won't hesitate to put them up against "encounters" that don't match their level expectations. Once the party realizes you're not going to let them get an automatic 5-minute adventuring day with easy rests, they become much more thoughtful about how they ration their resources, giving "cannon-fodder" enemies a much better chance of hurting them. My group rarely, if ever, "cleans out" a dungeon completely, combat is deadly and it's often not worth the risk for them to stick around once they've achieved their primary story objective for entering the enemy stronghold in the first place. They've developed into very selfless players that work hard to support each other in combat or sacrifice oneself so the rest of the party can get away. When a character dies, make sure it's an awesome death.

In the case of a character who is alone and facing certain death, you might want to grant him inspiration every round or something like that so that he goes out in a blaze of glory, Boromir style. Make sure that their character is somehow immortalized in the memory of NPCs, etc who are grateful for his sacrifice and courage. Make it clear that they didn't just die for nothing.

Tip #2: Describe attacks and consequences of the attacks. Self-explanatory, instead of saying "Okay you do 12 damage, Bob. Frank, it's your turn" describe how Bob's firebolt hit the Ogre in the eye, causing him to stumble a bit and howl in pain. Especially critical hits. This is particularly effective when you throw a low-difficulty encounter at the party and describe how utterly terrified the enemies are when they see the party members one-shotting their comrades with a single hit. As the enemies begin losing the fight, make wisdom saves to hold their ground, describe how they're starting to panic, have them scream out random NPC names whenever one of their allies dies, etc.

This takes a lot more work and a bit of practice, and it's easy to think it doesn't really matter, but IMC it's had a dramatic impact on the flavor and enjoyment of combats.

Tip #3:Use some of the advanced combat variants in the DMG. I don't use flanking, but I do use a lot of the other ones to open a lot more tactical options in combats (for both the party and the NPCs)

Tip #4: What everyone else has already said in this thread about encounter composition, complimentary enemies, terrain, etc. My favorite is to build an encounter that highlights a typically-unremarkable monster ability or often-overlooked rule.

Example:
My most memorable encounter took a lot of work, but the players still bring it up every session. It took place in a highly agile BBEG's custom "training room" (think the danger room from X-men) which looked like this (apologies for the blurry image)



The bad guy was a chosen of Bhaal and was able to jump really far. Normally a jump distance is a fairly mediocre monster ability and not really something that you'd consider BBEG-worthy. I decided to built the entire encounter around this ability, however.

Every round, I rolled 3d12 and those bridges either retracted or extended if they were already retracted. The water below the bridges was infested with crocodiles 30 feet down. If the party stood on a platform, a red glyph would appear and the next round that entire platform would be engulfed in flame. In other words, if the characters didn't move every round, they would get scorched. If they were on a bridge, they plummeted into the water if it retracted. The distance and size of each platform meant that the party often couldn't stay together and were forced to split up and separate.

Each round, there was a random chance of a beast/monster being released from the cages surrounding the arena. If a PC was on a platform and both bridges connecting it were retracted, they were in a tough spot and could, perhaps, attempt to balance their way to the center platform on the blue chains (DC 15 acrobatics) or jump from one platform to another if their strength was high enough.

The bad guy was able to jump from platform to platform with ease, sniping with poison bolts and singling out ranged characters and disarming them with battlemaster maneuvers. He had darkvision and the entire chamber was unlit. It was essentially a deathtrap that he used for training purposes to keep his skills sharp (he was in his late 40s and spent two hours a day training in the chamber) and the room itself proved to be nearly as deadly as the BBEG who inhabited it. They were only level 4 when I did this fight.

The party was barely able to survive and they definitely could not rely on their standard combat tactics to win this battle. I find that having a big "set piece" battle like this every two or three sessions helps to keep combat from getting too stale. PCs sometimes are grateful for a simple combat after a fight like the above.

TL;DR Amp up the difficulty, roleplay the attacks and their effects, use optional combat variants in the DMG, and utilize a combination of terrain and unusual abilities for set piece battles every 2-3 sessions.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Tip #2: Describe attacks and consequences of the attacks. Self-explanatory, instead of saying "Okay you do 12 damage, Bob. Frank, it's your turn" describe how Bob's firebolt hit the Ogre in the eye, causing him to stumble a bit and howl in pain. Especially critical hits.

This can lead to issues in any edition past AD&D, if you describe any damage in a manner that can't be recovered with a little bit of rest. Bob probably didn't firebolt the ogre's eye, unless you're using Lingering Wounds, and that happened to be the result.

You can still say that the attack hit the ogre squarely in the chest, and knocked the wind out of him, but these sorts of non-lethal attacks also start to feel stale after a while. There are only so many ways you can hurt someone, without really hurting them.

 

[vandaexpress]

This can lead to issues in any edition past AD&D, if you describe any damage in a manner that can't be recovered with a little bit of rest. Bob probably didn't firebolt the ogre's eye, unless you're using Lingering Wounds, and that happened to be the result.

You can still say that the attack hit the ogre squarely in the chest, and knocked the wind out of him, but these sorts of non-lethal attacks also start to feel stale after a while. There are only so many ways you can hurt someone, without really hurting them.

Typically when roleplaying gets stale, it's indicative to me that the group needs to take a break for a while. YMMV. That being said, I don't have a problem with PCs inflicting major wounds on enemies that incur lasting penalties because the difficulty of an encounter is typically high enough that a blinded ogre isn't going to make the combat noticeably easier. It's more of a lucky break. My go-to status effects for "cool" attacks are blindness, disadvantage on an attack, losing access to an attack (broken limb), prone, or being stunned for a round. I apply these effects whenever I feel that interest in a particular combat is flagging, and always on the NPCs, not the PCs.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Don't expect much in the way of tactics at level 3.

Levels 1-2 are the "starter levels" to introduce new people to their classes and the basics of the game. Level 3 is where you actually get to start making some decisions about your character and it increases from there.

There were a lot of complaints about 4E being too much of a "tactical miniatures wargame" then, well, whatever those people thought D&D should have been, so a lot of that was cut out from 5e (powers, measurements in squares, etc..).

The fact that 5E is also rules light also makes it less tactical.

So you're experiencing a conflagration of problems: Early levels have the least tactical elements. 5E was designed to be a much less tactical game, especially in comparison to 4E and 5E simply doesn't have the amount of rules necessary to support highly tactical play.

Solutions include: Don't play low-levels. Use a lot of the optional rules. Make overt attempts to be tactical with your party and ask the DM to play the enemies more tactically too.

Lack of defined tactical rules =/= lack of tactics in the game. I said this upthread. Every edition could have the same level of tactics based on how you play and what you did. Even level 1. Even 5e. Even Basic. Even a level 1 PC in Basic. Nothing is stopping you from using tactics, strategy, or the environment to your favor, even in a game where there might not be any defined rules for it. I can assure that almost 35 years of gaming, we have always used strategy and tactics in combat when we could, regardless of edition.

If there's one thing I wish all D&D players would remember, it's this: Your character is not limited to those actions listed on his or her character sheet.

Everything, from shield bashes, to pushes, to trips, to throwing sand in the eyes, to swinging on that rope to the next level, to flipping tables, to fighting with a log or a weapon in each hand can be attempted by everyone who wants to.

 

[S'mon]

Most have been a lot of fun, but at some point, everyone has no decisions to make, just dice to roll. .

They pretty well always have the decision "fight, or run?" - and so do the monsters.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Typically when roleplaying gets stale, it's indicative to me that the group needs to take a break for a while. YMMV.

It's not the roleplaying that gets stale. I'm saying that combat can feel boring if you're limited to describing all wounds as non-lethal. It's one of those things that shifts the balance between pillars, because I need more interaction and exploration to break up the boring combat.

That being said, I don't have a problem with PCs inflicting major wounds on enemies that incur lasting penalties because the difficulty of an encounter is typically high enough that a blinded ogre isn't going to make the combat noticeably easier. It's more of a lucky break. My go-to status effects for "cool" attacks are blindness, disadvantage on an attack, losing access to an attack (broken limb), prone, or being stunned for a round. I apply these effects whenever I feel that interest in a particular combat is flagging, and always on the NPCs, not the PCs.

Well, yeah. That's definitely a case of YMMV, because I would never think to treat PCs any differently from NPCs. If PCs only ever take soft damage, and NPCs are subject to lethal damage, then as a player it feels like the DM is cheating in my favor. It kills any sense of satisfaction or accomplishment.

 

[Sunseeker]

Lack of defined tactical rules =/= lack of tactics in the game. I said this upthread. Every edition could have the same level of tactics based on how you play and what you did. Even level 1. Even 5e. Even Basic. Even a level 1 PC in Basic. Nothing is stopping you from using tactics, strategy, or the environment to your favor, even in a game where there might not be any defined rules for it. I can assure that almost 35 years of gaming, we have always used strategy and tactics in combat when we could, regardless of edition.

If there's one thing I wish all D&D players would remember, it's this: Your character is not limited to those actions listed on his or her character sheet.

Everything, from shield bashes, to pushes, to trips, to throwing sand in the eyes, to swinging on that rope to the next level, to flipping tables, to fighting with a log or a weapon in each hand can be attempted by everyone who wants to.

Sure, but the list is unarguably shorter at lower levels.