Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 7165055" data-attributes="member: 6785785">Think of action scenes from movies or books or comics that you enjoy, and borrow from them. Create dynamic encounters by having the environment be a factor.Start off with some basics. A fight atop a cliff, and the enemies try to push the PCs over the side. Jot down the basics about grappling and pushing with your notes, and you're all set. Don't make the fall fatal, just make it hurt a bit and a pain to get back to the fight. Add some difficult terrain, or other obstacles. Hazards like a pool of lava, with bubbles that burst every four rounds and do damage ro anyone within 15 feet. Even just some areas of raised elevation with archers on them can make an encounter stand out a bit. It honestly doesn't need to be much, just a little something different from one fight to the next.Once you have those basics down, then you can try for more elaborate things. A recent elaborate encounter I had was along the inside of a vertical shaft that was 100 feet deep and 50 feet across. The bottom of the shaft was actually a great pair of doors that would open when the light of the full moon shone upon them. So the PCs had to make their way down the shaft, jumping along platforms apaced along the walls. This required Athletics/Acrobatics checks, so some made their way quickly and others went slow, so that kind of spread the party out. That's when the monsters attacked. I went with carrion crawlers who laired beneath the ledges. They attacked as the PCs jumped from the ledge, hoping to paralyze them and cause them to fall. Once all theh PCs made it to the floor, the moonlight hit, and the floor split in the middle and each half moved 5 feet each round toward the wall. So the PCs had to finish the crawlers off and also figure out a safe way to descend into the opening pretty quickly.An encounter like that can take a lot and usually requires a map and minis or some other visual representation, but they can be a lot of fun. However, it doesn't take all that to make a fight seem unique. Start simple and build up as you get more comfortable.</blockquote>

Verification