D&D General Game mechanics to keep routine combats interesting?

WizardOfFrobozz

Accardi-by-the-Sea

TL; DR version

What rules and mechanics have you experimented with to keep combat encounters fresh and engaging in 5e? Although encounter design is certainly important, I’m really NOT looking for tips or tricks on that front. If you’ve homebrewed rules or borrowed aspects from other games with the aim of breaking up the monotony of encounters in 5E, though, I’d love to hear about it! What worked for you and your players?

Long version​

Since COVID hit, I’ve probably played in and GM’d more sessions of DnD than I did in the whole decade prior. Some have been amazing, some have been meh, but one pattern that I keep seeing - across dozens of different campaigns with scores of different players and GM’s - is that without exceptional effort from the GM, combat encounters start to feel like repetitive exercises with few interesting, impactful choices to be made.

The warlock casts a spell on the first round and then snipes Eldritch Blast for the rest of the battle. The Paladin opens with Shield of Faith, closes with the tank (or is the tank), makes melee attacks every round, and picks when to smite. The rogue moves to range and repeatedly takes steady aim followed by sharpshooter, switching to disengage and repositioning if he gets tangled in melee.

These are just a few arbitrary examples; the specific routine depends on the build. But the point is that players repeat the same routine with minor variations just about every time initiative is rolled.

A good GM can break this up by introducing either mobs or environmental factors that disrupt those routines and encourage the party to look for different solutions. No question: this can be an effective solution, and hats off to all those GM’s out there with the time and the creativity to make the 35th encounter feel as fresh and interesting as the 3rd.

But I’m often struck by the fact that many of the other games I play do a much better job of giving players more interesting tradeoffs to think about on a regular basis without requiring any additional prep work. Usually this achieved by injecting some randomness into the player’s options on any given turn. That random element is big enough to tactically impact turn-by-turn play while still letting the player feel like their overall build, strategy, and/or identity isn’t being undermined.

All of which has me musing about what it might look like to cherry pick some elements of randomized gameplay - from a CCG, for example, or a puzzle game - and layer those into DnD's combat mechanics. I don’t want to completely reinvent the wheel or invalidate the build work that already goes into skill/feat/class selections, but boy would it be nice to keep things from falling into a predictable rut even when the GM doesn’t have a chance to polish each and every encounter.

Has anyone tried anything like this in their games? If so, what did you use for inspiration, how do you adapt it into the DnD rule set, and most importantly, how did it work out for everyone at the table?
 

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I think the most important thing is to make sure monsters/enemies are dynamic. Both is regular games and when doing design, I make sure to give 5E monsters reactions and bonus actions that are interesting, fun and create movement, and never just an additional attack or attack denial. For typical monsters you only need one or two of those kinds of abilities to keep players on their toes and the combat interesting, without necessarily increasing the complexity of running the game or the in game difficulty.
 

Check out the 4E DMGs. All the advice and mechanics you need to make D&D combat non-boring.

The big ones are secondary objectives, dynamic terrain, clocks, and countdowns.

In 1d2 or 1d3 rounds something happens. Foreshadow it in the scene or just before.
Objectives beyond "kill them all" are definitely important.
 

Pacing mechanics are useful for this.

4e had a few abilities that worked differently when you were bloodied, creating a sense of escalation as a combat goes on.

The Escalation Die in 13th age is a good idea.

Monster mechanics like villain actions from Flee Mortals or Mythic monsters from Theros have this element, too. Lair actions are pretty good for this.

Randomization would do this, but feels a little too removed from active choice for D&D most of the time. Random encounter generation is kind of part of this, but gets into that prep/encounter design space you're not interested in here. Random PC abilities are...well, often not particularly satisfying for PC's, especially those who like to "solve" the problem of combat by being super effective enough that they have a standard plan of attack for every encounter.
 

Some form of escalation sounds like it would break the pace - a deck, die, jenga tower or something that semi-randomly interjects some feature, consequence, advantage or random event into the combat to keep things from becoming staid. It'd need to be planned out ahead of time.

The opposite approach though might be to de-emphasize combat. Sometimes D&D tries to get too far into the weeds of the blow-by-blow and just ends up creating false action. If the same course of actions is happening every time, skim over it quickly and move forward to where things get more interesting - major active decision or turning points in the combat, exploration, puzzle-solving, interactions, whatever both sides of the table have more fun interacting with.
 

Make sure you understand monster roles and tactics - tanks (high AC), strikers (mobility), archers (range), lurkers (stealth) and use them tactics.
Use reactions
Use dynamic terrain and mobility - I sometimes write terrain notes on post-it notes which PCs can see and use
Combats should have objectives
Use waves of monsters
 

D&D is built around characters having a few options to choose from at any given moment. And as the saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

For example, I'm engaged in an experiment to see if I can make damage types matter a bit more. So I've been playing around more with resistances and especially vulnerabilities. Of course, even if the players know they are fighting enemies that are resistant to fire and vulnerable to cold, their ability to take advantage of that fact is very limited. The Fighter can do nothing but attack with his weapons. The Cleric doesn't have cold spells in his arsenal. The Sorcerer can do nothing to change his limited spell selection. So the only character who can even remotely take advantage of that is the Druid- and the Sorcerer has to avoid his fire spells, which, of course, are some of the most efficient damage spells in the game.

Simply put, the game doesn't really support a character being a Swiss Army Knife. They will then tend to use a single strategy that works in most situations and if they actually encounter a situation where that doesn't work, they flounder.

And even if you try to place things into the scenario that they can exploit, like cover or terrain hazards or whatnot, they won't think to use alternative methods because they likely don't understand how effective they are.

There's a fight in Conan the Destroyer where everyone's favorite sword-wielding side of beef has to fight a monster in a room full of mirrors. To win, he has to attack the mirrors, but being Conan, he spends quite a bit of time directly attacking with the creature- only by accident does he encounter his weakness. Players tend to feel the same way- they employ the tactics they know usually work (or worse, are the tactics they personally want to use, having built their characters around them) and will rarely be optimized to "shatter mirrors quickly"- and if they happen to be, well, that probably won't be much fun to sit through, lol.

What D&D would need, I think, is a system where actions had cool downs, or that you have "set up" moves. I used to have a Ranger in 4e who got hefty bonuses from hitting prone enemies, so my first attack would slow an enemy, then I had a feat that said whenever I hit a slowed enemy I proned them, which generally meant my third attack would be the haymaker. Of course even with that, I kept using the same handful of abilities in most fights.

So what's really needed are more situational tactics, where everyone has a move to use against a certain kind of foe- everyone has a disarm or a finisher they can use on a foe with the right status ailment, be it prone or bloodied or stunned.

Everyone should have an anti-flying move or a high mobility move to get around a cluttered battlefield quickly. But this adds complexity to the combat- you have to keep track of more things as a player, and of course, the bad guys will need moves of their own, or counters to them.

Which can make the game more fun on a tactical level, but can also make fights drag out or feel tedious.
 

I try to focus on boss battles to make them a bit more memorable. If a dungeon has 10 encounters which 6 a possible fights, I try to make 1-2 of them cooler with terrain, traps, or a teleporter in the room or something less static.

We also use the flanking rules which beings in the rogue to melee to help out and sometimes the casters to aid the fighter in flanking. It allows spells to hit more PCs and the BBEG to do more, but die faster making combat shorter.
 

Normally my advice would be to spice it up more with exploration encounters, but 5E is built around so many damn encounters per day. Though take this with a grain of salt as im more of a fast and furious combat guy then tactical chess puzzle type. I dont want combat to eat away all the game time. So, Id pay attention to environment and where the fights are happening. Its fine if the players have their go to tactics, but make it tough for them to set, bump, spike so to speak.
 

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