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


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. . . is that without exceptional effort from the GM, combat encounters start to feel like repetitive exercises with few interesting, impactful choices to be made.

. . . 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.
I know how this feels - it's like telling the PCs that they face a court of 17 nobles, and then the PCs want to walk around meeting each one personally. The old and gold solution is tables of random results. If the situation of an encounter doesn't alone make the encounter interesting, fall back on up to three (let's say) Random Detail Generators: ground feature, area feature, and if necessary, complicating feature. But it looks like you want the randomness to affect the PCs first...

. . . 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.
So I'll twist a Final Fantasy V spell mechanism to help us out here. A handful of spells would affect their targets only if the target's level was a multiple of the spell's title. So Old 2 affected only opponents with an even number of levels. For D&D, due to the Ebb & Flow (E&F) of battle, your PCs can use only character features (or spell levels) from character levels that are multiples of the E&F die (d6) that you roll before the first round. The die counts down to the next lower number on each subsequent round, making other features available and sometimes invalidating others. The PC's benefit for suffering E&F is that the E&F die also represents a penalty to NPC checks until the round that the die hits 1. This represents the NPCs reaching full combat speed.
 

Great comments, thanks!

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.

Yup, 100% this. Even if the GM is committed to providing a buffet of fresh tactical options for each encounter (either via mob abilties/resistances or terrain features), there are issues both with discoverability and magnitude of impact. Although honestly, at this point I'd be fine if parties were curb stomping all their non BBEG fights by exploiting the specific circumstances of each combat map rather than just sticking to the same routine every single time.

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.
To be fair, many of the typical encounters already do feel tedious even if they don't drag out. (I say that both as a player and as a GM.) When I'm wearing the GM hat, I make an effort to work in interesting mobs (e.g., the plant creature that heals as long as it is touching the ground) and terrain elements. I don't want combats to feel like gotcha puzzles, though, so the PC's can of course always barrel ahead and win through attrition.

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.
That's a good point. I'm going to noodle on that a bit - I like the idea of moving past the mundane rounds of combat and only dropping into turn-by-turn action when there are more interesting bits to play through.

...5E is built around so many damn encounters per day.
Amen. I don't want to have a two-hour adventuring day, but the system does feel like it's designed around the assumption that there are a few "trash mob" encounters that encourage the PC's to burn through some of their resources before they get to the BBEG.
 

Which can make the game more fun on a tactical level, but can also make fights drag out or feel tedious.
Well if the tactical situations and gameplay are engaging, then they shouldn't feel dragged out or tedious ... but there's certainly a limit yeah. I wonder what the truth is to that story about someone last-minute deciding to double all the 4e monsters in the core books hp.
 

Well if the tactical situations and gameplay are engaging, then they shouldn't feel dragged out or tedious ... but there's certainly a limit yeah. I wonder what the truth is to that story about someone last-minute deciding to double all the 4e monsters in the core books hp.
Honestly when I played 4e, I never felt like enemies took too long to die, though having a well-balanced group was important- I played a lot of Living Forgotten Realms and D&D Encounters, so you never knew what you were going to get, and I saw a lot of terrible Strikers, lol.

The main issue I saw with 4e combat was really the reaction game, where you had to read the triggers with a fine toothed comb just to figure out their timing. You'd think it'd be easy, with opportunity actions, reactions, and interrupts, but there were a lot of badly templated reactions with things like "trigger: when you are targeted by an attack" which could prevent you from being attacked even though that's not really what reactions were meant to do.

High level play could start to feel like Magic: the Gathering when there got to be too many reacting abilities.

But there was another issue, and that came down to status effects. While thankfully none lasted very long, given that 4e didn't have many powers that could remove effects (usually they just gave you another saving throw), there were lots of times when you'd have your entire turn basically stolen from you and there wasn't much you could do about it. Which was simply unacceptable in a long combat where you might have to wait 20 minutes before you could act again. And after awhile, it felt like every monster had some rider tacked onto their attacks, so the reason to fear being hit had little to do with the damage after awhile, and more "oh God, what does this thing do to me?".
 

Well if the tactical situations and gameplay are engaging, then they shouldn't feel dragged out or tedious ... but there's certainly a limit yeah. I wonder what the truth is to that story about someone last-minute deciding to double all the 4e monsters in the core books hp.
That was a bit of the issue I had with 4E. I didn't want to spend my entire night engaged in tabletop fights. I can enjoy it in small doses, but not one after another slugfests that had have to be run out on a battlemat - I'm not wanting to play Gloomhaven, Heroquest or the D&D minis game when I'm playing regular D&D. It's okay to have a battle encounter that can be played out in theater of the mind or resolved with a couple rolls - or avoided entirely if it isn't worth the risk to the party or to completing their goal (in fact, working in a couple that should be avoided or mitigated can be interesting in itself).
 

I feel your pain. I'm hoping maneuvers will help with this. Really, encounter powrs with limited uses per rest, if you can stop theni from resting, would give us this.
 


For me the answer is "don't make combat the purpose of playing the game".

The less frequent you use the board game, the less often or the wider the gap between the uses of these "standard operating procedures" and the less noticeable they become.
 

My memory is a little fuzzy on this as it has been more than a decade since I reviewed the game, but there is/was a RPG called Chronicles of Ramlar that had an interesting combat mechanic called Momentum. As I recall, every time you scored a successful attack in combat, you gained a boon that carried forward to your next attack and, if that attack was also successful, you gained another boon, and so on. A failed attack (again, IIRC) would deplete Momentum (and associated boons). I think it would be pretty easy to carry this over to D&D.
 

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