D&D General GM's are you bored of your combat and is it because you made it boring?

[Lanefan]

What does that mean in this context, though? I always play a monster true to its personality, knowledge, limitations, advantages and so on (to the best of my ability!).

Perfect!

What "give a monster an even break" means in this context, however, is that if its personality etc. says it would most likely do X then X is what it'll do even if that isn't perhaps the most exciting or interesting thing for the table.

Strafing dragons, for example: if a particular dragon is cautious and-or has run afoul of adventurers before, most likely it's going to try to inflict the greatest harm to its foes while taking the least harm itself; and that means it'll either strafe or just fly away. Not much fun for the table, but good for the dragon.

A different dragon who is far more confident (or overconfident) in its abilities might just sit there and let the party come to it. I had a big ol' dragon do this once: it was so convinced that nothing could possibly hurt it (much) that it just sat there and waited for the party - who it had seen coming from miles away - to find it. Then it started talking to them, negotiating while it sized them up and all the while (once it realized how much treasure they had!) intending to catch them off guard with a breath and go from there.

The players/PCs got bored with the talking long before I did, and dropped the hammer on the dragon; and though they didn't 'surprise' it they still did enough damage to ground it before it had a chance to try and fly away.

 

[ClaytonCross]

Another thing that has been toying in my mind, is the notion of setting difficult challenges for yourself as the DM to accomplish during a combat.

We've already talked about establishing the motivations of your enemies, and this covers a lot of the same ground, but there is something extra I want to add: what if the thing your enemies are trying to do, is actually pretty difficult and will require all your skill as a tactician?

I'll give an example.

--snip--

I like this idea but I don't know how to add it as a simple, clear, and separate idea. It seems like a cleaver combination of #2 Consider team monster’s motivation, #4 Consider Alternative threats to large piles of HP, and #5 Consider the power of friendly Rivalry. While I like it as an example and it is a good depiction of making things work for you, I think adding cleaver examples would end up making the post even longer and risk it becoming too daunting a read to be a functional set of guids. Though I do recognize there is value in showing the interaction and manipulation these into an idea.. maybe if I had grabbed the second post too I could a have use that as an examples section but I lacked to foresight to something like that.

 

[ClaytonCross]

I think the key point of the Dragons stories that keep getting listed is not if option A or option B is "the right way to run a dragon"... The point is no two dragons need to run the same way. Intelligent creatures can have different motives (#2. Consider team monster’s motivation), different strategies (#4 Consider Alternative threats to large piles of HP), and different allies (#3. Consider adding variety to your units). They also don't have to all be ancient dragons, their are many tiers of dragons and different colors with different natures. It possible to have two mating CR9 young dragons fighting your level 13 party instead of one CR 13 Adult dragon. In that case one could be a constant melee fighter positioning itself between the clutch and the party and the other strafing from the air. The Dragons could be afraid of the party and the GM playing the dragons with all he has (#5 Consider the power of friendly Rivalry.) because while a clutch of chromatic dragons might be something a party of adventurers might be sent to deal with these dragons are defending their own and willing to fight to the death ... unless the party leaves or perhaps offers to let them relocate (#4 Consider Alternative threats to large piles of HP).

Its not about if your running a Dragon encounter right. Its about if your running all dragon encounters the same and boring yourself for no reason. If your content or happy with the same dragon battle repeated and scaled with levels every time ... that is actually fine. If your finding your self dreading running another dragon encounter ... its possible and perhaps even likely because its an encounter your repeating rather than reprising. Even if your playing the exact same dragon your party fought before, that somehow escaped, you can change a number of factors to ensure that its not the same fight. You can add a number of elements to break away from "the formula" and enjoy running it instead of dreading it.

 

[Neonchameleon]

There are in my experience four ways that the mechanics themselves can encourage combat to not be boring - and D&D 5e fails hard at all four. I'm not bored of running combats, but I am bored of D&D 5e combat.

• Speed - if combat is fast I simply don't have time to be bored. D&D 5e combat is slow.
• Threatening consequences - if combat is swingy then every dice roll matters because it could lead to death or serious long term conseqences. Hit points are almost consequence free other than death, and bounded accuracy leads to monsters that are easily hit, which leads to bullet sponge enemy design.
• Tactically varied - if fictional positioning matters then each fight is going to be different. 5e goes out of its way to destroy tactics. Flanking isn't a thing. Spellcasters are as effective with most of their spells in melee as at range. Thanks to the rules for finesse and throwing weapons an NPC archer does almost as much damage as accurately with a shortsword as a bow, and a brute does almost as much damage with a javelin as accurately as a one handed axe. This all means that the main tactic that matters is focus fire.
• Otherwise encourages narration - this covers a range of things including hit location and wound rules, stunting, the Wushu Open giving an extra dice for each thing described, scene based aspects, choices of what the success means as in Apocalypse World, etc.

D&D 5e gives me none of these things. This doesn't mean I can't run an interesting combat in 5e - it means that if I've succeeded in running an interesting combat in 5e I've done it despite the system, dragging the system with me. If I run a fast and tense combat in Apocalypse World with threatening consequences that's normal and easy because that's what Apocalypse World encourages. If I run an interesting and swingy combat in D&D 4e with two of the players reduced below 0hp at different times, and the players working together to push the monsters into their own pit traps then it's been a joy because that's the sort of game 4e encourages. If my Fate game has made the scenery pop with aspects, and there are long term consequences for the characters with it ending in surrender rather than death this too has been helped by the rules because that's what Fate does and what Fate encourages.

Meanwhile the bolded suggestions in the original post of what to do almost say the same thing. "Take the gameplay the rules of 5e acually encourage and flush them down the toilet. Instead make up your own stuff."

• The worse offender however is the ready to die through away encounters - D&D 5e is based round an expectation of about six encounters per day and there is little in the way of rules support for combat that isn't to the death (unlike e.g. Fate).
• HP bag boss (or mini boss) - otherwise known as "Using monsters out of the Monster Manual".
• Rules are meant to be broken. - otherwise known as "Don't follow the rules of D&D but make up your own"
• Consider team monster’s motivation - something I always do. But the combat paradigm gives little other than lethal fights, with running away being hard. This is another case where the advice is to make your own rules up.
• Consider adding variety to your units. - as mentioned in the "Tactically varied" section above this D&D 5e is not good at this. My archers are almost as good at melee as at shooting and my front line is great with throwing weapons. I'm again fighting the system and using vastly more complex monsters than I was for stronger effects in 4e.
• Consider Alternative threats to large piles of HP - admittedly some of this is in the rules. But it generally says "reinvent what 4e did and 5e kept a little of."
• Consider the power of friendly Rivalry. - this is one of the many places where 5e's lack of balance and poor CR system is an issue. It's a "rivalry" between someone omnipotent and who is deciding what the challenges are by eye and people at their mercy.
• Consider Home-brew System additions - fix the system yourself.

If those are the solution then why on earth do I have a large and relatively complex system with multiple 320 page rulebooks in the first place? That list of solutions is pretty much an open admission that the system itself is a problem and the DM needs to do the work of fixing it as well as every other part of DMing.

 

[Wasteland Knight]

their answer was basically "too much to tracking and waiting for NPCs to die before we could get back to the story".

One side effect of the constant whinging over things producing “save or die” effects is that combats take longer.

 

[nevin]

RUMOURED.

Come on. RUMOURED. It's all bloody rumours. Find an account from a society, written by that society, where they actually did the thing. Or better yet, find archaeological evidence. Funny how there never is any of either, eh?

Probably because it didn't actually happen! Maybe I'm wrong, but let's see some evidence, not trash-talk from some Athenian prat or whoever.

You say you're not ignorant, and maybe you aren't, but why then repeat dodgy rumours with substantiation or qualification? Like, let's look at Herodotus. The Father of History of the Father of Lies, depending on who you ask. Dude is either his direct experience (very valuable first-hand accounts) or metric tons of rumours. To him tell it, no-one ever took a city by siege, ever. There's always an exotic/romantic tale about how people snuck into a city, or there was a traitor, or whatever. I love Herodotus but he's full of nonsense. Half of what he's saying is probably totally true, and half of it is probably complete bollocks. And we don't know which without other evidence, and that's true of most "rumours".

The Spartans were a failed state from pretty much day 1.

They enslaved a much larger population (something rarely but not never seen in history before/since), and then had to refocus their entire society into violently oppressing that slave population (and no I don't agree that a better word is "serf", but that's a whole other discussion). Pretty much every decision they made comes back to "Oh crap there are so many of them, we gotta keep them from revolting!", whether it's their military machine (which was largely used to suppress said slave revolts), to allowing women to own property (which was necessary with the professional military taking the men away full-time), to the use of exposure (which was part of the propaganda machine that kept them fanatic).

And don't make me start talking about the 700 Thespians, either, who history loves to ignore. "300" my arse.

They managed to stop oppressing the slaves long enough to have one moment of glory, and history forever acts like they were amazing, when in fact they were idiots who happened to be useful in one particular situation.



I don't think there's any evidence to support that, that I'm aware of. Explanations like this fail to account for that fact that they're humans, and so very much bound by emotion and often irrational beliefs, rather than cold calculus. In reality there are going to have been situations where people who could do tasks were ditched because they were unpopular and/or . so didthe situation was desperate, and people who were almost entirely useless were kept because they were beloved and/or sacred.

There's a temptation, I think, to see the stone age/bronze age as a sort "post-apocalypse", but studies on actual H-G tribes tend to suggest it was more edenic than apocalyptic most of the time.

every culture of any size in that region had slaves, Athenian power and the Roman power stood on the back of slavery so did Persians, most African nation's the egyptions, China, Japan, and almost every country documented. I think your feelings are getting in the way of actual history which like the people in it was always a hot mess.

 

[nevin]

Mod Note:

We know that topic drift is a thing, but this whole line about Spartans and such is... rather far from the original topic of the thread. Can you bring it back around to vague relevance, please folks? Thanks.

sorry will do

 

[Wasteland Knight]

To answer the top level question, as the GM I don’t get bored by combat.

GMs have to differentiate between “role playing” and “roll playing” just like players do.

I run my monsters and various opponents based on motivation. It’s fun to consider all the different creatures in D&D and then have them react based on the encounter.

It’s not uncommon for my monsters, aside from mindless undead and constructs, to choose to not fight to the death. Also, I make it fairly common for monsters to parlay. Finally, I try to make encounters dynamic, with possibility of reinforcements or turning a small encounter to a running battle.

By taking these steps, it significantly reduces the “grind” encounters that I run.

 

[Argyle King]

At higher levels, I sometimes find that the way basic building blocks of the game -hitpoints, AC, levels, the d20- contribute to combat being a bit of a slog. In the case of 5E, this is especially true because increased HP is often used as a primary mechanism for making higher level monsters more difficult.

 

[Helldritch]

The HP bloat from 3.xed and onward is a bit problematic but it can be circumvented by using lower level minions. With bounded accuracy, lower level foes with a simple bless spell can stay a relevant threat for a long time.

Take the veteran as an example. Giving him a shield raises its AC to 20. Raise the strength by two and with a bless spell the veteran will stay at its CR but will be a threat even for high level characters if used as a support with other veterans for a mini or big boss. Yes lower level foes are vulnerable to AoE spells, but if you play them right, they take away resources that the players will not have for later.

A front row of veterans using dodge in a hallway can bug down your players as their own ranged and spell casters will pester the players back row. If they have defensive spells cast on them too, they could go as high as an AC of 22 that you have disadvantage against. Even for 15th level characters, these buggers will be frustrating to fight. The melee chars will beg for a nice fire ball.

And that is only a small example of what can be done. Those same veteran could suddenly gang up on one character on the front line to knock him down, push him or grab him and break the PCs' formation. Possibilities are endless. Combat is as boring or exciting as you make it to be. The key here is to never (or rarely) use mono type encounters. They are useful in the lower levels but as the characters gets higher, you will need varied encounters and tactics to keep them on their toes.