D&D General Two Simple Ways to Make Combat More Engaging

[DrJawaPhD]

Anyone have any hacks of their own they use to make combats more engaging?

In addition to some of the advice above, something I've toyed with for less-critical non-boss combats is rolling initiative and setting up the map, then at the start of each turn having every player simultaneously declare their action / bonus action (which can take several minutes for everyone to strategize together), then rapid-fire adjudicate all dice rolls and results in one big pile of action.

This works awesome for keeping everyone engaged and paying attention, and for generally speeding things up, but doesn't work as awesome for following the Rules As Written since the game isn't entirely designed to work this way. Some weird results can arise that need to be retconned, like a melee character declaring they will move to a spot and attack an enemy but it actually has higher initiative and moved out of range, stuff like that. This works well for lower stakes combats though, particularly near the end of a session where you want to speed things along to finish in time

 

[EzekielRaiden]

If you want combat to be engaging, it has to be worth engaging with.

Create genuinely varied terrain which actually affects gameplay--positively and negatively.
Use hazards. They're good. Make them worthwhile to exploit, and fearsome to ignore.
Forced movement. Just...seriously. Forced movement. Make the space actually matter.
Reward clever and creative choices--and actually REWARD them, don't do lip-service.

Most important of all though, indeed most important for making any part of the game more engaging, and I literally cannot stress this enough:

Be open-minded.​

Closed-minded GMs are the death of player creativity. You need--genuinely N E E D need--to be open to ideas that you personally find silly, ridiculous, unhinged, etc. That doesn't mean you shouldn't ask for justifications, you should do that! But you absolutely have to be open-minded and consider things, even things you yourself would never do or think of. If you don't give a fair shot to such things, you are guaranteeing, sooner or later, that your players just stop behaving creatively and instead follow rote patterns.

Closed-minded GMing is the second greatest scourge on the TTRPG space. It's why I'm such a massive advocate for...a number of things, really, but most specifically emphasizing to GMs that they need to say "yes", qualified or otherwise, rather than defaulting to saying "no", which is what I see over and over and over and over and over when people talk about GMing.