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View Full Version : [3.5] Making combat (more)fun



weenie
2010-03-12, 04:34 PM
I've experienced several combats against well made opponents, that just weren't that fun. Usually the problem was, that they ended in the first round, before they could even start to get fun. I know that combats against single opponents tend to end quickly, but is there any way to make a scenario more tactically appealing when more opponents don't really make sense? And are multiple enemies enough to assure, that players have a good time fighting them?

Please, describe ways you use, or have seen being used, that make fighting more fun as a player or as a DM. Examples of battles you really enjoyed are also welcome.

Sinfire Titan
2010-03-12, 04:44 PM
1: What kind of terrain is involved?

2: How the hell does more enemies not make sense?

3: Are you giving the enemy in question a tactical advantage in the form of a surprise round?

4: Are you using the enemies as written? Even a simple feat change can alter the flow of combat entirely.

5: For Arcane Spellcaster enemies, are you remembering that Wands of Nerveskitter (Spell Compendium) can be used as an Immediate action to boost their Inits?

Nich_Critic
2010-03-12, 04:48 PM
This might not be helpful, but I find that the major "problem" with DnD combat is that the characters are built for damage primarily, and longevity second. This means that enemies who don't win initiative don't tend to get actions.

There are a couple ways of having an NPC survive the first barrage, however. The main trick is not actually being the target of said barrage, one way or another. This is where minions come in, but in situations where minions can't be justified, magical protections (concealment, blur, blink, mirror image, invisibility, project image, combinations thereof) can help keep your enemy alive. Or look for enemies that look like they can take a beating. Things with DR against what the party normally uses, energy resist and SR to avoid being blasted (too much) by the mages, lots and lots of hp, cool defensive tricks (if they can get a swift action teleport it goes a long way). They can also use the terrain, sniping from cover, grabbing concealment whenever possible, positioning themselves so that they can't be charged, staying behind cover from the mage.

randomhero00
2010-03-12, 04:51 PM
If you want to make a 1 enemy encounter where he actually gets to act and isn't crushed by action economy you need to figure out ways to give him more actions, probably through class levels (like factotum). Or give him access to celerity and timestop. That type of thing. There really isn't any other way to do it unless you want to just make up higher defenses than normal. But then that probably wouldn't be very tactical. Or I suppose you could find ways to split up the party, but that's probably not what you meant.

weenie
2010-03-12, 05:04 PM
1: What kind of terrain is involved?

Well, I usually run most combats outdoors, but usually I just go with "it happens where it happens". If the party gets attacked by bandits it usually won't be in a city etc. What I'm more interested in is what features should I take into consideration when drawing maps.


2: How the hell does more enemies not make sense?

Once my party released a super-demon from it's magical prison by mistake. Wouldn't have made much sense for two of them to come out of it..



3: Are you giving the enemy in question a tactical advantage in the form of a surprise round?

Depends on circumstances, but usually yes.


4: Are you using the enemies as written?

I usually change monsters a bit from what's in the MM and love to use NPCs with class levels, that I build myself.


5: For Arcane Spellcaster enemies, are you remembering that Wands of Nerveskitter (Spell Compendium) can be used as an Immediate action to boost their Inits?

I never used those wands in a game, but can you use immediate actions if flat-footed?

And don't get me wrong, not all of the combats I DM or play a character in end in round 1, that was just one factor that I noticed can spoil the fun in a game. Would it be reasonable for a DM to ask his players to try not to rely on SoD tactics excessively?

Eldariel
2010-03-12, 05:23 PM
Once my party released a super-demon from it's magical prison by mistake. Wouldn't have made much sense for two of them to come out of it..

Demons tend to come with built-in ability to summon lesser demons. Also, they tend to have powers to bend servants to their will, and a number of semi-willing servants of the old on their own rights. Few things truly make sense to act alone and those tend to rely on stealth.


Also, defensive focus with various stuff that mitigates damage, some nice contingent effect and teleports and such tends to go a long way.

Sinfire Titan
2010-03-12, 05:24 PM
Well, I usually run most combats outdoors, but usually I just go with "it happens where it happens". If the party gets attacked by bandits it usually won't be in a city etc. What I'm more interested in is what features should I take into consideration when drawing maps.

Difficult terrain against opponents who can either ignore it (Class features, Teleportation, flight), traps against creatures who won't trigger them (Unhallow spell, customized magical traps, Spell Turrets from DMG2)


Once my party released a super-demon from it's magical prison by mistake. Wouldn't have made much sense for two of them to come out of it..

No, but it would make sense for him to summon some or teleport away from a group of enemies after being immediately released (justified by him not being at full power from being sealed for so long).


Depends on circumstances, but usually yes.

Then the party has taken into account standard tactical advantages. In order to counter this, you need to build enemies specifically to deal with their advantages while still having a weakness. PM me their character sheets or a summary of them (slightly more detailed than a generalized description, please) and I can come up with at least one encounter to mess with them.


I usually change monsters a bit from what's in the MM and love to use NPCs with class levels, that I build myself.

As do I. One of the major problems is that feats in general are not that good until you get into the really late splatbooks (CM, CC, Bo9S), and even those have some garbage. In these cases, rebalance the feats a little (for example, I house ruled Improved Init to change what dice you roll for determining Init instead of giving a flat bonus to init. It now lets you roll 2d6+8 instead of 1d20, and you still get other modifiers).


I never used those wands in a game, but can you use immediate actions if flat-footed?

No, but the spell in question is an exception to the normal rules (it calls out the Immediate action restrictions and says it can be cast even when you couldn't normally take the actions).


And don't get me wrong, not all of the combats I DM or play a character in end in round 1, that was just one factor that I noticed can spoil the fun in a game. Would it be reasonable for a DM to ask his players to try not to rely on SoD tactics excessively?

It's entirely reasonable. Save or Dies are actually some of the worst spells a party could be using, as it makes others feel worthless. Encourage Battlefield Control spells, or Save/Suck spells (at least those spells give some chance and can be negated much easier than a SoD).

weenie
2010-03-12, 05:45 PM
PM me their character sheets or a summary of them (slightly more detailed than a generalized description, please) and I can come up with at least one encounter to mess with them.

Actually I am the greatest offender when it comes to one-shotting stuff in my group. Our DM wanted to see what a high level wizard is capable of, and asked me to make a broken build using core only material, so I made a Red wizard. Anything that didn't incapacitate, or kill my wizard as soon as it got to act got turned into dust by a maximized disintegrate heightened to lvl 17 and cast at CL 40.. It was really fun the first time I did it, but after that I kinda decided not to use a build that can end combats as fast as that ever again, because it got really repetitive, and all the other players just sat there looking sad.

So I'm familiar enough with the rules to come up with a monster/NPC, that my players couldn't get rid of too easily, but I would like some feedback on how would you as a player react to a DM promoting a certain style of play for his campaign, and what are the things that really make combats memorable for you.

Sinfire Titan
2010-03-12, 05:48 PM
Actually I am the greatest offender when it comes to one-shotting stuff in my group. Our DM wanted to see what a high level wizard is capable of, and asked me to make a broken build using core only material, so I made a Red wizard. Anything that didn't incapacitate, or kill my wizard as soon as it got to act got turned into dust by a maximized disintegrate heightened to lvl 17 and cast at CL 40.. It was really fun the first time I did it, but after that I kinda decided not to use a build that can end combats as fast as that ever again, because it got really repetitive, and all the other players just sat there looking sad.

So I'm familiar enough with the rules to come up with a monster/NPC, that my players couldn't get rid of too easily, but I would like some feedback on how would you as a player react to a DM promoting a certain style of play for his campaign, and what are the things that really make combats memorable for you.

I actually advocate my players using Level 3 Optimization (what you just described is easily level 2; powerful enough to overrun most enemies without pausing to blink). It's been a while since the thread existed, but I've summarized it before in a more recent thread. I'll try and dig that up. It should help you out.

shimmercat
2010-03-13, 03:54 PM
Nich_Critic mentioned that DnD characters are built for damage first and longevity last, which I completely agree with. I think this is the biggest issue with making single bad guys last.

I know that my DM just adds hitpoints to enemies. If you think of a Final Fantasy (or many other console/computer RPGs), the enemies have easily 10 times more hitpoints than the heroes do. My DM just adds hitpoints ad-hoc, and then lets a really dramatic hit from one of the players finish the villain off (or just ends the battle when people start to get bored). For our play style, this works really well, but I can see a very mechanics-heavy group having some issues with this.

We've discovered that having one big bad with several minions works well for our battles, although obviously that's not always possible.

My DM also suggests making every turn of the villain's count. Give them almost a little cut-scene. Obviously don't give them more actions than they are otherwise allowed (he's gotten in trouble with the players for this one >:C) but making sure that the enemy does something dramatic every turn DOES really help.

For higher-level encounters, a single villain gets less and less interesting, imho. Rogues and rangers get SCREWED, as damage reduction hurts them more than anyone else (from my experience). So instead of throwing one Elemental Monolith, throwing four smaller elementals IS a good idea.

If the characters feel like they are in danger, the battle is INSTANTLY more exciting. XD

As much as "splitting the party" is a bad thing, if the DM keeps the battles relatively quick, that can certainly make things a lot more interesting! One of the best battles we've had recently was against 4 earth elementals, while the PCs were trapped in a featureless stone box... without the cleric. I play the cleric, and I was fine sitting out the battle because I knew I was gonna get an awesome scene alone after the battle was over. (I did, too. XD) Because the other players couldn't count on having the healer there to keep them going, their playstyle changed significantly and they had to think on their feet.

Just throwing some ideas out there. :3 Obviously everyone has a different playstyle and these ideas won't work for everyone, but they do help us a lot, and we've had some of the same issues that you've mentioned -- battles that are over in a round, or just plain TEDIOUS.

Keewatin
2010-03-13, 07:56 PM
Well some fun ways to liven up combat are:

Adding goals other then murder, time limits or needing to capture someone alive.

enemies with interesting forms of movement (burrowing is a fun one) or using things like balance.

tunnel fighting. for whatever reason we do a lot of stuff underground or in dungeons and these places are not perfectly built tunnel complexes so squeezing and height limitations winding warrens that block LoS.

difficult terrain
If you have ever been caving or out camping you will notice the world is not a flat featureless plane with singular trees for bandits to hide behind. Things like tall grass uneven ground. Ever watch the show man tracker man vs wild? its and interesting world out there so try to go beyond the graph paper with 3+ point of interest.

even indoors things like furniture carpets.

try this measure out a 5' by 5' area in your house and then a 10' by 10' and look at how many people and things are in that.

3rd party interests
look too the movies for this one, fights on top of trains or inside a burning building, mabye an animal or something (there are plenty of huge things to chase people with) now imagine a fight in the woods two sides trading blows making noise when suddenly something comes crashing through the trees, now instead of fighting the other guys you just need to run faster and let big beastie finish them for you.

Enemies want to live
characers are pretty powerful and others will notice, have enemies that dont try to kill each time fights to the death are unwise. so bandits fire once from cover then leave and come back later wolves track you howling staying out of reach waiting for weakness... things don't just run in and kill or be killed.

Roc Ness
2010-03-13, 08:36 PM
Well some fun ways to liven up combat are:

Adding goals other then murder, time limits or needing to capture someone alive.


To add to this: Race to the finish style goals, escape from the endless horde style, several way battles, stealth goals

Roderick_BR
2010-03-13, 08:41 PM
As was said, the best way is to not let the PCs get the drop on the npcs. You can imagine a surprise attack on a group of guards to keep them from giving the alarm, but in others cases, enemies should be ready for incoming attacks, specially if they were warned, or just heard the PCs coming in. Obstacles in the way, enemies hidding to attack from behind when the PCs barge in, targeting the bait group, anything to keep them from doing a direct attack.

Most combats are based more on maneuvering through the battlefield than just standing in front of each other rolling the d20 until one of the sides drop first.

sonofzeal
2010-03-13, 09:43 PM
Doubling monster hp helps.

Really, one of the key questions most of the time is "how does this monster intend to survive this fight?" There's all sorts of answers to that, including superior firepower, distance/avoidance, DR, regen, high AC (whether through armor or agility or both), miss chance, or clever tactics. Monsters that can't take a hit should know that they can't take a hit, and act accordingly. Often, intelligent monsters could be using more equipment than they're shown with, and even Int 2-6 creatures could be using tactics like pack hunting, distraction, ambush, and hit-and-run.

Maeglin_Dubh
2010-03-13, 11:53 PM
I once made a level 10 Blackguard to act as the BBEG for a short crawl. As the PCs got closer, I re-evaluated his stats, and I gave him a good bit of extra HP, and a bit of DR. This allowed him to just barely survive the first round.

I plan on working to make things more interesting in the future, as opposed to going around the circle of characters waiting to see which one manages to get the final hit.

krossbow
2010-03-14, 12:55 AM
My group has significantly higher saves and HP all around for monsters and PC to tone down save or die spells, and houseruled alot of no save spells.

This tends to make things last a bit longer. Additionally, one thing i've found makes things fun, if gimmicky is to have alot of environmental things that can be used (as an example, having various pendelums in a giant clock tower that a rogue with sufficiently advanced skills could trigger to swing through an area, ect.)

Gerbah
2010-03-14, 01:33 AM
I've come into this issue a lot, and the thing is that D&D "bosses" essentially have to be threatining/diabling the party every chance they get. This isn't really that fun, as any player who is paralyzed/pinned/etc will tell you. A boss-like I had essentially had the following characteristics:

Lots of HPs: If it's 1-5 or even more, this is a very good trick. It makes it more like "old-style" videogame boss fights, but that may not be the way you want to go.

Healing: If the "boss" can heal in some way, it can make the fight last longer and be more interesting, as at least the players would start to plan around it.

Damage Reduction/Energy Resistance: What is useful about this is that it can help shrug off small amounts of damage or negate them completely, so only "strong" attacks can do a whole lot.

Concealment: Such as blur, displacement, etc.. Can make it very hard to hurt the "boss" without just giving HPs and such, and it makes those who chose "blind-fight" and like feats/spells feel useful.

Buffs/Teleports/Firewalls: Any gimmicks which can cut off sections of the terrain, give the boss an advantage or even get them out of a grim-looking situation.

Another issue with 1 vs Many fights is that the group has access to spells and the like which can totally disable a single creature (Hold Person or such). Even if the boss has massive saves (which can make the player's frustrated), there is always a 5% chance of failure. Consider giving it an ability to escape these, even if they lose a turn or something. Off the top of my head, only thing I can think of is "Iron Heart Surge" from Tome of Battle, but this may not be the route you want to go.

Anyways, those are my thoughts. Sorry for the wall of text.