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DontEatRawHagis
2016-04-12, 09:22 AM
When I played in D&D Organized Play the guy running the group had a lot of advice for players. The general advice was the equivalent of:

Never split the party.
Try to focus on one enemy at a time.


I'm looking for more advice on the DM's side of combat. I know DM's aren't supposed to TPK their players, but I just want to put some stress on my players so they aren't bored with killing another combat encounter.

What advice would you give to a DM who wants to make combats challenging? (Without the old stand-bys of increase the CR or throw a couple extra mooks in, I'm talking actual strategy here)

Democratus
2016-04-12, 09:30 AM
An encounter should be more than "a combat". It should be "a situation", sometimes even "a complex situation".

Create interesting and challenging locations for encounters.

Examples:
A ruined tower which has lost its stairs. But the bandits have climbed up to the top in advance.
An ambush with pits set up in advance that the enemies know how to avoid but can trap players.
Missile attack from the other side of a patch of assassin vines.

Make some of the encounters non-hostiles. Leave some doubt when something is first seen as to how the party should react. Are those hooded figures on the road monks on pilgrimage or cultists on the lookout for sacrifices? To find out for sure will require closing and talking - which makes the PCs more vulnerable to ambush.

TurboGhast
2016-04-12, 04:52 PM
Vary the terrain. If you want there to be more challenge, have the enemies take advantage of their knowledge and familiarity it. For example, the enemy could have an archer behind an arrow slit, or know where the shifting floor leaves behind standing space.

Knaight
2016-04-12, 05:13 PM
Varying the terrain has already been mentioned, but that this includes weather hasn't. It's also worth thinking about what the actual objectives of the antagonists are, and thinking about situations which are more complicated than just two teams enter, one team leaves. Raiders might just want to get in, get out, and take something valuable with them. You might have enemies of a particular PC who are going to try and kill or capture them and then clear out. You might have antagonists who are trying to buy time for their allies, and fighting accordingly. You might have antagonists who vastly out power the PCs with their full force, and who are trying to stop the PCs from doing something in particular. A few concrete examples:

A group of kidnappers are trying to escape with an NPC the PCs want to talk to, and the PCs run into them at the docks. They need to untie and finish loading the boat, and a small group of them move to block the PCs from getting onto the docks.
Terrain quirks: The docks create a narrow chokepoint for the NPCs, but they also create a situation where the PCs have access to much better cover. Good swimmers are also likely able to try and bypass the group, although if they're not sneaky about it it's going to be difficult.
Goal quirks: The PCs are trying to do a few different things. Dragging out the conflict works for them, so anything they can do to make the boat harder to load or untie (well, unchain) is a good thing. This might mean picking off the people loading the cargo/untying with ranged weapons, it might mean using magic to impair the boat's movement, it might mean going down a different dock to try and physically interpose one boat with another. That's not a comprehensive list, but it is a list of things just for that one goal that doesn't boil down to just killing an enemy. In addition, there's an advantage to breaking or bypassing the line entirely, which encourages fighting differently than if you were just trying to kill the whole group.

The PCs have an important object, and a group of enemies are trying to break and or steal it.
Terrain quirks: None assumed. The object can probably be thrown and caught though, so something that takes advantage of vertical distances that are easy to toss things to but hard to traverse could be fun. So could terrain that is exceedingly difficult to move through, but easy to toss things over. I'll arbitrarily pick a field of thick mud, with occasional big rocks sticking out of it, some of which have to be clambered up.
Goal quirks: The PCs are trying to keep the object safe, and the NPCs break or steal it. So, the PCs probably want to keep it far away from the NPCs, while the NPCs want to get near it and attack it. This creates room for a lot of tactics, from trying to alter the terrain to better create hard to reach locations with spells like stone shape to deciding between picking off faster NPCs and more dangerous ones first, to the aforementioned tossing of said object.

kyoryu
2016-04-12, 05:18 PM
http://io9.gizmodo.com/why-you-should-never-write-action-scenes-into-your-tent-511712234