How do you ensure melee combat isn't stale?

[Man_Over_Game]

Say you have a pretty classic team, consisting of a Barbarian, a Paladin, a Druid and a Rogue.

What steps do you take to ensure the melee combatants in this party don't follow a combat script of "Move up to bad guy. Attack bad guy"?

I'm talking enemy creature tactics, battle map changes, weapon changes, special narration, improvised actions, you name it. How do you make it work?

[Unoriginal]

I'm writing something detailed on that topic (among other things).

It's mostly presentation. People moving and attacking doesn't have to be boring. Via descriptions and putting yourself in the NPCs' shoes, you can give the combatants personality and a memorable combat presence even if mechanically it's a by-the-number combat.

The thing is to use the combat elements to transmit information. You can describe the enemy leader as a shifty human and his sword technique as clumsy and uncommitted, as if he was constantly looking out for an escape route, or as a musclebound brute who grins cockily in the face of danger before pressing the assault, the atmosphere will be completely different even if both are using the same Bandit Captain statblock. Using different weapons, equipment or the like can help with that effect, too.

[Grod_The_Giant]

I've actually found that ranged attackers tend to be the most boring. Melee involves some at least variability in positioning and has built-in tactical options (shoving, grappling, etc), and is conductive to fun narration. Archery--especially with Sharpshooter or Spell Sniper-- has you basically sitting on one place rolling attacks, and it's hard to come up with many fun descriptions for "you shoot it in the chest."

[Potato_Priest]

Yeah, I've never had too much of a problem with melee being stale. Like Grod_the_Giant, I typically find ranged combat, and to an even greater extent, Eldritch Blast is where the real staleness lies.

Edit: And I handle that by not playing a warlock.

Also, Dynamic maps are great, and you should use them when you can. However, sometimes they just don't make sense, and narration is going to have to be your way of keeping things entertaining.

[SociopathFriend]

A point to remember is if someone's playing a melee they might like having simple and stale combat while preferring to make up for it in RP out of combat. I did that as a Lizardfolk Barbarian. In-battle it was, "Walk up and bite/hit thing" and I liked it.

But out of combat I had tons of fun like: making him decide a chef in the outside world must be the most important job, asking a clothing merchant what the point of clothing was, taking the first offer given to him for selling something because he didn't entirely get 'money' as an idea, hearing something moving in bushes and proceeding to roar as loudly as possible in an attempt to Intimidate (convinced the DM it was a Con check for lung capacity, sucker, 20 Con vs 10 Cha) and the list goes on and on. Less effort in combat for me translated to more effort elsewhere.

You get out of D&D what you put into it. But if you want more fun in combat bear in mind "AC to hit" is metaphorical. You might still hit but it's a glancing shot off their breastplate and so it does no damage, or you nicked the speedy little ninja but not enough for a solid blow, maybe even someone with a shield managed to catch the hit on it squarely enough that it didn't hurt.

Likewise all "damage" is not the same. Say you dealt 20 HP, a generous chunk of an enemy, tell your players it was a serious blow that he's definitely staggering from and looking hurt from in comparison to dealing 2HP where the guy winces but otherwise doesn't react. These apply to everyone mind you but given that melees typically take and receive more attacks than other classes it will comparatively be more often in response to their actions that you give these fluff pieces.

[Menson]

Personally, I like the idea of a dynamic battle map.

Instead of a blank floor in a blank room, what if the fight took place in moving water up to their waist? At the beginning of each players turn, they have to role an Athletics check or be swept 10 ft by the current.

Fight in the road? What if the overturned cart was carrying barrels of explosive oil, and a fire is gradually burning closer to the barrels.

One I still want to try is a battle in a room where chains hang from the ceiling 100 ft above, where the PC's have to go. Each round, the PCs have to hang onto the chain while harpies fly around them trying to knock them off, platforms spaced around the walls with a couple archers, and the players have to swing over to get to them.

If the PC's are too static, move the battlefield around them.

[Pex]

I've actually found that ranged attackers tend to be the most boring. Melee involves some at least variability in positioning and has built-in tactical options (shoving, grappling, etc), and is conductive to fun narration. Archery--especially with Sharpshooter or Spell Sniper-- has you basically sitting on one place rolling attacks, and it's hard to come up with many fun descriptions for "you shoot it in the chest."

Since they ignore cover you can describe ricochet and bank shots. It bounces off the ceiling over the makeshift barrier hitting your opponent in the shoulder or between the eyes if it's the kill shot. If someone is taking cover behind a tree you can say you hit a branch which comes crashing down causing the damage, at least if the damage type is irrelevant so as not to have an arrow's piercing damage become bludgeoning due to falling branches as a regular thing.

[Malbrack]

As @Menson pointed out, there is lots you can do to the battlefield to make things more interactive for the melee characters.

You can also change the objectives. Instead of kill all enemies, you can try to stop a necromancer from finishing an evil ritual, you can try to reach a certain object first, you can have a puzzle that involves movement while under attack, you can try to save an NPC under attack, etc.

[Waterdeep Merch]

You can utilize combat options to keep them on their toes. Shove/Trip/Grapple/Disarm can change things a lot.

I had a paladin that was feeling immortal thanks to excellent ability score rolls, a +2 shield, and the defense fighting style. He tried to take on a group of eight gnolls by himself.

His hubris got his shield pulled off him, his weapon yanked away, his face in the dirt, a gnoll holding him down, and the rest stabbing him with advantage. He ended up dying.

[MaxWilson]

Say you have a pretty classic team, consisting of a Barbarian, a Paladin, a Druid and a Rogue.

What steps do you take to ensure the melee combatants in this party don't follow a combat script of "Move up to bad guy. Attack bad guy"?

I'm talking enemy creature tactics, battle map changes, weapon changes, special narration, improvised actions, you name it. How do you make it work?

Courtney Campbell wrote a good article on this recently: http://hackslashmaster.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-design-demon-and-amazing.html

TL;DR is verticality, liquids, barriers, terrain abnormalities (like grease or salt), things on the ceiling, periodic state changes, objects for players to interact with (sacks of potatoes, chairs, torches, ropes, chandeliers), secondary goals within the combat.

Excerpt:



These features can drastically affect the outcome of the game. This is intentional, and is why the players must know the meaning of the environment, in the same way you understand it, so they can leverage it. It is this player skill that makes high lethality combat enjoyable and manageable. Not through large hit point pools, but instead through dynamic control and utilization of the fictional space within the game.

Keep in mind that adding platforms and putting mages and archers on them is synergistically more powerful than either feature alone. This collection of features and expansion of goals is key to how middle to high level characters are challenged.

==============================================

@Grod,


I've actually found that ranged attackers tend to be the most boring. Melee involves some at least variability in positioning and has built-in tactical options (shoving, grappling, etc), and is conductive to fun narration. Archery--especially with Sharpshooter or Spell Sniper-- has you basically sitting on one place rolling attacks, and it's hard to come up with many fun descriptions for "you shoot it in the chest."

I agree that ranged is more boring than melee, but there are still sources of interest that you can add:

(1) Enemies that drop prone to avoid missile fire. Now the melee guys have to interact with them somehow to encourage the enemy to stand up instead of remaining prone.

(2) Total cover, either stationary or interactive. A Sharpshooter can shoot through an arrow slit, but he can't shoot through wooden shutters if you close them.

(2a) Patience. If the Sharpshooter is sitting there outside the total cover waiting for the enemy to show his face, and... he doesn't see anything this round... does that mean the enemy is cowering in fear within or fleeing deeper into the tunnels or maybe even he's sneaked away and is not even in there any more. The only way to find out for sure is going to involve someone going in to look, which means we're back to the interestingness of melee-range interactions, unless the players are prepared to simply write off this enemy as not a threat any more and ignore it. (And that decision to ignore generates its own dramatic tension.)

(3) Stealth. Stealth-on-stealth ranged battles in the dark are frightfully interesting and actually so complicated that I don't like doing them without specialized tooling. There are multiple levels of play and counterplay: Hide, countered by Readied Action (to shoot whoever gives away their position first), countered by ruses (e.g. Minor Illusion) to fool enemies into wasting their readied attacks on a false target, which potentially interact with reverse psychology. Also Search actions (Listening really hard) become an attractive action, and all the while everybody is playing with partial/total cover and darkvision ranges and Dancing Lights.

All of these things can make ranged combat more complicated and interesting.

-Max

[Throne12]

Fine what your players like. I have a few players that like to describe what's happening on there turn. Then other players like it when I describe to them what's happening.

Also if you have your npc's moving around and doing different things. Your players will see this and try different things too.

It's not easy and you just have to find wht works 4 u and the party.

[Man_Over_Game]

Courtney Campbell wrote a good article on this recently: http://hackslashmaster.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-design-demon-and-amazing.html

TL;DR is verticality, liquids, barriers, terrain abnormalities (like grease or salt), things on the ceiling, periodic state changes, objects for players to interact with (sacks of potatoes, chairs, torches, ropes, chandeliers), secondary goals within the combat.

Excerpt:

I particularly like that last part that you mentioned. This gives me the idea that early game players try to plan around their enemies in order to gain the advantage, and late game players are planned around so that the enemies have the advantage.

This way, it's entirely possible for a swarm of Kobolds to ambush some high level players, as long as they have the high ground (in the literal sense, not the Anakin sense).

[Bjarkmundur]

Know the signs
If a player shuffles through is character sheet, sighs, and then rolls dice, you have roughly two turns to either end the fight or otherwise engage the player.
When the players obviously have the upper hand, just change the Hit points of all remaining creatures to 1. Everyone knows they've ensured victory, no need to waste 20 minutes to finish an encounter. This is especially true when players start withholding resources since they know they'll win.
Another sign is how important combat is to your group. Do you want to have it the focus of the game, or do you want to do compress all of the action into two action packed turns, and move on?

Spotlight Management
After the fighter got to use his Great Weapon Master, bonus action, one warlock cast a faerie fire, and the other warlock used his imp in some creative ways, the rogue was about to do his thirds "walk up behind the monster and stab it". This is my queue to move the spotlight to the rogue, and proceeded to describe how his Rapier got locked inside the monster's sphincter, hand how the rogue had to hold on for dear life while the (understandably) angry monster did an impression of a like a rodeo bull.
You shouldn't control your PCs, but you can control the world around them to make things interesting.

Half-way events
If combat goes for more than 3 turns, have a half-way event that changes the dynamic in some way. Make some generic things ahead of time, so you can apply them to any encounter that goes long. A transmutation spell scroll that changes a creature, an environmental change, a poison dart. Time in dnd is only measured in "stuff that happens". If nothing happens, time doesn't pass. Make stuff happen.

Teach Strategy
I like making one encounter each session deliver a particular lesson. Whether it is "mummies die to fire" or "this is how concentration works. If a spellcaster is concentrating, hit him", or even "sometimes a tactical retreat is better than dying".
After 5 or so encounters, revisit one lesson, and you'll see the players jump in their seats going "Fire! Use fiiiiree!" or "Focus the WIZARD!"

[Spiritchaser]

No slight against other points, but I’d also include flanking.


I have a love hate relationship with the flanking rules (I don’t use them at my table, but my DM does) but they can certainly keep things from getting boring.

Playing flanking GO is acceptable on it’s own but add in a dynamic play area with terrain features like breakable walls that shift accessibility to some flanks, forced motion and hostile magic, and positioning becomes pretty dynamic and critical.

Edit: for the record: my prime concern with flanking is that my players can generate a LOT of summons. My next campaign I may try flanking with the caveat that magically summoned creatures do not interact with flanking rules in any way...

[Bjarkmundur]

Say you have a pretty classic team, consisting of a Barbarian, a Paladin, a Druid and a Rogue.

Give each player special means of using inspiration, decided at character creation. The rogue might use it to find a way to create a poison of mummy rot after killing a mummy, the Barbarian might use it to increase his jump distance, the druid might use it to have a tree whisper some good advice, and the paladin might use it to change a creature's alignment, allowing it to repent and see the errors of their ways.

[MaxWilson]

I particularly like that last part that you mentioned. This gives me the idea that early game players try to plan around their enemies in order to gain the advantage, and late game players are planned around so that the enemies have the advantage.

This way, it's entirely possible for a swarm of Kobolds to ambush some high level players, as long as they have the high ground (in the literal sense, not the Anakin sense).

Best times to ambush mid-to-high-level PCs would kobolds are:

(1) When they feel safe, especially when they're resting/bathing (no armor). If no PC ever takes off their armor, well, that creates its own problems.

Ideally you'd want any attacks during "safe" time to feel traceable to the players' own decisions. You don't want it to feel like the DM is attacking you, you want it to feel like this is the consequence of a tradeoff they made earlier: not investigating a suspicious character who was following them around, or to save an Action Surge for later instead of using it on those last three kobolds fleeing in different directions after the others are dead.

The threat of these kinds of attacks during quiet time is one reason why having an enemy successfully retreat behind total cover and wait (see (2a) "patience" above) creates so much dramatic tension--the players can't feel safe until that kobold-that-got-away is dead.

(2) When they are overconfident. ("Bree Yark!")

If you hit PCs with a big threat up front (twelve goblins and a Glabrezu), they'll pull out the big guns (Fireball and Wall of Force). If you hit them with three annoying goblins who all shoot arrows from the balcony and then Cunning Action (Hide) chairs on the balcony, repeatedly over the course of an adventuring day, you increase the odds that someone is going to teach those goblins a lesson by scaling the balcony, looking behind all the chairs, and murdering those annoying goblins wherever they're hiding. But what happens if three goblins isn't all that was up there? Now one annoyed PC is all alone against a bigger threat than he expected, and he may even be spending his concentration on an exploration spell (like Levitate to get up to the balcony) instead of a pre-cast combat spell like Hex.

Surprise is what happens when something you saw all along means something different than you thought.

[Trustypeaches]

Yeah, I've never had too much of a problem with melee being stale. Like Grod_the_Giant, I typically find ranged combat, and to an even greater extent, Eldritch Blast is where the real staleness lies..
See, and I find Eldritch Blast oodles more interesting to describe and flavor than firing with a bow / longbow, especially given all the extra effects you can give it.

Maybe your eldritch blast is a thin wisp of violet energy, or searing bolt of radiant light, or a a spectral tentacle that you whip around. It's a "bolt of energy", it couldn't be any more vague if it tried.

[Ghost Nappa]

One of the worst things about Fire Emblem Gaiden and its remake Shadows of Valentia are these massive field maps (https://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?/topic/70732-yep/).



You have a couple of these encounters about back to back and they are Boring to fight on.
It's just big and open with a single river in the middle. There's no cover, there's nothing to position around. You move as a swarm towards the enemies' swarm and hit things.


Adding different terrain, walls, obstacles, can make for much more interesting maps.

Consider a different map (https://i.ytimg.com/vi/L7vkB-V7_gI/maxresdefault.jpg) from a different entry in the series. This small building is much more cramped, allows characters to climb up the next level for a shortcut (at the expense of almost their entire movement) if there is no enemy in the way. The map introduces hit bonus/penalties for attacking enemies below/above you. These is a treasure chest in the corner away from the objective. The boss of the chapter doesn't actually block the objective. Terrain, range, movement, and positioning are all made much more tactically important by these things in contrast to the first example.

Combats on boring maps are boring. If you want plays to think tactically, you need to add ways for players to exploit the environment, and reward them when they do it.