People often talk about the three pillars of Dungeons & Dragons and how crucial they are when making a well rounded campaign. Of the three pillars, exploration, role-playing and combat, I usually tend to focus on the role-playing pillar the most while paying less attention to the others. I’ve always felt that exploration was the toughest one for me, but as I run more Dungeons & Dragons games with different groups, I find that combat ends up feeling the weakest and least interesting.

Combat always seemed like a layup to me, wherein I could just launch enough monsters at the players and call it a day. It wasn’t until I had to deal with a real slog of a combat encounter where everyone was rolling terribly, that I realized just how bad at these encounters I actually was. Simply pitting stronger enemies against a party doesn’t make for an inherently fun encounter, so I wanted to outline some things that I’ve started to fold into my combat scenarios to make them more interesting.

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LOCATION

One of my biggest issues with a lot of Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules, particularly the lower level ones, is that they don’t provide much in the way of variety for the players. Take the 5e book of one-shots, Tales from the Yawning Portal (TYP) for example. In TYP there’s a level 1-3 scenario called The Sunless Citadel, in which a group of adventurers has to go to this mysterious citadel that exists at the bottom of a ravine. While I’ve enjoyed running my players through this scenario, I’ve found that the majority of the fights they’ve gotten into basically turn into slug-fests where it’s just about standing your ground and hoping you hit more than your enemy does.

Most of the battles in The Sunless Citadel go this way, where there isn’t enough space or location variety to do any of the crazy stuff that makes Dungeons & Dragons so special. No one is going to swing from a chandelier or knock a dude into a pit if that stuff just isn’t there, and that’s the problem. These locations tend to lack a lot of variety often just being some dusty old dungeon where something was worshiped in a time long forgotten.

My solution to this is to invite people to flex their creative muscles by allowing them to basically manifest room features (within reason) if they succeed on a good enough investigation or other appropriate check. It can be something as simple as letting them scoop up dust to throw in an enemy’s eyes to blind them, or finding an empty bottle to hurl at a threat. I’m not gonna let them just find a rocket launcher or anything like that, but I think it’s important to allow players to get wacky and shake up the mundanity of just rolling dice to hit armor classes.

Most of the wildest stories you here when people describe their experiences with Dungeons & Dragons tend to come out of some wacky combat scenario, but planning for wackiness is an impossibility. Sure you can put some fun stuff in every room to entice the players, but they might not always take the bait. Instead, I tend to entertain just about every wild thing they want to search for in the midst of combat, and will make a decision then and there.

LEVEL DESIGN

Level design is incredibly important when making a combat scenario, and I often find that limiting the playing field both in width or height makes for a boring encounter. It’s easy to craft a battle in a single story room, but that doesn’t really afford the players or enemies any opportunities to do much besides just run at or away from each other. Things like pillars and furniture can help for sure, but I find that the best encounters are the ones where the enemies aren’t always in your line of sight.

I prefer battles that span larger areas as opposed to confined spaces, but that’s a broad sentiment that needs to be explained. You can make a combat encounter be on the first floor of a house and call it a day, but it would be far more engaging if the entire house and both front and backyard were in play as well. Sure a battle could just naturally spill out into those areas, but that might not happen which could lead to a bland encounter.

What really makes these encounters slow down to a crawl is when the party starts out all bunched together and there’s no incentive for any of them to move. That’s why you need a diverse location with plenty for the players to explore beforehand that could have them start the encounter off a little scattered. It isn’t a way for me as a DM to punish the party for splitting up, instead it’s a way to make combat encounters more than just a war of attrition. Are the wizard and rogue looking through an office on the second floor while the fighter and cleric explore the lower floors? Great, now the players have to really take into account their strengths and weaknesses and open their decisions up beyond just “what attack do I use?”

If they’re determined to group up again, make that an exciting event that might involve them using a full dash or disengage action. The act of self-preservation shouldn’t feel laborious, it should feel like a triumph. As a DM, you have be able to paint these less flashy actions as a victory for whoever needs to utilize them. Players have so many non-combat oriented abilities they can utilize, but no one will ever do any of them if it’s just about making sure the tank can take all the hits while casters do their work from a distance. My method is to make sure that every player has the opportunity to shine in a given combat encounter, while also putting them in positions where their characters might not be primed to be in. Just don’t be malicious about it.

Make sure everyone has the chance to bail out and regroup if they need to, but give them a chance to be the focal point at all times in combat. Sure all the characters combined are a party that needs to work together, but being a party shouldn’t steal their individualism as characters. The line is quite thin, but making sure that a character both feels capable and under powered on their own is difficult, but I find that when it’s done right it makes for some very memorable moments.

LESS FREQUENT & MORE INTERESTING COMBAT SCENARIOS

This final point also builds on the previous one, but it’s important enough to be its own thing. There is nothing less interesting than opening a door to a small room, rolling initiative, beating the bad guys, then opening another door a few minutes later to do it all over again. It’s tedious and makes battle feel more like a chore than an opportunity for fun. I think combat scenarios should be bigger than just combat in general, which is confusing at first, but let me explain.

So you’ve got your big open mine where a bunch of goblins hang out. There are various natural ramps along the walls allowing for miners to reach new areas, there’s a mine cart track and a large molten lava pit in the center that’s used for smelting. We’ve got ourselves a big open combat scenario right there, but the party is bunched up together as they entered the room and don’t really have a reason to split up. That’s why you need to give them a reason.

Adding multiple objectives to combat scenarios beyond just killing everything is key. Have the players take a look around and find that there are half a dozen detonator plungers with wires leading off of them in various directions. If you visually track those wires, you can see a few of them are attached to explosive charges that are crammed into cracks in the walls. Also, this mine is right below a village of unsuspecting innocent people! Oh no! Now the party has to survive and accomplish a goal to truly be victorious.

But you need to have a contingency plan for when your players just try mage hand the wires off the explosives or something. Maybe some goblins with fire arrows will show up to detonate the charges themselves, or some fire elemental gets summoned to do it. Maybe the goblins are protected by a massive troll who is going to run interference for the party, thus emboldening the slinkier and more nimble characters to go and deal with the charges while the tankier classes try to push the troll into the lava.

That combat encounter alone is way more interesting than just a flat room with 7 goblins running up to you with swords. I firmly believe that adding in objectives, having waves of enemies show up at different times, and having a big space with a lot of different tiny stories going on in them is key. Some goblins are on planting charges duty, some are running defense, that troll is protecting both of those parties. Having all of that going on at once will make for a longer and more memorable combat scenario than the firing squad of goblin archers standing opposite the party.

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I’m not the ultimate authority on this stuff, but I’ve had plenty of experience in making boring combat encounters. Adding in some of these elements alone made for a more engaged party in my experience. It’s a shame that Dungeons & Dragons often paints combat encounters into these random occurrences like something out of a Final Fantasy game where you open a door and enemies pop out.

The beauty of Dungeons & Dragons is that it empowers your players to use their imagination to conquer any challenge in their way. Too often I find that new players will use the rules and their abilities as static things, like it’s all they can do. The rules are there to guide you and give you a way to navigate the crazy shit you want to do and not the other way around. Regardless of if you take my advice in this article or not, make sure you’re emboldening your players to be creative whether they’re in combat or not.

I’ll never forget the first time I played Dungeons & Dragons. It was a few summers ago and one of our friends offered to run us through a single session campaign, otherwise known as a one-shot. It was a ton of fun and is the event I attribute to getting me hooked on the game. But there’s one thing that will always stand out to me most about that experience, and that was when we finished the game and our DM pulled me aside and said, “Ari, I play with a lot of people and I can tell when they’re hooked, and you’ve got it.”

That single phrase always stood out to me because of just how accurate it was. He saw something in myself that I never thought would be there, and even as he said it, I thought he was full of shit and just stroking my ego a bit. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. Regardless of his intent, he was a thousand percent right.

In the past few weeks, I’ve heard his voice echo in my mind louder and more frequently than ever. That probably has a lot to do with the amount of Dungeons & Dragons related purchases I’ve made in that time, a trend that tragically shows no sign of slowing up.

I’ve bought so many fucking dice and I have no idea why. Even before the pandemic, all of the games I played were online, so why the hell did I buy a ton of plastic dice along with a fancy set of metallic ones? Why did I buy a dice rolling box? Why did I buy several digital rule books and modules, and then also buy their physical editions as well?

Because I need them.

Every time I hear my friend’s voice in my head, reminding me that “I’ve got it,” I can’t help but feel like he cursed me. Right there and then, in the middle of our mutual friend’s kitchen, my DM cursed me to an eternity of buying books filled with adventures I will never experience and dice that I’ll never roll.

One day in the future when we’re allowed to congregate once again, I’d like to believe I will actually make use of these physical items that now occupy my bookshelves. But the odds are these will just be items that I’ll be pissed about having to transport when I inevitably move away from here. I just hope that I don’t start buying miniatures next. Like, yeah they’re cool and you can paint them to look like your characters and stuff… Yeah, definitely don’t want to buy those little guys.

Send help…

Recently my friends and I shuffled our roles, affording me the opportunity to play in a campaign rather than run one. It’s been fantastic both from a gameplay standpoint along with freeing me up creatively to focus on other projects. Simultaneously another group of friends expressed interest in running a starter Dungeons & Dragons campaign, so being the masochist I am I obliged and started running them through The Lost Mines of Phandelver. And honestly, both games have been tremendous learning experiences that I desperately needed.

I don’t want to imply that I didn’t have fun running home-brew campaigns for my friends, but it did get pretty exhausting from a creative standpoint, which is ultimately why I needed to shift focus from running games to playing them. I agreed to run my other friends through The Lost Mines of Phandelver because I didn’t have to really prepare anything on a week to week basis. Everything is accounted for and fairly well explained, leaving little need for drastic improvisation.

Being a player again allowed me to experience how other people run their games, seeing what rules and mechanics they tend to enforce or cast aside. That’s given me a lot of perspective on just how much of my own campaigns I was glossing over in terms of rules and abilities, giving me more insight as to why they exist in the first place. Understanding the various resistances, spell components, move actions and so much more have made it really apparent as to how infuriating my DM style could be at times.

It was never something I did to intentionally upset or undermine my players, but I’m almost certain that my actions directly resulted in a lot of session to session disenfranchisement. Considering I’ve only been a player once or twice back in the very early stages of my relationship with Dungeons & Dragons, I didn’t really have any experience as a player and instead just became a DM when I had no business doing so. But everyone has to start somewhere right?

Being a player wasn’t the only thing that helped me gain some insight into proper Dungeons & Dragons gameplay, running the starter campaign has been infinitely more helpful than anything I was doing before on my own. Being able to see what a module accounts for and doesn’t has been instrumental in my better understanding of how to build worlds, maps and encounters. To see exactly what I should be accounting for when crafting my own adventures has been illuminating to say the least.

At this point I’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons for about 3 years or so and only now can I say that I’ve really made progress as both a player and a DM. When I first started running games, I was trying to emulate what I’d seen and heard from popular videos and actual-play podcasts, not really understanding that real games don’t work like that. As of now I can safely say that my style of running games has evolved to the point where I am taking the rules of Dungeons & Dragons more seriously, and I am more conscious and aware of so many more facets of the game itself. I believe that this will only lead to a more positive experience for whatever group I end up running games for in the future. And for the first time in a while, I feel really confident about my abilities as both a player and a dungeon master.

For anyone out there that’s aspiring to be a DM, I genuinely and sincerely recommend starting with a preexisting module and really understanding why certain things interact with others and why. Knowing and enforcing effects on moves and spells heightens the tension and importance of every combat encounter because everyone is aware of what can and cannot happen. I look back at my previous blunders and wince at how I behaved and ruled on things, but genuinely hope that one day I can give my friends the satisfying and fun campaign that they deserve.

Pretty early on in the campaign I decided I wanted to add an auditory element to everything we were doing, without resorting to generic dungeon crawling ambient noises that you can find on YouTube.  How would one go about this then?  Maybe they would search for music that set the appropriate mood, cause that would actually be a smart idea.  But what if we added hours to my session prep and included unique music tracks for encounters and story beats?  That’s the position I’ve put myself in.

There were specific tones and moods I was trying to cultivate throughout our campaign in an effort to add some drama and weight to everything.  It started out with me making little stingers of violins swelling or big drums strikes that would act as the period on the important sentence I was relaying to the party.  It largely went unnoticed and didn’t really add much to the experience.

But instead of bowing out there, I decided to go further.  What if I made these long, loop-able songs that would properly portray the current encounter or location?  I should note, this was all inspired by listening to certain RPG podcasts, where the element of audio can add a lot for both the players and listeners.  On one of the podcasts, The Adventure Zone, they did an episode where they answered a lot of lingering questions by the listeners, where it was revealed that most of the music was made with Apple Loops that were built into Garage Band.

I didn’t have a Mac, but I did have an iPhone with Garage Band installed.  Using the phone version of Garage Band wasn’t the optimal experience, but it got the job done.  I mainly stuck to relying on the included loops and various midi instruments as well as occasionally actually recording a guitar track.  Luckily the loops all worked well with each other for the most part, which made the whole affair a lot more manageable and less laborious.  Once I had managed to make a handful of tracks, it was time to use them in the campaign.

It actually went really well and was received positively by my players.  It made things feel a little weightier and put them in the mental place they needed to be.  Would it have been easier to find a good facsimile of the music I was making on the internet?  Of course it would have been, but I like making things myself.  So not only did I get to make sure the mood was just right, but I got to stretch my creative muscles.

I suppose I never really appreciated how important music could be to a D&D campaign before, but I doubt I could ever go back to not having it.  Aside from making the campaign better, it’s just fun to create things in general.

Honestly, being a DM has been some of the most rewarding creative work I’ve ever had the pleasure of doing.  From writing, to map making, character creation, acting and of course, making music, it’s truly a creatively fulfilling experience.  And considering we’re about to start an entirely new campaign with new themes, you know I’m excited to get in there and make several albums worth of tracks for it.

 

Like the countless memes on the internet would lead you to believe, scheduling our Dungeons & Dragons sessions can be unnecessarily difficult sometimes.  People have their obligations and responsibilities, and it’s important to recognize and respect that, because at the end of the day these are still your friends.  I recently found myself getting very down due to the scheduling nightmare that is our D&D campaign, and it took some time for me to get over it.

For months now, my group had been on the verge of some pretty big revelations in our campaign that I’ve been eager to drop on them.  The problem was, with the holidays and various personal obligations, we hadn’t been able to meet for a full session in weeks.  Totally understandable stuff.

The problem is that at some point during this period, whenever I would send a text message to the group on game day, it always felt like a roll of the dice as to who would cancel this time and considering we’re a small group of 4, when one person bows out, we all bow out.  It wasn’t their fault that something came up and I understood that.  But after a while of this, it started to feel like I was bothering them and hounding them to play D&D.

I hated this feeling.  I hated it so much that it somehow warped into resenting myself and to a lesser extent, them.  I was angry at my friends and they had no idea.  While I completely had no right to be angry, there I was, dejected and frustrated with the current state of things.

The problem for me was that even though the sessions had stopped for a bit, my brain didn’t.  In my mind I’d been thinking about all the things I want to throw at them from combat encounters to story threads.  Whenever I’d go to write these outlines out or make a map, I’d just get upset because I started getting overly defeatist about the situation.

It was stupid and immature of me to be so upset and filled with resentment, and eventually I realized that.  The reasonable part of me finally chimed in, cooled me down, and made me realize how childish I was being.  Even though we still haven’t played a session yet, I’m okay with it.  I’ve started funneling my creative energy into other projects, and that’s been incredibly helpful.

Even though I know it was immature and shitty to harbor these feelings, it was just so deflating to have sessions get cancelled, the day of.  So one decision I did make was that I wasn’t going to hound them about playing anymore, and instead wanted to let them come to me when they wanted to start up again.  What I’m really trying to avoid with this strategy is having them feel like D&D is work.  It’s a game that we play together, and just like other games, sometimes you can’t sync up.

While I always feel immensely satisfied with the work I put into crafting and delivering our various DnD sessions, when I look back on where we started versus where we are now I can’t help but feel like I missed endless opportunities along the way.  My Dungeon Mastering started by following the Waterdeep: Dragon Heist book in an attempt to get my sea legs under me.  I had always intended to stray from the book and its story, but never did I expect it to be such a dramatic departure.

I’ve gone over that transition once or twice already, so I won’t retread that yet another time.  No, the crux of this The Master of Disaster is about adapting on the fly and how important being able to do it effectively is.

One of my players is currently in the midst of crafting a one-shot game for us as a way to get comfortable with being a Dungeon Master for a future campaign they’ll run.  He recently came to me and let me know that he was a little behind and needed more time to hone it.  That’s completely understandable, considering that putting together even a one-shot is a tremendous amount of work.  But I wanted to impart my limited knowledge upon him and maybe help him prepare for the stuff that you can’t script out.

I don’t know if I was effective in portraying that message, but hopefully this can help him along with other first time Dungeon Masters.

The first thing to understand is that you need to give your players a reason to do something.  I’ve struggled with it in the past and it led to a couple of moments with me breaking the fourth wall and just saying, “you’re going there cause that’s where the rest of the game is.”  There was more context to that statement, but it doesn’t matter because that’s just a bad way to handle the situation.  I either needed a better motivator or a better way to express that this was the direction the party should head in.

The second thing is to know your NPCs.  You don’t have to make bespoke character sheets for every NPC you craft, nor do you need to name every citizen in a town or village.  That path leads to nothing but insanity.  What I settled on was making sure I had an understanding of what the named NPCs knew and what that information meant to them.  Maybe the party would have to earn that information, maybe the NPC was easily intimidated, maybe they were a good Samaritan, or maybe they just don’t know something.  You can’t plan for every question or line of dialogue cause you never know what your players are thinking.

Along those lines is the third and arguably the most important thing a Dungeon Master can do, and that’s being able to adapt on the fly.  Improvisation is a required ability when leading a session or campaign, that’s why it’s important to have the previous two skills down because it makes this third one that much easier.

For example, you might have a quest line involving a corrupt king that’s been enjoying the benefits of their royalty while their people live in squalor.  Why should the party care?  Well, the easiest reward is money or treasure, but if you have players who actively role play, you can tap into their characters minds and appeal to their nature.  The lawful good guy isn’t going to be too keen on an neglectful and abusive king.  You can reinforce this by having citizens who voice their disdain and dissatisfaction to the party, or an event that shows the kings brutality.  These can help propel the party in the direction you want them to go.

But you never know if they’ll take the bait or be as invested as you want them to be, and that’s why you need to be able to improvise and think on the fly.  Maybe the party is looking for a diplomatic approach even though you planned for a big battle.  Don’t squash that effort, embrace their decisions.  Even if you had this elaborate fight planned, you need to know when to let it go and let the party succeed.  There will be plenty of opportunities for other fights.

But let’s say you really want them to fight anyway.  Okay, I guess if that’s how you want to play it, you have to justify it.  The king might be okay with the negotiation, but maybe a group of his personal guards aren’t to keen on giving up their power.  Things like that can allow the players to feel like they’ve accomplished something without making it too obvious that you just wanted to fight.

Although one thing I’ve learned is that it’s usually better to just let your players take their victory in circumventing a battle because it makes them happy.  But maybe now you’re in a position where suddenly a battle that could take up half of your session is just gone and you’ve got nothing planned.  Using the previous example of the king, you can have the guards jail the king for betraying them or the throne or something and have it end up as a big brawl between the citizens and the guards that remain.

That actually accomplishes a lot because your players feel like their plan worked, but there were unforeseen consequences of their actions that rippled throughout the town.  Now they’ve got to clean up their own mess, and now they’re invested.

Like I said, I’m not perfect at this Dungeon Mastering thing, but I have figured out a decent way to keep my players engaged and excited most of the time.  Sometimes it’s fun to make a quest that plays their alignments against each other, or that one players character would be really invested in and see how they convince the rest of their group to follow along.

I guess to sum up everything here into one tight sentence, it would be this; Don’t say no to your players, instead offer up alternatives, goals and challenges to their requests and attempts, even if it goes against what you’ve planned for.