By: Joe Gaylord (LabLazarus)
Combat is a standard element of most RPGs. It’s often a moment of high tension and narrative importance. It’s also, unfortunately, often a bit boring. One of the common complaints is that combat drags, players lose focus, or it starts to feel repetitive and one note. There are many reasons for this, but often, sub-par combat comes down to the DM not having the language or skills to present combat in a dynamic and impactful fashion.
This article presents the second half of my combat advice, specifically discussing strategies at the table that can help keep combat dynamic and engaging. The first half, which you can read here, discussed how to contextualize combat in a story and use inspirations to create better combat. Let’s pick up where we left off. How many hit points were you at?
Mechanical Beats
Each round of a fight shouldn’t happen in a vacuum. A fight in an RPG tells a story, and ideally is a story in itself as I said before. The more you build that story into a fight, the more memorable it will be. Within writing and storytelling, a key concept is beats. These are moments where the narrative changes in a substantial way. Beats string together to create the fundamental rhythm of a story. When planning fights in TTRPGs, it’s good to build in these same beats to the description or mechanics for the same purpose.
This could be as simple as texture (an element with little or no mechanical impact), like a rocking ship or driving rain, that gives a descriptive throughline to the fight. Watching a barrel roll back and forth across the deck of a storm tossed ship as the party fights off merrow raiders feels evocative. Starting each round with a lighting bolt or thunderclap reinforces the setting. Obviously, in games limited primarily by our imaginations, these things can transcend mere set dressing. A player could trip an enemy, causing them to land in the path of the barrel, or the thunder could be used to conceal stealthy movement. Even as scenery alone, these elements help keep time and provide a sense of place and momentum to a fight.
Even better, you can give the fight waypoints, moments that happen with specific triggers, either timing, rolls, or the HP of one side or the other. A band of guards just fighting to the death feels dull, but if one of them breaks and runs to summon help after half of them are killed, it creates a little bit of story and changes the dynamic from a set piece battle to a countdown or potentially a chase. Fighting a shambling mound in a swamp is already a good setting, but adding a complication where anyone who rolls a 1 gets their feet mired in the bog and is slowed or restrained makes it matter more and gives more reality to that environment. JRPGs like Final Fantasy do an excellent job of this, with staged combats featuring waves of different enemies or a boss fight where after the enemy is “defeated” it simply changes form or reveals a second enemy and the battle continues with a totally different set of powers for the foe.
Lair actions, from the first version of D&D 5e, are a great tool for this. At the start of each initiative count, the environment itself gets an action, based on the monster you’re fighting. A red dragon causes volcanic activity in its lair, lava flows, tremors, or the release of volcanic gasses that pose risks for intruders. A yeti’s snowy mountainside has the potential for falling boulders, avalanche or whipping winds.
Lair actions are a great way to add variety and danger to the fight and never let the players forget where they are fighting. In fact, I find lair actions so valuable in play that I coauthored a book on lair actions you can get here if you want inspiration! https://www.dmsguild.com/product/384113/HomeField-Advantage–A-Compendium-of-Lair-Actions
Descriptions and Connections
One of the easier ways to keep a fight interesting and moving is to provide richer descriptions than “you hit” or “you miss”. Give reasons these things happened, tie them into visuals that resonate. This is another reason, as mentioned in the previous article, to be familiar with how combat works and to have a deep set of inspirations to draw on. Ideally, you can make these personal to the individual character. The cowardly mage misses because they are shaking too badly to swing effectively. The ranger doesn’t just hit, but leads his target perfectly and places an arrow precisely in its shoulder. The goblin’s sword hits the paladin, but the creature is too weak to get through the PC’s holy armor. This is somewhat easier in systems with tiered levels of success, since those systems inherently give more than a binary success or failure, but it can be worked into any game you want to make things more heroic and compelling.
Within the fight, you can connect these descriptions to build narrative as well. Each action can build on the last. A berserker could miss when attacking the paladin, then the berserker’s rogue ally could hit with a sneak attack, but it’s more interesting if the paladin barely fends off the berserker’s attack with her shield leaving her side open to the rogue behind her. A character that was wounded might move slowly and breathe heavily when you describe their next attack. This asks a lot of a GM, but your mind’s eye will improve quickly with practice. If you can keep one or two words in mind or jot them on a notepad for each of the main characters in a fight, it will make a fight feel more like an action movie and less like a game of Yahtzee.
Get Your Combat Going – 4 Quick Tips
Four things you can do to quickly strengthen your RPG combat narration are to keep it moving, involve the players, improve your vocabulary, and evoke the scene.
Keep It Moving
Don’t let combat drag. Tell the next player they’re on deck, don’t allow excessive take backs or strategizing, have spell and ability descriptions handy, roll attacks and damage together. You can use physical prompts like initiative cards or towers to help with this and create a visual of the turn order for everyone. Some tables have an hourglass or timer to ensure decisions are made within 30 seconds or a minute. You don’t want to make players uncomfortable, but keeping up the pace can give a sense of pressure and urgency, and help the events of the last round stay fresh in the players’ (and GM’s) minds.
Involve the Players
“How do you want to do this?” Is one of the more notable catch phrases in TTRPGs for a good reason. It gives the player ownership over a big moment. Expand on that. Encourage players not to simply say “I attack with my longsword” but “I make a left feint before driving in with the point of my blade.” Or to replace “I disengage and step away” with “I bob and weave, spinning out and away.” Those descriptions give a lot more for a DM to work with and lighten the load of needing to describe the actions of both sides. They also prompt players to think more about their character and how who they are relates to how they fight.
Improve your Vocabulary
TTRPGs exist only as a series of spoken words, so make those words the best you can. Learn a little about human and animal anatomy, and about medieval weaponry. Know 15 different synonyms for “red”. “You were hit with a mace in the shoulder and it broke” is fine. “The flange of the morningstar shattered your right clavicle” feels punchier. Reading fantasy and listening to actual play TTRPG podcasts can help build this vocabulary quickly. Try some out. You don’t have to be the next Brennan Lee Mulligan right away to slowly build your capacity for description.
Evoke the Scene
This is a challenge, but saying more with less is a great way to provide value in narrating any scene. Steven King calls this “evocation”. Rather than trying to describe everything, choose 2-3 strong images that provide the sense you’re going for and let people imagine the rest. Think about how classic horror movies often show almost no gore, the tension is all from the limited things you do see. A common expression related to this “don’t show the shark” comes from the production of Jaws where we see nothing of the title monster except glimpses of fins and teeth until the final act.
Also, rather than stating what happened, apply the advice of “show don’t tell”. Extending the advice from the mace hit above, “The bandit swings their mace down at your clavicle and you hear a crunch and see a white flash of pain” gives much more substance than a simple statement of “you were hit”.
Conclusion
Combat is one of the pillars of D&D and part of most RPGs to some extent. The more interesting a DM makes the description of combat, the better it will be. It is worth your while as a DM who wants to perfect your craft to take the time, learn some techniques, and build truly cinematic fights into the game. By backing up the descriptions I discussed in the last article with mechanics and table tools that support dynamic fights, you can make sure that everyone is getting the most of their time while playing.
About The Author
Joseph Gaylord has been playing TTRPGs and TCGs for 25 years, with almost 50 titles to his name on DMsGuild as an author, co-author, or contributor. He is on most social media as LabLazarus.
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