As you know — because I won’t shut the Hell up about it — it’s been a rough time here at Angry Games HQ. If you somehow didn’t know that and you want to know more — though I can’t fathom why — you can check out this long-ass update.
To lighten my load and let me catch up while I recover, I asked a bunch of you to throw me some topics you’d like me to address. And I trawled the giant pile of reader-submitted e-mail questions too. I just wanted some one-off stuff to tackle while I got major projects back on track and I didn’t want to churn out a bunch of rambling bullshit filler content.
Unfortunately, rambling bullshit filler content’s what you’re getting today. That ain’t my fault, though. You asked for this. Well, a bunch of you did. Today, I’m killing a dozen birds with one stone by answering a whole lot of questions people asked me about combat in Dungeons & Dragons and how to fix it. Questions I’ve actually tried to answer before.
Unfortunately, I have now reached the conclusion that it’s beyond fixing.
Today, I’m telling you why you can’t have deep, tactical, strategic, teamwork-based combat in the current version of Dungeons & Dragons. Why combats will always devolve into kill-or-be-killed races-to-zero-hit-points. And why you can’t fix it without gutting the whole damned system and starting over.
Enjoy.
Shallow Kombat!
There are lots of Game Masters out there who are pretty unhappy with combat in the current iteration of Dungeons & Dragons. At least if my Ask Angry inbox and Discord and my private messages are anything to go by. It ain’t that your players don’t enjoy fights in the latest edition of the world’s greatest roleplaying game, but rather, that you folks running the show find it all kind of… unsatisfying? Uninteresting? Dull? Sloggy? Pointless? Bland?
You decide how to tend that thought.
The problems that most of you can’t put your finger on what’s really wrong and why. You just have this vague sense that D&D combat just isn’t engaging. Or it’s not engaging in the right way. Or the players aren’t engaging with it right. So you send me questions like, “How can I get my players to fight more strategically?” Or, “How can I get my players to fight as a team?” Or, most commonly, “How can I get my players to do something other than dish out as much damage as possible?”
That last question, especially, is responsible for numerous common aphorisms in the online D&D space. People say, for example, “The only condition worth imposing is the Dead condition.” That one first appeared in the 4E days, mind you. This is pretty ironic given that the 4E designers were purposely trying to fix that problem. It was always possible, see, in D&D to use your action to slow an opponent or stun them or debuff them or whatever, but, none of it was ever as good as just hitting them with enough damage to make them dead. So, in 4E, the designers ensured that every character dealt damage with every attack. Powers that slowed, stunned, debuffed, or marked opponents also did damage. The choice wasn’t between dealing damage or imposing a debuff, it was what kind of debuff you wanted to slather atop your damage.
That plan didn’t work.
Another common phrase you hear among the D&D-ratti is “Combat is a race to zero hit points.” And… no shit. That’s what combat’s all about. Two armed forces have decided to resolve their differences through violence. Once a conflict hits that point — the point where each side is willing to injure or kill the other — then the conflict’s down to who dies first. Pedantically and technically, every fight ever is a race to zero hit points. And yet, Game Masters know — they can feel — something’s fundamentally wrong with that.
And something is.
And so y’all whine and beg and cry and scream at me to fix it. And, for my part, I’ve tried to give you good answers. Or at least, supply some patches and Band-Aids. Because none of you want to hear the truth that, for a game with such a deep and detailed and mechanically complex combat engine as Dungeons & Dragons, the actual fights are mediocre. They’re bland. They lack depth.
They’re shallow.
And there’s no saving them.
Alternative Combat Goals
Before I tell you why there’s no hope for D&D combat, I want to address a specific proposal I hear a lot. It’s an idea people think is some kind of magic bullet that’ll fix the Shallow Kombat problem. And it’s almost always mentioned in the same breath as “Making combat about more than a race to zero hit points.”
Angry, how can I add alternative goals to combats so they don’t devolve into kill-or-be-killed races-to-zero-hit-points?
That idea makes sense if you don’t think too hard about it. But I think too hard about everything, so let me explain why it’s stupid and impossible and won’t fix anything.
If combats always devolve into kill-or-be-killed damage races, then offering a goal besides kill-or-be-killed should fix the problem. If fights were about disabling or capturing or demoralizing or dispiriting or whatever, there’d be a good reason to focus on shit other than damage-dealing.
The problem is that combat is what it is. It’s violent conflict resolution. It starts when two parties decide their conflict is serious enough to risk injury or death over. And serious enough to inflict injury or death. It’s like the old gun safety rule, “Don’t point your gun at anything you don’t mean to kill.” If you start a fight — if you draw a sword and roll initiative — you’ve decided that injuring and killing is the way to accomplish your goal. And the enemy has decided the same.
I ain’t saying combats must end in death. Enemies can be routed or disabled. They can surrender. But those are choices the enemy makes, not you. You can’t rout a foe that won’t run. You can’t force an enemy to surrender if they’d rather die. And — despite idiotic myths to the contrary — fighting to disable is way, way harder than fighting to kill. If someone’s trying to kill you, it’s very risky to try to avoid killing them back.
Combat is, by nature, a kill-or-be-killed race to see who’s left standing. It’s only if one party is willing to admit defeat or absorb the risk of using nonlethal methods that death is avoided. And even in games with morale and nonlethal attack options, they’re still usually keyed to damage. The easiest way to break an enemy’s morale is to overwhelm them with damage.
The point is, that each party always has two goals in combat, and they’re always the same. First, remove the other party as an obstacle to whatever the party is trying to do, and, second, don’t get removed as an obstacle yourself. Routs and surrenders and disables are outcomes, but they’re not goals. Not barring external, extenuating circumstances. And you can’t force them.
What Makes Kombat Shallow?
Dungeons & Dragons sure doesn’t seem like a game of Shallow Kombat, does it? Every character has a multitude of combat options and most of them are useful in almost every fight. Meanwhile, the monster design in D&D is pretty great. Some specific monsters suck and there are some implementational problems, but D&D’s monster design affords a lot of possibilities. Hell, I’d say that D&D has the most intricate, detailed, and approachable tactical combat engine and monster design of any roleplaying game that exists.
Simply put, combat in Dungeons & Dragons should be awesome. Even if every other part of the D&D experience sucks, you should get some great fights out of the system. And, to be fair, most players agree that you do. They love fighting D&D battles. They love the D&D combat engine. Mostly.
And yet, Game Masters tend to find D&D combat dull. Why? Because they can see that every fight boils down to everyone dishing out as much damage as possible until one side’s reduced to pairs of empty, smoking boots. And they can see that every player is playing their own game. Players don’t care what their allies are doing. Hell, most players don’t even care what enemies they’re facing. They don’t fight as a team, they don’t play strategically, and they don’t make tactical decisions beyond, “Which attack should I unleash next?”
And this probably ain’t limited to particular players and particular tables. It seems to emerge at every table over time. Even if a group of players starts out being all tactical and teamworky, given a few weeks or months of play, they just kind of give up. And this happens at lots of tables with lots of different kinds of GMs. There are a few GMs who never see the problem — or they’re blind to it or they don’t care — but it’s widespread. It’s, dare I say, systemic?
That word is, of course, a death knell. If the problem isn’t coming from particular players or particular Game Masters or particular approaches to encounter design, then it must be built into the system itself. And if it’s so deeply ingrained as to affect so many different tables, it may be unsolvable.
Turn-Based Combat Sucks
Turn-based combat has been a staple of wargaming and roleplaying gaming and video gaming for as long as those media have existed. These days, though, it’s fallen out of favor. Even series that were practically synonymous with turn-based combat — like Final Fantasy and Fallout and the various D&D-based CRPGs that became Baldur’s Gate — started evolving away from it years and years ago. And that’s because it’s hard to do turn-based combat well.
YouTuber Joseph Anderson — who provides very excellent and very, very long video game analyses — put it best in his only sane man critique of Darkest Dungeon. “Turn-based combat,” he said, “is boring.” And he later said that the barest-bones versions of turn-based combat “can be summed up in one sentence: ‘Make sure you spend some turns healing damage or else you die.'”
Modern D&D is a far cry from the sort of old-school turn-based video game combat Anderson described. It ain’t just about fighters standing on opposite sides of the screen waiting for their turns to bonk each other. In D&D, the fighters are also waiting for their turns to decide where to move.
I ain’t saying that turn-based combat systems automatically suck. That would be a dumbass thing to say. What I’m saying is that it takes a lot of skill to build a good turn-based combat system and that D&D’s turn-based combat system can’t even be summed up with Anderson’s one flippant sentence.
Do you remember that I once explained that D&D has this attrition-based macrochallenge at its heart? Well, it doesn’t matter whether you do or don’t remember it. You didn’t understand it. No one did. I’m still getting e-mails about that shit.
The point is, in D&D, no one encounter — combat or otherwise — is a be-all-and-end-all adventure fail state. So there’s this system of mechanical, numerical balance that ensures that, as long as everyone dishes out at least an average amount of damage in every round of combat, the players will win the fight in three to five rounds. This means that even if a character goes down, it’s very unlikely they’ll die before the fight’s over and someone can revive them.
It’s a forgone conclusion then that, as long as the players don’t let up on dealing damage, they’ll win every fight. This means they don’t actually have to spend a few turns healing damage. Players just need to click ‘Attack’ every round.
Don’t Work for What You Don’t Have To
Most players choose the path of least resistance most of the time. That’s how they be. If a game’s designed such that a player just has to spam attacks to win, most players will do just that. And that is, unfortunately, how Dungeons & Dragons is designed. On a fundamental, system level. Partly, it’s an intentional consequence of its attrition-based macrochallenge and partly it’s an unintentional consequence of design goals that are at odds with creating deep and meaningful combats.
Consider this…
Once upon a time, fighting undead sucked. Back in D&D’s 3rd Edition days, undead resisted almost everything. Some of them couldn’t even be stabbed or cut. None of them could be poisoned. They didn’t suffer extra damage from crits or sneak attacks. Most signature class abilities just bounced off them. At the same time, undead did all sorts of deadly dangerous shit. They did ability damage, drained experience levels, or just killed you by screaming too loud.
Players hated fighting undead. And they complained. And Wizards of the Coast heard those complaints and decided — when it was time to design D&D’s 4th Edition — to fix the problem. “Every character,” they said, “must be able to use their signature abilities on every foe all the time. Monsters can’t shrug off core class features. Wizards can’t run out of spells. None of that shit anymore.”
As reasonable as that may sound, it was, in effect, WotC saying, “Every character must have an ‘Attack’ button they can spam in any fight.”
See, players didn’t like fighting undead because they had to work at it. Their normal strategies and tactics didn’t work. They needed to engage intelligently, protect themselves, and work as a team.
Many elements that added depth to D&D’s combat system — all of which somehow restricted the players’ tactics — have gotten pared down or thrown out over the years for being “too complicated” or “too punitive” or “not fun.” Opportunity attacks and cover rules — which restrict how players can move and who they can target — have been sanded down so smooth that anyone can basically safely stand anywhere and attack anyone with anything. This is why any idiot who chooses a melee weapon over a ranged weapon or a spell in D&D is just, well, an idiot.
That’s just how D&D is now.
And that’s still only part of the problem…
Make Sure You Spend a Few Turns Healing Damage…
Constraints and restrictions drive meaningful choices. But so too do conflicts. When you can have everything you want — or when you can have what you want at the cost of something you don’t care about — choices are easy to make. But when you can’t have everything you want, life ain’t so simple.
Imagine you’ve got these two projects, right? You want to finish them both. Both require resources — time, money, supplies, whatever — but you only have so much of that shit to invest. Further, imagine the outcome of each product is unpredictable. The more resources you invest in either project, the more likely that project is to succeed, but there’s no guarantee. That’s a really tricky situation, huh? The sort of situation that demands good, strategic thinking and moment-to-moment tactical reassessment.
You have two goals in combat. Two projects. Your first is to defeat your opponent. Your second is to avoid being defeated. In theory, that should be a really tricky situation demanding strategy and tactics and teamwork. So, how then, can a game like Dungeons & Dragons end up with Shallow Kombat?
Remember that D&D isn’t designed to eliminate player-characters. That same math that ensures the PCs can win every fight in three to five rounds of average damage output also ensures that the monsters can’t eliminate the player-characters in that same time. Really, the only way the PCs can lose a D&D fight is by underdamaging the opponent long enough that the opponent can start eliminating PCs.
The whole Race to Zero Hit Points only works if you have a head start. And, in D&D, the players do. They always do. They can reliably outdamage their opponents because the system’s designed to let them. Try that same Race to Zero Hit Points crap in, say, Dark Souls or Cuphead and you’re screwed.
Not that I’m saying that’s the standard D&D should aim for. I’m just illustrating that D&D, specifically, is designed so that the player-characters will always win a damage race.
Not that the player-characters can do anything else anyway…
Defense! Defense!
Dungeons & Dragons characters have tons of combat options. But most of those options are offensive in nature. Mostly of the direct damage or debuff variety. And there are some buff and heal options too, of course, but there aren’t really many resources players can divvy between Kill and Don’t Be Killed.
Really, the major resource every player’s got is their Combat Action. And there’s no good way to allocate your turn to defense. Yeah, there’s a shitty Parry option, but given the combat design in D&D, Parrying is just a way to fall behind in the damage race. However, that doesn’t have to be the case.
Imagine, for example, there’s a monster with a very powerful attack it can dish out only once in a while reasonably predictably. The sort of thing that can cripple or even one-shot any player-character. That’s the equivalent of the monster springing ahead in the damage race. And there’s suddenly a good reason to spend a turn buffing your defense.
There are actually a few creatures that fit that description in D&D. But players can’t really predict when those attacks are gonna happen. They can’t read their opponents, so they can’t properly allocate resources to defense. Hell, there are monsters against whom it is optimal to wait out their most powerful attack while turtling and then unleash a flurry of your own while the beast is recharging. But those critters are few and far between so most players don’t even recognize those opportunities.
Now, Reactions and Bonus Actions do give players a spendable resource to allocate to offense and defense — and I can come up with a half-dozen ways at least to use them better — but D&D is still balanced such that any and all extra resources are best spent on offense.
Really, this is down to the fact that most tabletop roleplaying games are built around passive defenses. Attackers test attacks against static defense stats. Your only defense option is to stand there and tank the hit. Or maybe buff your defense stats ahead of time, but that doesn’t feel the same as actively defending yourself.
It’s All Too Easy
Even if you dismiss all my other analyses, there’s still a big factor keeping D&D’s combat in the shallow end of the game-design pool. And that’s that D&D doesn’t want to demand anything of its players. The game is built so that individual fights — even fights classified as Difficult in the system and which might constitute boss fights — just don’t pose a threat. As long as the players never stop dishing out damage, they’ll win. And they have plenty of effective ways to dish out damage.
Now, I’ve read all the posts about Combat as Sport vs. Combat as War. They’re mostly semantical horseshit. But they all miss the fundamental point that combat in modern D&D is designed neither as sport nor as war. It’s a performance masquerading as a challenge.
And, to be honest, I’m not even claiming that the combat engines in previous editions of combat were rich or deep, mechanically speaking. What gave it depth was its limitations and its constraints and its level of risk. If you didn’t think about how to handle every fight — if you just went back and forth bonking your foes — you were as likely to die as win.
From that statement, you might conclude that amping up the difficulty is the solution. Make your fights deadly dangerous and the players will have to engage. Evolve or die, right? Well, you’ll still run into the stilted combat design that is way too focused on offense.
But, frankly, I’m not actually sure you should be trying to fix D&D’s Shallow Kombat!
Why Don’t Players Get Bored?
So Dungeons & Dragons has Shallow Kombat. By design. And the designers don’t seem to have much interest in fixing it. Why not? Because many players like D&D combat just the way it is. Not just because it’s easy — the answer’s not as pat as that — but because it is engaging. It isn’t deep, but it isn’t dull.
Players have lots of options for attacking and buffing and debuffing and doing all sorts of awesome shit. And they’re always gaining more options. Sure, individual turns in combat boil down to deciding where to move and what attack to make, but those choices feel meaningful and exciting and fun. The players feel like they’re playing a tactical combat game and they feel awesome when they win. It may be an illusion, but it’s one only you — the Game Master behind the curtain — can see.
Well… that ain’t quite true.
Some players do get bored. Warlock players — and spellcaster players in general — have noticed they spend a lot of rounds flinging the same cantrips over and over. How many times have you heard a warlock’s player sigh and say, “I guess I’ll eldritch blast, again.” It’s actually kind of ironic that these days, the primary spellcasters — the characters with no abilities apart from their spell lists — are the ones most likely to get bored.
But by and large, players like D&D’s combat. It feels like it presents an exciting, tactical challenge and it lets them do all sorts of cool shit. The lack of stakes doesn’t much matter; there’s enough spectacle to satisfy. Kind of like most modern movies. Especially superhero movies.
By the way, that’s why the solution — even if did want to rebuild the whole combat engine — isn’t about upping the difficulty so the players can’t win the damage race. If you do that — especially if that’s all you do — you’re just going to leave a bunch of players behind. Really, you need a whole new way of looking at balance and challenge. And that is why I can’t tell you how to just fix the Dungeons & Dragons combat engine. It’s shallow by design and it stays that way because that keeps the players happy. And it’ll take more than a few tweaks, hacks, or alternative combat goals to add any depth.
Maybe the problem here… is you. Maybe you, the Game Master, need to rethink your idea of what combat is and what it should be. If it’s fun and it feels challenging and it feels exciting, aren’t you giving your players a good game? Aren’t you doing your job?
Maybe the question to ask yourself is, “Why do you think D&D’s Shallow Kombat is a problem in need of a fix?”
I think I want to show my players (and to myself) how my skills and mastery can help me go above and beyond what the system itself can offer to me, and how I can overcome its constrains. I want to show and prove how better I’m than it.
I think lots of people might think the same way, on some level. But maybe we’re actually enough.
I’ve been playing a lot of turn-based video games recently (XCOM 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, WH40k Mechanicus), and have been comparing them to my experience playing and running D&D combats. I figure in D&D there’s two major things missing: for one, in D&D you only get to control one character, so you’re missing a lot of synergies between characters unless you want to bark orders at other players (and even if they wouldn’t be offended some might simply not understand well enough to deviate from “I attack whoever’s closest”). The second miss is repetition: BG3 had this issue too, where every combat features spellcasters on both sides so nobody knows what to expect. Compared to XCOM and Mechanicus that have a small roster of enemies with maybe 1-3 abilities and very predictable behaviors, and they’ll tell you before you enter the dungeon which enemies you’ll be facing. So I guess, in conclusion, these video games are more like GMing than playing D&D. Playing D&D is basically unlike any game I know of, except maybe a sort of slot machine where the house *doesn’t* win. Which makes me wonder why fights tend to take so long if that’s all they boil down to.
“a sort of slot machine where the house *doesn’t* win”
I adore this line.
My solutions to Shallow Kombat as a warlock are Grasp of Hadar and Repelling Blast.^^ Sure, I’ll cast eldritch blast at every turn, but being able to move the target opens up plenty of interesting options.
I wonder if severly restricting out-of-combat healing (both spells and rests) could be a way to spice up combat without overhauling D&D’s system. It’s a way to increase combat difficulty without putting the players’ beloved characters in peril in every confrontation. And if the 2nd objective of combat becomes “lose as few hp as possible” instead of “don’t die”, defensive options, debuffing and control gain a lot more appeal, possibly enough to compete with straight offense.
Good idea Camille! I like the idea of giving the power of short and long rest to the GM. (It may be that I like this option because I am the GM and. like having all the power.) That said, it gives the GM something to offering players that isn’t just treasure, and can add to the narrative. The only down side is that the warlock is always pandering to the GM for a good reason to take a short rest.
Having played both tons of other system other than D&D, I found out that imo the ones that tend to the opposte way, meaning the games that gave players almost all their resources every combat tend to have the most dynamic and instresting fights, since every fight can be deadly in it’s own right and player have option to invest in debuff and CC without the fear of consume important resources for a more important fight.
Thank you for the post, Angry!
Your ending question inspired three thoughts in me:
1) My own ego desires a fix. It bothers me when players take down my stronger monsters without breaking a sweat.
2) Combat system as is, the game world seems dangerous but actually feels quite safe.
3) Even though the latest edition of D&D’s monster statblocks have undergone some streamlining and simplifying, many of the statblocks are still wordy and complex enough to take up a whole page. And that’s without spell descriptions! If combat is simply a shallow HP race to the bottom, I question the need of the length and complexity of many of the statblocks.
“Why do you think D&D’s Shallow Kombat is a problem in need of a fix?”
D&D 5e asks players: “How do you win this time? Which of your dozen attacks do you use to be improbably awesome?” I want to ask my players: “What are you willing to risk or sacrifice to achieve victory? What is most important to you?”
Tough decisions can be scary, so I can’t blame players for shying away from them. But I believe tough decisions are essential to long term health of an RPG, and that it’s my responsibility to provide them. There are only so many times the heroes can laugh in the face of death before it stops being a drama and starts being a comedy.
It’s fine if some rounds are just mindless fun, but I wish D&D gave me better tools for offering players those pivotal choices when it matters most.
“It’s fine if some rounds are just mindless fun, but I wish D&D gave me better tools for offering players those pivotal choices when it matters most.”
Yep, 100% agreed. I’m sure it can be done within the existing rules, but it just seems like it will be a lot of extra work concocting specific scenarios for maximum advantage to the bad guys.
I run old-school D&D sort of games. My solution has a death & dismemberment system after HP is reduced to 0, so players don’t know exactly when they’re character will bite it. I also either run a phased combat system where certain actions can only be performed in certain phases, so players don’t get all of their actions during a round all at once, or I run a simultaneous resolution system, which is basically how the Diplomacy board game runs. Everyone writes down what their characters do with the GM writing down the enemy NPCs actions. Then everyone reveals at once and the GM resolves everyone’s actions at once to the best of their ability with initiative rolls called for to figure out who acts first if two people try to perform contradicting actions. The players suddenly have to take into account how the battlefield looks, what their opponents are likely to try to do, what their allies might try to do, and how things may pan out with their action, before committing to something.
I used to have that problem and weirdly enough I started to not have anymore withy new group. I don’t know why. Maybe I startrd to think more of terrain and environmental hazard that make the fight something else than just running towards the enemy? Or my players are more team oriented.
I feel a lot of the advice you give on combat in other articles fix a lot of the stuff you said in this article. I’m even surprise none came up. Telegraphing? Sharing info through descriptions? Reminding the players of the global situation? Terrain stuff from older articles? All of that kinda improved my enjoyment of fight encounters and it seems to make my players do interesting stuff.
Totally agree on it being systemic. This is actually a big part of why I enjoyed trying out P2e a while back. Even though the 3 action thing can be looked at as analogous to D&D5e’s Move, Action, Bonus Action, I love that different abilities consume different amounts of actions and multi-attack-penalty encourages making use of non-attack actions. For example, if you want to gain the AC bonus from your shield you have to spend an action to “raise” it, and this enables a reaction to further reduce damage if the enemy still hits. And the system strongly emphasizes buffs/de-buffs, particularly for harder enemies as you will have a hell of a time landing hits otherwise.
The article on attrition based macrochallenge was one of my favorites and completely changed the way I both play in games and how I run my own games. I’ve mentioned it to my players, and it’s been fun watching them change up how they play.
Well said, and thanks for the insight. I’ve been scratching at that itch for a long time. One option I tried at my table was letting every character (PC/NPC) in battle take a re-action every turn. I found that it helps keep players engaged between turns, and gives them an offense/defense action that can add to the combat narrative.
RE-ACTIONS
– Defend Yourself: Add STR to your AC against a single melee attack that targets you, add Dex to your AC against a single ranged attack that targets you.
– Resist: Gain advantage on a Saving Throw
– Move 10ft
– Any Bonus Action
– Any single melee attack
– Do something creative
*A re-action can be triggered by any action performed by any character
Just something to try out while you’re in the shallow end of the pool slogging it out.
This made me think:
1. Cool!
2. … This could mess with the action economy.
3. Yes … let’s MESS with the action economy.
I had a friend try to get me into DnD years ago. I was playing a halfling duelist. I tried to tumble around a larger enemy so that my ally and I were on opposing sides so that we could both get some sort of bonus from a pincher attack or bonus form attacking a blind side. I was told there would be no bonus. He would turn to face each and every attack. I also provoked attacks of opportunity while tumbling to get past. By the end of the battle I started saying “I attack” every round getting bored. Never played a second session. I’d argue I noticed right away as a player. Possibly it was an inexperienced GM.
“[Players] can’t read their opponents, so they can’t properly allocate resources to defense.”
I think I remember an older article where you talk about giving monsters “tells” about what they’ll do on the next round, precisely to allow players to react to those actions, but I can’t seem to find it. Am I hallucinating ?
Probably Barking at Your Players.
https://theangrygm.com/barking-at-your-players-advanced-combat-narration/
That’s the one, thanks !
Legendary Actions really make this fall apart, though. No use telegraphing when the boss will just switch up and do something else before it’s even it’s turn.
Perhaps the solution would be to consolidate all legendary actions into the main turn, and all movement legendaries into the base speed of the boss. The boss turn would become a cutscene then, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all.
Alternatively, give them a second turn (so a second action, movement, and bonus action at a different initiative step) but keep everything else the same. Essentially, it would be halfway between the legendary actions currently in play and Angry’s Paragon Monsters.
That could work as well, with two caveats:
1) It is slightly more work for the DM, as legendary actions usually don’t do as much as a main action, so there is some rebalancing involved.
2) Every extra turn for the boss makes telegraphing less substantial, as players have less time to adapt.
A third, even easier solution would be to simply roll all legendary actions into the main turn. They’re still legendary actions with their associated costs and recharge rates, they just happen on the boss turn (or even at the end of the boss turn) instead of between player turns. The advantage of this method is that you won’t even have to touch the statblock.
In the end, it all comes down to preference. But for a quick fix this final method is my favorite.
Every now and again I find myself on the other side of the table, and most combats are just awful. Perhaps too much of how I DM derived from what I want as a player, and just rolling dice at a problem until it dies doesn’t interest nor engage me
That’s all very sensible, Angry, but I’m still going to try shoehorning what I can remember of the threaten/opportunity attack/five foot step/flanking rules from that one game of Pathfinder I played in a few years ago into 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons because I’m an idiot.
I’ve sort of accepted combat as a necessary evil in the 5e campaign I run. By “necessary evil” I mean the table’s come to treat it as the riskier resolution method that they’d rather avoid, I’m not depending on it for session flow, and my players do the most of their strategizing before/around combat. More macrochallenge focused, I suppose.
I homebrew my entire roster of monsters at this point and they’re a fair bit more brutal than normal, but they will appear multiple times in a given environment/dungeon so the party gets to learn & adapt to them. Sort of bringing back in the “fighting this thing sucks” element of some monsters; the party’s got a deep hatred of Werecorvids now from just a few skirmishes with a pair of them.
I also tend to give the party a view of a potential foe without immediately rolling initiative; thinking about it now, sort of like the old Monster Reaction table if both parties see each other (or the warlock or rogue are scouting and spot something dangerous, so they get to try and evaluate it). Immediate hostility & ambushes do happen, but they’re more the exception than the norm.
That said, while it works, it’s fighting the system itself, and we’ll be switching (likely to either a game I’m whittling at for lower-priority combat or the MCDM rpg for hopefully interesting tactical combat) once this campaign wraps up.
Honestly, I’m not that excited about the MCDM new game. This whole “you always hit” thing put me down really hard. It gives you one less “button” to push, since accuracy is not a thing anymore. It screws verisimilitude, because aways hitting the enemy doesn’t sound like a fight, in the real world, or in any fantasy media whatsoever. And finally, it seems to me that it will only aggravate the problem being exposed in this article, because you can defend yourself, it’s the ultimate HP race.
MCDM looks at how people actually play the game of 5e–disliking attrition, encumbrance ignored, combat and narrative focused–and just makes it Verbatim. Designed for it.
It’s an HP race? Make it an interesting one.
You have a good point. It just won’t be the game to me then. And that’s ok. Luckily, some angry guy in the internet will make a game more to my tastes someday…
I think D&D’s Shallow Kombat is a problem in need of a fix because I don’t _just_ want my players to have fun. I want them to feel threatened at times, scared for their lives or exhilarated for overcoming a challenge they struggled with before or did not think they could surpass. I want them to feel like they’re bonding with their fellow players outside just having a good time together. It’s a deeper satisfaction to achieve a goal by working together than by each individually pressing your best buttons because the choices of your party members hardly affect yours. Isn’t that the whole point of the party of adventurers? Of stories about groups of people? The sum of the parts and the whole and all that. There’s more to be gained from this medium than just fun alone.
But I suppose I’m grabbing low hanging fruit, it seems Angry feels the same way considering the superhero/marvel analogy at the end there.
Here is the secret: Angry is with you. He thinks it’s a problem worth addressing. And he knows why. But he wants all of YOU to know why before you start demanding fixes from him. Or start fixing it yourself.
The solution seems pretty easy though. If 3E solved this with resistances and immunities, it should be simple enough to homebrew back into the game. If it’s special monster attacks that are supposed to be defended against, basic telegraphing should work here.
If the baseline is skewed towards the players always winning the damage race, then make them work for it. The monster starts out as broken and you must do X or Y thing to bring it down to the “balanced” damage race that the players can actually win. Like a magic shield with a damage threshold that blocks everything that doesn’t surpass the threshold, and permanently breaks if the threshold is surpassed. Make the threshold reset every turn, and high enough that a single player can’t break it on his own.
Bam, now the players suddenly have to coordinate their attacks against the shield with ready actions to all strike in a single turn if they hope to ever damage the boss. And this is just one example. You could do something similar with a master swordsman that just parries everything unless he is disarmed and cuts throughs spells like butter. Groups of monsters are even easier, just give them items you have to break or something. I don’t think this is impossible to solve at all.
This is pretty deep in “for every problem there is an easy solution that is wrong” territory IMO.
Resistances have limited value as encounter design tools, because 5e gives very few non-spell ways of getting non-physical damage on demand. Martially inclined characters are SOL, and 5e spellcasters either have the right flavor of damage button on tap or they don’t. Fixing this requires reworking classes entirely to give broader damage access and make the difference between elements more significant i.e. a system level rework.
Your monster idea isn’t as obviously terrible, but in practice it wouldn’t work as you described. Your super monster would sit on the knife edge of either being incapable of stopping the PCs from surrounding it and nuking it down in a turn, or the monster will remove a PC very quickly and then the death spiral begins as the PCs can no longer make the burst DPS check. Not to mention that “oh we all focus fire this one thing” is pretty close to a non-mechanic, as is “oh we need to spend an action/attack on this otherwise terrible maneuver to play the game”.
You could jump through several more hoops to add environmental considerations and more monsters with unique mechanics that intermesh and get something a bit more tactically interesting, but that leaves you with a huge amount of work (and a lot of balancing chops required if you want to do it right) for a single encounter, and if you want to do this consistently from session to session then you are basically going to have to write your own monster bestiary with a lot of completely bespoke mechanics and oh look another system level overhaul.
Depth is the whole point of it though, this is about fixing the “shallow combat”, remember?
Also you completely missed the point by complaining that most classes don’t have an inbuilt win-button against physical resistances and what not… Like dude that’s the whole idea XD. Force the players to think of alternate ways to win other than spamming their class-given win button, or they lose. You provide them with those tools before or during the fight, but don’t make them obvious so that they have to figure it out. The monsters themselves still do the same damage per round, and have the same player-favoring CR rating so that they can actually win the encounter comfortably once they have neutralized the monster’s advantage.
As for your claim that it will be “too swingy”, and that players will either surround the boss immediately or be nuked by it just reeks of inexperience. Even the base game provides you with the tools for highly dynamic (if ultimately shallow) fights that last 3-6 rounds or more depending on how you use the environment. Considering the fact that extremely powerful attacks that are limited use already exist in the game, the additions I suggested actually extend the fights by providing the boss with ways to live longer and potentially outlast the players after round 6 (if they don’t figure it out) or let the players themselves avoid massive damage from the special boss attacks by using their heads instead of relying purely on saving throws that many classes are not proficient at.
Finally, homebrewing new monsters is a viable choice but not really required. Like, the additions I suggested can be easily done to any MM creature by adding one or two traits at most, of just a single action. Hell, I’ve made highly entertaining fights for both me and my players just by giving one or two destructible items to existing MM creatures with no further changes.
I’m noticing a lot of handwavey “just add handbrew mechanics to every fight to make it less straight forward” and not a lot of details. If it was as easy as you are making out, 5e wouldn’t be infamous for being as deep as a puddle and difficult for even experienced GMs to elevate beyond mediocrity.
If I had to throw out a minimum requirement for combat to be deep, I’d say that:
a) the players are strongly rewarded for executing a non-trivial gameplan
b) the players are strongly punished for allowing the opposition to execute their gameplan
c) everyone has tools at their disposal to meaningfully disrupt the opposition’s gameplan while advancing or protecting their own.
Sadly, 5E fails on all fronts. The gameplan for all sides is usually the damage race (i.e. press button to deplete HP), the PCs tend to win that by default, and there’s little you can do to change the outcome besides some minimal low hanging fruit like focus fire and a few super powerful standout abilities that are so combat warping that they themselves become trivial win conditions.
The site won’t let me reply to your other comment so I’ll just post it here.
You may find it handwavey but it’s the way I’ve been running all my sessions lately. For example, I have a final boss with the reactive trait and a magic shield he can activate on reaction to instantly absorb any spell or ranged attack that affects him until the end of the turn. The boss is CR 9, and the shield has a damage threshold of 35 that breaks the shield if surpassed, but recharges at the end of the attacker’s turn, party is level 5. No single character can do 35 damage in a single turn without very lucky rolls from lightning bolt, which means they have to coordinate their attacks with the ready action if that want to break it. Otherwise, they’re forced to deal with him in melee where he can dismantle them with debuffs while moving around with legendary actions. The fight is on round 4 by now and only now they figured it out, everyone is having a blast and the boss still has half his HP, while one character is down and the rest are on half health and 25% resources. The outcome is uncertain even for me.
A previous boss had a stone in his chest that let him shoot ki blasts and fly around like Broly until it was destroyed. He was a normal vampire before this. Two characters went down before they figured it out and ended him in an extremely cinematic exchange. The fight lasted about 7 or 8 rounds.
This is all based on Angry’s advice, btw. He once suggested giving monsters a destructible part (like a guy with a scorpion tail that did cheese-tier damage but could be cut out) to monsters that made them hit far above their CR, forcing the players to think about ways of disabling it to stand a chance. It was the article about called shots I think.
I do agree that 5th edition is a dumpster fire though. But not because of the fights being hard to make fun for the DM. For me it’s how hilariously weak the martial classes are compared to casters. To fix this, I’ve created a simple system to let players create their own “signature techniques” that they can use a few times per short rest, only if their character is a fighter, rogue, monk or barbarian. My players seem to like it so far. I can elaborate more on this if you want.
It does not “fix” the GM side of the problem, but imposing permanent costs short of death for combat missteps goes long way toward introducing tension and keeping your players focused on tactics.
Even something as minor as permanently reducing a character’s max HP by 1 each time they’re knocked unconscious can ensure your players take every fight seriously. (And if you’re so inclined, you can mostly counter-balance the long term effects by letting players roll HP with advantage each time they level up).
Another thing that works surprisingly well is to introduce truly unpredictable elements (embodying “no plan survives contact with the enemy). For set-piece fights, I often every round ends with the player with lowest initiative rolling on a table filled with random complications, events, and opportunity that will immediately alter the fight in a meaningful way (eg. reinforcements arrive, a new threat appears, the terrain changes, another faction becomes involved, an innocent bystander is threatened, something valuable is in peril, a trap is sprung, etc.). It’s like lair actions, but more generic and dynamic. This one is fun for me (the GM) because it forces me to think creatively and adapt as much as it does my players.
I think that the main reason for lack of depth is that the system has been purposefully built to be streamlined and fast in favor of depth. When they decided to replace all the situational bonuses with advantage/disadvantage, then, when you achieve advantage and give your enemies disadvantage, that’s all there is. If your enemies are already restrained (easily achievable through a 2nd level spell, for multiple enemies), for example, there is nothing to be gained from gaining higher ground, being invisible, investing your action to help a teammate, or dodging.
And advantage and disadvantage don’t even stack, they cancel each other out. It doesn’t matter if you get advantage from 3 sources, and disadvantage from just 1, or vice versa, it’s still a straight roll. So, there is no incentive whatsoever to stacking multiple advantageous positions, such as high ground, crowd control, etc.
Therefore, once advantage is achieved, that’s already the most anyone can do, and mechanically the best course of action is to go ‘pew-pew’. Did this eliminate numerous pre-fight buff rounds? Yes. Did it also kill a lot of tactical depth, and make teamwork (beyond the basic ‘grant advantage’) not only unnecessary, but also detrimental? Also yes.
I ran an NPC once who was clearly signposted as ‘has crucial information, but is evil’ and was just sitting at his desk when the player party tracked him down. They could have done anything they wanted. They merked the heck out of him. A lesson I learned was that the phrase “Roll initiative” is a death sentence for NPCs.
Possible solutions that don’t need a change to the system are combats in towns where the guards turn up after a few turns to de-escalate, or a dungeon with an overwhelming number of reinforcements mid-battle to force a retreat, but this can just turn into a bigger pile or corpses. I’ve averted the “Greek Tragedy” combat ending with these methods before, but hardly foolproof. Taking a leaf out of the Final Fantasy playbook, write bosses who upon reaching zero hitpoints deliver an impassioned monologue and then disappear! Expect arguments.
Good article!
Interesting and thought provoking, thank you. If you (Angry) had to create a “Shallow Kombat” ranking system, where would you put (relatively speaking), AD&D, 3e, 4e, and 5e?
I like the D&D combat system… in videogames. Baldur’s Gate 3 combat is really fun, even in multiplayer. It’s fun to make insane builds etc. It’s fun because I have all the control as a player. Some of the combats are very difficult too, because you can always load a save game if you die. You can’t do that in a tabletop setting.
In tabletop settings I have found that I prefer simpler systems, where the players know that there is a logical world that doesn’t play fair they are in. Playing OSR type games combat often becomes more of a puzzle: We know these three trolls will kill us if we fight them head on. We know they regenerate – but fire stops that. Can we get in while they are sleeping and douse them in oil, and set them on fire?
And equivalent 5E game would be one of two things:
1. If they were too low level compared to the Trolls: “Come on, that’s not a fair fight!”
2. If they are ‘the right level’: “I cast fireball, I hit it with my stick. That wasn’t a very engaging encounter”
Combat in D&D is best resolved quickly and with little fuss, in my opinion. The real fun of D&D is exploration, roleplay, and “the Quest”. And before someone tells me to play a different system, I still do like combat…as the connective tissue between these things. No I don’t necessarily want to play a system where every time I get into a fight I’m at risk of contracting “Grit-itis” and dying. Its one area where quantity actually beats quality for me.
If I have a session where I fought the goblin troop in the woods, entered the dungeon, disabled the trap, explored 5 rooms wherein there was some treasure, a dead body, fought a hive of giant bees, and a wary but possibly friendly group of NPCs, and we negotiated with them to team up to fight the lesser demon on level 2, that is WAY MORE FUN than having 1 “interesting” goblin fight with tons of mechanical fiddly bits.
I can certainly second that. Can’t explain why.
If the goal is for 5e to provide quick low risk fights in between other stuff, then it isn’t nearly streamlined enough IMO.
5e sits in this awkward middle ground where it it places heavy mechanical emphasis on combat, but doesn’t have the depth to back it up. Systems where combat is less of the focus have much simpler and faster resolving rules, and there the lack of depth is less of an issue.
Couple thoughts:
1. Alternative combat goals are supposed to be things that involve interacting with something in the environment other than the enemies, e.g. grab the holy MacGuffin before the corruption spell cast by the evil necrolord just before the party entered the room completes (which the GM knows will happen at the start of the 5th round). Anything that the players must spend actions or other resources on that they would otherwise spend on murderizing as efficiently as possible, and which the enemies are actively trying to stop them from achieving.
2. Is this the same Joseph Anderson who asserts that there’s no such thing as objective criticism and then fervently stamps out any suggestion that his sweeping opinion statements like “Horror games aren’t scary” or “Dark Souls has no story” are anything but unassailable, stone-cold facts?
Also, what really resonated with me is when you say that upping the difficulty still makes you run into a stilted combat system way too focused on offense, and that twisting the difficulty knob only makes the players get further ahead or farther behind in damage race. And I realized, that’s 100% true.
If I make the fights more dangerous, or have more of them, all I’m doing is adding more HP to the monster’s pool which the players will have to deplete. Nothing else will change, tactics-wise. The players will still use the exact same approach no matter what gets thrown at them, with maybe tiny variations, usually involving throwing more offense at a problem.
And I don’t even think that’s the players’ fault. The system seems just built in a way where the options besides doing as much damage as possible are just so limited that the height of tactical play is sorcerer/warlock eldritch blasting the enemy back into the radius of their web spell.
Thanks for again putting into words what was itching me on a subconscious level, Angry!
I would think that if you twisted the difficulty knob, that would induce players to fight more tactically, since they cannot rely on the inbuilt favorable odds.
I notice some of the proposed solutions feel very videogamey. D&D has already gone way down the video game rabbit hole — to the point where combat does not feel like an immersive roleplaying experience at all. It’s more of a “push button X for Y effect” experience.
To me, “tactics” implies literally that — thoughtful decisions that are situation-based that assist the characters succeed: positioning, choke points, flanking, softening a group of enemies with an area effect spell and missile fire prior to engagement, taking advantage of cover to enable missile fire — casting illusions in order to mask sneak attacks, or provide cover, making use of terrain End Forcing enemies into unfavorable positions, etc.
If the CR dial was twisted to make combats less assured, and if healing were tweaked to make it much less likely that characters couldn’t bounce back virtually instantly from any combat, I would think that taking advantage of truly tactical play would become more important to them.
I can’t believe I read all that and then there isn’t a single suggestion in there other than “don’t change anything”
You can change systems.
In the introduction:
“Today, I’m telling you why you can’t have deep, tactical, strategic, teamwork-based combat in the current version of Dungeons & Dragons. Why combats will always devolve into kill-or-be-killed races-to-zero-hit-points. And why you can’t fix it without gutting the whole damned system and starting over.”
Not sure why you were expecting suggestions…
D&D, and any other TTRPG in fact, intrinsically cannot be geared towards strategic combat and teamwork. The reason is very simple: it does not depend on each person’s own ability to function. To explain better: in a sport (like soccer, the best sport in the world, by the way), or in a real-time competitive game (like MOBAs), everyone needs to do their part, deliver their personal skill, so that the teamwork works. In a TTRPG, a single player who is more intelligent, or more knowledgeable about the monsters and the rules, can dictate what each character should do to achieve the best result. And it ends up that one person has fun, while the others just watch (and cheer, at most). In fact, this would always end up being the ideal condition, just one controlling them all. I don’t think it would make the game more popular.