Any suggestions for working combat into a campaign? My characters are starting off at level one (some of them are new) and they like combat more than roleplaying. I'd still have a story, though, because it's more fun than fighting monster after monster, but I was wondering how to make it meaningful? What would the BBEG trying to take over a kingdom have to do with a town of level one players? I have some ideas for when they're higher leveled, but not so much now. Thank you :)
first off. be careful as at level 1 they are weaker than a grape. seriously you can kill them easily.
second. implement roleplay into combat. for instance at level 1 (assuming a party of 4) 5 bandits (cr 1/8) should be a medium difficulty fight. now you add context. maybe the 5th bandit is holding a mayor/chief hostage to extort money from a small village. your job is to kill the 5th bandit specifically to save the mayer. this adds an objective that has more of a threat than "the bandits want your money" because now the bandits have a hostage who you have to keep alive. this will also get the party more into roleplaying and strategizing instead of a typical run in, kill the bag guys and get paid, playstyle.
What would the BBEG trying to take over a kingdom have to do with a town of level one players?
He would be sending some minions who aren't expecting any particular trouble. For example, you might have a Bandit Captain with a squad of a dozen bandits; he sends out two squads of 4 to search/loot the town while the third group guards him while he takes a nap in the Lord Mayor's house. PCs who are reasonably tactical should be able to take out each group separately, but if they're overly noisy or slow they might have to deal with all remaining bandits at once, which will be a tough fight. If the PCs lose, it's a perfect time to have them be captured and tossed into the gladiatorial arenas (or if some die, well, level 1).
Level 1 PCs can die very easy to unlucky rolls, and it's incredibly unfun.
It doesn't feel like they players lost it feels like they died to a coin flip, and there is no impact of losing a character the player have grown to care about because they are level 1.
I highly recommend that you start out with a combat where the end goal of the enemies isn't just to kill everyone. If the enemy goal is to escape, to steal something, assassinate a noble, knock out the party and take them as prisoners/hostages etc. even if they succeed it just leads to the next part of the story rather than a level 1 tpk.
One way to avoid accidentally killing your players without taking away the 'risk" feeling is: use the advantage of a DM being able to roll in secret: basically limit how much damage/how many hits enemies can get on your players. "Pulling punches" to some degree as it were. Yeah: it's "not rules as written": but honestly nobody likes being killed round 1 by a scorpion getting a critical hit on the wizard.
Make use of NPCs. Have a "backup plan" in case things go south. Deus Ex Machina isn't always a bad thing. ;)
For example, an old 2E AD&D campaign I bought and read through has this to say about its very first encounter:
This can be a tough encounter for a small party composed entirely of lst-level characters. If the PCs fare extremely badly due to poor dice rolls, the adventure could end abruptly and prematurely right here. To avoid this disaster, allow the PCs to be battered into unconsciousness (should the dice fall that way). They awaken a day later, lying among the trees a short distance from the road. Their wounds have been treated with herbs and spiderweb and bound with leaves and vines; the worst of the injuries appear to have been magically healed. Their gear lies not far off, along with the mangled bodies of several of their would-be kidnappers. The first PC to awaken may (Intelligence check) catch a glimpse of a wolf or a woman (equal chance of either) slinking away through the trees. Although they may not guess it for some time, this is Oleanne the druid, who rescued the party but prefers not to make her presence known.
What would the BBEG trying to take over a kingdom have to do with a town of level one players? I have some ideas for when they're higher leveled, but not so much now. Thank you :)
The BBEG might not be doing anything directly - but if he is attacking cities elsewhere in the country then refugees will be leaving that city, and perhaps heading towards the party's town. This then leads to bandits wanting to take from the refugees, or maybe some of the refugees are thieves who have taken up local residence. Some could be evil casters, maybe collecting corpses in their cellar and turning them into undead.
Or there could be other knock-on effects of what the BBEG is doing elsewhere. The DoIP campaign (which I ran last year) had some good logic for different groups of creatures being displaced in a cascade effect - bigger thing moves in, big thing moves away from there and moves into somewhere else, less big then moves away from that place and moves into somewhere else. A massive domino effect that the BBEG never intended, and that the party won't get the relevance of immediately (they'll only notice undesirable activity starting after a long period of peace).
It all starts as a dream (but the players may not, at first, know that).
The first gameplay thing you say is roll initiative. You also ask players to roll, say, a d8 and another d to determine their direction and distance from the within dream BBEG.
The 1st level characters either run, try (perhaps unsuccessfully) to surrender or die fighting. Either way, they wake up in their beds, probably in the communal tavern, wondering what the f was that about. Perhaps there was a psychic/divine intervention call out for heroes and this is how the message got delivered.
One combat is done. The possibility of death is established. Roleplay begins.
Maybe the fight is against a minion troop whose dying words promise vengeance from the BBEG.
What would the BBEG trying to take over a kingdom have to do with a town of level one players?
He would be sending some minions who aren't expecting any particular trouble. For example, you might have a Bandit Captain with a squad of a dozen bandits; he sends out two squads of 4 to search/loot the town while the third group guards him while he takes a nap in the Lord Mayor's house. PCs who are reasonably tactical should be able to take out each group separately, but if they're overly noisy or slow they might have to deal with all remaining bandits at once, which will be a tough fight. If the PCs lose, it's a perfect time to have them be captured and tossed into the gladiatorial arenas (or if some die, well, level 1).
Seriously? A Bandit captain by themselves is likely to TPK a group of four x level 1 characters. The captain has 65 hit points and makes 3 attacks/rd at +5 to hit .. two are d6+3 and the last is d4+3. Level 1 AC averages somewhere in the 13 to 18 range for the most part while hit points are typically 8-12. If the captain lands all three attacks, they average 18.5 damage. A single crit from d6+3 averages 10. If the captain is unlucky or the party has exceptional AC for level 1 it will take a bit longer but the captain is reasonably likely to kill one character/turn while the party is likely to reduce the captain's hit points by 15/round (d8+3 average damage with a 50% hit rate with a +5 and four characters).
On the other hand, the bandits themselves are likely a decent challenge but a bit of bad luck against even 2-4 bandits could result in a character or two dying.
To the OP, I suggest a very easy combat at level 1 against 2-3 bandits with maybe 1-2 available to show up as reinforcements if the characters are having an easy time of it. This gives them a taste of combat. However, try to advance them to level 2 after the session or at most 2 sessions. Level 2 characters are more durable and less likely to die just due to bad dice rolls.
Seriously? A Bandit captain by themselves is likely to TPK a group of four x level 1 characters.
I would not call it likely, though looking at its stats they are on the high side for CR 2; replacing bandits with cultist squads and a cult fanatic, while nominally exactly the same difficulty, would be significantly easier for the PCs.
Don't try to make every single encounter from level 1 directly tie back to the BBEG's evil plans. Tie it in at the adventure level- the story of merchants being robbed by goblins might be a consequence of the BBEG putting the king under his thrall in order to reassign the road patrols towards his own means. It's also fine to just have some standalone encounters or even adventures where you can just sprinkle in some hooks to later stuff.
So the bad thing about 1st level combat is that the players can very easily die, and that's not a fun way to start a new campaign.
The good thing about 1st level combat is that the players will likely be facing relatively-equally low level monsters. So whether they're fighting goblins, or bandits, or a bunch of badgers with rabies, remember - not every enemy fights to the death. That's an important thing that I think often gets overlooked, so I'm gonna say it again.
Not every enemy fights to the death!!!
So let's say you've got a party of four 1st level characters, and they're facing off against four goblins. Easy peasy. Well, not necessarily. All it takes is one crit from a goblin and a player goes down and now they're outnumbered and if that was their healer they're in big trouble. So remember - goblins aren't smart, but they ain't stupid. Once one goblin gets killed, the others may second-guess their commitment to this job. Don't plan on every combat being a war of ultimate attrition. Every enemy should have a "Break Even Point" - a point at which that one particular monster begins to value their own continued survival more than it values the instructions its boss gave it.
So if you throw seven bandits at four players they may get scared and feel overwhelmed. but - if the players kill one bandit before any players have been killed, have the rest of the bandits drop their weapons and yell, "Hey! Hold up! Okay! We're just trying to get some coin for something to eat!" Not every bad guy attacks players because they are Pure Evil and have an elaborate plan to kill those particular players. Some bad guys are just trying to make a quick buck to buy some food because they're hungry.
I shaped the party's first encounter to minimize the chances of them falling to zero and being wiped out. One character falling could domino the whole party. But everyone has already talked about the delicacy of the situation.
I had the players meet the town's High Sheriff. He sent them on a quest to help the Manor Lord that was six hours away deal with wolves that were taking sheep on his lands. He has tenant farmers working different parts of his land, so after meeting the Manor Lord, the party has to go find the farmers and get information of where the wolves have been.
That evening, the party decided to spread out to find the wolves and they remained still in the dark. Sometime after midnight, the wolves came. First two rushed in and the PCs gathered together to fight the two wolves. One PC took a bite and over half their HP were lost. Two more wolves came charging in. Another PC took a bite. Two more wolves came in and they were killed as well. Somewhere in their a healing spell was used and somewhere in there the paladin did a healing touch. The thing is, I sent in the wolves two at a time so if the party had a problem, the chance of a party member pulling away and disengaging was very good so it would be unlikely anyone would be dropped to zero. But at the same time, I could send in three, four, five pair of wolves if I want to make it seem tense. By sending in low level monsters in waves, I could 'control' the outcome much better. This was intended to introduce the party to the D&D combat system.
The underlying relationship with the BBEG ... well, something was driving the wolves off their traditional feeding ground. What could that be? The party never pursued that question. They took four wolf heads back to the Manor Lord and the High Sheriff as proof and to collect a small bounty. They also sold four wolf pelts to a tanner for another small sum. But at level one a small sum makes a difference.
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Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
Also, remember that the players are not the only adventurers in the world. You can use NPCs to give them a little buffer at low levels. For example:
The players take a job guarding a caravan that's traveling to the next town over the hills, and the hills have been known to have bandits or goblins or whatever. So maybe the caravan company hired the four players, but a few wagons in that caravan also have their own bodyguard or two. So you got a dozen wagons being defended by the four players and let's say 7 NPC defenders. So when the caravan gets ambushed by 8 goblins, 4 orcs, and an ogre, the party might feel a bit worried. Sure the players will be targeted by attacks, but only by fewer than half of the attacks. And since you're rolling for the NPCs - hey look at that! - one of them critted against the ogre!
So yeah. You can make it look like you're throwing the party into this massive battle against a powerful enemy, when really you're just buffering the party from the majority of the damage and giving them a taste of battle without having to worry about Death Saves on the third round of combat.
Any suggestions for working combat into a campaign? My characters are starting off at level one (some of them are new) and they like combat more than roleplaying. I'd still have a story, though, because it's more fun than fighting monster after monster, but I was wondering how to make it meaningful? What would the BBEG trying to take over a kingdom have to do with a town of level one players? I have some ideas for when they're higher leveled, but not so much now. Thank you :)
Despair!
first off. be careful as at level 1 they are weaker than a grape. seriously you can kill them easily.
second. implement roleplay into combat. for instance at level 1 (assuming a party of 4) 5 bandits (cr 1/8) should be a medium difficulty fight. now you add context. maybe the 5th bandit is holding a mayor/chief hostage to extort money from a small village. your job is to kill the 5th bandit specifically to save the mayer. this adds an objective that has more of a threat than "the bandits want your money" because now the bandits have a hostage who you have to keep alive. this will also get the party more into roleplaying and strategizing instead of a typical run in, kill the bag guys and get paid, playstyle.
He would be sending some minions who aren't expecting any particular trouble. For example, you might have a Bandit Captain with a squad of a dozen bandits; he sends out two squads of 4 to search/loot the town while the third group guards him while he takes a nap in the Lord Mayor's house. PCs who are reasonably tactical should be able to take out each group separately, but if they're overly noisy or slow they might have to deal with all remaining bandits at once, which will be a tough fight. If the PCs lose, it's a perfect time to have them be captured and tossed into the gladiatorial arenas (or if some die, well, level 1).
Level 1 PCs can die very easy to unlucky rolls, and it's incredibly unfun.
It doesn't feel like they players lost it feels like they died to a coin flip, and there is no impact of losing a character the player have grown to care about because they are level 1.
I highly recommend that you start out with a combat where the end goal of the enemies isn't just to kill everyone.
If the enemy goal is to escape, to steal something, assassinate a noble, knock out the party and take them as prisoners/hostages etc. even if they succeed it just leads to the next part of the story rather than a level 1 tpk.
One way to avoid accidentally killing your players without taking away the 'risk" feeling is: use the advantage of a DM being able to roll in secret: basically limit how much damage/how many hits enemies can get on your players. "Pulling punches" to some degree as it were. Yeah: it's "not rules as written": but honestly nobody likes being killed round 1 by a scorpion getting a critical hit on the wizard.
Make use of NPCs. Have a "backup plan" in case things go south. Deus Ex Machina isn't always a bad thing. ;)
For example, an old 2E AD&D campaign I bought and read through has this to say about its very first encounter:
The BBEG might not be doing anything directly - but if he is attacking cities elsewhere in the country then refugees will be leaving that city, and perhaps heading towards the party's town. This then leads to bandits wanting to take from the refugees, or maybe some of the refugees are thieves who have taken up local residence. Some could be evil casters, maybe collecting corpses in their cellar and turning them into undead.
Or there could be other knock-on effects of what the BBEG is doing elsewhere. The DoIP campaign (which I ran last year) had some good logic for different groups of creatures being displaced in a cascade effect - bigger thing moves in, big thing moves away from there and moves into somewhere else, less big then moves away from that place and moves into somewhere else. A massive domino effect that the BBEG never intended, and that the party won't get the relevance of immediately (they'll only notice undesirable activity starting after a long period of peace).
It all starts as a dream (but the players may not, at first, know that).
The first gameplay thing you say is roll initiative. You also ask players to roll, say, a d8 and another d to determine their direction and distance from the within dream BBEG.
The 1st level characters either run, try (perhaps unsuccessfully) to surrender or die fighting. Either way, they wake up in their beds, probably in the communal tavern, wondering what the f was that about. Perhaps there was a psychic/divine intervention call out for heroes and this is how the message got delivered.
One combat is done. The possibility of death is established. Roleplay begins.
Maybe the fight is against a minion troop whose dying words promise vengeance from the BBEG.
Seriously? A Bandit captain by themselves is likely to TPK a group of four x level 1 characters. The captain has 65 hit points and makes 3 attacks/rd at +5 to hit .. two are d6+3 and the last is d4+3. Level 1 AC averages somewhere in the 13 to 18 range for the most part while hit points are typically 8-12. If the captain lands all three attacks, they average 18.5 damage. A single crit from d6+3 averages 10. If the captain is unlucky or the party has exceptional AC for level 1 it will take a bit longer but the captain is reasonably likely to kill one character/turn while the party is likely to reduce the captain's hit points by 15/round (d8+3 average damage with a 50% hit rate with a +5 and four characters).
On the other hand, the bandits themselves are likely a decent challenge but a bit of bad luck against even 2-4 bandits could result in a character or two dying.
To the OP, I suggest a very easy combat at level 1 against 2-3 bandits with maybe 1-2 available to show up as reinforcements if the characters are having an easy time of it. This gives them a taste of combat. However, try to advance them to level 2 after the session or at most 2 sessions. Level 2 characters are more durable and less likely to die just due to bad dice rolls.
I would not call it likely, though looking at its stats they are on the high side for CR 2; replacing bandits with cultist squads and a cult fanatic, while nominally exactly the same difficulty, would be significantly easier for the PCs.
Don't try to make every single encounter from level 1 directly tie back to the BBEG's evil plans. Tie it in at the adventure level- the story of merchants being robbed by goblins might be a consequence of the BBEG putting the king under his thrall in order to reassign the road patrols towards his own means. It's also fine to just have some standalone encounters or even adventures where you can just sprinkle in some hooks to later stuff.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
So the bad thing about 1st level combat is that the players can very easily die, and that's not a fun way to start a new campaign.
The good thing about 1st level combat is that the players will likely be facing relatively-equally low level monsters. So whether they're fighting goblins, or bandits, or a bunch of badgers with rabies, remember - not every enemy fights to the death. That's an important thing that I think often gets overlooked, so I'm gonna say it again.
Not every enemy fights to the death!!!
So let's say you've got a party of four 1st level characters, and they're facing off against four goblins. Easy peasy. Well, not necessarily. All it takes is one crit from a goblin and a player goes down and now they're outnumbered and if that was their healer they're in big trouble. So remember - goblins aren't smart, but they ain't stupid. Once one goblin gets killed, the others may second-guess their commitment to this job. Don't plan on every combat being a war of ultimate attrition. Every enemy should have a "Break Even Point" - a point at which that one particular monster begins to value their own continued survival more than it values the instructions its boss gave it.
So if you throw seven bandits at four players they may get scared and feel overwhelmed. but - if the players kill one bandit before any players have been killed, have the rest of the bandits drop their weapons and yell, "Hey! Hold up! Okay! We're just trying to get some coin for something to eat!" Not every bad guy attacks players because they are Pure Evil and have an elaborate plan to kill those particular players. Some bad guys are just trying to make a quick buck to buy some food because they're hungry.
Just my 2 c.p.
Anzio Faro. Protector Aasimar light cleric. Lvl 18.
Viktor Gavriil. White dragonborn grave cleric. Lvl 20.
Ikram Sahir ibn-Malik al-Sayyid Ra'ad. Brass dragonborn draconic sorcerer Lvl 9. Fire elemental devil.
Wrangler of cats.
I shaped the party's first encounter to minimize the chances of them falling to zero and being wiped out. One character falling could domino the whole party. But everyone has already talked about the delicacy of the situation.
I had the players meet the town's High Sheriff. He sent them on a quest to help the Manor Lord that was six hours away deal with wolves that were taking sheep on his lands. He has tenant farmers working different parts of his land, so after meeting the Manor Lord, the party has to go find the farmers and get information of where the wolves have been.
That evening, the party decided to spread out to find the wolves and they remained still in the dark. Sometime after midnight, the wolves came. First two rushed in and the PCs gathered together to fight the two wolves. One PC took a bite and over half their HP were lost. Two more wolves came charging in. Another PC took a bite. Two more wolves came in and they were killed as well. Somewhere in their a healing spell was used and somewhere in there the paladin did a healing touch. The thing is, I sent in the wolves two at a time so if the party had a problem, the chance of a party member pulling away and disengaging was very good so it would be unlikely anyone would be dropped to zero. But at the same time, I could send in three, four, five pair of wolves if I want to make it seem tense. By sending in low level monsters in waves, I could 'control' the outcome much better. This was intended to introduce the party to the D&D combat system.
The underlying relationship with the BBEG ... well, something was driving the wolves off their traditional feeding ground. What could that be? The party never pursued that question. They took four wolf heads back to the Manor Lord and the High Sheriff as proof and to collect a small bounty. They also sold four wolf pelts to a tanner for another small sum. But at level one a small sum makes a difference.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
Also, remember that the players are not the only adventurers in the world. You can use NPCs to give them a little buffer at low levels. For example:
The players take a job guarding a caravan that's traveling to the next town over the hills, and the hills have been known to have bandits or goblins or whatever. So maybe the caravan company hired the four players, but a few wagons in that caravan also have their own bodyguard or two. So you got a dozen wagons being defended by the four players and let's say 7 NPC defenders. So when the caravan gets ambushed by 8 goblins, 4 orcs, and an ogre, the party might feel a bit worried. Sure the players will be targeted by attacks, but only by fewer than half of the attacks. And since you're rolling for the NPCs - hey look at that! - one of them critted against the ogre!
So yeah. You can make it look like you're throwing the party into this massive battle against a powerful enemy, when really you're just buffering the party from the majority of the damage and giving them a taste of battle without having to worry about Death Saves on the third round of combat.
Anzio Faro. Protector Aasimar light cleric. Lvl 18.
Viktor Gavriil. White dragonborn grave cleric. Lvl 20.
Ikram Sahir ibn-Malik al-Sayyid Ra'ad. Brass dragonborn draconic sorcerer Lvl 9. Fire elemental devil.
Wrangler of cats.