I'm new to both dnd and DMing, though I've listened to 300 odd episodes of a dnd podcast over the last few years so I'm not completely clueless.
I'm DMing for some friends who are now level 3 and I'm finding that most of the encounters end up being unplanned by myself (i.e. spontaneous in reaction to my player's decisions), and humanoid - i.e. pirates, bandits etc rather than monsters.
The dndbeyond encounter builder is the only thing that has enabled my inexperienced self to set them up in time, but it's getting boring - there's only so many times I can recycle bandit, bandit leader, orc etc before it's all the same.
I've noticed while searching the DB for general terms like 'pirate' that some of the other content books have more opponent types (I think it was Xanathar's which had boson, deck wizard etc as well).
How do people generally do this? Should I buy more mostly irrelevant content, like Xanathar's, or invent my own selection of opponents to draw from as needed? (the downside to that is the convenience of using the encounter builder is lost).
Any help appreciated, and apologies if the answers already exist somewhere.
You don't really need anything beyond the basic rules for a broad range of adversaries. You being the GM can just make stuff up.
But really, there are a ton of monsters in the basic rules. If you want one of them to be a leader, give it +10 hp and +2 AC or give it two attacks instead of one or whatever.
Throw in some undead.
Throw in some monsters that fit the environment.
Throw in some undead monsters that some necromancer cooked up.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
Buying another wizards book will not answer this issue. Xanthers is definitely a priority if you collecting the books. It would probably be the first book I would recommend outside of the core three.
as for this issues...
so I could probably write a full blog just on avenues you could take to address this. The simplest way I know to sum it all up is the devils in the details. You have to bring the encounter alive. If you as the DM present it as just another bandit, then it’s just another bandit.
Instead of just another bandit what if the bandit had a deformed face and a blink dog at his side. What if you gave the bandit a fire bolt cantrip on top of his normal stat block and when he talked he talked with a lisp.
small details. tweak a few things. add something random. give it RP flair.
You have to bring the encounter alive. If you as the DM present it as just another bandit, then it’s just another bandit.
You could use the same stat block 100 times and it would never get boring with a different name and plot device. What are these enemies trying to accomplish, or the players for that matter?
Honestly I don’t think the problem is lack of resource I think, and I mean this respectfully, it’s lack of prep
”I’m finding that most of the encounters end up being unplanned by myself (i.e. spontaneous in reaction to my player's decisions)”
This is a bad practice and I would get out of it. Giving the players free choice to sandbox does not mean improvise everything it means prepare lots.
You said you were new to DND and DMing but relying on having listened to lots of live plays. Those live plays are usually DM’d by someone with a decade of experience under their belt that can magic knowledge about rules and monsters out of thin air, and I guarantee you none of them are DMing in the way you described.
You don’t need more content to make interesting encounters you need to put the time into creating them.
I'm DMing for some friends who are now level 3 and I'm finding that most of the encounters end up being unplanned by myself (i.e. spontaneous in reaction to my player's decisions), and humanoid - i.e. pirates, bandits etc rather than monsters.
Edt: re reading your whole original post again, I think I misinterpreted; seems like you want humanoid encounters so disregard below unless you want to add more beasts and monsters... I'll keep my original post below in case it's helpful to anyone else.
You might be a DM who could greatly benefit from random tables. Plenty of them exist throughout the Great World Wide Web or in the official books.
But, more likely, your prep time could involve creating small random tables for your personal use. You'll know ahead of time what setting the players are in (forest, desert, caves), you know their level, and the DNDB encounter builder links to the campaign. For example, you can pre imagine that it's possible for the party to run into deer, boars, bears, giant owls, or any other beasts within a forest. In a particularly magical forest, the beasts can be replaced by a fey creature type... Once you've picked out some nonhumanoids, gauge difficulty using the encounter builder, if it passes your muster, add it to your random table. And monsters or creatures don't have to be the ONLY things present in a random table. Things like finding a strange book, a pile of melted coins, an ancient grave, etc. To just add more flavor.
Over some time, you can build out a d4 or d6, or d12 or d20 list to your personal satisfaction. Need to improvise an encounter on a moments notice b/c Sandy the Gnome wants to check out the cave? Boom, the DM rolled 7 behind the screen, and Sandy finds herself face to face with a hibernating bear; or a roll of 3 meant she stepped in gross guano, looking up to see 50 roosting bats.. After every few levels, you can update your random tables. Knowing that you have them can scale back the impulse to have bandits being everywhere.
How do people generally do this? Should I buy more mostly irrelevant content, like Xanathar's, or invent my own selection of opponents to draw from as needed? (the downside to that is the convenience of using the encounter builder is lost).
The Encounter Builder will show homebrew creatures you've created. As has been said above, create a bunch of variations of the basic ones by giving them spells, enhanced stats, etc
I find giving your encounter participants motivations can lead to making otherwise mundane encounters varied, interesting, and able to drive your story forward.
An example might be “escaped criminals”
“You encounter 2 bandits and a bandit captain” is very different from “three unsavoury and somewhat gaunt looking men in rags burst from the bushes and tumble into (lead character), everybody ending up in a sprawl on the ground.” They beg the party to aid them from the tax men chasing them. The play from that point could go a lot of different ways. I also could have done wildly different things with “escaped criminals” so it’s very open ended. They might have been chasing someone or roughing someone up or mid-heist or targeting the party or setting the party up or literally mid-escape
I maintain lists of different ideas to draw on mid game. There are also random generators online and tools like Rory’s story cubes to spark the imagination.
Understanding your NPC’s motivation has the added advantage that it makes it infinitely easier to role play and open into story lines.
As everyone else said, it's not only about the stat block. But if you want to have really great encounters, try to prepare a few "archetypes" that reflect your description mechanically.
That brute bandit with arms like trunks who wields a greatclub while he yells at the top of his lungs? That's not a bandit... that's a barbarian with damage resistance and reckless attacks.
The captain of the city watch with an eyepatch who slowly circles your players, seizing them up and down for weaknesses? I'm sure he knows a few battlemaster maneuvers.
The middle-aged woman in white robes clutching Lathander's symbol? She's a cleric of life and under those robes she's wearing chainmail and right now she's summoning her spiritual weapon to protect her.
The cocky elven scout who mocked you all the time? She's a ranger and just lured you right into a snare trap while her wolf companion breaks out of the thicket to tear into your friends as she covers your group with a Conjure Volley spell.
You can either build those enemies as real PCs at a higher level than the party or you take a fitting enemy and add some class feats or swap some actions around.
Building them requires time and preparation, but gives you enemies that are flexible and interesting for whatever level your players are. Remixing existing monsters is quite fast and can be done on the fly, but you are limited to that monster's CR.
Everyone else already told you the best solution, so I’ll just point out that I find Xanathar’s and Volo’s most useful as a DM and a player. Also, just remember that all of those Bandits and such say “any race” right up at the top. It’s a simple matter of giving a Bandit Sonecunning, a slight adjustment to weapons and Abilities, and there you go, now you have a Dwarven Bandit! Arg. Those are basically templates, not whole monsters.
You can create templates that are a bit more complex, though. For example, if you take a Bandit or Guard and give it the ability to spend one superiority die per turn and one (or more) battle master maneuvers, the result is around CR 1/4, or CR 1/2 if you also double its hit dice, and that gives you a bunch of different monsters because different maneuvers will significantly change how they actually play.
The Encounter Builder will show homebrew creatures you've created. As has been said above, create a bunch of variations of the basic ones by giving them spells, enhanced stats, etc
Hi all, thanks for all those replies.This detail is what I was missing - that I can homebrew monsters and they appear in the dndb encounter builder.
I wasn't presenting encounters as '3 more boring bandits like last time appear'. But when my players decided to attack or however it worked out, I'd pick a mix of guard/bandit/orc/bandit captain or whatever and use those stat blocks in place of whatever I'd described the opponents as. Deciding that I wanted one of the opponents to have firebolt as a cantrip was fine, except I wanted to roll electronic dice from that creature's stat sheet in dndbeyond.
It wasn't impossible, but I really wanted an easier way. I've only got the one 13" screen to work with and not even a table, so I'm perhaps more reliant on the tech tools than is traditional. So now I've brewed up a set of opponents belonging to an organisation that will be a common enemy for the party over the next few levels and I think that will really help things along.
Regarding the advice about more prep - I am definitely aware of that. I know I don't prep enough, but I also don't have a lot of time. I've mentioned to my group that I don't feel I can really do this justice and would love to step down, but unless we find a new DM it would just end. And they tell me they're having fun (and so am I) so my only hope is that old 'work smarter not harder' saying (or is that 'laziness begets efficiency' ?)
When we say prep it doesn’t mean you have to spend your whole week doing it but for a single 3-4 hr session I would expect to do at least an hours prep ahead of time. Doing it at the table live in game is going to slow your game and burn you out quickly, and it will become far less fun.
But honestly if you think you don’t have the time to do it justice don’t step down and don’t buy Xanathars, buy an adventure book. The amount of work you are putting in now is probably more than you would need to read ahead and prep.
This post reply may be way too late but I thought I'd add my 2-penn'oth (tuppence worth - lancashire speak 😊).
I have been a dnd player for 6 yrs, and a DM for a homebrew campaign since Sept 2020 (it's now August 2021). I also don't have bags of time but for playing the game, setting up encounter maps amd monsters I absolutely swear by Foundry VTT - and Pinterest. I find my maps on Pinterest, get ideas for homebrew monsters and make them on DnD Beyond - then simply import them straight in using the Importer tool. I can then roll directly from their sheets in the game.
I keep a notepad and pen for jotting down any ideas that will help with plots and characters. I asked my players for a simple backstory each - and reward them with minor magic items that will encourage roleplaying such as Boots of the High Ground, Monster Compass, Blanket of Fortitude, etc.
I also set aside an hour after the game itself to write down what happened in the session - heroic actions, NPC's met, plot points covered.. and random stuff my players ended up doing. I can then refer back to this as a reminder or guide to what is coming up.
The number 1 rule is to have fun - you may be running the game but you still need to enjoy it, otherwise it becomes a chore.
No 2 - no matter how well you prepare, your players will always manage to screw up your carefully laid plans. That bandit hideout you had planned in the next town but your players have gone the opposite way? Move the fight to them. Hag causing mischief? Make her an Annis or Night hag and give them nightmares too.
Stretch out of your comfort zone and open up your imagination. Borrow ideas from others and use them in your games.
More succinctly stated, it’s not the stat block that makes an encounter interesting.
This. What makes the encounter interesting is what's invested in the encounter by the players _and_ the DM. If you're cruising along on random encounters, you're just throwing stat blocks and no one's going to be inspired to do any more than number crunch. By level three, the players should have a sense of their characters' place in the world. It's up to you the DM to further the world along through intentional design, or if you go "rando" or "reactive" with what happens you need to engage the randomness and make it matter.
In my last session, a third level party was on a road. It's fairly "civilized" trade route, so encounter tables skewed toward the noncombative. For session admin reasons, I didn't want the characters to arrive at their destination (because I was still tweaking around the maps and adpating the published adventure to give it more weight to the game played so far) so could just narrate "you spend two days on the road, then travel off the road east for a day when you come to the forrest". So I rolled off the area's random encounter table and basically rolled "aristocrats and bodyguards". The party are not of the class and realistically I could have just had a snooty drive by, but instead I had the carriage and escort halt ... because prior to getting on the road the characters spent downtime gambling on their fighters pit fighting. A happenstance of nat 20s on 2/3 of the XGtE checks (yes, nat 20s mean nothing outside of combat ... except to every DM to whom it does) I opted to in addition to a coin windfall the fighter developed some celebrity as a result of their experience. The characters are also part of this sort of "magical pay for view" program being subsidized by the thieves guild to maximize profits in getting the theater they loan sharked under water (financially) out of hock, and the pit fighting was in part engaged in to develop the players' local celebrity to increase the potential audience to the pay per view reality program. These aristocrats, or rather their children, recognized the new local champion and their mother solicited the champ's autograph. This actually turned into a discussion as to whether the particular character knew how to read/write (stat and background raised the question too). We resolve they had rudimentary reading ability but rather than a signature per se, opted then and there to make their "mark" (having literally never signed anything before) using the giant rune equivalent of "X" (name actually has an X in it, and character speaks giant) surround with squiggles that are suppose to represent fire and ice (Levistus Tieflings). Having secured a commodity precious to her children, the noblewoman ordered her entourage forward without so much a thank you, interrupting so discussion of "the good gig but such a drag" of bodyguarding the rest of the characters were having with the well dressed security team.
Later in session the characters "random table" encountered a goblinoid war party. One of my characters is Hobgoblin and is actually a sort of secret agent of the Hobgoblin nation (secret agent status of said character is preserved in the reality show via a potion of pixelation obfuscation) so rather than a straight hostile encounter I turned it into a role playing encounter that got the rest of the party a greater sense of the scope of the goblinoid activities in their world (basically rather than the whole war band, they came upon two Hobgoblins in ghilli suits who had been tracking them since they turned off road, after some words with the parties hobgoblins, the pickets literally drew the party a map to get them around their camp which they wished the party not to lay eyes on for "security" reasons).
This was all on the fly from playing with this particular group for three levels and investing some of my own and the players brain and notebook space to the characters stories. If you can't pull things out of your butt juggle like that, it's time to do more planning. I'd say my game is 1/4 "outline" 3/4 extrapolated from what I think the party would enjoy at the moment. Throwing a larger CR or slightly more buffed monster encounter at the players might pull them into using more of the character's features, but in short order they're going to get back to "why are we doing this?" Now if it's the DM who's asking the question, you're in the best position to make up the answer, through either plotting or pulling it out on the table from what's already happened.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I can't believe you necro'd this. I'd forgotten I ever asked the question.
The correct answer (to the specific problem I was having last year) is of course to watch Matt Colville's videos a lot and then run a premade campaign. Making a sandbox world from scratch when I was new to both dnd AND dming, and time-poor, was a mistake. But we went through to level 7 and then stopped for about 6 months (while a couple of friends ran their own games).
Now I've started up again (with content from Midnight Tower) and it's been a lot easier for me. Sometimes I get excited when I have lots of spare time and change up encounters with unique stuff, and other times I do half an hour of vtt prep and half an hour reading the pdf, then start the game.
Throw in some unusual types of humanoid like goblinoids, centaurs, fae, smaller giants like ogres and ettins, maybe a construct.
Use caster NPC monster stat blocks, but swap a spell or two for something different that will have interesting tactical uses, and build a battle map around that spell's strength.
I'm new to both dnd and DMing, though I've listened to 300 odd episodes of a dnd podcast over the last few years so I'm not completely clueless.
I'm DMing for some friends who are now level 3 and I'm finding that most of the encounters end up being unplanned by myself (i.e. spontaneous in reaction to my player's decisions), and humanoid - i.e. pirates, bandits etc rather than monsters.
The dndbeyond encounter builder is the only thing that has enabled my inexperienced self to set them up in time, but it's getting boring - there's only so many times I can recycle bandit, bandit leader, orc etc before it's all the same.
I've noticed while searching the DB for general terms like 'pirate' that some of the other content books have more opponent types (I think it was Xanathar's which had boson, deck wizard etc as well).
How do people generally do this? Should I buy more mostly irrelevant content, like Xanathar's, or invent my own selection of opponents to draw from as needed? (the downside to that is the convenience of using the encounter builder is lost).
Any help appreciated, and apologies if the answers already exist somewhere.
You don't really need anything beyond the basic rules for a broad range of adversaries. You being the GM can just make stuff up.
But really, there are a ton of monsters in the basic rules. If you want one of them to be a leader, give it +10 hp and +2 AC or give it two attacks instead of one or whatever.
Throw in some undead.
Throw in some monsters that fit the environment.
Throw in some undead monsters that some necromancer cooked up.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
Buying another wizards book will not answer this issue. Xanthers is definitely a priority if you collecting the books. It would probably be the first book I would recommend outside of the core three.
as for this issues...
so I could probably write a full blog just on avenues you could take to address this. The simplest way I know to sum it all up is the devils in the details. You have to bring the encounter alive. If you as the DM present it as just another bandit, then it’s just another bandit.
Instead of just another bandit what if the bandit had a deformed face and a blink dog at his side. What if you gave the bandit a fire bolt cantrip on top of his normal stat block and when he talked he talked with a lisp.
small details.
tweak a few things.
add something random.
give it RP flair.
You could use the same stat block 100 times and it would never get boring with a different name and plot device. What are these enemies trying to accomplish, or the players for that matter?
Honestly I don’t think the problem is lack of resource I think, and I mean this respectfully, it’s lack of prep
”I’m finding that most of the encounters end up being unplanned by myself (i.e. spontaneous in reaction to my player's decisions)”
This is a bad practice and I would get out of it. Giving the players free choice to sandbox does not mean improvise everything it means prepare lots.
You said you were new to DND and DMing but relying on having listened to lots of live plays. Those live plays are usually DM’d by someone with a decade of experience under their belt that can magic knowledge about rules and monsters out of thin air, and I guarantee you none of them are DMing in the way you described.
You don’t need more content to make interesting encounters you need to put the time into creating them.
Edt: re reading your whole original post again, I think I misinterpreted; seems like you want humanoid encounters so disregard below unless you want to add more beasts and monsters... I'll keep my original post below in case it's helpful to anyone else.
You might be a DM who could greatly benefit from random tables. Plenty of them exist throughout the Great World Wide Web or in the official books.
But, more likely, your prep time could involve creating small random tables for your personal use. You'll know ahead of time what setting the players are in (forest, desert, caves), you know their level, and the DNDB encounter builder links to the campaign. For example, you can pre imagine that it's possible for the party to run into deer, boars, bears, giant owls, or any other beasts within a forest. In a particularly magical forest, the beasts can be replaced by a fey creature type... Once you've picked out some nonhumanoids, gauge difficulty using the encounter builder, if it passes your muster, add it to your random table. And monsters or creatures don't have to be the ONLY things present in a random table. Things like finding a strange book, a pile of melted coins, an ancient grave, etc. To just add more flavor.
Over some time, you can build out a d4 or d6, or d12 or d20 list to your personal satisfaction. Need to improvise an encounter on a moments notice b/c Sandy the Gnome wants to check out the cave? Boom, the DM rolled 7 behind the screen, and Sandy finds herself face to face with a hibernating bear; or a roll of 3 meant she stepped in gross guano, looking up to see 50 roosting bats.. After every few levels, you can update your random tables. Knowing that you have them can scale back the impulse to have bandits being everywhere.
Boldly go
The Encounter Builder will show homebrew creatures you've created. As has been said above, create a bunch of variations of the basic ones by giving them spells, enhanced stats, etc
I find giving your encounter participants motivations can lead to making otherwise mundane encounters varied, interesting, and able to drive your story forward.
An example might be “escaped criminals”
“You encounter 2 bandits and a bandit captain” is very different from “three unsavoury and somewhat gaunt looking men in rags burst from the bushes and tumble into (lead character), everybody ending up in a sprawl on the ground.” They beg the party to aid them from the tax men chasing them. The play from that point could go a lot of different ways. I also could have done wildly different things with “escaped criminals” so it’s very open ended. They might have been chasing someone or roughing someone up or mid-heist or targeting the party or setting the party up or literally mid-escape
I maintain lists of different ideas to draw on mid game. There are also random generators online and tools like Rory’s story cubes to spark the imagination.
Understanding your NPC’s motivation has the added advantage that it makes it infinitely easier to role play and open into story lines.
More succinctly stated, it’s not the stat block that makes an encounter interesting.
As everyone else said, it's not only about the stat block. But if you want to have really great encounters, try to prepare a few "archetypes" that reflect your description mechanically.
That brute bandit with arms like trunks who wields a greatclub while he yells at the top of his lungs? That's not a bandit... that's a barbarian with damage resistance and reckless attacks.
The captain of the city watch with an eyepatch who slowly circles your players, seizing them up and down for weaknesses? I'm sure he knows a few battlemaster maneuvers.
The middle-aged woman in white robes clutching Lathander's symbol? She's a cleric of life and under those robes she's wearing chainmail and right now she's summoning her spiritual weapon to protect her.
The cocky elven scout who mocked you all the time? She's a ranger and just lured you right into a snare trap while her wolf companion breaks out of the thicket to tear into your friends as she covers your group with a Conjure Volley spell.
You can either build those enemies as real PCs at a higher level than the party or you take a fitting enemy and add some class feats or swap some actions around.
Building them requires time and preparation, but gives you enemies that are flexible and interesting for whatever level your players are. Remixing existing monsters is quite fast and can be done on the fly, but you are limited to that monster's CR.
Everyone else already told you the best solution, so I’ll just point out that I find Xanathar’s and Volo’s most useful as a DM and a player. Also, just remember that all of those Bandits and such say “any race” right up at the top. It’s a simple matter of giving a Bandit Sonecunning, a slight adjustment to weapons and Abilities, and there you go, now you have a Dwarven Bandit! Arg. Those are basically templates, not whole monsters.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
You can create templates that are a bit more complex, though. For example, if you take a Bandit or Guard and give it the ability to spend one superiority die per turn and one (or more) battle master maneuvers, the result is around CR 1/4, or CR 1/2 if you also double its hit dice, and that gives you a bunch of different monsters because different maneuvers will significantly change how they actually play.
Hi all, thanks for all those replies.This detail is what I was missing - that I can homebrew monsters and they appear in the dndb encounter builder.
I wasn't presenting encounters as '3 more boring bandits like last time appear'. But when my players decided to attack or however it worked out, I'd pick a mix of guard/bandit/orc/bandit captain or whatever and use those stat blocks in place of whatever I'd described the opponents as. Deciding that I wanted one of the opponents to have firebolt as a cantrip was fine, except I wanted to roll electronic dice from that creature's stat sheet in dndbeyond.
It wasn't impossible, but I really wanted an easier way. I've only got the one 13" screen to work with and not even a table, so I'm perhaps more reliant on the tech tools than is traditional. So now I've brewed up a set of opponents belonging to an organisation that will be a common enemy for the party over the next few levels and I think that will really help things along.
Regarding the advice about more prep - I am definitely aware of that. I know I don't prep enough, but I also don't have a lot of time. I've mentioned to my group that I don't feel I can really do this justice and would love to step down, but unless we find a new DM it would just end. And they tell me they're having fun (and so am I) so my only hope is that old 'work smarter not harder' saying (or is that 'laziness begets efficiency' ?)
Anyway, thanks again for all the advice :)
When we say prep it doesn’t mean you have to spend your whole week doing it but for a single 3-4 hr session I would expect to do at least an hours prep ahead of time. Doing it at the table live in game is going to slow your game and burn you out quickly, and it will become far less fun.
But honestly if you think you don’t have the time to do it justice don’t step down and don’t buy Xanathars, buy an adventure book. The amount of work you are putting in now is probably more than you would need to read ahead and prep.
This post reply may be way too late but I thought I'd add my 2-penn'oth (tuppence worth - lancashire speak 😊).
I have been a dnd player for 6 yrs, and a DM for a homebrew campaign since Sept 2020 (it's now August 2021). I also don't have bags of time but for playing the game, setting up encounter maps amd monsters I absolutely swear by Foundry VTT - and Pinterest. I find my maps on Pinterest, get ideas for homebrew monsters and make them on DnD Beyond - then simply import them straight in using the Importer tool. I can then roll directly from their sheets in the game.
I keep a notepad and pen for jotting down any ideas that will help with plots and characters. I asked my players for a simple backstory each - and reward them with minor magic items that will encourage roleplaying such as Boots of the High Ground, Monster Compass, Blanket of Fortitude, etc.
I also set aside an hour after the game itself to write down what happened in the session - heroic actions, NPC's met, plot points covered.. and random stuff my players ended up doing. I can then refer back to this as a reminder or guide to what is coming up.
The number 1 rule is to have fun - you may be running the game but you still need to enjoy it, otherwise it becomes a chore.
No 2 - no matter how well you prepare, your players will always manage to screw up your carefully laid plans. That bandit hideout you had planned in the next town but your players have gone the opposite way? Move the fight to them. Hag causing mischief? Make her an Annis or Night hag and give them nightmares too.
Stretch out of your comfort zone and open up your imagination. Borrow ideas from others and use them in your games.
Have fun!
This. What makes the encounter interesting is what's invested in the encounter by the players _and_ the DM. If you're cruising along on random encounters, you're just throwing stat blocks and no one's going to be inspired to do any more than number crunch. By level three, the players should have a sense of their characters' place in the world. It's up to you the DM to further the world along through intentional design, or if you go "rando" or "reactive" with what happens you need to engage the randomness and make it matter.
In my last session, a third level party was on a road. It's fairly "civilized" trade route, so encounter tables skewed toward the noncombative. For session admin reasons, I didn't want the characters to arrive at their destination (because I was still tweaking around the maps and adpating the published adventure to give it more weight to the game played so far) so could just narrate "you spend two days on the road, then travel off the road east for a day when you come to the forrest". So I rolled off the area's random encounter table and basically rolled "aristocrats and bodyguards". The party are not of the class and realistically I could have just had a snooty drive by, but instead I had the carriage and escort halt ... because prior to getting on the road the characters spent downtime gambling on their fighters pit fighting. A happenstance of nat 20s on 2/3 of the XGtE checks (yes, nat 20s mean nothing outside of combat ... except to every DM to whom it does) I opted to in addition to a coin windfall the fighter developed some celebrity as a result of their experience. The characters are also part of this sort of "magical pay for view" program being subsidized by the thieves guild to maximize profits in getting the theater they loan sharked under water (financially) out of hock, and the pit fighting was in part engaged in to develop the players' local celebrity to increase the potential audience to the pay per view reality program. These aristocrats, or rather their children, recognized the new local champion and their mother solicited the champ's autograph. This actually turned into a discussion as to whether the particular character knew how to read/write (stat and background raised the question too). We resolve they had rudimentary reading ability but rather than a signature per se, opted then and there to make their "mark" (having literally never signed anything before) using the giant rune equivalent of "X" (name actually has an X in it, and character speaks giant) surround with squiggles that are suppose to represent fire and ice (Levistus Tieflings). Having secured a commodity precious to her children, the noblewoman ordered her entourage forward without so much a thank you, interrupting so discussion of "the good gig but such a drag" of bodyguarding the rest of the characters were having with the well dressed security team.
Later in session the characters "random table" encountered a goblinoid war party. One of my characters is Hobgoblin and is actually a sort of secret agent of the Hobgoblin nation (secret agent status of said character is preserved in the reality show via a potion of
pixelationobfuscation) so rather than a straight hostile encounter I turned it into a role playing encounter that got the rest of the party a greater sense of the scope of the goblinoid activities in their world (basically rather than the whole war band, they came upon two Hobgoblins in ghilli suits who had been tracking them since they turned off road, after some words with the parties hobgoblins, the pickets literally drew the party a map to get them around their camp which they wished the party not to lay eyes on for "security" reasons).This was all on the fly from playing with this particular group for three levels and investing some of my own and the players brain and notebook space to the characters stories. If you can't
pull things out of your buttjuggle like that, it's time to do more planning. I'd say my game is 1/4 "outline" 3/4 extrapolated from what I think the party would enjoy at the moment. Throwing a larger CR or slightly more buffed monster encounter at the players might pull them into using more of the character's features, but in short order they're going to get back to "why are we doing this?" Now if it's the DM who's asking the question, you're in the best position to make up the answer, through either plotting or pulling it out on the table from what's already happened.Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I can't believe you necro'd this. I'd forgotten I ever asked the question.
The correct answer (to the specific problem I was having last year) is of course to watch Matt Colville's videos a lot and then run a premade campaign. Making a sandbox world from scratch when I was new to both dnd AND dming, and time-poor, was a mistake. But we went through to level 7 and then stopped for about 6 months (while a couple of friends ran their own games).
Now I've started up again (with content from Midnight Tower) and it's been a lot easier for me. Sometimes I get excited when I have lots of spare time and change up encounters with unique stuff, and other times I do half an hour of vtt prep and half an hour reading the pdf, then start the game.
Throw in some unusual types of humanoid like goblinoids, centaurs, fae, smaller giants like ogres and ettins, maybe a construct.
Use caster NPC monster stat blocks, but swap a spell or two for something different that will have interesting tactical uses, and build a battle map around that spell's strength.
Make every fight a social encounter.
So you win the fight, but a crowd of bystanders have gathered around and are calling to the guards to come arrest you for murder.
You don't just have to win. You have to slash your way through or around the noble's bodyguards to get to him before he runs away.
Switch it: you're the bodyguards and you have to win a fight while making sure a squishy NPC doesn't get hurt.
Another option is to have a humanoid caster, but he summons monsters to fight for him.