Equipping humanoid enemies with magic items is a good way to introduce some unique abilities into the fight, and also reward players with a magic item if they win.
It's been asked and answered in detail, but I love adding my own observations.
What makes Humanoids more interesting? Oddly enough, it's by making them act like people. A wise man in a book made the observation that anyone was welcome at his dining table if they were able to say please and thank you. I've seen a dog beg for a treat, and wag their tail when they get it. That makes dogs people so far as I am concerned. If a dog can be considered a person, so can a Humanoid. Buried inside the word "Humanoid" is the word "Human".
The encounter builder tool is in Beta, the Combat Tracker is in Alpha. If you want to use a tool that's been fully released, (actually, they are still tinkering with it) use the Character Builder. Pick any given race, and generate them as a character. Give them as much detail as you have time for. Try to give them personality traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws.
In the end, we are all human. We make mistakes. We get upset about silly things. We fall in love with the wrong things and the wrong people. We laugh at the wrong times, we cry about things when we are sad. If you want to present a social situation, have a Goblin crying off in a corner of a tavern and being ignored by all the other patrons is probably going to be interesting. If you want to have a combat situation, give the players a chance to fight with Orcs and see what they do. If they kill the lot of them, have an elderly Orcish woman digging graves nearby, who doesn't say a word and avoids looking at the player characters.
Humanoids don't have to be opponents. They can allies, they can be people, just all the rest of us.
Another really good piece of advice to change up same same encounters is to change up the environment. The same encounter in a thin corridor, a ship, a warehouse with boxes everywhere, stuff for ranged baddies to take cover behind, etc makes encounters very different.
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Equipping humanoid enemies with magic items is a good way to introduce some unique abilities into the fight, and also reward players with a magic item if they win.
It's been asked and answered in detail, but I love adding my own observations.
What makes Humanoids more interesting? Oddly enough, it's by making them act like people. A wise man in a book made the observation that anyone was welcome at his dining table if they were able to say please and thank you. I've seen a dog beg for a treat, and wag their tail when they get it. That makes dogs people so far as I am concerned. If a dog can be considered a person, so can a Humanoid. Buried inside the word "Humanoid" is the word "Human".
The encounter builder tool is in Beta, the Combat Tracker is in Alpha. If you want to use a tool that's been fully released, (actually, they are still tinkering with it) use the Character Builder. Pick any given race, and generate them as a character. Give them as much detail as you have time for. Try to give them personality traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws.
In the end, we are all human. We make mistakes. We get upset about silly things. We fall in love with the wrong things and the wrong people. We laugh at the wrong times, we cry about things when we are sad. If you want to present a social situation, have a Goblin crying off in a corner of a tavern and being ignored by all the other patrons is probably going to be interesting. If you want to have a combat situation, give the players a chance to fight with Orcs and see what they do. If they kill the lot of them, have an elderly Orcish woman digging graves nearby, who doesn't say a word and avoids looking at the player characters.
Humanoids don't have to be opponents. They can allies, they can be people, just all the rest of us.
That's how to make them interesting.
<Insert clever signature here>
Another really good piece of advice to change up same same encounters is to change up the environment. The same encounter in a thin corridor, a ship, a warehouse with boxes everywhere, stuff for ranged baddies to take cover behind, etc makes encounters very different.