When I started as a DM, building consistently fun and dynamic encounters gave me the most trouble. Some of them were inspired and my players loved them, others fell flat and felt like a forced march. It took awhile but I got the hang of building encounters and wanted to share what I've learned. I put together quite a long article about it. This is the link.
TLDR - Break your encounters up into four components. Enemies, Terrain, The Players, and Narrative. If you give each of those thought and attention you can build encounters your players will enjoy.
Enemies - Mix and match creatures, both creature types and challenge levels. Variety makes things exciting and forces your players to prioritize.
Terrain - Give your players and enemies terrain to interact with. Include bushes to hide behind or rocks to climb onto. A physical environment everyone can react to puts complications on the board and stops it from being two lines of combatants standing across from each other.
The Players - You have to keep your players abilities in mind when building encounters. If they all have magical armor and +3 weapons your CR ratings are going to be way off base. On the flip side, if your players are out of spell slots and low on hit die you might have to scale things back. Once you decide the difficulty level of your encounter make sure your player choices don't change the math.
Narrative - You can lean on your plot to decide what monsters to include in a fight. If your players are chasing a necromancer, undead enemies make a lot of sense. Encounters that further your plot are rewarding. It gives the players a sense of advancement toward their goals.
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I spend way too much time thinking about D&D. So much that I had to start writing it down.
If you want to build more advanced and interesting encounters, then give each fight a Gimmick, and a Gimmick Changer. Gimmicks force players to think, keep things different and fresh, and prevent fights becoming a standardised rotation of blowing all the best abilities in turn 1. It's important to give players choices.
The best way to think of this is in the kind of raid boss fights that you get in an MMORPG like World of Warcraft. Each boss does something different to other bosses, and forces the players to move around, avoid visibly incoming damage, use cooldowns at appropriate times and so on. If you run this kind of combat encounter, your players should learn that it's not always best to blow all their cooldowns as fast as possible.
Imagine a fight with a Fire Giant and a group of level 5-6 characters. A Fire Giant is meaty, hits hard, takes a lot of damage - but that's really it. Not a very interesting fight. Now let's change that Fire Giant so that when he dies, he explodes into 4 Fire Oozes (stats of a Gray Ooze,). Each Ooze rolls a separate initiative. On their turns, the Oozes try to head back to the Giant's corpse, taking 2 turns to get there. When all living oozes meet together, they reform into the giant. The giant's HP total on reforming is proportionate to the number of oozes that combine. If the players can take out oozes, the giant comes back weaker, and for each ooze killed it splits into one less ooze. If the players can Grapple or Restrain Oozes with magic, they can buy more time to hack them apart. If they use Ray of Frost, it takes an Ooze 3 turns to combine instead of 1. So that's the Gimmick: but alone that's not enough, and it will feel dull for the characters when they're mincing the giant on his second or third life. So instead, you need a Gimmick Changer. In this case the interesting thing is that the players can deal with the oozes fast or slowly. Slowly is likely to weaken the giant more - so let's force more choices on them. In this case, the players are on a clock. They only have 10 turns in which to kill the giant before the cage with a prisoner in it will collapse into a pool of magma, killing the prisoner.
A second example of Gimmick and Gimmick Changer: In this example I'll use a terrain gimmick rather than a creature modifier. First up, the players are 4 level 6 creatures against a Beholder or some other CR12+ creature. Not a fight they are likely to win. Except that there are five pillars in the room, each one with a different colour. When a player touches a pillar, they gain its benefit. Only one creature can have the pillar's power at a time, and loses all current stacks if they touch another pillar. Blue pillar: Increase attack and damage rolls by 2. Gain an additional stack each turn. Suffer 1d4 damage for each stack at the end of your turn. Green pillar: You heal 2d6 hit points at the start of each turn. Increase spell DC and spell damage by 2. Gain an additional stack each turn. Lose concentration on any spells at the end of the turn. On 3 stacks, turn Blind. Red pillar: Gain a Reaction ability that allows you to redirect incoming attacks against allies within 30 feet towards yourself, taking 10 damage on 1 stack, 20 on 2 stacks, 30 on 3 stacks etc. Gain 1 stack a turn. Yellow pillar: You cannot cast spells whilst you have this stack. Regain 1 used spell slot of 1st level on 1 stack. Regain 1 spell slot of 2nd level on 2 stacks. Regain 1 spell slot of 3rd on 3 stacks. On 4+ stacks, suffer 4d10 Psychic damage. Gain 1 stack a turn. White pillar: Dismiss all stacks.
This should create an encounter that allows the players to fight beyond their level, but only if they use the pillars successfully and intelligently. The fight should be exciting and memorable.
Very cool ideas for advanced encounter design. There is a lot of territory to explore once you get past the basics. That's probably a good topic for another article down the road.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I spend way too much time thinking about D&D. So much that I had to start writing it down.
When I started as a DM, building consistently fun and dynamic encounters gave me the most trouble. Some of them were inspired and my players loved them, others fell flat and felt like a forced march. It took awhile but I got the hang of building encounters and wanted to share what I've learned. I put together quite a long article about it. This is the link.
http://thathitsrolldamage.com/2021/02/16/how-to-build-dampd-encounters/
TLDR - Break your encounters up into four components. Enemies, Terrain, The Players, and Narrative. If you give each of those thought and attention you can build encounters your players will enjoy.
Enemies - Mix and match creatures, both creature types and challenge levels. Variety makes things exciting and forces your players to prioritize.
Terrain - Give your players and enemies terrain to interact with. Include bushes to hide behind or rocks to climb onto. A physical environment everyone can react to puts complications on the board and stops it from being two lines of combatants standing across from each other.
The Players - You have to keep your players abilities in mind when building encounters. If they all have magical armor and +3 weapons your CR ratings are going to be way off base. On the flip side, if your players are out of spell slots and low on hit die you might have to scale things back. Once you decide the difficulty level of your encounter make sure your player choices don't change the math.
Narrative - You can lean on your plot to decide what monsters to include in a fight. If your players are chasing a necromancer, undead enemies make a lot of sense. Encounters that further your plot are rewarding. It gives the players a sense of advancement toward their goals.
I spend way too much time thinking about D&D. So much that I had to start writing it down.
Dungeon Master, Blogger at That Hits, Roll Damage!
https://thathitsrolldamage.com/
If you want to build more advanced and interesting encounters, then give each fight a Gimmick, and a Gimmick Changer. Gimmicks force players to think, keep things different and fresh, and prevent fights becoming a standardised rotation of blowing all the best abilities in turn 1. It's important to give players choices.
The best way to think of this is in the kind of raid boss fights that you get in an MMORPG like World of Warcraft. Each boss does something different to other bosses, and forces the players to move around, avoid visibly incoming damage, use cooldowns at appropriate times and so on. If you run this kind of combat encounter, your players should learn that it's not always best to blow all their cooldowns as fast as possible.
Imagine a fight with a Fire Giant and a group of level 5-6 characters. A Fire Giant is meaty, hits hard, takes a lot of damage - but that's really it. Not a very interesting fight. Now let's change that Fire Giant so that when he dies, he explodes into 4 Fire Oozes (stats of a Gray Ooze,). Each Ooze rolls a separate initiative. On their turns, the Oozes try to head back to the Giant's corpse, taking 2 turns to get there. When all living oozes meet together, they reform into the giant.
The giant's HP total on reforming is proportionate to the number of oozes that combine. If the players can take out oozes, the giant comes back weaker, and for each ooze killed it splits into one less ooze.
If the players can Grapple or Restrain Oozes with magic, they can buy more time to hack them apart. If they use Ray of Frost, it takes an Ooze 3 turns to combine instead of 1.
So that's the Gimmick: but alone that's not enough, and it will feel dull for the characters when they're mincing the giant on his second or third life. So instead, you need a Gimmick Changer. In this case the interesting thing is that the players can deal with the oozes fast or slowly. Slowly is likely to weaken the giant more - so let's force more choices on them.
In this case, the players are on a clock. They only have 10 turns in which to kill the giant before the cage with a prisoner in it will collapse into a pool of magma, killing the prisoner.
A second example of Gimmick and Gimmick Changer:
In this example I'll use a terrain gimmick rather than a creature modifier.
First up, the players are 4 level 6 creatures against a Beholder or some other CR12+ creature. Not a fight they are likely to win. Except that there are five pillars in the room, each one with a different colour. When a player touches a pillar, they gain its benefit. Only one creature can have the pillar's power at a time, and loses all current stacks if they touch another pillar.
Blue pillar: Increase attack and damage rolls by 2. Gain an additional stack each turn. Suffer 1d4 damage for each stack at the end of your turn.
Green pillar: You heal 2d6 hit points at the start of each turn. Increase spell DC and spell damage by 2. Gain an additional stack each turn. Lose concentration on any spells at the end of the turn. On 3 stacks, turn Blind.
Red pillar: Gain a Reaction ability that allows you to redirect incoming attacks against allies within 30 feet towards yourself, taking 10 damage on 1 stack, 20 on 2 stacks, 30 on 3 stacks etc. Gain 1 stack a turn.
Yellow pillar: You cannot cast spells whilst you have this stack. Regain 1 used spell slot of 1st level on 1 stack. Regain 1 spell slot of 2nd level on 2 stacks. Regain 1 spell slot of 3rd on 3 stacks. On 4+ stacks, suffer 4d10 Psychic damage. Gain 1 stack a turn.
White pillar: Dismiss all stacks.
This should create an encounter that allows the players to fight beyond their level, but only if they use the pillars successfully and intelligently. The fight should be exciting and memorable.
Very cool ideas for advanced encounter design. There is a lot of territory to explore once you get past the basics. That's probably a good topic for another article down the road.
I spend way too much time thinking about D&D. So much that I had to start writing it down.
Dungeon Master, Blogger at That Hits, Roll Damage!
https://thathitsrolldamage.com/