“You can’t win. But there are alternatives to fighting.”
—Sir Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars (1977)
If every fight in your D&D campaign is a fight to the death, you’re making your game worse. There are dozens of reasons why. If the goal of every encounter is to rout the enemy, your game will become predictable and rote. If you force your players to chase down every fleeing goblin and squish every giant centipede before your encounter ends, your fight loses all tension and becomes a mindless grind. But just as there are multitudinous pitfalls in encounter design, the best Dungeon Masters know that there are many solutions.
Last week, we talked about hobgoblins and how their military tactics can create unusual combat encounters and even entire adventure scenarios. When a hobgoblin warlord musters an army, it creates a scenario in which routing the enemy is impossible. The heroes must secure another route to victory—a creative win condition. I call these creative win conditions and not unconventional or alternative win conditions because most violent encounters in real life don’t end with one side slaughtering their enemies to the man, even in open war.
In a pitched battle, a group of humanoid enemies can flee, surrender, or be forced to tactically retreat to handle a separate crisis. Battles can also be decided through other means, such as by breaking supply lines, winning a race to advantageous terrain or unoccupied fortifications. If the battle turns against your force, sometimes the only way to survive is to find an escape route, which becomes a victory condition of its own. Outside of military skirmishes, even more solutions arise. Many monsters are simply hungry predators, and will flee if its food puts up too great a fight, and others are protective of their young, and will only attack so long as the characters are near its nest.
Encounter Design as Story Design
Before we look at specific examples of telling different stories than just "kill 'em all!" in D&D encounters, let's take a close look at designing stories using action. An encounter is a very specific type of scene in D&D. The act of rolling initiative should communicate to your players that the story is advancing in some way.
But this is not always true.
Typically in D&D, rolling initiative means the opposite: that the story has stopped dead in its tracks so that the characters can find a creative way to kill some monsters for a few hours. If you want to run a story-focused D&D game, you need to break yourself of this habit and think of ways to have your combat encounters also either a. progress your story at large, or b. tell a small, self-contained story. A lot of D&D players think that only in-character dialogue can move the story forward. That’s false in all forms of storytelling, from films to books to games. Action is one of the most engaging forms of storytelling, and battles are stories where the tension and development should be at their highest, not their lowest.
Even in games with only the barest of interest in telling a story, boss battles often advance what little story there is, since the boss monster usually has a plot that needs to be foiled. The cultists of the Eternal Flame in Princes of the Apocalypse don’t have a lot of personality, but killing their leader, Vanifer, douses their ambitions of summoning Imix, Prince of Evil Fire into the Material Plane. Destroying bad things—such as killing a villain, unmaking an evil artifact, or counteracting the magic of a cult leader’s ritual—is an easy way to create story progression through action.
Games with a greater story focus typically present villains with personal connections to the heroes, and these fights become catalysts for character growth or plot revelations. The fight between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back is filled with moments that develop the characters and the story at large. Everyone knows that the end of the fight contains a revelation that completely recontextualizes Luke and Vader’s relationship, but the entire encounter is filled with tiny, wordless moments that advance the personal stories of the individual combatants.
Vader underestimates his foe at first, casually waving his lightsaber with only a single hand, but his arrogance leads to an early defeat and forces him to flee. Luke is emboldened by this victory and pursues, but finds that Vader is lying in wait and overpowers Luke by fighting dirty. Instead of simply clashing sabers, he uses the Force to pelt Luke with heavy debris, and even smash a window, creating a vacuum that hurls his enemy onto another platform. As a disoriented Luke tries to regain his bearings and find his foe, Vader—who has been holding his breath to silence his iconic rasping breathing—leaps from surprise and attacks Luke ruthlessly.
Vader’s emotional growth—from arrogance and showboating (“Perhaps you are not as strong as the Emperor thought”) to desperate and cunning (holding his breath, fighting dirty)—is communicated to the audience almost entirely through action. Your D&D fights don’t have to be filled with quipping and in-character dialogue to be filled with tension or character growth. Your villain’s actions can tell a story just as clearly as dialogue, and all without you having to interrupt your description of the action in combat with an improvised monologue.
Creative Victory Conditions in War
D&D has trouble with war. In my experience, the game is at its best when it can focus on two sides in a small conflict: a group of 3 to 7 heroes facing a similar number of distinct monsters. War is nothing like that. War in epic fantasy sees massive armies clashing all at once in grand cavalry charges, focusing instead on epic scale and spectacle to create a believable facsimile of the chaos of war. D&D was born from Chainmail, a wargame which simulated mass combat, and there have been several attempts at mass combat rules for D&D, but these rules have always had difficulty gaining traction.
Short of developing an entirely new rules system for representing war in D&D, one way of creating war scenarios your players can engage with is making them a small strike force. They are an elite group of heroes that can accomplish objectives that armies are too unwieldy to attempt. The goal of this is to pit your small party of heroes against more manageable numbers of enemies. Here are a few new goals you can use in skirmish-sized war encounters. Make sure you clearly communicate these goals to your players, otherwise they will probably continue to treat encounters as they always have: as a mission to rout the enemy.
- Rout. First and foremost, here is the assumed objective in nearly every combat encounter. If there’s an enemy nearby, kill it. Repeat until there are no more enemies nearby. This encounter objective isn’t a dirty word. It’s just another tool, but when all you have is a hammer, every encounter starts to look like a nail.
- Defeat the Boss. In war, armies are led by commanders. If you assassinate an enemy commander, their entire unit can fall apart. This objective works well in combats against hobgoblins and other lawful evil creatures. Once their power structure falls apart, the enemy will either flee or surrender—ending the encounter, in either situation.
- Escape. An enemy scout has been spotted spying on the characters’ camp, and they must give chase and hunt the scout down before it reports back to its commander. The characters must travel through enemy territory, fleeing snipers and avoiding traps, and they must use cover wisely to get to the scout and find a place to lay low before they’re taken down by hidden snipers. The characters don’t have to defeat their ambushers, just stop the scout and escape back to safety.
- Pillage (or Burn). The enemy camp is filled with supplies that, if stolen, would weaken them and strengthen your army. The characters must sneak into the enemy camp and either steal or destroy precious supplies like armor, food, munitions, mounts (setting mounts free is more tasteful than destroying them), tactical plans, and weapons.
- The characters’ enemies possess an item, such as a magic artifact or an item of cultural significance to the enemy. If they are able to steal it from the enemy camp or ambush its wielder while they are out on patrol, the enemy’s force will be weakened or lose morale entirely.
- Capture. When the enemy army sorties, they may only leave a skeletal force behind to protect their fortifications. It’s up to the characters to infiltrate their fortress and wipe out their defenders, then lock out the enemy army. Accomplishing this objective involves capturing, ejecting, or killing all enemy units within the fortification.
Creative Victory Conditions in Other Adventures
Not all D&D campaigns are set against a backdrop of war. Most simply follow adventurers exploring crypts and fighting dragons in dungeons. Makes sense. Still, a DM running a campaign of dungeon crawling should create combat encounters with a wide range of objectives to keep their campaign from getting stale or predictable. Here are some encounter objectives that can work in typical adventuring situations.
- Monsters only fight because they want something. Instead of requiring your players to fight an intelligent monster, consider what it wants—besides the characters’ blood. A behir may want to eat the characters, but it would be willing to set aside its hunger if the characters agree to kill the nearby white dragon and deliver its eggs as a snack. This route essentially turns a combat encounter into a roleplaying encounter, which is one of the strengths of fifth edition D&D’s light and snappy play!
- In fights against wild beasts or territorial monstrosities like an owlbear, sometimes all you have to do to overcome an encounter is to realize that the monster is just defending its turf or protecting its young. Keep moving and it won’t even try to pursue.
- Some creatures react viscerally to fear. If you have a combat encounter featuring a few major enemies and a lot of minions, you don’t have to make them flee immediately, but you can describe to your players that the minions are looking at one another uncertainly, and that one sharp shock could cause them to scatter in fear. This helps keep combats from overstaying their welcome.
Your Favorite Encounter Objectives
These are the nine encounter objectives I like to use in my home games. Do you use any that aren’t on this list? Sound off in the comments with some of your favorite creative encounter objectives. I might even steal some of them for my game.
James Haeck is the lead writer for D&D Beyond, the co-author of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and the Critical Role Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting, and is also a freelance writer for Wizards of the Coast, the D&D Adventurers League, and Kobold Press. He lives in Seattle, Washington with his partner Hannah and two territorial beasts, Mei and Marzipan. You can usually find him wasting time on Twitter at @jamesjhaeck.
Very informative post!
Since I prefer the XP mode over milestone (because I want every decision to have an impact on the Leveling), but don't want to train my players to become murder hobos, I have a simple rule of thumb:
Depending on how good you deal with an encounter, you get some EXP.
Some examples:
Killing/KO-ing all, or enough to make the rest flee in terror or surrender: 100% EXP
Persuading an enemy(!) to become a (temporary) ally: 100% EXP
Very cleverly outsmarting the enemy: 100% EXP
Only killing a few, then retreating: 100% EXP for the killed, 50% for the other creatures
Start the fight, but use diplomacy to work out a truce and both sides retreat: 50% EXP
Distract the enemies so you can dash past them: 25% EXP
Just fleeing the second the encounter starts (but having a chance of being attacked): 10% EXP
Of course I prepare some encounters with alternate win conditions in mind, like "Kill the boss, everyone else surrenders" or "You can not beat this creature head on, and fleeing would be the simplest option", but in general, this method brings the players themselves to think about how they want to resolve an encounter.
Wonderful reminder! I love creative solutions to these sorts of problems instead of the smashy-smashy approach. :D
I enjoy spacial puzzles, and throwing enemies into them. It makes my players have to dance around the enemies, and make choices between attacking and solving the puzzle. Often, my enemies are stronger or have the upper-hand as long as the puzzle is left unsolved, such as some Merfolk in a half flooded room, and if certain stones are removed from the wall to make holes and placed on a weighted plate on the other side of the room, the room will empty of water. I like to make sure that the solution, in this case the removal of the water, specifically does something else, like opening up a new passage way, and has the added benefit of reducing the Merfolk's power. When the puzzle is solved, the merfolk will attempt to flee, and killing the rewards some minor loot, much less than if the point of the encounter was to kill them.
I also enjoy races. A situation in which neither side can spend a lot of time attacking the other, and must instead attempt to get something or avoid something before the other side succeeds. Running from a volcanic flow, attempting to steal an artifact in a sleeping dragons nest (Attacking makes sound), these create great moments of tension where wit is more important than brawn.
Any chance you can remove the name of the leader of the fire cult from Princes of the Apocalypse? D:
I'm currently running this adventure and know one of my players reads your articles and am trying to keep some mystery surrounding the cult's leadership! Thank you and love your articles!
I would add that there are very clear types of military missions for small units (e.g. PC parties). This includes movement to contact (most adventuring), deliberate assault (e.g., against a stronghold), ambush, hasty defense, prepared defense, raid, surveillance, and reconnaissance.
This doesnt work for my current party.... they are entirely "if it can die, it can give xp"
Spoken like someone who has military experience himself. Is there a book you'd recommend to us civilians that details these different mission categories and the strategic and tactical principles behind them?
Especially when the PCs are squishy, it's often fun to make toe-to-toe combat the worst possible encounter choice by pitting them against intelligent foes who can be dealt with in other ways: persuasion, bribery, trade, etc., and who obviously outmatch the adventuring party or by providing scenarios that require finesse rather than the blunt force approach to problem solving. This "trains" the players early on to look for creative solutions and to exploit role-playing opportunities first (rather than as a last resort). By allowing a group of 1st level characters to encounter a large band of goblins with a leader, for example, I essentially force them to think about the story and ask themselves questions: why are these goblins here now? What do they want? Do they have anything to do with us or is this just a random meeting? How can we get by them, avoid them, mislead them, thwart them, etc. without getting wiped out? etc.
This approach allows me to dish out hints about the larger story and encourages players to try non-fatal (or at least lower-risk) options, like letting the rogue try to sneak into the camp to eavesdrop on the goblin boss or the ranger attempt to back-track the band to discover from whence they've come, etc., or to devise creative ways to separate goblins from the main group to attempt to capture a few for questioning or to defeat them piecemeal if that seems to be what's needed. It makes fun sessions for players and encourages them to more actively role-play, to participate in the creation of the story rather than just reacting to what I throw at them. It requires me to be flexible and prepared, of course, but it's usually a lot more fun for all concerned than the "Hey, look! Five goblins. Let's bash 'em." approach.
My only problem with this whole article is that you are saying to basically never count initiatives and to just basically always go cinematics... but that alone defeats the purpose of strategy, a thing many players like about the actual combat. and strategy in cinematics cannot really be made unless you give your players a huge advantage right from the get go. that advantage being that there is no ruling you are taking into account. while i often use cinematic to quickly advance a combat. my players preffer a more traditionnal combat scenario where they can take their time to think of their strategy. blocking the opponents path, fighting until either them or the boss is done for. trying to counter a fleeing boss. seeing a boss actually teleport out of combat. them trying to find said boss. running after that goblin to kill him before he contacts reinforcements. all these are great exemples of what rolling initiatives means.
you say roll inititiaves means stopping the story... but on the contrary, what it truly means is "danger as reach critical mass and it explodes !" these players more often then not, try to avoid such a thing, not because combat is long and boring... but because it means they wrongfully did something and now they are trapped in a scenario where disarming things might be impossible. you often see this in games where the first thing players does is to fight your boss thinking that it will disarm the situation right away. or players fighting to the death because they are players and heroes never die. cinematic fighting is cool, i do it often, but only for a few rounds, after that i start combat. You have to remember that, at heart, D&D is a strategy game, not a movie ! that's the major part of why players actually play the game. but if you, the DM, always tell your players what to do... and do not let them devise their own strategies... in the end you are not better then them.
which leads me to my last point... your job as the DM is not to find solutions to the problems... its the job of your players to do that. you, as the DM, present problems to them, and they have to find a solution to it. D&D mechanics has a hard time comparing though... most creatures have the same speed, and those with higher speeds rarely ever want to leave the combat because if one player has more speed he just runs and wants the kill. if you start trapping players on their own mechanics you end up doing the very thing you are trying to stop. and if the monsters always succeed at leaving the scene and retreating, the players do not feel the win. they just feel the faillure of stopping the enemy.
my point here is... while your players might be loving what you are doing in your campaign... othe rplayers might preffer a more movie like encounter where the enemy fight to the death and where ressources are important. because D&D for many is still a strategy game where every word, every actions are important. not everyone likes realism like the way you describe it.
I assess negative XP when my party members decide that rampaging through the town in quest of XP might be the key to accumulating levels and power.
Somewhere along my years of traveling the internet in search of articles relating to D&D, I came across a small article about D&D 4E that was titled, simply "Rule of 20 Encounters". It suggested that the party face 20 encounters to arrive at enough XP to reach every new level. I know what you are thinking. "20 combat encounters! That's crazy!" What it did, however, was break down what these encounters might look like.
It dovetails nicely with James' article, however. It suggests, on average, the following:
4 Standard Combats. Tough enough to challenge the party, making them think on how to overcome their enemy, while still using some of their assets.
3 Easy Combats. These are geared towards making the party feel powerful, while not overtaxing the party. It's especially useful for showing the characters how much they have progressed. Throw at them an encounter with the same types of combatants that they struggled with a few levels earlier and they feel empowered. Oddly enough, sometimes the party will blow resources they could have conserved, because they simply don't expect an easy encounter.
1 Epic Boss Battle. This is a culmination fight and what the whole arc they are on is about. Tough, with a chance of player death, but with sound tactics, coordinated planning and sometimes a bit of luck.
1 Bigger Fish. This is an unwinnable battle. Much like trying to take on that whole hobgoblin army James has written about, instead of pin-pricking the leadership. Or finding out that the boss behind the bandits who are extorting the village you are trying to save is an ancient green dragon. These encounters are aimed at reminding the players that they, as of this point in their career, are not at the top of the food chain. These are hideously deadly, which requires plenty of foresight and hint-dropping so the party doesn't bumble into a TPK.
2 Objective Combats. These are somewhat like standard combats. Their purpose is much different, however. Instead of straight up murder-hoboing, they require a task be completed to be considered a success. Destroying the bridge at Skull Gorge in Red Hand of Doom is a great example of an objective combat. You don't need to kill all the defenders. You simply need to destroy the bridge. Depending on party make-up, resources and how the battle runs its course, you might destroy the bridge with little actual swordplay.
4 Skill Encounters. These can be as simple or hard as need be and generally follow the parameters of the 4E skill challenges. There should be consequences for failure. For instance, you might set up a skill challenge that requires that a certain access point to the surface of the world from the Underdark be closed off before minions of your boss enemy can reach the surface. If the characters pull off the skill challenge spectacularly, the minions fail to reach the surface and your battle with the boss is with him and what few minions/lieutenants he usually has around him. If it goes OK, maybe a few get through and bolster the boss. A poor skill showing might make the boss encounter deadlier than expected. However, if you fail the challenge, the failure might encompass anything from the local village being overrun, the boss becoming much too powerful to take on now or anything else that helps show the party that their failure has had an impact on the world.
4 Social Encounters. These are basic roleplaying encounters. Maybe your paladin needs to sweet talk the barmaid into letting him and the party into the cellar. Once in the cellar, the mage alters self and tries to deceive the door guard at the other side of the cellar that he is a cult member and his new "recruits" are there to become indoctrinated. It can be a string of small skill checks, table-side roleplaying and other conditions that advance the story. Once accomplished, PCs earn XP for advancing the story.
1 Friendly Encounter. This is just like it sounds. An encounter among friends and potential new allies. I usually like giving my adventurers time to blow off steam, interact with townsfolk, accomplish downtime activities, etc. It doesn't even have to be in town. Just any relatively safe space where they have an opportunity to engage in roleplaying while pursuing other goals.
I usually find myself mixing and matching all of the above. Depending on how I want the campaign to unfold, I figure what the PCs must do to advance the story line. Sometimes it is more combat, sometimes more roleplaying. In the end, the Rule of 20 Encounters is a guideline. I hope you find it useful.
As a new DM, this is helpful. We've been going through the starter module (Lost Mine of Phandelin) and I feel like I haven't been making combat satisfying. This really helps! Thanks!
I often use a monster / npc that greatly out classes the characters to force them to think of alternatives to fighting.
Recently used a territorial Roc with some level 2 players to force them to use stealth and think their way through a problem rather than facing the beast and get one shotted to oblivion. It's also fun for lower characters to have a memorable experience with a high cr creature and live to tell the tale.
Here are some alternative win conditions I've used in our campaign:
I really enjoyed that piece. Keep up the good work James ;)
Thanks for this article and all the useful comments. I'm trying hard to break my players (incl. my 8 year-old daughter) of killing everything that moves, but they don't seem to get the hint. Maybe next week when we start with: 'well, your fireball also destroyed the only shelter in this desert, so roll a d20 and then rip up your character sheet' , they'll understand better.
Try to find a fun, entertaining and creative way to engage them without fights at all. For younger players I used to utilize a jester-kind of character that would be 100% immune to damage/antargetable at all, that would lead characters through dungeon and give them riddles. It's a well known trope but a whole session like this can build up the narrative focus in players and allow them to relax a little (a lot of players are tense about solving things without fighting because they have a feeling it will be less beneficial or dangerous for them).
Also, if they really enjoy fights maybe make the fights a little bit more demanding. Make them happen less often but put more challange but not only fighting wise - make the players to move, use surroundings, find a way to win (like in many video games bossess where just hitting is not enough).
Great article! The further I can distance my campaign from 'the bad guys have to die to progress', the better. Implementing greater rewards or information for clever resolutions, or consequences for simple slaughter, have really helped.
One I like to use is 'the turncoat'. I sometimes have an enemy surrender, stating that he was forced to fight, and will gladly help the party if they spare him. While I never make them a particularly good combatant, I always have them sketch at least a rough map of certain areas, suggest locations of traps, and help the party find secrets
And Slaadi. There are a few things in D&D that will never back down from a fight, if that's the sort of encounter you're after, but yeah, I'd say they're the exception, not the rule.
You don't need to slaughter your enemies. You only need to make them think they're being slaughtered and (most) would turn and flee.
Unless they're zombies