What could be better than an exciting battle at the top of a crumbling volcano, a dangerous trek through charted, trap-filled territories, or a tense negotiation with a scheming despot? That’s easy! All three at the same time!

In the last article we talked about creating encounters using each of the three pillars of play in D&D: combat, exploration, and roleplaying. Now we’re going to discuss combining those pillars within an encounter to make a whole that’s more challenging and memorable than the sum of its parts. More importantly, we’re going to look at ways to make these encounters sings narratively without making them terribly difficult to run on the mechanical level.

Combat + Exploration

I’ve talked to many, many DMs and players over the years, and what they want out of a D&D adventure is as diverse as the players taking part in the game. Some players and DMs would be happy just running one combat after another; for them, the interaction of the abilities of the monsters and the abilities of the characters are the best part of the game. If this is your thing, that’s wonderful.

Others, however, may grow weary of endless combats, which can seem to be all the same: the characters enter the dungeon room, they fight the trolls (don’t forget to bring the fire or acid), they defeat the trolls with nary a word spoken outside of numbers thrown back and forth between DM and player, they take the treasure, they decide whether to rest, and they move to the next room with the next group of monsters and their treasure. What can we do, even in the most straightforward dungeon crawl, to add something to the combat that is more exciting than just making the monsters and the treasure different?

Exploration can be a key component in adding to the uniqueness of a combat encounter, and it can be done in a variety of ways. Changing the shape of the battlefield, varying the terrain that the combatants must deal with, hiding parts of the setting that must be uncovered during the combat: all of this takes only a modicum of work on behalf the adventure designer, but it can breathe new life into an otherwise stagnant combat encounter.

Here are tips for adding some exploration to a combat to make it more unique, enjoyable, and memorable:

• Design the encounter to encourage movement. Tactically, most participants in a combat do not move once they get into an optimal tactical position. This can contribute to a series of staid encounters. Sometimes all that is needed to create a little chaos in an encounter is to include something in the combat that encourages or demands movement. For example, the floor is electrified, so that if a creature ends its turn in the same spot that it started its turn, it suffers lightning damage (or worse). Place elements in the room that move, or that draw the characters to them. Zones that cause damage encourage characters and foes alike to attempt to push or move their enemies.
• Symmetry is not necessarily your friend. The human brain is generally drawn to symmetry. Drawing maps is no different. We tend to draw nice, symmetrical rooms that are always the same, leading to combats in them that are too similar. As you create your maps of encounter areas, look for ways to make maps different, with uneven structural formations that might not be pretty, but that are interesting as creatures move within them.
• Hide the monsters, and let the characters hide. When both sides in a combat can see each other, they tend to fall back into the same old optimal tactical routine. Shake things up a little by hiding the monsters occasionally, either some of them or all of them. When some of the enemies are hidden, or need to be evicted from a tactically superior position, it makes players think a bit more than usual, and think differently. Similarly, creating a battlefield that allows the characters to hide or otherwise make tactical use of terrain can be exciting and different.
• Give the encounter some wonderful toys. As the characters fight the cultist servants of the evil warlord, one of them pulls a tarp off of a nasty-looking machine that begins to buzz with magical power. One of the servants sits in the seat and the machine’s turret whirls to take aim at the nearest character. You do that, you now officially have the players’ undivided attention. Place these mysterious objects in the room. Something as simple as a chandelier can add memorable moments to an encounter. Give the players ability checks to know what these toys do. If they are still unwilling to interact with anything other than their characters sheets, have the monsters use the toys to great effect. Someone should have fun with the exploration, even if it is just the DM!
• Keep an eye on encounter balance. While adding complication to a combat is fun and memorable, don’t add complication to the point of crushing the characters. When you create these complications, think about them in terms of challenge on their own. If the complications hinder only the characters, look at how difficult the complication is in terms of a monster, and assign that complication a challenge rating as if it was a monster. Figure that into your math when deciding how difficult the encounter is. If it is a complication that can be used by either side in the battle, it shouldn’t effect the difficulty level of the encounter, but just be sure that it isn’t so powerful that the first person to use it wipes out the opposing side.
• Make the exploration in the combat enticing to all player types. There are certain types of players that love chaos, or at least love the stories that come from embracing the chaos. These players often need little enticement to forego “typical” combat and try new or different thing. Min-maxing, optimizing players often move in the other direction, eschewing the unknown because it might not be as optimal as what they’ve created on their character sheet. In these cases, make sure that it is clear these other actions or situations are not suboptimal. Don’t force characters to use actions to learn things, and make the actions they do take valuable.

You can also turn this around and make exploration the main goal of the encounter, where the combat is present but acts as a lesser component. Imagine this example: the characters are trapped in a metallic room where they are receiving damaging shocks at random intervals, and the shocks increase in intensity each time. The mechanisms to disable the electricity are hidden within four statues, but there are twelve statues in the room. At the same time, lightning damage-resistant drakes are attacking, but they pose less of a threat than the electrical discharges. In this case, the exploration of the room is a more urgent task than fighting the drakes.

In this situation, the disarming of the trap (and the exploration to find the disarming mechanisms) is more important than the creatures that are attacking. Again, it is important to make it clear that the monsters are the lesser of the two threats—and you will still have some players simply attack the drakes, because there can be a tunnel-vision on the part of players to always deal with monsters before dealing with anything else.

Combat + Roleplaying

If mixing combat and exploration deals with changing the way the characters and DMs interact with the map and the setting, mixing combat and roleplaying often has more to do with changing the narrative elements of the encounter; that does not mean, however, that roleplaying cannot also have a great deal of power in determining the outcome of a combat.

I can hear many people saying now, “But you can always roleplay during combat!” That is undeniable. Much fun can be had trash-talking with the enemies, hurling taunts and barbs, and even describing in loving detail the actions and reactions of the characters and monsters.

What I am talking about here is designing an encounter that not only allows roleplaying during combat, but that actively uses roleplaying as an integral part of the combat encounter. We do this by going back to those elements of encounters we’ve discussed previously (information, goals, threats, challenges, choices, consequences, outcomes, etc.) and figuring out how to make roleplaying integral to the mixed combat/roleplaying encounter. If we think of how roleplaying can clarify or satisfy one or more of those elements during a combat, we’ve made a more interesting encounter than just straight combat.

Perhaps the characters need information in order to successfully complete the encounter, and it can only be obtained by convincing one of the prisoners they are trying to rescue to provide it—or trick one of the monsters trying to kill them to divulge it. Perhaps the true goal of the combat isn’t known until the characters learn it via roleplaying. Perhaps a threat can be diffused—or turned into a resource—through successful roleplaying, such as the characters convincing a mercenary to switch sides.

Exploration + Roleplaying

Encounters that mix exploration and roleplaying can be a bit trickier to imagine, but they nonetheless offer great challenge and uniqueness when designed well. Again, we should return to those elements of an encounter to see how either exploration or roleplaying, or a mix of the two, can be incorporated.

In some ways, a deeply involved and expertly planned social encounter is always a mix of roleplaying and exploration. Rather than exploring the physical realm, however, the characters are navigating a social realm that could have traps, hazards, locked passages, and dead ends that are just as real as the physical ones of a dungeon. Getting a monarch to provide assistance to a cause can be fraught with as much peril as a trapped tomb; saying the right thing at the right time, avoiding unpleasant or unwelcome topics, and striking the right tone with the conversation is vital. Instead of making Wisdom (Perception) or Intelligence (Investigation) checks to spot problems, characters are using Insight. Instead of using theives’ tools or Sleight of Hand to bypass trouble, characters are making Wisdom (Insight) or Charisma (Intimidation) checks.

Alternatively, the encounter could be an exploration of a physical space, but the characters have more resources (or more at stake) that can be affected by roleplaying. While moving through a dangerous landscape of hazards and traps, the characters have the chance to earn either the help or the ire of two warring factions of orcs and lizardfolk. Who the characters align with, if anyone, can give them bonuses or penalties in their travels: the orcs can assist the characters in the Badlands, while the lizardfolk offer a guide to assist the characters through the Swamp of Woe. Many levels of Undermountain in Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage exemplify this faction-negotiation style of dungeon exploring, particularly level 11: Troglodyte Warrens.

The Trifecta: Mixing All Three Pillars

Where a game can be at its best is when it’s using every tool at its disposal to create the challenges and rewards. Mixing all three pillars within the same encounter takes a great deal of thought, patience, and tinkering, but great play can come from it. Let’s try to create on right now, using the example from the boxed text article as a starting point. I have updated that boxed text to better fit our example.

In this encounter, the characters have been asked to visit an underground complex at the edge of an unexplored area. They know that the complex is used to store artifacts brought out of the wilds by explorers. The leaders of the group who runs the complex expected communications from the people here, but no messages have come from the outpost in days. As the characters approach the entrance to the area, they see the following:

The carrion crows on the hillside and take flight, blood decorating their beaks. Their feast is gruesome: at least thirty human bodies are strewn across the hillside, muddy from the downpour earlier in the day. Cresting the top of the hill, near the entrance to the secret base, ten spiders as big as dogs scuttle toward you. They move like others of their kind, but at the end of some of their legs is a hand, clenching and opening reflexively as the spiders approach. Behind them, another spider, this one the size of a horse and sporting eight human eyes, chitters angrily at your presence. A man dressed in explorer’s garb is shackled to a post in the middle of the field by blue glowing manacles. His screams are muffled by a gag as a swarm of small spiders crawls over him.

We could easily imagine this as a combat encounter, with the characters fighting the mutant spiders. We could create a roleplaying encounter where the characters need to rescue and converse with the prisoner. We could even make a pure exploration encounter where the characters must navigate the strange hillside scene. But let’s try all three at once and see what we come up with:

Handsy Spider Encounter

Based on the monsters involved, this encounter is normally a Medium difficulty encounter for six 5th-level characters. Here are some elements within the encounter:

Giant Wolf Spiders. These 10 spiders have human hands at the end of their eight legs. Their stat block is unchanged by this mutation.

Phase Spider. This spider is the leader of the swarm. Although it has human eyes, its stat block is unchanged. The spider is empowered by its master to guard the area with its smaller spider-servants. As long as the manacles are on Jodice (see below), the phase spider is immune to damage. When the manacles are removed, the immunity is gone, and the spider becomes vulnerable to all damage, and loses its Ethereal Jaunt trait.

Corpses. The dead bodies spread over the hillside are members of the group that runs the secret base, and their dress indicates that affiliation. All but five of the corpses are missing their hands. The five corpses that still have hands are infused with magic. If a creature other than the spiders enters within 5 feet of such a corpse, the hands reach out and attempt to grapple. A creature must succeed on a DC 13 Dexterity saving throw or be grappled (escape DC 13). A successful DC 10 Intelligence (Arcana) check reveals that the bodies are not alive or undead, so “killing” them with damage does not stop them. A successful DC 15 Wisdom (Perception) check taken as an action can locate the two nearest corpses that still have their hands.

Prisoner. The man shackled to the post is Jodice Farseer, an explorer who works out of the secret base here. The spiders on him are not damaging him, but he is terrified nonetheless. The phase spider is drawing power from Jodice, via the magical manacles. The phase spider is immune to all damage until Jodice is released from the manacles. The manacles are immune to damage as well, but can be opened with a successful DC 10 Dexterity check by a character proficient with thieves’ tools. Jodice might also be able to slip the bonds on his own, but he must first be calmed with a successful DC 10 Charisma (Persuasion) check. As soon as Jodice is free of the manacles, the phase spider loses its immunity to damage. If the gag is removed, Jodice can also warn the characters about which of the corpses are still moving to help characters avoid the grasping corpses.

What’s Next?

Next time we’ll take a look at encounter flow, putting all of our carefully designed encounters together to make an adventure that is both fun to play and easy to run! In the meantime, tell us about your most memorable encounters that was crafted from more than one pillar.

Shawn Merwin's professional design, development, and editing work in D&D has spanned 20 years and over 4 million words of content, ranging from third to fifth edition. His most recent credits include the Acquisitions Incorporated book, Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus, and Storm Lord’s Wrath. He is also the Resource Manager for the D&D Adventurers League’s Eberron: Oracle of War campaign. Shawn hosts a weekly D&D podcast called Down with D&D, and he holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. You can follow his ramblings and musing on Twitter at @shawnmerwin.

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