This article contains affiliate links. If you’d like to support us, feel free to use these links 🛒 to buy books, dice, or similar products. Thank you 🙂
One of the most important parts of roleplaying games are the fights. Whether the group is facing a griffin in its lair or being ambushed by a few goblins on the road, it’s important to find the right balance between danger and fun. Here you’ll find helpful tips for creating your Dungeons and Dragons encounters.
What monsters should I use in my encounter?
Sometimes as a Dungeon Master you only know that you’d like to include an encounter in a session. To give players the opportunity to prove their combat abilities, this needs to be well thought out. Many groups also play with a main focus on combat and less roleplay. Whatever applies to you, your monsters should fit the world and the situation.
A good tool for quickly finding suitable enemies is the search function at D&D Beyond. Here you can filter not only by Challenge Rating (CR), but also by the environment where the monsters can be found. This of course only serves as a rough guideline and isn’t absolute, but it can quickly help you find a few suitable enemies for a situation. You don’t need a subscription here to find monsters, but you do need one to see their stats.
Additionally, you can of course always redesign a monster to adapt it to your situation. You can simply take the stats from another monster and change its appearance. Or you can take an existing monster and modify a few of its values to make it stronger or weaker.
How difficult should a Dungeons and Dragons encounter be?
Both on D&D Beyond and on other sites like Kobold Fight Club there are encounter builders. There you can set how many members your party has and based on the “adventuring day” (DMG p. 84) it will show you how many monsters with which CR would make an appropriate encounter. These tools are quite good as rough guidelines, but you still shouldn’t trust them completely.
One problem with the “adventuring day” is that it assumes multiple fights per day without resting. In most groups I’ve played with so far, there was often resting and all players were very mindful of their resources. A party that still has all spell slots and abilities will often defeat even an encounter marked as “hard” relatively easily. If your players are like this too, you might try making more “deadly” encounters. These will then demand more from the players and therefore be more fun.
Additionally, the term “action economy” should mean something to you. This refers to the number of actions that both sides have in combat. If there’s only a single griffin fighting against a group of six players, for example, it’s massively outnumbered. Even though it’s actually a very strong monster, it won’t stand a chance. Here you can improve things quite a bit with “legendary actions” and “legendary resistances,” but it’s still always difficult.
On the other hand, a huge horde of goblins can be very dangerous at times. They’ll quickly overrun the adventurers, even though the individual enemies are easy to defeat. In such situations I find it helpful to have the enemies come not all at once, but rather in waves. This gives you the opportunity to spontaneously add or remove one or two enemies to adjust the encounter.
What should the battlefield look like?
Especially in important fights against the final boss, most people probably know from video games maps that change or even contain puzzles. But even for less important encounters it can often become much more exciting when the environment is relevant to the fight. Players (and enemies!) can often make good use of a cliff or river to gain advantages.
Here you can also be very creative and for example include encounters where everyone involved is moving (boats, mounts, skis, free fall, etc.). Also exciting are maps where players must regularly move to dodge things (falling rocks, spraying poison, fire, etc.) or only have limited time to fight before something bad happens (water rising, walls closing in, etc.).
All these possibilities ensure that players must think “outside the box,” which is one of the biggest advantages that pen & paper roleplaying games have over video games. Here you can find creative solutions and also reward players when they come up with a good idea that you didn’t expect. What you always have to expect though is that your players might become murderhobos. What that is and how you can deal with it, you can find here.
Image source: pexels.com
