Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 247 - Making Combat More Fun

Episode Date: February 9, 2025

Combat can quickly turn rote, samey, and dare I say it even boring or dull.  GMs, there are some things you can do to make combat in your game far more interesting and players, I have a couple of tips for you as well. #pf2e #Pathfinder #gmtips #dmtips #dnd #rpg #combat Resources: Glass Cannon C2E67 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkTVOYbQQ5E XPLoveCat - How to Make Combat More Interesting - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jerYT5xiv-Y Taking 20 Podcast Ep 160 - https://youtu.be/P1H88UKXa98?si=bToCQK7ejW40VVEP  Taking 20 Podcast Ep 191 - https://youtu.be/kqBQWhYxs6k?si=y6MlCiUy_OXGx2XP 

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. If you DM long enough, this will happen to you too. You have plans on how the combat will go, but the dice go cold. Characters to hit rolls are awful, and when they do hit, their damage is consistently low. It just makes what could be a fun combat the worst time for everyone involved. Thank you for listening to the Taking 20 Podcast, Episode 247, some tips for making combat more fun. I want to thank this week's sponsor, Spaghetti Noodles.

I love me some spaghetti. I tried some at a restaurant and it turned out the noodles were made of cauliflower. As far as I'm concerned, that's an impasta. Hey, if you enjoy this podcast, please consider sharing an episode on your social media feed of choice. Speaking of which, we're on blue sky now. Search for Taking20podcast and you'll find us. I'm working on getting my episodes published automatically to my feed there as well, but if you could help me spread the word about this little podcast, I would be so very grateful. A lot of my players, you know what, scratch that, the overwhelming majority of my players probably enjoy the combat portion of my games more than the other parts.

The cynic in me says it's because my social encounters suck and they're just humoring me because I suck at everything and I should just give up and become a d***. Sorry everyone, imposter syndrome can hit anyone hard sometimes. Through the years of running games and various systems I've discovered some things. All of us make mistakes and I'm going to talk about some mistakes and I and others have made and some tips to make combat even better. I do my level best to keep my game as fun as I possibly can. One of my core tenets of being a game master is that it should be fun for as many of the

people around my table as possible. Hopefully all of them. But keeping everyone happy is a balancing act. A few of my players love the social aspect of wandering place to place in town, talking to everyone, and relishing a pretend life in a pretend world. But in most game systems combat is inevitable and in many systems is one of if not the core mechanic the game is built around. I'd argue that's true of most of the popular RPGs D&D Pathfinder and so forth. Compare that with combat in say Call of Cthulhu which has less combat and it's only usually undertaken

in the most dire of circumstances because things from beyond the veil can be pretty resistant to bullets. There are other game systems like Apocalypse World that is very combat light and the examples could go on and on, but I tend to play Pathfinder and D&D the most so this episode's advice will likely apply most strongly to DMs and players of those game systems. Now, in a break from the norm I want to start by talking to my beloved players out there. What can you do to help keep combat fun? You may be thinking nothing, but that is definitely not true. Games are better when they stay moving. One of the things you can do as a player is stay focused on what's going on at the table.

I get it, don't know, I understand. We all have jobs and loved ones and friends and games all competing for your attention at the same time. However, do me and your hard-working DM a favor. When you're at the table, try to be mentally at the table as much as you possibly can be. Don't be doom-scrolling on your phone watching videos online, listening to music, browsing social media, posting to blue sky or whatever. Please let the game be your primary focus for the time you're gaming. Saying, okay that's Belus's turn done,

croaking you're up. That's no problem, that's expected and DM helps keep the game moving that way. However, I cannot tell you how frustrating it is when one of the players isn't paying attention and we have to say, hey hey it's your turn, excuse me, sorry, hey yeah it's your turn now. By paying attention you're doing your part to keep the game moving as quickly as possible and as fun as possible for everybody around you. So what do you do when you're paying attention to the game? Good I'm glad you asked. Of course you should participate in discussions with the

other players about tactics and options and ways to take down the big bad and so forth but one of the main things you can do while paying attention to the game is to pre-plan your turn. You're a fighter. You need to give yourself the best chance to do damage by either maximizing your damage output or improving your or your allies chance to hit. So what does that look like on your turn? Start planning what you'd like to do

when your turn comes up in the initiative order. Similarly, you're an arcane spellcaster and you have a spell that does damage in a 15-foot cone. Start planning where you'd like to drop that spell to best help the party. While others are taking their turn, make those plans for your character, but be ready to change them due to changing battlefield conditions. Maybe your ally or the opponent moves and you can't flank anymore, or maybe a spellcaster makes part of the map impassable or slows movement in an area. Who wants to walk through an area covered in black tentacles that's all grabby grabby on

your ankles and try to slow you down? No. So moving east through that gap maybe no longer an option. But Jeremy, if positioning on the map is going to change, what's the point of paying attention and planning my turn? I might not be able to do it, so why should I put forth any of the effort? Well, there's a whole philosophy discussion here that gets into the core of my being that says we should always have plans for our personal and professional life, but instead I'm just going to quote Dwight D. Eisenhower said quote, plans are useless but the planning is indispensable. You may not be able to execute exactly what you planned but the time you took planning should allow you to make a good decision faster and keep the game moving. So players please pay attention at the

table and pre-plan your turn to facilitate good game flow. Moving on to my beloved DMs out there, there is a lot you can do to keep the game moving and fun. One of the most common issues I see are fights with a single enemy. This topic could turn into an entire encounter design episode, but the Cliff Notes version of it is that this is one aspect of encounter design. If you're designing an encounter for your adventuring party, I think it makes sense to all involve that if there's only one enemy against them on the battlefield and there's four or five party members, that one enemy will need to,

to quote Daft Punk, it'll have to be harder, better, faster, and stronger than a lot of the lower level combatants. Otherwise, the party will just mop the floor with the opponent unless they are tougher and have features to keep them upright. It's just good in counter design. One combatant will have a harder time against four PCs, so they need more hit points, more or better attacks, higher armor class, resistances to damage, and so forth,

or they will just get rolled by the party. There's a potential problem with opponents like that though. It showed up in a recent Glass Cannon episode 67 of Campaign 2. I'll put a link in the top corner of the YouTube feed and there'll be a link down in the resources but let me preface what I'm about to say by saying the Glass Cannon GM Troy LaValley is superb. He's funny, engaging, charismatic, extremely capable, and runs games overwhelmingly well more often than not. However, and minor spoiler for that episode, because one combatant in that episode had damage resistance and higher hit points and immunity to

various things, the combat became an absolute slog. Now, what do I mean by slog? It was exhausting, it took forever, and for a long time it seemed like nothing happened as player after player missed their attack rolls and damage after damage just got absorbed by the thing. There was no indication that the combat was progressing and that the PCs were making a difference at all.

After a brief scare early on in the combat, it was obvious the party would eventually win the combat and wear it down. It would just take a long time for the party to do that on this one opponent. The combat took up much of an episode and eventually in between recording episodes, Troy decided to just hand wave the rest of combat and say, Yay, you won, combats over and here's the loot. I do not blame Troy for doing this. Slog combat is just... Ugh, it's just awful. And when you're mired in it, it's easy to get lost in just trying to get to the end.

If you DM long enough, this will happen to you too. You have plans on how the combat will go, but the dice go cold. Characters to hit rolls are awful, and when they do hit, their damage is consistently low. It just makes what could be a fun combat the worst time for everyone involved. For the record, there is nothing wrong with hand waving the end of combat, but, and this is a big but, oh yeah, doing so may make the players feel like they have been cheated out of a satisfying end of combat.

Now that being said, it is a tool, keep it in your toolkit and use it if you have to. However, there are other things that you can do if combat appears to be dragging. The first and most common solution is to adjust the baddies hit points behind the screen. combat appears to be dragging. The first and most common solution is to adjust the baddies hit points behind the screen. The players have no idea how many hit points that dragon or beholder or kobold priest or giant or construct or whatever has or

if they do know how many hit points they have they've been reading the adventure and that shit shouldn't happen either. So the adventure says the golem has 150 hit points and damage resistance and After nine rounds of combat, that's almost a minute of game time and probably a couple of hours of real time, the creature still has 55 freaking hit points and it looks like the combat's going to stretch another five to six rounds, another hour and a half as these things are going. You know the PCs are going to win, it's just a matter of when the damn numbers get rolled. If the combat is stretching on there is nothing wrong with making that 150 hit point baddie have let's say 90 hit points. You can decide at any point that the next character that hits the baddie will

kill it. Who gives a crap if the adventure says that they should still have another 50 hit points? It doesn't matter what the monster manual says that the baddie should still be alive after this many hit points of damage You are behind the screen and have your part in the responsibility for the fun of your game at your table Whether physical or virtual remember the mantra fun is more important than story, which is more important than rules Generally, you should do what you can to keep combat moving. If you don't already have some way to visually display the initiative order for combat, like if you're at a physical table, maybe it's cards across the top of your GM screen, or maybe it's a whiteboard that you write down the initiative on and display it to the table.

A long time ago, actually, I used a paper towel holder, you know one of those with a stand with a single wooden dowel rod, and I had painted shower curtain rings with the characters names on it. Or you can use clothes pins on a piece of plastic or if you're using a virtual tabletop maybe it's an electronic initiative table that's up in the corner. Anything that is a visible reminder of combat order. Who's going first, who's going next, who's going last. By the way, while researching for this episode, I discovered a great YouTube channel by xplovecat. She had a video about this very topic that she

released about three years ago. Her channel is full of good advice and reviews for some smaller RPGs out there. I'm going to put a link in the resources if you're listening on YouTube, there should be a card in the corner linking to her video on making combat more interesting. Please go check her channel out. Now you may be saying, Jeremy my combats don't drag on I'm the king or queen of getting combat in then out. Wham bam thank you ma'am and done. I expect more from you. First off I have no idea what accent that was supposed to be. I think I blended maybe 25 different dialects and groups, so my apologies to the two-thirds of the world that I probably just offended with that accent.

But that's not my only idea for making combat more fun. As I talked about in episodes 160 and 191, links in the resources and in the YouTube video, make your maps interesting by giving them a third dimension. Let combat happen between rooftops, hills, in a crevasse, on stairwells, anything except a flat plane with a bunch of bushes drawn on it. I expound on this concept in those two episodes so go give them a listen if you would like to hear a little bit more. In general the combat will be more fun and more interesting if it is a participant in the combat itself. Wait, I don't mean that the planet's trying to kill the combatants, well not actively

at least. It's more interesting with a third dimension, a changing landscape, moving pieces of the ground or a building. Classic examples I can think of off top of my head would be like the Kaisilius fight against the Ancient One in the mirror dimension of Dr. Strange or the Anakin versus Obi-Wan lightsaber battle on Mustafar where the terrain is constantly changing. It doesn't have to be alive although that would be an interesting fight the more I think about it but the environment itself provides challenges. The lava alone on Mustafar gave that combat a particularly lethal quality, not to mention the collapsing buildings, falling debris, worker robots, and everything else that made that fight interesting to watch.

By no means am I suggesting that every one of your combats need to be in a constantly moving three-dimensional world, but include some interesting aspects of the combat. If it's an ambush at the edge of a forest, give the baddies, the party, or both cover to hide behind. Rocks, trees, maybe thick brush to provide concealment instead of cover. Are those trees old enough to have sturdy branches for humanoids to stand on or creatures to hide in? If so, just adding a few baddies hiding in the trees above the ground can make combat fun, different, and maybe even challenging. Since I

mentioned ambushes, that's another thing you can do to make your combat more fun. Vary them up. I would dare say most combats by most DMs start with a PCs in one area of the map and a bunch of baddies in another area about 60 to 90 feet away. Everyone can see everyone else or pretty close to it. Initiatives rolled, combat begins. There aren't any real surprises or hidden dangers. It's just one side against another.

Swing your weapons, sling your spells until one side or the other is dead. There's nothing wrong with a straight up fight, but that's not the only way combat can happen. If baddies think the PCs are pretty tough, they might ambush them in a dark forest, or alleyway or even rooms at the inn where the PCs are sleeping and divided. Even if it starts off as a straight up fight, the baddies could bring in reinforcements who overhear the combat and join in round 4. What was a straight up fight where the party wasn't that worried they knew they'd win

eventually suddenly becomes a desperate Donnybrook where there's real danger to the characters. Or maybe what starts out as a straight up fight has a third party join. I mean hang on the first time you do this don't go all fight from Anchorman where there were I think four different news teams fighting each other or dear god Anchorman 2 where there were and I went back to watch it again nine different news teams in the melee keep it simple for example let's say the PCs are fighting it out with a group of assassins in an alley when a policeman or town guard hears the noise and discovers the fight they blow their whistles or get on their walkie-talkie or shoot up a flare or whatever they do to bring more police to the area.

The police don't know who's in the right in this fight they just know a fight's happening and they need to break it up so they start attacking everyone in round three and suddenly it's a good old-fashioned three-way combat. A menage-a-trois of pain if you will. The Taking20 Podcast would like to apologize for the suggestive nature of that joke, and I assure you, Jeremy has received a right good thrashing for it. Sorry, where'd I go just now? Anyway, adding another group to the combat can also be expanded to just, say, add some

sort of complication to the fight. Having the police show up and start arresting people? That's a complication. Having a fight occur in a crowded area where there are non-combatants who are threatened? That's a complication. An earthquake in the middle of the fight? That's a complication. Weather events like rain or fog that limits visibility? That's a complication. Whether you make it something crazy like a portal opens up to the elemental plane of air or or something mundane like a news crew shows up to film the fight and they're just a little bit too close. Complications can make combat a lot more fun when for example I have to be careful where

I drop my fireball because there's a risk of harming the hostages. Different monsters also will use different strategies depending on what they are, where they are and why they're fighting. An earth elemental on their home plane may be fighting to protect its home or earth elemental family and friends. Hang on, do earth elementals reproduce? I legitimately have no idea if they would. I'm gonna leave that to you to research if you're interested. Anyway, close to home that elemental may fight to the end to survive, while that same earth elemental cut off from its home and desperate to survive, may use more ferocious and ambush tactics and flee if there's even a hint that they might get overpowered. Similarly, a kobold hit and run team that's trying to steal grain from the town mill will use different tactics than ones who are trying to destroy the village that's expanded too close to the warren.

All of this to say, the baddies have a reason to fight and a reason to stop fighting. You should know that going into the combat for the baddies. Sometimes creatures are fighting just to be left alone. If you wander too close to a bear den, the bear may only fight long enough to get the PCs to run away. Or maybe the PCs shouldn't be adventuring on another gang's turf or whatever and they just want to make sure the PCs think twice before coming back. This is always an option if the PCs wander into a fight that they're ill-prepared for, the baddies just fight long enough to convince the party they want to flee and then doesn't pursue them when the PCs do run. Of course if you're like some of the groups I've DM'd for,

they're going to fight to the bitter end, even if the end is mostly bitter for the PCs, no matter how many times you give them hints. This to say, not all combats end in complete death for one side or the other. You're not going to hear me say that something was better in the old versions of the rules, but there was an interesting aspect back in the day, or the game Chainmail, which was actually the precursor to basic D&D. Monsters had something known as a morale score. When they first took damage or lost a certain fraction of creatures or hit points from their side, you would roll 2d6 and compare that to their morale score. This meant that over time, more and more of the NPC combatants might get second thoughts about fighting all the way to the death and might peel off combat to make sure they see another sunrise. A similar mechanic was carried into the first edition of D&D by the way. There's a lot of resources about this

morale mechanic. Do a quick search for it and you'll see a lot more about it. But there's a problem with that mechanic even though I like the idea of it. The number of NPCs that left when bad things happened was a little bit random. With the right rolls, maybe only three of the twelve baddies will still be around in round two, but if the rolls go the other way, morale may have very little impact on the size of the fight over time. It added randomness to the combat, which is fun in some ways, but can be problematic if it goes wrong. So what can you do?

Take the randomness out of it. Make a decision that if the PCs kill 6 of the 12 baddies, the other 6 are running for the woods, or if they can take the beast down to one quarter of its hit points, it's going to try to flee as fast and as far as it can if it has any intelligence whatsoever. Behind the screen you are in control of how long combats last and what happens at certain stages. Don't be afraid to end combats early if they seem to be dragging. Design your combat encounters to be varied and occasionally include a wild combat, very

different from your standard flat plane. Maybe give it three dimensions, complications, or an environment that moves. Players, pay attention at the table and plan your turns ahead of time. With a little creativity and adjustments behind the screen, combat can be a lot more fun and I'd be willing to bet that you and your players would have fun doing it. Hey, we have a website, www.taking20podcast.com. I keep thinking I'm going to have time to completely redesign the website, but damn it, two jobs just tends to chew up my time.

Tune into the next episode when I'm going to talk about a very polarizing topic, guns in your fantasy game. But before I go, I wanna thank this week's sponsor, Spaghetti Noodles. You know, when I make spaghetti, I tend to crack a lot of sexual jokes at dinner. I mean, what can I say?

I like it saucy. This has been episode 247, some tips for making combat more fun. My name is Jeremy Shelley and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking20 podcast is Copyright 2025 by Jeremy Shelley. The opinions or views expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the host. References to game system content are copyrighted by their respective publishers.