As a dungeon master, do you find that the interesting and challenging combats you’ve dreamed up for your players sometimes wind up playing out to be way too hard, or worse, way too easy? In this article, we will discuss 5 easy methods that you can use to adjust your encounters on the fly and make combat more awesome in your game.
When to Tune an Encounter
Knowing when to tune an encounter to be harder, or easier than originally planned will eventually be second nature. If you’re trying to get your bearings, look for these “warning signs” as a signal to consider course correcting and adjusting the encounter that you’re running.
- Is the fight seeming trivial for the players?
- Is a climactic boss fight turning out to be a walk in the park?
- Is the fight just dragging on in an HP slogfest all the while the party is obviously going to win? (OK! You’ve killed skeleton #12 of 30 and no one has a scratch on them…. We’ve been at this for 40 minutes)
The main guiding principle here is to tune your encounters harder or easier on the fly in order to enhance the experience for your players. You want your players to feel the tension of real challenges and have them work together to solve them. Make the encounter harder when it will add drama, flair, and fun to a battle that is turning out to feel a bit flat. Doing alternate adjustment to turn down an encounter when the fight is just dragging on or is just working out to be way harder than you planned can
Tuning D&D Encounters Tip #1 – Add Waves
Party cleaning up the baddies way too fast? Add waves of the same monsters, or lower CR monsters to the mix. If you’re in a bind, grab a familiar stat block from a familiar, fairly low-level monster such as a skeleton, goblin or orc, and just reskin that as the monster you’re fighting. You can introduce them at the end of a combat round before going back up to the top. Perhaps one of the enemies calls for help during the round or a door busts open, or they drop in from the ceiling, or they were hiding in crates to ambush the party. Be creative! Inventing this stuff is the fun part.
Tuning D&D Encounters Tip #2 – Add Health
Party slicing through the HP in your encounter like a hot knife through butter even though the setup is already interesting? Feel free to just on the fly add HP to enemies.
This works great on large or particularly impressive creatures that have kind of “unfamiliar” amounts of HP. The party will find it weird if a single rabid wolf in the wild has 90 HP instead of a dozen or so, but they won’t blink twice if an adult black dragon has 350 HP instead of 200. I once had a group of high-level party members fighting a single giant… I added 150 HP on the fly so that the fight that they were building up to was not so anticlimactic as they would have killed it in a round and a half with its previous 100HP pool. It helped a lot, however, hey still killed my boss fight with ease. This is mostly because I did not think to add legendary actions.
Tuning D&D Encounters Tip #3 – Add legendary actions
Legendary actions are just awesome. They give a single “big bad” monster the ability to keep taking certain actions even outside of their turn. Check out the example below from the Adult Black Dragon
Adult Black Dragon – Legendary Actions
The dragon can take 3 legendary actions, choosing from the options below. Only one legendary action option can be used at a time and only at the end of another creature’s turn. The dragon regains spent legendary actions at the start of its turn.
Detect. The dragon makes a Wisdom (Perception) check.
Tail Attack. The dragon makes a tail attack.Source: D&D Beyond – SRD Content.
Wing Attack (Costs 2 Actions). The dragon beats its wings. Each creature within 10 feet of the dragon must succeed on a DC 19 Dexterity saving throw or take 13 (2d6 + 6) bludgeoning damage and be knocked prone. The dragon can then fly up to half its flying speed.
Tuning D&D Encounters Tip #4 – Add phases
Maybe a big boss monster triggers a big environment effect like a cave in or explosion or the room filling with gas. Perhaps the boss transforms into something else when it reaches a certain HP, or calls in reinforcements, or it turns into a chase scene. Again, have fun being creative here.
Tuning D&D Encounters Tip #5 – Add Attacks
Plain and simple, consider simply giving monsters 1-2 additional attacks on their turns to make the encounter more interesting.
Bonus Tip – Reducing HP or Monsters
Reduce their health, make them run away, have them turn on each other. Feel free to take a creative measure to taper down a fight faster rather than feeling like you need to widdle down all of the remaining HP.
Caveats
Make Sure Not to Punish Player Creativity
If the party found an awesome, creative way to solve a problem, don’t punish them by just making the problem re-appear in a different way. Creative, rapid solutions to problems should really be rewarded.
Don’t Just be A Softie.
Don’t be too quick to reduce combat difficulty at the fist signs of struggle. The best play experience is when the DM’s don’t hold punches and the thrilling chance of player death is real. Give them real challenges. They can handle it.