Whether you’ve been playing D&D for a while or you’re just starting, it can be tricky to make combat interesting. You don’t want combat to become boring or slow. With these five tips, your next combat encounter will be quick and engaging. And they’ll help you build a better story. So read on! 

1. Keep up the pace and get everything ready before you start

Preperation

To keep up the pace in your combat, you can use a couple of tricks. First, prepare all your monster stat blocks. If you want to run your encounter digitally you can use an online encounter builder so you have the sheets of your monsters right there. If you want to do it analog you can add a bookmark to your monster manual to quickly find the monsters.

Another option is to print out the monster stat blocks beforehand and keep them near your play area.

Grouping

A great way to increase speed in your encounter is to group monsters of the same kind together. This way, you won’t have to roll five dice for your five wolves. Instead, you just roll once and have them attack at the same time. This especially makes sense for monsters who have the pack tactics ability!

Initiative

To keep your initiative clean and readable, I would recommend a two pane system. On the right, track the initiative and maybe HP of your enemies. On the left, keep the initiative of your PCs. This way, you won’t have to scribble in new enemies if you add those later in the fight or when someone messes up their initiative.

Communication

Another way to keep up the pace is by telling your players who will be going next when you are going to the next character’s turn. For example if it is the big bad’s turn, help your rogue remember hey it is your turn next so they can already decide what to do. This way you remind your players to think about what they want to do `before` it’s their turn.

 2. Your villains are smart so prepare them

When you run an encounter with intelligent creatures you should make sure to treat them as such.

Abilities

It is very easy to forget your villain’s special abilities in the heat of the moment. For example when you are running two banshees. They can both do a Wail attack. You players will be expecting this so try to use it. Depending on how you want to run your encounter you can either start with your special abilities, so you can focus on everything else after that. Or you can set a specific point in the combat to use it. Maybe when your banshee has a quarter of their HP left, as a last ditch effort. You can also write down ‘after the 4th round’. By preparing when to use special abilities you keep the combat interesting and dynamic.

Plan ahead

If you run a prepared combat encounter you can also prepare the first 3-5 moves of your enemies. You might know how the players will enter your battlefield and act accordingly. For example if you have a necromancer and two skeletons. The necromancer who might have an area of effect spell can use that at the start so your skeletons can rush in after. By thinking ahead and planning your moves you can utilize all the abilities of your creatures. This will make your combat more challenging for the players and also more fun for you as a DM.

Use the environment

When starting your encounter remember that your player characters have a line of sight. So if you can place some boulders, pillars, trees or other obstacles in your map you can hide some of the enemies behind those. You should still roll initiative for them so that when it is their turn your players will not know what is happening. You can even use this to make your villain more confident than your players would expect. Since they know they have some henchpersons behind cover.

 3. Allow for small roleplay moments

How do you want to do this?

Using roleplay in a combat encounter is the perfect way to make the encounter memorable. Who doesn’t like telling their friends that they killed that dragon and how they did it. As a DM you can make this happen by working with your players on how the enemies are defeated. You can do this by leaving all control with your player and letting them decide, but you can also make it a roleplay moment by letting your enemy react to that final blow. Maybe the dragon screams a final screech when it dies. Maybe the evil necromancer yells out the name of a big bad and says they will remember what happened.

You enemy can talk!

Another way you can integrate roleplay in your combat is by having an enemy that speaks to the players to create some tension. You can do this by letting the enemy give command to their hanchpersons. Or to tell the players that they will burn right before throwing a fireball at them. When you let your enemy react you make them more real. That way your players will also be more engaged with your encounter.

4. Prepare the rules

Combat maneuvers 

Nothing takes the speed out of combat as reading how shoving and grappling works. One thing you can do as a DM is either learn all these rules out of the top of your head. Or you can keep a reference by hand with all this information. To remember all the possible actions a player can take you can use a cheat sheet. 

If you use a monster that has spell casting abilities I would recommend pre-opening all the spells in a browser if you use a laptop or mobile device. If you work analogue I would write down where you can find them in the guides or remember them.

You can also communicate this prep to your players so they might also do this to keep the combat flowing and so you don’t have to wait for players to read ten spells to decide what to do.

Initiative

The initiative order is something that will come up for almost every encounter. you can ofcourse run encounters without an initiative order, but for bigger encounters the structure is needed. You should establish your initiative rolling rules in a session 0. If you don’t know what a session 0 is, read all about it in our ultimate guide. It is smart to decide if you want the higher dex to decide who goes first or if you want to roll again. This takes guessing and asking out of the initiative rolling and makes it so you can get started with the fun part. MURDER!

5. Let your players celebrate 

Creating an end sequence

After combat is finished your players might be all over the place because one of the pc’s went down. Or maybe the big bad of the arc was just defeated. It is up to you, as the DM, to give a clear cue that combat is over and it is time for celebration or mourning. You can do this by describing what happens in the environment, you could describe that the trees start standing more upright because the evil druid has just been defeated. Or maybe some townsfolk start coming out of their houses crying, because they are finally free. If you start interacting with the players they will join you. Another way to do this is to just ask your players. How do the player characters react to what just happened? Ask the players one by one to give their reaction. This will open up a moment for roleplay and celebration. You can then incorporate the looting in this celebration moment to not break the flow of celebration by rolling investigation checks and going right back into mechanics.

6.  Bonus tip: Use a encounter generator

You now know how to create a fast paced and engaging encounter. But what if getting the inspiration for that encounter is not working for you? You can try our encounter generator! Our encounter builder creates an encounter tailored to your party. You just have to fill in the levels and the size and how hard you want it to be and we will start giving you inspiration for your next encounter.

Thank you for reading these tips and tricks for creating more engaging encounters. I hope you learned something new and that all your encounters go as smooth as you want them to!