#dap combat hack

[dailyadventureprompts]

DM Tip: Lining up the Pieces

A few years ago I saw a video that changed the way I design combat encounters, using chess pieces and 4th edition monster roles as a handy way of conceptualizing the enemy roster and making better combat.

I’ve wanted to refer back to it for ages now, but I can’t seem to find it.  As such, I’m going to reproduce it’s wisdom here for everyone’s benefit and hope I can find the source one day.  ( I feel like it was a Matt Coville video, but my searches have turned up nothing. Seriously, if you can find it I will be extra grateful).

TLDR:  You can break down enemy combatants into six (ish) roles represented by different kinds of chess pieces, and you can mix and match them when designing encounter to create fun tactical scenarios. You can also use this as an alternative to CR picking a “budget” of these enemy roles based on how many players are in the fight.  Check out the types below the cut: 

Infantry (pawn):   Generally weaker and mechanically simpler than any other type of combatant, the infantry uses teamwork or sheer numbers to overwhelm the party. This can be anything from rank and file soldiers to a necromancer’s skeletal minions to a pack of wolves, anything that takes up space on the battlefield and prevents the party from targeting who they want or generally getting their way in a fight. 5e combat is a numbers game, and the infantry is there to swing the numbers in the enemy’s favour (until the party cut through them to even the odds).  Infantry likes battlemaps with chokepoints they can hold and crossroads they can use to outflank opponents. When budgeting they’ll have a balance of 2 infantry per 1 player they’re matched against , but the weaker they are, the thinner you can spread them.

Brute (rook): High defence, high offence, the brute is an outright threat that the party should not want to take in a head to head fight. Giants, beasts, constructs, and heavy armoured warriors are your traditional brutes, but you could also go with a buffed to hell battlemage getting all up in the party’s face. Conversely, every brute has some kind of weakness that the party can exploit. They might be slow, or be unable to maneuver as easily, or like a werewolf, fiend, or troll, have particular weapons or damage types that overcome their natural resilience. Their job is to force confrontation, blunder into the middle of combat and force the party to act defensively rather than proactively. They soak up the party’s frontline’s attention while forcing the mid/backlines to scatter under the threat of too much raw damage.  The brute Likes open spaces where they can have a direct path to the party and dead ends they can corner their targets against. Budget: Around 1 per 3 players

Skirmisher (knight):  A very broad type of opponent, the skirmisher’s job is to bully  the party’s weapsots whenever they’re exposed. They can do this by being ranged fighters ( traditional archers, magic users) or by being highly mobile (stealthy, mounted, flying, teleporting). They’re the bane of the party’s backline, generally targeting whoever has the lowest armour/or least health, then using their evasiveness to deny any kind of retaliation when the group rallies to protect their squishy friends. Skirmishers have great offence but are generally pretty weak, made helpless when you can deny them their movement/terrain advantages.  Skirmishers like unfair fights, terrain that gives them a movement advantage, cover, or allows them the highground over their foes.  Budgeting: 1 per 1-2 players. 

Controller (bishop):  The controller’s job is to fuck with the party, Either by locking down some of their stronger options (counterspelling, mind control, status effects, grapples),  by manipulating the battlefield in some way that disrupts planning (aoe spells to prevent grouping together, summoning to reinforce numbers,  barriers and banishment to single targets out), Or by advancing the baddies’ goal while the party is otherwise occupied (the cult priest finishing the disastrous ritual, the master thief making off with the mcguffin) forcing them to split their attention. The controller likes to distinctly be away from combat, and will usually be on the otherside of some kind of hazardous/hard to bypass barrier, sometimes of their own making. Budgeting:  1 per 2-3  players: 

Support (king): Usually a healer, bodyguard, or some kind of buff-bot, the support wants to piggyback on other sorts of units or make them better at doing their jobs. Generally this means they’ll ignore whatever the party is doing to focus on staying with effective range of those who most benefit from their abilities. Supports will stay back in safety while throwing out buffs, bodyguards will put themselves between the party and their designated defendee. They tend to prefer whatever type of terrain most benefits their partners. 1- 2-3 players

Elite (queen): Something to be reckoned with, an Elite mixies the strength and abilities of two other kinds of combatants and uses both to devastating effect. Combine a brute and a support for an unstoppable frontline commander, or infantry and a skirmisher for an elite striketeam that attacks in perfect coordination before fading back into the shadows.  Mix and match for whatever combination you think would be most interesting for a situation, then supplement it with a different unit or two for contrast.  Elites make up your traditional “big bad and minions” bossfight, without escalating to the full party challenge of “solo” monsters. Budgeting: 1 per 3-4 players. 

Picking the right Pieces:

Generally what you're going to want to do when planning a combat is to first think of what the baddies are trying to acomplish with the fight then pick 2-3 different types of baddie that you think would work well in concert to achieve that goal. "Kill the party" is an all too common goal, but you could easily imagine others that provide for dynamic stakes:

A group of forest bandits intend to rob a caravan, so they unleash a captive warbeast as a distraction while their archers rain chaos from above (Infantry, brute, skirmisher)

A villain abducts an important npc into a carriage while their dutiful muscle run interference (controller, brutes)

A necromancer hurls curses from behind a barricade of gravestones while their undead minions pour from surrounding tombs ( Controller/infantry)

While the party is ambushed by an archer in a tower, a cloaked figure waits in the underbrush, waiting for them to thin out and begin picking them off one by one (paired skirmishers of different types)

After the fighter is tricked into single combat against the mounted arena champion, the rest of the party will have to search the crowd for the caster secretly channeling healing magic to their opponent. ( combined brute/skirmisher elite, support)

Once you've got your pieces picked out, you can start designing the battle arena taking the desires of each combatant into account while also throwing in any environmental flourishes you'd like to enjoy.

As an added benefit for DMs like me who don't have the inclination or budget to collect huge batches of minis, it's SUPER easy to pick up a second hand chess set or two and use them as stand ins. Your players will have an instinctive understanding of what each piece does which will help them understand the roles outlined above.

Artsource

[dailyadventureprompts]

Simpler Monsters = Faster Combat

Been thinking a lot about different ways to tune 5e the way I want it, and I was inspired by a recent chat about how bullshit CR is as a mechanic to ponder over how d&d does its monsters in comparison to other games.

What fundamentally slows combat down (both at the table and during prep) is the mechanical assumption that the monsters/baddies/npcs controlled by the DM have to function on the same mechanical framework as player characters: standard/move/bonus/reaction action economy, HP, AC, Damage numbers etc. While some of this is in the name of game balance, we can all admit that it's clunky as hell and could stand to be overhauled.

In a lot of ways d&d monsters are the way they are (huge stat blocks, a pain to modify/homebrew) because of the old wargaming/competitive/adversarial days of play, specifically in that every monster had to have a canon range of stats so that the DM coudn't "cheat" in the party's favour or against it. I think the pursuit of good gameplay has largely evolved past this obsessive need for objectivity over the past 50 years.

Once you run enough d&d you realize that monster stats don't actually matter. The baddies need enough offence to threaten the party and enough defence to hang on long enough to make the combat interesting, with the actual spice of the combat being tactics, goals, and special abilities. For several levels during an ongoing campaign (lvls 6-9) I swapped out traditional monster HP for gnomestew's "10 good hits" system. None of my players noticed the change, and suddenly my prep/running the session became 1000% easier because there were way less numbers to take care of.

Over the past couple years I've branched out into games using the PbtA and FitD systems, which run the combat encounters through the same gameplay framework as they do skill resolution. Fighting a demon to the death is mechanically the same as escaping away from an avalanche, and while this game design is quite elegant, I want to preserve d&d combat as the tactical miniature skirmish minigame that it is.

I think I'm going to start work on a combat hack, something that will let you port in any vanilla or 3rd party monster you'd like for theoretically any CR range. I'm going to wrap in some of the developments made by the 5e successors (daggerheart, mcdmrpg etc) along with my own ideas about how to make the system run smoother.