I have a recurring necromancer. Players have managed to unalive him once, but every other encounter he managed to get away. Players know that Orcus is the big bad puppeteering every campaign I've run so far, but none of their characters know. So first time they encountered again after his death, players were all like "wtf we k!lled him!" "Yes, you did. But he's back, roll initiative."
Great points as usual! Thanks for the video. Any further advice on how to prepare dynamic battlemaps for playing in person? Using various "base plates" seems a bit too much to prepare. Maybe changing the props on the background to 2D printable heroes props? 🤔
I'd like to amplify the Cover section because it's also useful for teaching new players. Sure, a melee warrior will rush towards an enemy in cover. What does a ranged combatant do? Well, in the real world they take cover themselves, then poke their heads out and wait for their opponent to poke their head out. That's what you do in D&D as well: Move into cover, then Ready a ranged attack. D&D feels like an artificial, I-Go-You-Go affair until players learn to make use of their reactions to act out of initiative order -- then it feels a lot more real. Also, they're more mentally prepared for when they fail a Perception check and stumble into readied goblin archery.
Thanks for this helpful video Malcolm! I notices my players tend to hesitate to interact with objects during combat. I placed a lot of objects to cover/hide/climb/push/burn etc. but they rarely use it during combat. Seems like they hesitate to use an action for it or just too focused on the enemies itself. Any tips to encourage them? Secondly, I also noticed if the battle maps is too big, they only use 10% of the map, so I think smaller maps tend to be less intimidating. I really love the ideas with the rewards,I will try it out, thanks so much as always 🙏🏻
I’m still a very new dm so haven’t done a lot of maps yet but I’m keen to try out a forest battle map with difficult terrain and a bunch of trees and stuff for cover
Great points! I’m always looking for good ways to keep my battle maps dynamic and interesting. I’ve often shared the story of the first campaign I ran where a low level party dominated a fight against multiple necromancers, a lich, and a horde of modified zombies. One of the key features they had was a choke point. The fight was happening in a castle’s banquet hall, which was on an above ground floor. All the bad guys were streaming into the entrance from a spiral staircase. Our hexblade warlock immediately positioned herself at the top of the staircase and cast darkness on herself (she had the devil’s sight invocation). All the necromancers had “animate dead” prepped to bring back up any fallen zombies ahead of them, but they all had to drop that spell in order to use dimension door to get into the banquet hall.
The dynamic map thing is why I struggle to use pre-fab maps with any notable features, and have since decided to just sketch the maps directly into my VTT of choice, or use objects for any cool things that are laying around. It's just the only real way I can make a dynamic map that works for my games, and whatever crazy idea my Players come up with next.
I spent 8 years in the military (Security Forces & Infantry) and profoundly appreciate the ability to exploit choke points, natural hazards, cover/concealment, elevation, obscurement like fog or roaring water to enhance stealth, etc… I have used rooftops, sewers, furniture, stock tanks, dead mounts, bridges/tightropes, triggered avalanches… Anyway, combat can be far more interesting than simply lining up like the Redcoats and trading volleys of fire. Consider creative ways to control a battlefield with fire, water, or wind. Can you drop a tree to create partial cover for your ranged attackers? What about using Mold Earth to establish a mound to fire from behind. Are there heavy wooden tables to tip and hide behind to avoid incoming bolts and arrows? Can you shove enemies off of a ledge or balcony? Can a caster create a Fog Cloud to conceal your repositioning? What about mundane options like a unit building a large smoky fire for the same purpose? I’ll stop there, but basically just get creative and exploit the environment. Manipulate it if needed. Even on an open field, a crossbow wielder could use their adventuring pack and dropping prone for some cover. There are always opportunities. You just need to spot them, or create them.
Elevation is so easy to forget but adds so much to encounters! It also validates feats, spells and character abilities which allow for more vertical movement that people not used to verticality in their maps might not have given a second thought. But that ability or spell that would have granted you a climbing speed suddenly sounds real nice when you have to spend two rounds doing nothing but running to get at the archers in the ramparts, all the while getting pelted with arrows.
Some very good advice, designing a combat has a low skill floor and a high skill ceiling - and with how long each fight takes, its really important to take time to design it in interesting ways!
Absolutely! And the thing I find amazing is how a good map can make pretty standard enemies feel interesting. Bandits on a road? No problem. Bandits in a well-fortified camp? A challenging combat encounter!
@@TalesArcane always a big fan of the "rope bridge over a pit in a cave, where kobolds are up on a ledge behind some cover parallel to the bridges, making you seriously regret trying to cross the wobbly bridge"
The Moriarty type figure is hard to do because you have to be clever enough to fake being a brilliant mastermind Video criticism: some of your sentences get a bit cut off by the music between sections Might want a cleaner cut between transitions
great timing! im enjoying your series of videos. im creating lore for a semi-homebrew world. my campaign uses an established 'off the shelf' setting (Thieves World) and im adding my own and making changes to suit the darker more epic story I am weaving. I also love the missing god troupe and am using this for a "Dark God' that has been banished from the prime plane. Priests who worship this banished god are working to free the god and return them to their place in the pantheon via dark rituals and human sacrifice. I have created a number of relics of the gods which are keyed to specific gods that exists and the party are on a major quest to find these relics and help defend a magical city that is under assault from an evil horde that are followers of the Dark God and seek an ancient tomb of magic which contains spells to summon all manner of demons, vampires allies loyal to the Dark God. I have created backstories for each of the relics and am only now creating details for 3 vampire races and 5 vampire lords. The vampire lords are banished from the primary plane but if they are once more set free then they collectively will have the power to summon the Dark god.
The two most underrated faction books in D&D are easily Guild Master's Guide to Ravnica and Mythic Odysseys of Theros. Ravnica offers ten guild factions with distinct themes, goals, types of members, and all the tables, guides, and prompts needed to run any number of the guilds as working against or with each other or the party. Theros has fifteen gods, and the churches of those gods get the same treatment the Ravnica guilds got. That's 25 fully developed factions and the tools to run them in all kinds of roles in the campaign, ready to be renamed and dropped into any setting you're running.
I have this "there are no random NPC's" rule in my games. As in I don't allow my players to approach a "random guard". Because no one ever approaches random people. They look around and see 5-10 guards. And then they pick one to approach. So the player will describe the guard they approach along with what they wish to accomplish from the interaction. "I approach the young guard in a brand new uniform. Looks like it's the first day on the job so I expect him to be super gullible and easily manipulated." Or: "I approach this old grey haired guard that looks like he's a week away from retirement. Someone who's willing to look the other way at everything and just wanna get through this week and maybe pocket a quick bribe." Instantly tells me a whole heap of how the player wishes to engage with the town as a whole, it takes alot of the load off of me by having me spend less time generating randos and it provides me with a steady stream of NPC's that the players actually care about because they had a hand in their creation.
For a resurrecting villain I recommend the Darkonda approach. Darkonda is a secondary villain for the In Space Power Rangers. He's a cruel and slimy Bounty Hunter. Always plotting to hurt enemies and allies. He was granted 9 lives by Dark Specter, the Gran Monarch of Evil in the universe. Darkonda is very powerful and very smart, too smart for the Rangers. But he still manages to die a few times, by underestimating the Rangers and their courage. He's also so untrustworthy that some of his deaths come from the allies he constantly backstabbs. After a few encounters, the Rangers become stronger and smarter and catch up to him. Darkonda finally sees the threat and as his lives are way too low, he becomes desperate and plays with fire, trying to betray every single ally, even the one that gave him his 9 lives. Finally his demise is poetic and feels well deserved by the Rangers, the audience and even his allies. Darkonda is such a slime that he makes you feel simpathy for other villains that happen to be next to him and have to work along side him.
This video is so helpful! Thank you! I finally see a path forward in how to get a new campaign up and running in a way that goes smoothly for both me and the players.
Not to make things political in this comments section, but the Obiden administration perfectly matches the description of the public villain (like Moriarty). 😂 New insight into what’s happening in our world! 💥
In my experience, having a villain escape even once can frustrate many players, but sometimes that's necessary. Much like it's Human nature to optimize the fun out of a game, players will often want to win constantly to the detriment of their own engagement and investment.
Once should be fine, if it's somehow interesting escape. But especially if many sessions have been spent tracking, preparing and getting to the enemy... I understand well why players might be "a bit" salty after the second escape.
A sidenote. Regardless of type, every faction is an interest group; they're there to do Thing. What is Thing? Why is that faction doing Thing? How is that faction doing Thing? And, last but certainly not least, who is their opposition and what are their motives? "But, wait!" I hear you say "What, How and Why are the exact same questions you ask yourself when writing an adventure!" Pre. Cisely ;) Factions drive conflict and plot, because they are made of *people* with motives and resources.
An example of real world cataclysms that erased written history is what scholars call "Hellenic Middle Age". We have (some) sources from *before* it, we have horseloads of sources from *after it*, but from the later second millennium BC we got next to nothing.
I have 2 in my current campaign. A hag that specialises in turning people into other things. She was the Warlocks patron and they realised she turned people into monsters (he was a plasmoid but originally a human) and could resurrect though them if she ever died. He had to break his pact so he could take her out safely. The second is an archmage. I mentioned he's rumored to have been killed several times and his body just falls apart into twigs and roots then he springs up later. They lost an intense fight with him, he captured them and explained he was a sulimulacrum. They would have lost immediately if it had been the real mage with all his spells. The trick for a reviving villain is to make sure the players understand the gimmick and can counteract it with planning. Turns it from hax to a story beat.
The campaign I am currently running will be checking off two boxes that I have been dying to play around with. First, the BBEG is a group of incredibly powerful supernatural beings, and secondly, because they merged their consciousnesses with an elder evil, they exist so long as that elder evil does and effectively cannot die. They seek to do its will, and will hunt down the party wherever they go unless the party learns how to sever their connection to their host.
I had a pair of sisters in a campaign that where recurring villains. I introduced one of them as a damsel in distress that after being rescued help the party get to where they were going… and right into a trap. The party survived the trap and managed to throw the woman from a tower and leave her for dead. Only to find out in a cut scene that her sister was part of the same band of mercenaries that trapped them and left her post to help her sister and both survived (the encounter was getting rough for the players and I wanted to reduce the number of enemies). Later in the campaign, when they contacted a town Thieves Guild to ask for help, the two sisters, one of them in a battle wheel chair now, were part of the help. They were forced to work together, but obviously the distrust made them fight again after the mission. The sisters managed to escape (I guess they fit in the escape artist bucket) and swear vengeance. Later, in the celebrations of that campaign arc, the sisters attacked the party with an airship, very fun encounter where one of the sisters died but the other escaped. Never got to use her again, but the party was always on the look out and where scrying for her constantly. Fun.
Just have the villian flee before he dies. You're the DM. If you want to complicate things: they had a thing that teleports them just before death. Or it wasn't really the bbeg but an impostor. Or it suddenly uses a power the party didn't know about before. Or the session was just a dream sequence the whole time. Or my favorite, he just didn't feel like dying today so he flips all off and says "screw you guys, I'm going home." Then he just walks casually away.
You mentioned how useful some of these are for horror-themed games, but it occurs to me that recurring villains are a great idea for games with a lighter tone, such as campaigns to run for children. It's possible to create an airy, lightweight campaign -- more Oz than Westeros -- where people generally get along, but some bad thing out there has been freed and is causing people to do bad things. The party have to deal with its attempts to fill the world with evil, setting back its schemes, but always needing to move on in search of a way to permanently end its influence in the world. You could actually make a campaign that feels like a 1980s afternoon children's cartoon this way, without necessarily needing to resort to murderhobo behavior. The players can be merciful to minor opponents because the real evil just manipulated them into being bad -- and the real goal is the Big Bad.
