Why Are We Fighting? 

It’s funny that everyone KNOWS, correctly, that D&D is built on wargaming bones. But, ironically, wargames used to focus on scenarios with victory conditions! D&D…DOES NOT!

I still remember the scenario in my friend's 4e game where we had to save an NPC from an aboleth lair, and I said "Our goal here isn't killing everything. Our goal is to get the captive out of here." The fastest PC ran to snatch and grab the prisoner while everyone else ran interference; it was one of the best combats we had in that game.

When it’s clear the bad guys have been beat, I ask my players “have we smoked the best part of the cigar?” And they always say yes. I allow them to narrate how they defeat the stragglers without rolling, and we just roll forward to keep the pace up.

I doubt you will ever see this comment, but I just wanted to say how thankful I am that you made that first RunningTheGame video. If not for your advice, I don't think I ever would have played Dungeons and Dragons. I was always waiting for the game to come to me. I never considered that I could run the game I was waiting for. You are an inspiration and gave me a great reason to meet with my friends every week. Thank you, Matt!

I think the Verbs video is also great for this! “Defend” the magic whatever machine; “Capture” the enemy lieutenant alive; “Rescue” the covert operative! My DM had our party owe a debt to the Bounty Hunters’ Guild, and those jobs came with bonus objectives. “You must fight the leader in a high-noon-style duel,” or “provoke a gang war between these two factions, so our assassin has the cover he needs.” And I remember those sessions very, very fondly.

"If literally all we want is to fight monsters, well, go play Gloomhaven." Curiously enough, Gloomhaven is FILLED with missions where the objective isn't to kill all the monsters. It's a fantastic resource for GMs to browse through to find some objectives to inspire them and reskin for TTRPG sessions

One of my favorite tricks for this is "bad guys make things worse in 5 turns". The ritual is complete in 5 turns, there's a ton of minions between you and them. Go. It's not the end of the campaign if they fail, just a bonus boss battle or something. The bad guys doing their thing not being a lose condition lets you make the timer much tighter. When the players enter the room and they see the ritual, I'll actually tell them they have five turns, crank up the tense music. Very fun.

I had a great moment where once my players were in the "win state" my husband and wife bad guys who were the sun and moon in an evil organisation based on tarot. When they realised they were losing the bad guys came together and locked their wedding rings together to make a portal. It became a mad dash to not lwt them get away and it seemed drama was on our side because they managed to kill the husband but the wife got away and she became one of my best ever recurring bad guys

Part of the problem is that D&D and adjacent games are not systems where every fight can or should have narrative weight. The boss fight at the end of the dungeon may be the reason the party is there, and can have alternate conditions for victory, but unless you want the players to go nova on the bbeg then you'll need to have anywhere from 2-8 encounters beforehand along the way. It's a lot to ask of DMs to think of a unique story objective for each of those. I think this is one of those issues where we really are reaching the limitations of the system. Want to play d&d? Acknowledge that its bones are a resource management dungeon crawling war game. Want every fight to be a Indiana Jones scene? Look into other systems.

It's amazing that after all this time, somewhat simple or straightforward advice can still result in "aha!" moments. This video is one of the best Running the Game videos you've done in awhile and has given me a ton to consider - I am definitely a DM guilty of too many "wipe them all out" objectives. I'm super excited for a design series. Thanks for continuing to share your thoughts on this awesome game!

This put some serious clarity on my previous encounters. I had a juiced up frost salamander terrorizing my players while they navigated it's lair. The whole encounter was just about them trying to escape. After a few rounds they started taking turns drawing its attention while hopping across platforms to get out. They used resources and took some damage of course. Though the escape was exciting for them. They felt like they won despite not killing anything. Gotta try and capture that drama in more of my encounters.

On the "waiting for your go" bit, the Genesys system uses initiative slots that can be taken by any player, which means everyone has to be thinking about what's the right time to go and talking about what's the best order to use their abilities. Makes combat much more engaging in my opinion

I think one of the things that made the fight against the Black Iron Pact so fun and memorable is that there was real danger to the PCs. The moment of victory and the moment all the BIP were dead aligned because each BIP member represented a real chance to kill a PC, and getting through the slabs of HP meant each character in the party was a little bit safer. The fight had *stakes* from start to finish, and so the players had fun. 5e needs better tools to balance encounter design, since most encounters either tip to victory too quickly, or threaten a TPK immediately.

I am currently running Red Hand Of Doom (cheers for tip btw), and the Battle for Skull Gorge Bridge was probably the best combat I ever run. I am not sure any of the enemies actually died. Just run in, blow up the bridge, survive, retreat. And it was tense, dramatic and entirerly badass.

This is the key I've been missing. Wow. Already thinking about how random encounters in the wilderness could start not with an ambush, but with an enemy stealing a magic item from a party member. Now it's not about killing everything, it's about getting the item back, which once they do, that would be the perfect moment for the remaining bad guys to abandon ship and flee.

Running games has been a really interesting experience b/c I had some hardcore D&D types in my first game as GM and they all had surprised Pikachu faces when a last surviving miniboss turned and ran down a Vietcong style tunnel system to light a fire alerting the entire dungeon. They managed to hunt him down in time but boy does introducing real tactics and strategy take some people completely off guard. I'm awful at roleplay but the combat scenarios and objectives are what I love designing and doing. A recent example was a spaceship with zero G filled with water canisters. When the players missed water droplets sprayed everywhere making visibility nearly zero. I had planned the encounter to be a brutal melee encounter but a player asked to use a console to turn on gravity and despite never thinking about it during prep I said yeah you can try. A few minutes later my players attached to the floor with mag boots in a firefight with an enemy squad in knee deep water on the ceiling. The objective was to stop the ship that was running their blockade. They could've gone to the bridge and gotten intel and ordered the ship to stop, but instead they went to the engines to shut them down. When they succeeded I reminded them that there was a whole other half of the ship yet to explore they opted to blow the engines and drift out into space for pickup because the mission was done. It's why I became a GM in the first place. I run the games I wish I could play and because I easily get bored and distracted, as DM I'm using every available preplanned resource to realistically challenge, surprise, and subvert player expectations.

I love that every time Matt makes a video it immediately improves my games. Can’t wait for Appendix M!!!

I normally have most enemies run away when the heroes have won and now just need to finish the fight, but normally they don’t get away because as soon as they do I treat them as minions. But I like the idea of adding more variation with encounter goals! And other great video. thank Matt

Killing every last bad guy is a mindset. Almost every encounter I prepare in my campaign has the losing group running away when the battle meets certain milestones (leaders killed, a certain number of the opposing side goes down, etc.) I like the idea of objectives in combat. As always, great content and a means to improve the games I run.

I ran a Lancer campaign a short while back. When I embraced objectives in encounters being the main focus, the combats got SO much better. Everyone was engaged and trying to figure out how they could contribute to doing "the thing".

One reason I love this channel and company isn't just because the awesome Running the Game videos but it really feels like this community and company is growing constantly, producing new and amazing stuff that makes the hobby feel alive. Thanks so much, you guys. And great advice, it really opened my eyes and now I wanna run an encounter where the goal is more objective-based like pull the levers simultaneously or retrieve the special book in the obscure language, all while the bad guys try to stop you.

I like using environmental timers. For instance; The PC's have to retrieve a relic from a room in a evil wizards tower that resembles a magical artic wasteland. Every 5-10ft they move into and through the room they have to roll saves or take cold damage+ effects. The more failed saves the worse the effects, like halved movement or points of exhaustion, until they freeze solid. If they are frozen solid they can only survive so long without air, so they might have to choose between thawing allies or their objective. Add a slippery floor, some falling ice traps and a few frozen undead to slow them down and watch them start to fine tune their priorities. They will magically start thinking outside the box trying to figure out how to stay warm or thaw an ally or just avoid the monsters entirely, get their objective and get out as quickly as possible. Environmental obstacles are extremely underutilized.

Hi Matt I was just literally at this very moment listening to some of your DM guides as I'll be DMing for the first time soon atter Christmas, and always enjoy listening to the Colville. Thanks for being a fun voice in cyberspace for us all

I’ve been trying to teach some of my friends about this. Dimension 20 does a great job of it.

I've used the surrender option for badly wounded NPCs before, and it's worked in my game, probably because I started it off in small fights so my players got used to it happening. Definitely going to keep the goal oriented encounter design in mind going forward though.

My friend did this once ages ago, and we still talk about it today. He gave the players a visual puzzle, and they could spend their action to try and solve the puzzle (it was like a code-master puzzle, get the tiles in the right order). Every turn he'd roll a d4 for how many murloc creatures came through the portal. Great video and a great thought to have before you put the players in combat!

Great vid as usual. Making combat interesting in 5e has been a recent obsession of mine due to all the problems you mention. I also recently did a post portum of my last nearly 2 year campaign, and this was one of the ideas I examined. In short, I determined the best way by far to make combat interesting - which you already allude to pretty heavily - is blurring the line between combat and roleplay via story context and more dynamic, interesting objectives than reduce enemy x to 0 hp. You mention retreat and surrender before somewhat handwaiving those ideas, but i've employed both regularly in more grounded scenarios involving other humanoids. I find that not only is dealing with the mess that those scenarios represent tends to be far more interesting than it otherwise would be with somewhat filler, less finely crafted encounters, but it's also a good excuse to end combat 1-2 rounds early when it's apparent to everyone at the table the outcome is all but decided, which helps because the last taste in someone's mouth is interesting roleplay and problem solving rather than attack rolls devoid of tension. Other than mechanically messier scenarios, the other thing i've toyed with a ton lately are the rest mechanics. I really think the current rest mechanics shove the expected adventure structure into a small box while also forcing DM's to do a ton of work coming up with contrivances to prevent players from spamming long rests in say, a dungeon. I'm more and more convinced the way rest should work is that a short rest should be "on the road" sleep (or sleep equivilant) of 4 hours or greater while long rests should be specifically 24 hours of non strenuous/non-adventuring activity in a safe, civlized area. I find this allows far greater varieties of mechanical and story challenges, and allows various characters to shine in different scenarios. Martial characters will tend to be relatively the strongest in long travel/high attrition situations like dangerous overland travel to a dungeon where 8+ encounters might occur before a true long rest, where spellcasters would shine in say, a surprise attack at a wedding where one can reasonably assume 1 or 2 encounters between rests. I've also toyed with a "baby rest" that automatically occurs after combat and allows for a bit of healing so i can do even longer treks without a long rest or raise the margin of error for players on a per encounter basis.

Thank you for all the content you make. I no longer DM or play but i watch these videos religiously because you have a wealth of knowledge and "There is no knowledge that is not Power!" - Mortal Kombat

One of my fav campaigns was about 15 years ago in a 3.5 game that my army buddy was running. It was an evil campaign (with no murderhobos) and each player had their own motivations which made it easy for the DM to have objective based combat encounters and promote inventive/alternative methods to advance our individual goals. It seems to be a lot easier to tailor towards individual objectives of a character than have a massive overall goal from the beginning. If each character is "Get this macguffin" and you have to kill this group because they have the item. Then you do that for each character and it just happens to be the same group or groups that have each item, that sounds like the beginning of a campaign to me.

I did this in the first small dudgeon (Goblin Dungeon) I had ever run and for some reason forgot about objectives entirely after that. Thank you for the reminder!

The Inquisitor (specialist game) actually included a four or five page pamphlet about how to quick start one of six different objectives and build a narratively meaningful encounter. No one anywhere else approaches that level of “turn the crank for something fun” except maybe the rng mission creation for Battletech by HBS.

In Torchbearer, you explicitly set the goal of the combat beforehand. E.g., Kill, Drive Off, Pursue, Capture, etc. And winning the fight explicitly *only* accomplishes the stated goal

I think the best example of this done in actual plays is Dimension20, almost every combat has another purpose or objective. It's really improved my combat design.

I've started running LANCER, which has a list of SitReps in the book which give a set of win and loss conditions for the players, and deployment zones for either side, and the difference between victory and defeat often comes down to the final round during the course of combat. It makes combat much more interesting than in the 5e campaign I've been running, where the only interesting combats are combats that involve important villains.

Thank you for putting my unformed thoughts into words again. My instinctual solution to fights getting boring was always making it harder, but then it just takes even longer. Tension doesn’t always equate to fun. One group I ran loved to be challenged, the other it drained the players. I feel objective based encounters would have pleased both.

Probably the earliest I've been to one of these videos and I know you read the comments, so I just wanted to thank you for your advice and the Running the Game series. Happy holidays.

I think part of the solution is morale rules. This isn't a perfect solution but it does remind players that they don't HAVE to kill everything to win. Another thing that can help is XP for treasure rather than XP for Monsters. Last thing I can think of is just bringing it up in the first session. "Hey, fighting every monster may not be the best solution in my game. A fair chunk of the time it is, but you should be aware that it is worth looking for other solutions. DEFEATING monsters is what gives XP, not killing them. Defeating might be saving their prisoners or stealing their resources or forcing them to retreat. Occasionally it might mean killing them all to the last man, but I'll make sure you know explicitly if that's the case."

I miss Morale checks from AD&D 2e(haven't played much before that so I don't know if they are older)! Then at least the game told us that if things go badly enough the bad guys might run, surrender, etc.

Teaching game design one video at a time since 2016. Solid advice for tonight's session and next years new rpg.

The DMG has a small list of sample objectives on page 81, for anyone who needs some inspiration. There's also a list of longer term objectives on pages 73-74

Thank you for spelling this out! I have been stuck in that combat 'slog' as both the DM and as a player. It is funny how something as exciting as fighting to the death can become boring.

Amazing, I never really thought about how the fight does get more tedious the longer it goes because you have even less things to do. I suppose the drama of possibly losing or dying can mask it depending on the situation, but it really is less and less exciting the longer it goes. I'm wondering it a new mechanic could be added for players who've reached a certain threshold of HP + Spellslots spent, sort of like special moves in Fighting Games, where there's something interesting they get to do once at the very end of each battle.

One old fallback I always rely on is to make the enemies do something dramatic. My players have knocked out the ghost king's skeleton minions and now King Andrias has all but lost the fight and he knows it. Well he pulls a knife on one of the player characters who foolishly wandered away from the rest of the party, and now suddenly its a tense hostage situation. The gargoyles' hitpoints are all but depleted? Suddenly the last gargoyle lifts one of the player characters and drags him higher and higher into the air until all they see is a spec in the sky. Doesn't work all the time, and often it feels like I have to do work to get my players out of the situations I've thrown them into, but so far I think they've enjoyed it.

My amateur solution I encourage everyone to steal is once the bad guys are mostly down one or two remaining grab a hostage and say "let us leave here or he/she gets it" suddenly your combat encounter turns into a roleplay/puzzle encounter. You've seen this in tons of movies players will have some idea of what to do

I did this in an arc called 'The Siege of Phandelver'. The players were tasked with infiltrating a city that had been occupied by an army of dragons and plant a number of gemstones in cathederals to set up a field of banishment that would banish this army back into the astral plane. Now, half of the party was made up of Lizardfolk and the bad guy, he was Bromraim, Champion of the Black. An ancient black dragon that used to be a great wyrm, but was defeated 600 years ago and banished to the Astral plane as an Adult Dragon. This isn't something that is put in the monster manual, but I found it in some lore pages I was reading, Some black dragons have the ability to control the minds of other Draconic creatures, including lizardfolk! So after they had infiltrated 4 cathedrals and lost a character to an Adult black dragon (At level 7! Bearing in mind that the party was split and the other two players killed one in 4 turns) the party went to scout out the final location, the Keep. Long story short, just before Bromraim joined the battle that was there to distract him and his army enough to make it possible for the party to infiltrate the city (which had about 3 different factions pouring most of their military might into it and they were still outmatched), Bromraim controlled the minds of the two lizardfolk, turning them hostile against their fellow party members. If you'd like the full story, I have it all written up in a shortstory style format, I can grab it and send it to people who are interested.

A great list of objectives is better for encounters than great monsters.

I was(and still am) an amateur DM. But the longest campaign I ever ran had only really three memorable encounters(out of like a dozen or so): A save the hostage situation where they had to negotiate with the captor while holding the hostage by dagger point. A countdown scenario where I gave them IRL a minute and a half to figure out how to shack off an incoming Roc (Giant bird) while the hitchhiker they picked up had it's egg. But the last combat of the campaign we played was the most interesting. Which involved a group of relatively weak cultists trying to summon a glabrezu. the party had to interrupt the ritual and kill the cultists before the fiend was summoned. Pretty straight forward right? Except that the ritual was a blood sacrifice and that any cultist killed within range of these blood filled birdbaths (For lack of a better description) would accelerate the ritual. and if half of the cultist were killed within range of the demonic birdbaths. It was (effective) game over. The fact that it took place within a claustrophobic room meant that there was very little space for the party to work with. The party had to grapple the cultists and count how far they could move at half speed to drag the cultist away and kill them elsewhere. and contend with the cult leader who I gave a single legendary action (one point per round) to ceremonially slit the throat of one of his underlings. the party actually managed to stop the ritual quite easily once they figured out the gimmick. but it was so memorable that they still mention it to this day.

LANCER, a TTRPG about mecha tactical combat, has a chapter on SITREPS, which are essentially wargame objectives. I would recommend checking it out for some inspiration. Some of them can be fairly easily translated into fantasy situations: protect the NPC mages casting a ritual, while the enemies pour in from the cave. Fight your way through the lizardman nest to the safe room across the hall, etc. These situations also make the game feel more epic than just mindlessly battling enemies, like Matt said. I would recommend adding weather effects in to spice up the encounter. An old memorable encounter I ran was a gauntlet where characters could not see more than 10ft away from them because of heavy fog, meaning they had to call out to each other and call out enemy locations. Just my two cents if you are interested in a more tactical game that will draw in your non-tactical players. (Also make sure your monsters are also using cover. Have your melee monsters run back behind corners to get out of the Archer's fire, etc)

Giffyglyph's initiative looks nice. It encourages teamwork, tactics, positioning. As for the video a lot, really, A LOT of times my players took humanoid NPC monsters as prisoners to get information out of them.

Bring back the 1E morale mechanic. Gives monsters a reason to run without being intimidated. Or, encourage players to make intimidation checks mid-battle. I let some players do it today, it worked great, shortened the combat, and got the players some answers. It really comes down to retraining both players and DMS. The game will never do it, we have to do it.

An adventure/encounter design series from Matt? That would be a treat!

Some of my favorite experiences in the biggest 5e campaign I was in were less combat-focused challenges. They easily could break into combat, and sometimes did, but things like figuring out how to sneak into a vault in the middle of a hugely crowded party, disable the guards without alerting anyone, and crack the riddle to access the artifact was some of the highest catharsis I (and probably my party members) ever have experienced. On a more combat note, there was another time where we were confronting one of the big bads, who was pretty well prepared, and figuring out how to disrupt his escape and deal with his mechanical guard dogs was a challenge inside the combat itself. Since he was a foil to one of our party members, he kept him busy one-on-one while we tried to make openings; and the end goal was to get him to surrender, so he could properly be put on trial, so the fight was never planned to overstay its welcome.

This is mainly a 5e problem. I am an OSR gamer, and I only DM for BX/BECMI. I have been a player in 5e, and I know from experience how tedious and complex combat is. It took two hours to fight three rounds. Action, Reaction, Contraction, and on and on and on. But to speak to the topic and offer a solution for 5e, I propose three simple "patches". The first is to adapt Reaction rolls from older editions. Sometimes the best strategy is to negotiate or intimidate. The second is to adapt Morale checks, also from earlier editions. Make surrender or fleeing viable and regular options, get the players used to it. And get them to accept it using the third idea I propose, which is to offer xp for treasure recovered and.or other objectives. Again, an idea taken from earlier editions. Sense a theme? And no milestone leveling. Experience points motivates players and can be used to encourage certain behaviors and actions the DM desires.

That gap between clear victory and the end of the fight is so important! A lot of people run very difficult combats every time because of this, which can get annoying, but I’ve noted the other side as a player more often, where it’s super obvious that these few monsters will get cooked by a couple spells and attacks. There have been combats that I’ve checked out of before they start because it is clear that it is just there to east spell slots.

Good advice. Enemies that run away can be a good way of giving the players a win. It can’t happen all the time or it gets stale. We can look at it from the opposite perspective, that monsters and enemies have their own objectives that are not to wipe out enemies or be wiped out.

Matt, let's be fair. The players at your table (and mine) think they must kill all the monsters in front of them because, if they don't, in the least, they'll just have to fight them later with even less resources, or worse, those monsters will be bringing in reinforcements/ warning their team that the party is coming.

I recently had a fight that was super popular with the players. They were killing demons and devils on a stage to entertain a crowd. The fight was real, the devils and demons came out of portals. The objective was to kill them in a flashy way to try and rile the crowd up. It was great!

It's nice to see how topics you brought up in your twitch streams turn into those short and punchy videos! My players arrived in a seemingly empty city on a faraway island, discovered only one or two decades ago. The people that moved there to live new lifes were nowhere to be found... if you didn't count corpses. The group spent a few days exploring the city, until they encountered a group of armed lizardfolk. I was at the time very bad at encounter design and threw way to many enemies at them, but one of the players cast a fog cloud, so four of the eight enemies got disoriented. I rolled behind the screen what they would do: two of them found their way through the fog in the second round, but the other two fell into the river. When the two lost guys found their way to the fight, they just witnessed the last of their six brethren dying. They looked at each other in a moment of 'analsis paralysis', before deciding they should better be leaving. This moment alone was funny enough to my players to feel rewarded for winning that fight. A few sessions later I used an action oriented lizardfolk warleader to challenge them. He stated he wanted a 'fair fight, leader vs leader'. He was totally overpowered for a single one of my players, but one decided he was the leader of the group and entered the one-on-one. After he lost about half his health in one attack, the rest of the group joined in. The warleader was furios. The cheering crowd of lizardfolk got angry as well, started throwing spears, but the warleader ordered them to stop interfering, that this was his fight and he would crush those fools alone, being the one-man-army that he was. The fight was very dramatic, the killing blow and what came after was astonishing. The crowd wouldn't believe it, some ran, some didn't know what to do at all, some started attacking the group. The PC that got the killing blow shouted at them in draconic. They were so intimidated they lost all morale and ran. Both of those fights were situations where we could have just continued fighting until one side was no more. In the first one, I decided it was enough and in the second one they just felt like they couldn't lose, even though the numbers clearly went against them. They had also no way to retreat if the enemies decided to fight on, but every single one of the enemies would have to face the fact that they would probably die if they got too close in on the action, numbers or no. It's often hard to decide when the optimal moment to end a battle would be. In the second one you could logically argue the enemies should have kept on fighting, but I thought about that fight for a while before the session even started an I thought this was the most dramatic way to do it and I think my players had a lot of fun doing it like I imagined it would go, without them knowing I had planned it exactly like that.

My favorite DnD fight was when the DM put us in a museum looking for three artifacts and he told us that in three rounds he would have a group of cultists come in. So one character continued searching for clues while the others set up an ambush, and once combat started everyone was constantly chasing cultists around the building. It was a mad scramble of balancing dealing damage with stopping their movement while also looking for the artifacts ourselves. It definitely took our DM a ton of prep time because they had the entire building’s floor plan including exhibits and what various plaques said, but man was it satisfying when we managed to get all three McGuffins and jumped out a window while the last two cultists were caught in Web.

A system I've been playing recently, LANCER, seems to fix this issue pretty handedly. In LANCER, 99% of the time your mission objective is something separate from "kill everything". It could be an escort, moving someone from one side of the map to another- It could be an extraction, taking something from one point on the map to another- It could be defending an objective point, keeping enemies out of it for a specific number of rounds- Things like that. LANCER encounter design frequently uses reinforcements and round limits to apply pressure and give players different objectives, and it even helps encourage the players doing things they normally wouldn't, like fleeing from combat; You can always try again if you retreat to fight another day.

The players may THINK that they want to run in and fight to the death because of danger and stakes and all that, but I think what they Really want is the stakes of feeling that they are playing real people in a real world! A real world where you Do pay attention and creatures Do want to live to see another day.

Already going to put this into action with the hot open in my upcoming campaign. The idea before was to land on a beach and clear out a lighthouse of the undead minions of a lich, so it can be their base of operations in attack said lich's island. Now their goal will be to put up wards around the lighthouse that keep the undead out. I imagine this small change in frame of reference will make the battle much more enjoyable, and give a plausible the reason the hordes of undead leave them (relatively) alone afterward. Great video and already useful (which I know is why you do these).

This is one of those videos that you can come back to before prepping a session to get the juices flowing. Thanks a bunch, MCDM. Have a nice and relaxing Winter break!

Thank you Matt for putting into words the exact thing I've been feeling in my recent games. An example of this from my own time as a player and as a DM: My friends and I are entering the last session of a heavily homebrewed Curse of Strahd, and the DM of that game has done this in a significant number of combat encounters. I would say less than half of the combat encounters we've faced were fights to the death, and the best ones often felt more like problems to solve. "Cast greater restoration on the insane wizard". "Rescue the innocent woman from the evil druids". "Escape Castle Ravenloft alive with the artifact you need". Contrasting this with my own Dungeon of the Mad Mage I run for my family, I didn't stray too far from the module, and it became a slog nearly a year ago, and hasn't lightened up. Every "problem" in the dungeon often has one solution: roll attacks and throw spells until everything in the room is a quivering pulp. It's not engaging to run, and only marginally engaging to play when the players change up that formula and go against the adventure's design. If only this video had come out two years ago, that module may have been salvaged. I'll be using this mindset for future encounter design in my games, and I think it will change how I run the game as a whole.

Happy "early" holidays Matthew!

When I feel the scale has tipped... I'll start asking for the "how do you want to do this" cinematic. Basically "okay guys this is the final round what's your character doing?" Sort of like right when the mighty nein defeated ukatoa matt asked for some cool thing they did. Wrapping up rounds like that has seemed to keep people involved. When you drop an inspiration die they seem inclined to participate as well

At my table almost all the encounters I throw at my players is deadly/overwhelming. However, I would always put in something that would allow them to turn the tide. Whether that be “find and kill the enemy leader”, “Do (Blank) to collapse part of the building.” “Turn the enemy chasing you against the one blocking your way.” Etc. the first few times I gave them hints. Then they just started looking for the solution as soon as battle started. So the whole table was working together and strategizing the whole time. Often they would figure out solutions I hadn’t even considered. It was pretty cool.

Matt I just want to say I appreciate each and every one of your videos. Thank you, and your team, for all the hard work you do!

"I suddenly remembered my Charlemagne, 'Let my armies by the rocks and the trees and the birds in the sky.''"

i think this is another case where the old school games kinda solved it already, but later editions broke it. In old school dnd, the objective was always the same: get the treasure. Enemies didn't even give XP, gold did! This made combat incidental; you fought to survive and get the treasure, so it was OK if the enemy ran away or you have to retreat, as long as you got the gold in the end. I think if dnd brought some of that energy back, it would help fix this problem a little.

I really enjoy your videos because they make me think of sessions I’ve already run players through, and how I could directly apply the ideas in the video to make those past sessions more dynamic. You have a great way of encouraging the creative juices to flow without directly saying, “hey do this exact thing!” 😃

I will never forget in our 4e game where we had a conspirator to the crimes of a subsect of the church of Moradin that was corrupted in our custody. The objective keep him alive to get to the hall of law in this dwarven city. The complication: we had an entire church worth of dwarves and their constructs against us, as we were the bad guys (no one knew of the corruption), and only one city official ally on our side, who couldn't support us out in the open at the time. It turned into a running game of survival first, killing only the things in our path, and keeping the party warden alive, as he was able to keep the conspirator alive, but he had to eat two hits for AOE attacks every time (they were trying to kill the conspirator at this point as he was a liability). It lead to one of the most tactically "stupid" moves of our warden leaving combat to get the guy out, while we held off the final encounter with no Daily powers left, it was amazing. That still lives in our party's memory fondly, and I think the clear objectives were a large part of it.

The most awesome anti-slog rule I know is from Feng Shui. Sorcerers have access to a lot of spells, but if they have to look at the book when it's their turn (ie, they didn't decided what to do when it wasn't their turn), casting a spell takes two turns instead of one. So basically, the Sorcerer has a mechanical incentive to be invested in the battle and plan beforehand. I so much love Feng Shui.

The DM should.... 1) Use more minions so that it doesn't turn into a slog. 2) End the battle when the "drama" is over. Tell the players they kill off the remaining goblins without too much trouble. Hand-wave a few rounds of combat. Solves the problem!

thnk you for all Matt, every time a felt let down with the DM thing you lift me up again with new ideas

I love these videos because they always help me to remember (sometimes) basic engagement tips like these. I always try to optimize my players’ fun, but sometimes I forget or lose sight of ways to do that

I'm surprised you wouldn't at least mention, even if not focus too long on, the fact that earlier editions did XP for treasure and had the morale system. You've talked about it before, so maybe it seemed like retreading old ground, but I think it ties into this topic decently well; the objective in older editions wasn't to kill all the monsters, it was to get the treasure and get out alive, which, *could* be achieved by killing everything, but that was usually not feasible without a lot of risk or employing an entire mercenary corps to put overwhelming odds on your side, so usually you were incentivized to find an alternative to straight up combat, and you could kinda choose your own objectives as long as they served the ultimate goal of getting the treasure and getting out alive. Obviously the ethos in 5e tends to be pretty different, and the systems don't entirely support that without fiddling with a handful of things, but you could still look at that for inspiration--heck, milestone leveling is already more popular than XP for monster killing, based on what goals the PCs are pursuing, you could like, lay out for them some smaller objectives in service of a wider goal and be like, "If you do 3 of the things on this list, you get a level, doesn't matter *how* you get 'em done, and it contributes to the thing you're trying to do in the narrative/world anyway." But then, coming up with the specific objectives might be the hard part, though at the same time, usually if you've got a developing narrative already rolling, a lot of times it's kinda obvious what could be done next.

Sorry Matt, not even you can get me to play B4B over L4D

I have been spending my last few days watching interviews and DM tips from many people and I have heard you many times. So now I am here and for the first video i have seen. Ill be here quite a bit.

One of my go to's when the objective is "kill all enemies" and I realize we are getting into slog territory, I have the enemies explode. Sometimes literally, sometimes not. Like the cultist rips out their eye, holds it up, and screams "Lord of Worms, witness our Destruction!" As they turn into a Pilar of Flame casting fireball centered on self. But even then, you can only do something like this so many times before players catch on. So don't do it every time. You want them saying "oh God!" Not "ugg, this again."

Leaving 5e was my solution.

The fan wikis for basically any turn based strategy game like XCom or Phoenix Point are goldmines for mission objectives and ideas BECAUSE THATS WHAT WE ARE PLAYING.

I agree with this. My favorite encounter of all time was from a the Dragon Age TTRPG with a homebrew campaign. We were travelling the Deep Roads and we accidentally triggers a Darkspawn swarm. As we were running we came up to a cliffside that we needed to climb in order to be save. Me and my gf at the time were being the tanks as the rogue climb to the top and sniping them from above. The mage was struggling because he had no strength or climbing ability. All the while each round more powerful darkspawn would appear and each time we took damage we had to make a save in case we got infected. It was extremely intense because we had an objective of we could get to the top of the cliff and each round we delayed it would up the stakes.

Thank you Matt for your wisdom and insight. I love the ideas you suggest to help with this problem. I've noticed the same thing at my table. Players check out unless it's their turn. Thank you so much! You are a plethora of knowledge! Thank you so much!

The Sentinel Comics RPG utilizes a Scene Tracker for every significant action scene that goes from green to yellow to red to the PCs failing the objective and bad stuff happening. The amount of rounds the Scene Tracker will be in a certain color zone depends on the nature of the scene. When the scene transitions to the next color zone, something significant happens in the scene and the players may even use different dice and have access to more powerful abilities to denote the nature of the rising tension. Really cool stuff.

Matt, thanks a bunch for your videos. I started with D&D as a player some 4 years ago and then, because I couldn't find a group to continue playing in, started considering DMing, came across your video with the one-shot, ran that a couple of times. Then LMoP, then CoS. Up until recently I've been perceiving 5e rules pretty religiously and, admittedly, while players do have fun, I would frequently get burnt out with prep. These running the game videos and discovery of the OSR scene have probably been the reason I fell in love with running the game again. Thanks!

I'm currently running a West Marches campaign (thanks for the inspiration for that btw!) with an old-school megadungeon in it, and if there's something like a random encounter that reaches that point where the heroes have won but there's still enemies left, I have said before "ok we can wrap this one up and assume you guys kill off the few remaining guys without using any resources". It's a bit of a blunt tool, but it does help reduce slog and let the players get to more in one night. I do appreciate the advice to add objectives to combat as well - I am definitely too guilty of running only "kill everyone dead" combats, but if you're in one of those and it's a lower-stakes combat and you reach that point where the heroes have won, I don't think there's anything wrong with just saying "ok you guys are able to finish the rest of them off."

A great video - hope it sparks some ideas beyond my own..... to MCDM and all the crew you work with - many thanks for 2022, and have a great break, be as festive as thou wishes and I look forward to seeing what 2023 brings :D

I really feel my growth listening to Colville now vs when I was first learning how to DM from his videos and it's gotten to the point where I can see the solutions to the threads before he finishes the tapestry. Yet every time I can still see the power in acknowledgement so value is still here. Thank you Matt for years of tutoring

Great video, Matt. You probably know this already, but the game master section in ICRPG does a great job with designing objective based encounters, using timers and other cool techniques. It really changed the way I think about room design, encounters and yes, combat. As an example, in our last session, the PCs had to obtain a specific book from a multi-level library, guarded by a creature that could only be harmed by fire. Of course, attacking it with fire set the place ablaze and I gave them d4+1 rounds to grab the book and get out before the whole place went up in flames. All the while, they still had to contend with the guardian, who was now trying to avoid the fire as well. It was a blast.

I love your videos Matt. I first ran 5e with a single friend and I was DM years ago now, thankfully I had very creative player who helped a lot with keeping combat fun and made up for my lacking DM skills and sadly he did fight a bbeg and it turned into a grind, while he enjoyed most of it the last post of the session fell short. Your videos along with other great creators have improved my skills a lot, I just need to play more now; for the experience.

Yeah, great advice again, Matt. Going now to think about the encounters I have planned for next session...

My personal opinion is that the way turns and initiative works makes the player feel like a passenger when it's not their turn, and the DM feel like a waiter waiting for an indecisive client. I don't know if it would ever be viable, but I want to try a "all players act simultaneously" type of thing one day, as chaotic as it may be; It would present its own host of problems, I'm sure, but it sounds fun and I think it would incentivize the players to work together in a tactical way.

I like these little rpg vignettes Matt does. They're good for writing just about anything.

This is very solid advice. As a new DM, this gives me a lot to think about. Thanks so much!

Just recently I had a DMs meeting and in it I said I didn't like random encounters that I always wanted them to have some meaning to the story. I wanted other DMs to understand that, you very eloquently said it in this video. Well said and loved the Flee Mortals...will be using the Vampire in my next session.

This was awesome advice! Simple, to the point and effective👌 Really helped me to realign my understanding of conflict when planning my games. Thanks and greetings from Germany!

I've been waiting for one of these videos for a while now! Thanks!

On this topic, I actually used a combat scenario when my players were getting bored during their travel to a prepped dungeon. They stumbled on a larger-scale conflict between a group of goblins and a group of kobolds. Their objective (to win) wasn't about fighting monsters, but was more about crossing the battlefield to make it the last couple of miles to their destination. They succeeded without killing all the monsters, and made it to the dungeon. After the session, a few of them even told me how much they enjoyed that random encounter, and after really thinking about it myself too, I could see how it made the world feel more real to the players as well; by showing them that even groups of monsters come into conflict with each other and not just the players or 'civilized races'.

It's rare that I can watch a 12 minute video and think, "Implementing this will make me a more effective GM." Your insights have built context for a lot of my observations in-game. Thank you.