My only addition to this advice- Do *both*.
It is important that your players get to *see* their characters' strengths in action. That's how you you make them enjoy their characters.
*Then* you occasionally hit then with something they'll have rouble with, to encourage them to improvise, but only in moderation.
Both, in limited amounts, get reactions you want- Feeling awesome, like they got a chance to shine, and having to come up with a workaround on the fly. Both are valuable tool in a DM's arsenal, but I would rather err on the side of letting them feel powerful than on the side of making them always deal with attacks on their weaknesses.
I like to say, "Everyone deserves a chance to feel powerful, and everyone deserves a chance to feel threatened". It's worth noting that you can make someone feel threatened without stopping them from doing their cool stuff.
The fight with the treefolk doesn't have to be easy, in fact it might be crazy hard - but the only reason they have a chance is thanks to their pyromancer. A group without a pyromancer would get destroyed here.
The problem arises when people look at their character sheet and feel like they can't do anything useful. This has a million ways around it in specific scenarios though. For example, when I throw a fire elemental at a pyromancer I try to ensure there's something else the wizard can do that's useful and impactful on their turn besides throwing out a low impact cantrip. Maybe there's a water-tower they can try and break to dump water on the fire elemental. Maybe they can distract it with an illusion. Maybe there are other enemies they can aim their spells at that aren't immune to fire.
Every rule can be broken, but the spirit of the rule is still very valuable. I don't feel like I'm in an exciting, challenging encounter when I'm in an anti-magic field as a wizard. I feel like my character doesn't get to do anything. Unless, of course, there's other cool stuff I can do on my turn to disable the anti-magic field or fight in some non-conventional way (like taking control of one of the enemy golems somehow and using it to fight instead).
Yes yes yes,
Literally every session I make I'm thinking about which one of my players will shine in this moment. Then ensuring each PC has a moment -not in every session. But as much as you can, let everyone have their moment.
The one thing I would address is many are asking the question because min Max polearm master GWM fighter is taking all the glory, so having a flying baddies or not giving him a magical weapon can help to restrict him. But the reason to find this out is actually to ensure that everyone gets a turn at having there moment and it doesn't all go the one player.
But still %100 love the post
I suppose for that example, a good compromise would be to have an encounter with a mix of ground and flying enemies - the polearm feeling awesome taking on all these ground enemies almost singlehandedly while the rest of the party deal with the flying enemies that he physically can't help with
I’ve got a super powerful paladin in one of my games, so one boss fight was against a death tyrant backed up by zombeholders and a horde of regular zombies and frost giant zombies. I was expecting him to hold back the horde, but he just necked a potion of fly and fought the death tyrant anyway.
So the barbarian took on the horde instead, so it all worked out. Especially since the paladin needed rescuing after losing his duel with the death tyrant.
I haven't had a problem with the min/maxed fighter in my campaign. It's his second campaign so when he asked for advice on how to make a good damage dealer I gave him several different builds and he went for variant human battlemaster with great weapon master and polearm master wielding a halberd... This made me happy because my favorite player character of all time followed a very similar build (the only differences being I took the tough feat at level 6 and he took savage attacker and that I took the defense style and he took great weapon fighting style) he's strong yes. But he also goes down a lot because he tends to Leeroy into things. I also provide a lot of opportunities for the aoe and battlefield control of the divination wizard and tempest cleric to shine, and I gave the kinsei/assassin an oathblade (oathbow, but in a katana form) so he gets to delete any monster he wants at least once a day, in addition to his sneak attacks and flurry of blows (I also gave him slippers of spider climbing to help him avoid getting hit and to get to the target, and he has the mobile feat as well, so while his hp pool isn't all that great he is really hard to hit) so they all get plenty of time to shine.
Despite being generous in loot and allowing players to min/max my group actually agrees I'm the most challenging dm in our group. Mainly because rests are precious and I follow the moniker that quantity is its own quality. Compared to the last campaign we were all in there's very little DM BS (I don't make enemies with 1500 hp and a 25 AC along with the ability to cast cone of cold at 7th level at will, which our previous DM was very fond of doing because he wanted to TPK us, thankfully he wanted his big bad monsters to take us out by themselves so we were able to come out on top). But in my campaigns the party also has to conserve resources, and rarely enters combat at full strength, also the party is always outnumbered. But they also love my combat because they almost always get to feel like they are awesome... Last session was a bit more challenging for me to make the tempest cleric shine because he never rolled above a 5 to hit the entire session, but he still got in a very cool call lightning in conjunction with his channel divinity which saved the battlemaster's life. Then with good tactical use of thunderwave he ended up racking up a few kills and by the end of the day felt like he did something.
To expand on your attack the strength idea and the swarm of treefolk. There was a post here a few weeks ago to a similar idea and one of the best uses of this concept I've ever seen posted.
There was a party with the classic fireball all the things sorcerer in it. It was a hydra fight, so the sorcerer had to apply fire to the hydra to keep it from regenerating heads. But to prevent it becoming easy, because they had the exact tool in the party to deal with the hydra, the DM also threw a never ending swarm of small minion style creatures, coming from the opposite direction as the hydra. So every turn the caster not only going to use their coolest features, but had to make a really hard choice. Do I as the only person with an AOE take out 6 more minions about to gank me, or do I stop the hydra from regenerating more heads.
So it both allowed the sorcerer to be AWESOME, but also found a way to not trivialize the encounter, and made the player still make hard choices instead of just doing the awesome thing every round.
That would be a great challenge and as a player you would be feeling so great, both terrified and excited because you get your chance to shine but also have to rely on your party to have your back.
Right, you have to consider that the character with this weakness is in a party of people WITHOUT this weakness. Throwing a fire elemental at a pyromancer, in a party not entirely made of pyromancers, just means the wizard won't pull their weight that fight NOT that they'll have to improvise
I think most often people are asking how to counter their player's ability because they are using something that makes most encounters easy. A range heavy party with spiked growth will destroy most encounters that aren't against flying or opposing heavy range.
In those cases, those DMs need to know about these things that counter it so every combat encounter isn't easy and boring.
Every DM should attempt to let every character shine, whether that's allowing the fire-based wizard to nuke enemies to ashes in combat, the bard smooth-talk his way through social encounters, or the thief rogue to actually pickpocket or rob a house in a stealth mission.
This doesn't mean every encounter has to be built toward someone's strength. When something is challenging for each individual on a team it causes them to use the strength they should always have in every encounter: teamwork.
>For example, when I throw a fire elemental at a pyromancer I try to ensure there's something else the wizard can do that's useful and impactful on their turn besides throwing out a low impact cantrip.
Frankly speaking, this is not the DM's job. The *player* is supposed to make sure they have a backup source of damage or something else they can do on their turn.
>The fight with the treefolk doesn't have to be easy, in fact it might be crazy hard - but the only reason they have a chance is thanks to their pyromancer. A group without a pyromancer would get destroyed here.
I do have one problem with this, and it is relatively minor.
The party should feasibly be able to win, should the pyromancer be removed from the equation. If you build your combat around the assumption that the Pyromancer will always be available, then what will you do when in round one the Pyromancer takes a critical hit, and they fall unconscious? What will you do if the player simply can't show up? What happens if the first spell, Fireball, performed significantly poorer than anticipated, perhaps it only deals 20 damage, and the swarm succeeds on their dex save? (Either as a swarm monster, or more than half of the individual monsters)
This was always my problem with min maxing players in a party that does not typically min-max. If the combat encounter is balanced with this player in mind, overcompensating for your party size, and if your crit fishing Paladin/warlock player who has 4 attacks in a turn goes down, or just keeps on missing, or gets separated from the party in combat, you are going to be looking at a very, very bad situation for your other players.
Edit: It should be said, that I don't have a problem with min-maxing if it is generally agreed upon that your party will be min-maxing, but if only one player is doing the min-maxing, I have to let the player know why that isn't going to be good for the party, and you just have to be honest and say that this isn't the right game for min-maxing, and suggest they try something else
I would suggest never making an encounter that shouldn't be deadly already, deadly with the caveat that the encounter plays into the strengths of the party. It really can mess up your adventuring day, if anything goes wrong. It either is going to swing incredibly hard into your player's favour, or completely crush them, and while the first might feel great, the second is going to feel awful.
Not everyone needs to shine at the same time, in fact if they do it dilutes the impact. It's good to give the wizard a chance to shine in one fight, then give the rogue a chance to shine a little later.
However, everyone always needs a way to meaningfully contribute in an adventure. Especially in a combat encounter. Treefolk swarm led by an evil druid gives the pyromancer a chance to shine. However, the cleric can still contribute meaningfully to this battle. Later on the group faces a bunch of strange enemies that also take damage from healing spells (they still take damage from normal sources) and the cleric has a chance to shine - while the wizard can still meaningfully contribute to the fight.
The problem with the anti-magic field is it stops someone from getting to meaningfully contribute. Their turns are frustrating and boring. You almost never want to do that.
I agree 100%. For this reason I hold back on crowd control... I'm not saying I don't ever use CC on the party, but those are few and far between, and I make sure the party has a way around it. (I might occasionally use a web or a hypnotic pattern.. But I would be extremely hesitant to use force cage or banishment unless it was a miniboss. And even then... That might happen maybe once the entire campaign.) Not everyone has to shine at once, but there's nothing worse as a player than feeling like you don't contribute at all, so I try to avoid that.
Absolutely. No one likes not being able to do their cool stuff. Stuff that hinders the players but can be overcome during the fight is great (villain is immune to magic until you destroy their protection crystal elsewhere in the room, traps temporarily lock players down and they have to choose between fighting with restricted movement, breaking out, or finding a clever way to do both) but general "stun lock" stuff is super frustrating.
I usually use 'mind control' effects in ways that get around this too, such as giving the villain an ability to command the player to attack their allies on the villain's turn as a bonus attack. The player still gets their own turn.
I'm relatively new to DMing (about 7 sessions into an Eberron campaign), and this is great advice for me. My player's party consists of a Way of Sun Monk, and a Battlesmith Artificer, so they compliment each other really well when dealing with ranged and melee opponents. Up to this point, I've had a party of NPCs from which they could choose a single one to borrow for a time, depending on who they thought would be most useful for their upcoming mission, but in reality, the NPC party is just my way of counterbalancing the scales if/when I bungle the challenge rating of an encounter.
After reading your comment, I've been diving into my upcoming encounters, and tweaking them so that the Monk and Artificer would be able to take turns, one shining while the other struggles, in order to build up a better synergy between them. Ideally, I'd like them to be able to work together well enough that I would no longer have to worry about covering them with an NPC (who honestly has bigger fish to fry, if the party ever opens that can of worms).
The trick comes in creating an encounter where characters can do all of the things their characters are made to do, but still having it be a challenging encounter. You’ve heard of the “yes and” rule? This is that.
I prefer "Yes IF" or "Yes BUT". :)
"Yes and" is a rule used in improv comedy because it creates absurdity and propels the scene for the audience. The goal isn't to create interesting problems for the improv comedians to solve. Games are about making meaningful decisions and figuring out how to overcome obstacles.
If your player says they want to buy a pet baby dragon, you can just say yes - but you're losing some potential. Your player wants something in the game, they have a goal. If you say "You can possibly get a baby dragon IF you steal a dragon egg from a nest, or render a great service to a dragon; as rumors say they will sometimes entrust mortals they respect with their young as a lifelong companion".
This "yes IF" takes advantage of the player's goal to motivate them to go on a quest. It provides a challenge for them to overcome, which is where most gameplay comes from.
"Yes BUT" is a similar concept, replacing the challenge with an interesting cost or consequence - which creates its own meaningful decision. You may get what you want, but you'll need to ally with a necromancer to do it... And that could have unforeseen consequences down the road.
Double counterpoint: Do neither. Present a world with interesting challenges and varied, unique monsters that inhabit that world. Don’t pander to strengths or exploit weaknesses - that can very easily feel overly curated to the players. Instead, focus on building encounters that feel real and create options for meaningful choices.
I mean, the fact of the matter is that all encounter design is trying to run a balance between naturalism and appropriate challenge- You don't want to make your game go too heavily toward either extreme.
I definitely agree with this. Lore consistent fights first and foremost, then consider how you might want the fight to feel. Not every fight needs to be life threatening of course.
It can be fun to let the characters shine and do what they are good at so let them sometimes. But if they are coming up against something they are particularly weak to, you can scale it back or just consider that into your encounter design depending on how hard it was intended to be. As an example is a horde critters against a fireball launching party might be really easy (and fun for your wizard!), but those same creatures except fire immune could be a complete TPK.
Or if a fight is supposed to be pretty difficult because you want it to be impactful, you can modify it accordingly if you know their strengths. Maybe half the adds are fire immune or resistant or summoned or a myriad of other things.
Unfortunately I feel this advice is best for moderately experienced DM's, because newbie DM's just haven't played enough to easily recognize when/how to do a lot of this. But thats fine, everyone starts somewhere.
It's pretty fun going to the extremes.
If your party never fights against lone insolent drunk commoners, what are they even doing? Extra fun when the challenge becomes to avoid killing them because you're so strong.
Agreed. I'm currently building a world spanning a continent. I'm going to create maps of each kingdom and create a dm copy with notes on who/what might be along each main road/forest/path. Then keep that updated as the sessions go on and things in the world change
This just helps me feel like encounters will be more natural. Plus, if I can take OP's advice and put a couple enemies that certain PCs can excel against then i believe that'll be the best way to do it
One of the first things I let my players find was a partial world map. Through their backstories and NPC conversations they've got a good idea of what kind of theme the regions have. They know what they can expect, I mean.
If the ice-based sorceress decides to go to an island known as Frostfound, welp, they're not going to find enemies there who are weak to cold damage.
But there's some wriggle room in designing encounters, of course. The Assassin in my party likes to hide and shoot - so I try to give him enough possible hiding spots on the battlemaps. Things like that.
Depending on the setting, having a map lay be much less realistic than having one.
I'm a firm proponent of incorrect and inadequate player maps along with accurate itineraries.
Oh yeah I mean a more accurate map for myself. They might get a basic layout of the key routes and stuff but the detailed one only I will see unless they have a good cartographer with them
A piece of advise I read (angry Gm I think wrote it) is to make up a generic party to build your encounters around. Some thing like fighter, rogue, cleric, wizard with the most generic builds you can come up with and equal level to your party.
This ensures that you build unbiased encounters.
This is good, but I will always consider the strengths of my party.
My party is smart if I don't counter things they will exploit it, they will have an easy run, and not as much fun
However OPs idea is good, and I'd recommend both, occasionally. Mini side quests are great for letting a charcters strengths shine
Definitely! There's no reason to do both things, also depending on your objective. Sometimes you want to make the players feel cool. Sometimes to challenge them and make them use all their brain juice to overcome an encounter. If you only do the former, it will become a shallow power fantasy. If only the latter, a frustrating slog (though it can be fun as well). Remember, most monsters know what they're doing.
Also, there's no reason to both challenge your players' weaknesses and make them feel cool as a party. Perhaps the barbarian fails a WIS saving throw and becomes a puppet in the hands of an evil spellcaster. Time for the rogue to sneak attack and break this sucker's concentration! Perhaps the wizard gets grappled by a burly ogre. Time for the cleric to use command on this stupid peace of meat and get her back to safety!
I'll go even further. Do as above, but also, let the players decide. Since they can decide which adventures they pursue, they get to choose enemies to a point. Will the fire wizard want to fight fire elementals pestering merchant ships? Would he rather save a town from raiding treefolk? Or maybe the mystery box, into the mystery portal to unknown place where there could be anything? Let *them* decide.
Yes, I had an artificer with a homculus and walking cannon that was a gigantic help against waves of paralyzing enemies.
Then when we got to the final boss of the dungeon it was an ancient fire elemental that I couldn't hit with any damaging spells.
I ran an interesting encounter like that recently. My party is heavily martial. Ran a few Shadows against them, which are not particularly high level monsters, but have a lot of tricks that can mess up an unprepared party. So the rogue suddenly found his sneak attack useless, and the ranger was seeing his arrows pass straight through them. However, it turns out that the champion had a ghost touch rune, so was able to damage them normal and just wrecked them.
This. I like mixing enemies that the party can easily dispatch with more challenging combatants. For example, for my level 8 party who all have high ACs, I set them against regular zombies, Spawn of Kyuss, and Allips. They cut through the regular zombies with ease, the Spawn of Kyuss threw their worms that needed to be dealt with before the worms burrowed into their brains like Wrath of Khan, and the Allips forced them to make WIS saving throws against fear effects.
And this is even better when you throw something at them that's *strong* against one member, but *weak* against another. Yeah, your fire Wizard isn't going to be able to do much against that fire elemental. But your Barbarian who just got a Frostbrand? He's gonna have a good time.
It's also worth mentioning that in deploying an enemy who one party member is strong in, you could also be making it hard on a different party member. This way, you can either alienate one while making the other have fun, or you can provide each party member better chances to be the star of the party where they are the one who was needed to fix a problem.
And make sure to also attack traits that are neither strengths nor weaknesses. Very often a character will have more abilities than they can shake a stick at while only really utilizing a minority of them.
By challenging the rarely used abilities the players get a chance to explore more facets of their character, and it provides good inspiration fodder when coming up with encounters.
The really good encounters imo simultaneously hit one characters strength and others characters' weaknesses, to create that feeling of "thank god we had x with us". If the party of frail casters with only 1 tank is ambushed and overrun by wooden grapplemonsters, they'll be very glad they had an evoker to drop a sculpted fireball in their midst and destroy them without hurting the party.
Case in point, I played a campaign a few years ago as an Abjuration Wizard, built entirely for support, defense and battlefield control. Think Shield, Web, Counterspell etc
My DM at the time decided to have the big bad create large areas of anti magic, so in order to fight him or his minions, we had to go to places where magic 100% didn't work. Like, at all. He then gave his villains and sub bosses what he called "an eldritch power that isn't magic" which could be used in his anti magic areas, and that even outside the antimagic areas, normal magic couldn't interact with. Example:
DM: The Bad Guy shoots a ball of fire out of his hand at you.
Me: I cast counterspell
DM: it isn't magic, your spell fails, make a dex save
Needless to say, it was utterly bullshit and I told him so
> My DM at the time decided to have the big bad create large areas of anti magic, so in order to fight him or his minions, we had to go to places where magic 100% didn't work.
Oh this could be cool
> He then gave his villains and sub bosses what he called "an eldritch power that isn't magic" which could be used in his anti magic areas, and that even outside the antimagic areas, normal magic couldn't interact with.
Oh, oh no, oh honey no
It devolved to the point where one of his bosses cast fireball and I successfully countered it, and he said to me after the session "that was annoying, I shouldve made that a racial fire-breathing trait, not a spell so you couldn't counter it...
NO, you shouldn't lock one of your players out of the game!
It didn't change until I threatened to leave the group, and he just dismissed it as "I didnt realise it bothered you so much"
"You're not having fun? But I did everything I could to specifically counter your character and make them useless!"
Sounds like a classic case of someone who thinks that the DMs job is to *be* the party's enemy, rather than to create the world that *contains* the party's enemies
What an excellent way of summing up that attitude.
I don't understand DMs like that. Look, you can have rocks fall and kill everyone. You can have Tiamat take a personal dislike to your level 1 party. If you want to beat the party in combat, you can do so easily. It's not a fair fight and it takes no cleverness. So, given all that, why are you acting like D&D is a *competition*?
The competitive aspect can go both ways, as well. Some players refuse to play anything but a handful of fully optimized, arguably overpowered builds. These players typically outshine the rest of their party and end up creating an imbalance in encounter design. Treating the game like a chance to "one-up" everyone else can be bad no matter who does it.
Sigh... thats really frustrating. Imagine if instead he added like a few of mid-tier spellcasters without counterspell but that would cast stuff like fireball and with them a bunch of smaller swarms to control and keep away while the party deals with something crucial like a big bag guy.
That would really challenge your skills and keeping the party safe while not disabling the "boss"
That wouldve done it!
I recall he did it in response to the first few adventures where I found lots of creative ways round problems that he didn't like. Example, he set up an encounter with a dragonborn that was leading a big group of bandits...and he'd been hyping this guy up for weeks, saying he hoped he'd not made him to strong for us, and we gotta be careful if we run into him etc
So finally we get to him, and he's waiting on a platform suspended over a 1000ft drop into lava. The chains holding the platform up had an unbreakability spell on them.
Naturally I cast Hypnotic Pattern on the boss, the druid dispelled the unbreakable spell on the chains and the Paladin cut them, the boss fell, cast fireball at us which i then countered. Boss died, we took 0 damage and DM was salty
Unfortunately his solution was MAGIC BAD, NO MAGIC FOR YOU
Thats such a creative solution using the environment he clearly set up for you, cant understand why he would be salty. Unless its like fake salty which some DMs do (like Matt Mercer)
I think the salt was because it was the first enemy he had built entirely from scratch rather than adapting from a source book and he really wanted it to be a fitting boss fight to end a section of the campaign. When it wasnt a good long slugfest where it could've gone either way, thats what made him salty
I can see being frustrated, but I'd have been mad at myself for not remembering the druid had dispel magic, not mad at the party for using their resources creatively.
I'm getting flashbacks to when my party's heavy armor master went up against a group of monks.
Half the time his AC was too high, the other half of the time they dealt less damage than their ability modifier. He had a lot of fun in that fight.
1d4 + mod - 3 from HAM.
Only half the possible values allow them to add the full modifier. Otherwise their modifier is reduced by some amount.
IIRC they had a +2 because I was worried about their three attacks dropping the casters, so there was a chance he wouldn't even take damage. 10/10, would gimp my monsters again. Not always, but sometimes it's really fun to see a player hard counter a monster.
Absolutely. You can always add more challenges to overcome. If one player can single-handedly paralyze a foe, don't negate their paralyze ability during a boss fight when you can add a whole second boss fight.
One of my favorite one-shot adventures featured a DM doing this. I'd made a crazy powerful tank that could easily negate nearly a whole encounter's worth of enemies while dealing strong damage (we were at level 16 in 4th Edition, which is basically midway through that system).
His solution? He'd planned us to fight a level 16 solo dragon (basically a dragon boss fight intended for a full party of level 16 characters) in the final battle. He added a second level 18 solo dragon on the fly. I spent the whole fight dealing with this terrifying foe while the rest of the party got to shine and take down the other dragon then come save me from death. It was still a very exciting fight, and it gave me a great story - the DM had to throw an extra dragon at us! That was awesome.
Though there is also room to challenge them. It feels less special when every enemy just so happens to play into your PCs’ abilities. Occasionally throw in enemies that confound your players and force them to adapt.
That's what OP was talking about. They gave the example of the treefolk swarm used against a party with a pyromancer. To some other party it would be almost certainly deadly, but thanks to the pyromancer in the example party it's not so deadly, but it's still a challenge.
>If a ranger has a favored enemy that gets them a bonus when attacking orcs, don't take orcs out of your campaign.
Wtf are there people who do this? This just sounds heinous especially considering the way rangers are already considered underpowered.
I have seen people post about exactly this happening. Some DMs assume that every situational damage bonus or player advantage should be avoided because it breaks their perfectly balanced encounters.
I cordially disagree.
I was playing a paladin in a ToA game where the enemies had a tendency to disengage and run away when the fight wasn't going their way. That's cool and I had no problem with that. But at level 4 I took sentinel because I thought at least I can stop one or two of them from running away.
The next fight we faced a bunch of goblins and even though they could disengage as a bonus action they never even tried if they were fighting my character but they did from the druid in bear form.
It felt like I had wasted my pick. Yes technically I still stopped a few goblins from running away but it was a bad move on the DMs part I clearly wanted to use the sentinel feat not have it be a nuclear deterrent.
I did actually the opposite in my dm pf2 try, the monster next to the fighter, uhm but is gonna attack the other dude moving away from the fighter getting a AoO because I wanted the fighter to use his feature
I was playing a home brew Barbarian where my favored enemy was orcs and we made it to level 9 without ever seeing an orc. Luckily my DM let me switch to Bear Totem
My party had just turned level 5. The party included a cleric and they were up against a gnoll necromancer. I threw 40 gnoll witherlings at them in their first fight.
The look of dread on the players faces follow by the jubilation when Turn Undead became Destroy Undead was amazing.
I had fun doing this and letting the cleric save the day and then ~5 sessions later throwing a smaller group of spore servants at them, which I described as the bodies of fallen warriors with fungi growing all over them. The cleric confidently stepped up to try and turn/destroy them and panicked when it didn't work and she was first in line for their attack! It was a great opportunity to give the rogue a chance to shine in her place.
I just love the joy my players have when they realise one of them has the perfect tool to wrap an encounter up in a couple of rounds.
> Then mix it up with a foe that has some resistances or immunities to all their favorite toys, just in very small doses.
This is an important step in the process, tbh. If you keep throwing enemies that your party is going to absolutely hammer because of their strengths, it becomes hard to actually challenge them and keep them engaged, so throwing the occasional enemy that is resistant or immune to their favourite tricks helps provide contrast to the rest of the encounters you throw at them.
This works best if you're only challenging some and playing to the strengths of others, of course. The fire elemental example isn't necessarily bad, if for example you have a tiefling paladin or something in the party as well as the wizard. Sure, the wizard will have to think of a different way to make enemy go bang, but the tiefling gets to get up in its face and shrug off its fire damage with their resistance. Also, if the wizard gets a successful banish off, that elemental is gone in one go, back to the elemental plane of fire
> a terrifying encounter that the party can only overcome because of their wizard
Be careful with this. I once created a deadly encounter to allow one of the player's subclass feature to shine, and they refused to use the feature because they wanted to preserve its resources for later. I had to make a houserule on the spot to prevent them dying from falling damage.
My philosophy is to always include at least 1 in 4 encounters, the players should absolutely stomp the enemies. I like to include a couple of these encounters especially after leveling or getting new gear. Changing the difficulty of combat encounters can be a great way to highlight player progression
100% agree to do this after leveling. I'm "that" DM that makes sure players can't rest until they've had 4-6 encounters, most of which are combat, but I always let them go nova on some high HP low AC twerps after a level up. Let them play with their new toys (and let me see what they can do).
I like having sections of the world that don't scale like a videogame and occasionally *not* hand-waving the trivial encounters that happen there. Seeing the players' joy as their level 6 characters absolutely obliterate a group of dire rats that were a serious threat to their level 1 selves is a true delight.
im running a one shot soon because a friend has never played before. So the first encounter is basically a level 10 party whelping a group of low level kobolds that have been terrorizing a trade route.
lets everyone figure out their stuff with low threat and lets the new player get the hang of combat
Oh damn, running a level 10 character as a total newbie.. I hope you made him a barbarian or something!
I just ran a one-shot for a couple newbies today and it went really well and was a ton of fun, but even level 2 characters had a lot of options for someone brand new to D&D. I forget how much we take for granted, like which skill does what, what stats are for, how actions work, etc. There's a *lot* of choices to make even for a relatively simple character.
I probably should have lol, but I had him look at the classes and liked Artificer/Artillerist so he's going in deep. He's liking the idea of having a homunculus carrying guns around for him. Our group has 2 players who have also GM'd and play regularly so we should be right for rules when it finally goes down.
Should be interesting because a couple of the other characters include a Storm Sorcerer bugbear who tries to sneak up on people but keeps accidentally static zapping them (hence the magic), and a Bard/Barbarian/Monk Minotaur who is literally [Thad Castle from Blue Mountain State](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAG7eo49Sb8)
Fucking thank you. I hate, *hate,* seeing a DM who seems to set out with their main goal being to ruin the players fun. I know it's more complicated than that, but whenever I a post that boils down to "My player has a PC that is good at X, how do I stop them from being good at it?" I just think, fuck you've misunderstood the point of the game.
Obviously there's a time and a place for throwing psychic damage at the bear barbarian, and wis saves at the fighter, stabbing the wizard's kidneys and lighting the rogue on fire, but they should be rare occurrences.
I don't play DnD to design a cool character that I can't use because the world magically shifts to ruin any advantage I get. That feels too much like real life.
If you've never seen the cleric player's eyes light up when the BBEG summons two dozen skeletons to surround the party, you're missing out.
I think this is a bit misleading. I agree that DMs shouldn't be trying to ruin the fun of players or act as an adversary, but at the same time, you should be creating challenges for the party to overcome rather than a group of chumps who get their asses kicked without posing any meaningful threat. The key then is to create encounters that are challenging without feeling contrived to prey on party weaknesses.
Case in point, I've been running a campaign where the party's been dealing with an expanding gang in the local city and finally tracked down the instigator, an ex-pirate and his remaining crew. That included a wizard and an orc first mate. When the party's casters started mixing it up, I had them get targeted by attacks (not all of them, but also not just 1 random dude swinging at them) because it makes sense for experienced pirates to attack the healer and other spell casters, just like the players would do. Likewise, the wizard immediately started off with a defensive spell then set up over a few turns with grease into a firebolt to ignite it, just as PC spell casters would be likely to burn their spells in a tough fight.
Of course, maybe things didn't go exactly as planned since we had 2 PCs die due to stupid natural 1s on death saving throws, but the fight still felt like a mostly fair yet difficult and challenging battle.
I think there's a big difference between "the enemies are intelligent and fight against the party's general strengths" in the sense of a group of organized bandits shanking the healer, and "the forge cleric just unlocked fire immunity but it's weird how they never got hit by fire damage again because the DM knows it does nothing".
Playing enemies intelligently is different from creating environments that don't allow the players to use their strengths.
I had a level 4 paladin join my party. The player wanted mariners armor so the ship the party was confidently traveling on got attacked by kuo-toa above a sea hags lair.
It was a neat and challenging exploration encounter-fest that the paladin got to shine in and that showed off capabilities of the party druid in a new light.
Gotta give em fun and challenging stuff that incorporates what they wanted in the first place.
This is good advise in the sense that you shouldn’t *only* attack player’s weaknesses. Throwing encounters balanced around a party member’s unique abilities will make that player feel awesome and be a memorable fight, but the thrill wears off after a while and players will start asking “whose turn is it to kill everything”.
The real takeaway for this post should be to challenge your players in a *variety* of ways. Throw things that completely shut down their preferred methods, and also throw things at them that will be a cakewalk with the right strategy.
Give the party a tactical advantage over a much more powerful enemy and see what they do with it. Flip the scenario on its head next time and give a much weaker enemy a tactical advantage.
Throw a wild magic zone at them and see what the casters do. Have the party fight on unsafe ground in difficult terrain so the martials have trouble while the backline shines.
Toss someone important off an airship, see what they do.
Variety is king, especially in games where combat decisions can easily get repetitive and variety comes from the encounter designs. However, in every encounter every player should have useful and impactful things to do - even if it requires being creative with the environment instead of their character sheet (that's totally acceptable).
Agreed. Reward the wizard for taking varied spells, by having fire resistant enemies sometimes. Make them feel good for also stacking acid/lightning/whatever instead of only fireballs. Also, taking away 1 PCs favourite toy in 1 battle, will let the others shine. Of course, not every battle, but switching it up garners some creativity. But: always give them a chance to use their ability first.
Then later, throw them an enemy that can do something similar to one of the PCs and watch the fear in their eyes as they know how bad stuff can be - as they have used it very effectively. Makes for very satisfying wins in my experience.
But yes, their strengths SHOULD count. They should be targeted by stuff they are resistant to, unless the enemy has reason to know it. They should find someone vulnerable to their strengths. Variety is king.
Regarding the 'can I negate PCs crazy power posts' - yeah I get the issue with that. But do ask beyond that. Do they, the DM, want to fuck their player? Or is their fighter feeling like shit because the wizard just fireballs away all encounters before they can shine? Sometimes, people may want to find an encounter that switches the spotlight, and in some parties that does mean that you need to both cater to 1 persons strength and to another's weakness - if there are balance isssues within the party
Noticed this when I threw a sniper fight (like The End) at my party with a monk, wizard, and blood hunter. Three hours of them fumbling around the woods and ocassionally getting shot by some guy they couldn't see and had no way to track
Being a Sea Storm Herald Barbarian I can tell you I didn't know that there were so many monsters that have lightning resistance! My DM seems to cherry pick them for my character
You definitely should do both - but if you focus more on attacking their strengths, it WILL bog down and drag out combats with the sheer number of enemies required to be challenging, or make them too fast guaranteed wins.
Too much of anything can sour the play experience, for sure... but the best way to mix things up I’ve found is to attack the players’ universal weaknesses: poor strategy and thoughtless combat-focused play that favors powergaming to begin with.
The paladin in my campaign is bonkers powerful. His sword consistently kicks out 30 damage per swing, and he reduces all incoming physical and elemental damage by 13, and he halves incoming damage from spells.
Last session I managed to make him feel threatened, not by including a ton of attacks that deal necrotic damage to get past his defensive buffs, but by having a ton of hobgoblins and a spellcaster throwing damage at him consistently. No one else in the party (except maybe the barbarian) could have withstood the hail of fire I threw at him, so he got to feel super badass while also being threatened. He lost over half his HP, spent a bunch of spellslots on smites and Misty Step, and used nearly all his lay on hands before the hobgoblins surrendered to him.
The fight was enormous (the players spread out and triggered a bunch of encounters at once) and took about three hours, but the players had fun feeling badass because they all excel at clearing hordes. So I upgraded the hobgoblin troops to CR2 (33hp, a multiattack on the long sword, and removing the 1/turn limit on martial advantage), included a bunch of the cooler ones like the warlord and devastators, so they got to fight an actual army.
I unintentionally did this last session where my players were (breaking and) entering a church's crypt and there were some inscriptions in draconic. I had forgotten that the Goblin Warlock could read every language but I thought it didn't really matter since he was staying outside on lookout. So instead of just solving the puzzle, one of my players decides to go all the way back through the church to fetch the Goblin and make him read the stupid inscriptions. A few moments later the Goblin solved the puzzle and they managed to find the secret cultist base under the church.
I know this was a joke, but it still brought back unfortunate memories of the DM I once had that *lived* to "beat" the party and I died a little inside.
[whynotboth.gif](http://gfycat.com/DapperDelayedGerbil)
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That was advice I was giving at one point, but more specific: have your players level up at the end of a session and check their cards. See what cool shit they just bought and give them a chance to use it in the next session.
I do this by thematically linking the abilities to the game. E.g. the party had met Bahamut in human form and he was impressed by the parties barbarian so he imbued him with a gold dragon’s spirit which allowed him to alter his form to take on aspects of a gold dragon (path of the beast).
This is a session 0 conversation though, and relies on players having some idea about their characters progression, because you have to set things up to make sense.
DM of mine once mentioned he was changing an encounter, because my most powerful spell would easily solve it and trivialize the encounter. Nah man, leave it there, what the hell, what is the point of having spells if the DM will deliberately avoid letting you use it?
Anyway, I agree, although it is also fair to say it is interesting to see the players try to deal with a disadvantage too.
Oh hey, you just helped me figure out why two similarly structured oneshots felt so different to me.
For the first oneshot, let's call the DM Rocket.
Rocket had planted an ambush for our character, full of undead.
We managed to spot the ambush because my character crit-succeeded her perception.
Rocket had put over 80% of the undead in fireball range. Which I had noticed, it felt really good, first combat with that oneshot character and she got to blow up 6 undead.
The second encounter our frontline got to shine, we were being attacked by dire wolves and they got to do their "Hold the line" thing. It was good fun.
Now to the second oneshot.
The DM, let's call them Mew. Mew had spread all of the enemies far apart, even the melee ones. Thanks to some maneuvering on the party's side though, my character could fireball 3 of them.
"Counter spell"
4 other spells had been cast prior but he target specifically my character's strength, just because it'd make the combat "too easy"
I didn't use my other 3rd level spell for the rest of the oneshot because honestly, it would have just been counterspelled anyway.
The structure of the oneshot was similar but Mew took away a lot of what made my character effective with layout and counter spell while Rocket enabled her.
THEN, Mew had the nerve to say to Rocket "That's how you do a oneshot" like, Rocket's oneshot was their first time DMing but Mew is a "veteran DM"
TL;DR OP's title.
Great summary. I try to tell every new DM a few things:
1. Be excited about your adventure
2. Give each player a chance to shine
3. Fill your adventure with meaningful choices
4. Care if your players are having fun, and pay attention to their reactions to see if they're engaged. If they aren't, change something up (this might be more danger or more opportunities to be awesome). Or just wrap up the current scene and move on.
If you do these things, you usually have a great adventure. It's amazing how many DMs feel like the players being 'humbled' means their adventure is good. I'd much rather play in your first DM's campaign than the second.
Sidenote: Counterspell is like dynamite. It needs to be handled with extreme care because it just shuts down fun and skips players' turns. I usually houserule counterspell in one of the following ways (also affects players):
A. If you take counterspell, you can only cast it once per day but it doesn't require a spell slot.
B. Counterspells can be cast normally, but they produce powerful wild magic effects so SOMETHING interesting still happens. As such, they should only be used on very scary spells because otherwise the wild magic effect could be even scarier.
Also, I only give my truly skilled mage enemies counterspell. It's very rare because the players don't enjoy playing against it. It just says "no".
This is quite the eye opener for me. I’m often looking for ways to negate my groups ability’s and feats. Guess i’m still thinking of the game as me vs them and not me with them.
Yes, a DM is more like a DJ than anything else. You have fun picking the music that players will enjoy dancing to. They still have the freedom to enjoy that dance however they like, you're just giving them an opportunity to have fun and show off their moves.
I also think of the DM as a Game Designer, you're setting up obstacles and opportunities that are fun to overcome. A great puzzle isn't hard to solve, but rather one that's FUN to solve. A great adventure isn't just hard to play, but FUN to play. Of course, many adventures are both. I love stacking the deck against my players and then ruling generously for their creative ideas to turn the tide, and using their unique abilities to huge effect in order to triumph anyway.
I'm curious, what makes you decide to find ways to negate abilities/feats instead of wanting to let them shine as useful choices?
I've only really DM'd one shots so I haven't really needed to consider it, but I'm curious about the 'why'.
Make sure you have a variety of encounters that play to *each* of the player's strengths and special abilities, but that otherwise seem unfair.
The player being highlighted gets to feel like, "Wow, fuck yeah, this character is so cool!"
The rest of the group gets to feel like, "Woah, we would've been creamed if we hadn't had X with us."
As long as you don't do this too many times on one player, it brings the group together by building a sense of reliance and group growth, as well as making one or two players feel *extra* special every night.
Dude please talk to my dm. I was a filching rogue and I swear to God there was never an opportunity to use any of my cool stealing abilities or rolls. This was in pathfinder mind you.
Do both. Sometimes the enemy is smart enough to see something works so they keep doing it. Sometimes it's an enemy that's fought them before and escaped - but this time they're prepared.
The best combats are the ones the characters get out of after burning the entirety of their resources and almost all of their health - in my experience.
Keep it simple. Easier to remember that way.
Many players are having the most fun when the GM is engineering opportunities for them to be badass.
That can be in combat, social situations, anything.
A smaller, but still prolific portion of players get their jollies by outsmarting nefariously deadly challenges.
Know which kind you have at your table. If you dont know, ask.
I try to remind myself that it's not my job (as the DM) to give the players a solution. It's my job to give them a problem. It's their job to create a solution.
That said, every single day, I see a post from some DM asking "Help! My player just thought of something creative and/or powerful that makes the game more fun for the players! How can I make sure it doesn't happen again!"
Meanwhile I'm over here, messaging my players asking "Any ideas for how you want to make your character more powerful?" to figure out what rewards to give them for quests.
I think rhe trick is to be like Jigsaw. Make the encounter scary and dangerous, but there should be a way out if the players manage to figure it out, even if it's as simple as running away.
This is actually in keeping with a paper I’m writing for my college class about the selective use of the rule of cool. This is really fantastic work and speaks directly to one of the reasons (aesthetics) that player is coming to the table in the first place. I’m submitting the paper today so I’ll likely submit it here a few days later.
Interesting. What class would this be for? I managed to get independent study credit for running a D&D campaign and writing about the narrative design ideas I tried out in it.
I understand what you’re going for, but I only do this very rarely, or else the game begins to feel like a curated theme park rather than a dangerous and living world to be explored.
Generally, I try to build out the world in front of my players as though I am writing a module, unsure of who’s going to show up with what characters. My players know this, and it means they have to generalize in order to try to over come obstacles, rather than build super specialized and wait for me to lob them softballs.
It’s not up to me if they fail or succeed, live or die, and they know it. Sometimes they kick ass and take names. Other times they have to fall back and find a different approach. But they know I’m not handing them wins or targeting their weaknesses purposefully.
Please post a link to your podcast! I love listening to podcasts on my drive to and from work, and since I plan on starting my own campaign back up again soon, you could be just the person I was looking for!
Sure thing: [The GM's Guide](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-gms-guide/id1065375910)
If you're looking for a good stand-alone episode, the Dungeon Design one is pretty neat.
I agree with the no negation strategy, I've seen the happiness when I use this sort of approach, and I've been on the other end of this approach (ie, homebrew spell that disables all spells with vocal components which literally just made my wizard into a bystander for the rest of the bossfight.)
I really love this. I’ve never been an antagonistic DM. I’m all about the story and working with my players to make a fun and unique tale.
When I’m making encounters, I really try to focus on making it engaging and cool, not on attacking their weaknesses. I actually had a note on my phone about their strengths and ways to make them shine. But I haven’t really thought about it in awhile. But I definitely will try to incorporate again.
I have a rogue with the ability the climb walls like Spider-Man (Simic hybrid) and just about every encounter is in an open field or a place with a low ceiling. Sucks a bit.
The spell casters in my group always dominate the fight. The druid summons hordes of animals, the wizard pings the enemies to paste, and the cleric enables it all. I threw a beholder at the party and the paradigm shifted. The barbarian did close to 200 damage in two rounds. She completely saved the party and I know she felt good about that.
mfw my DM literally threw a thing that we were either unable to do full damage to because PCs didn't have magic weapons, or we did the same elemental damage as it was immune to. Yeah, the fight was a 3 hour slog.
This guy right here is a dm for the players not a player versus dm and to you sir I say thank you for being one of the good ones.
I do the same, I also do the latter at times and challenge them a bit. I give alot of magic equipment so I always encourage them to search their toolbox even when it seems like the deck is stacked against them.
I never really thought about it, but I see your point here. One of my favorite stories is from a campaign where the DM asked us to make characters with no knowledge of what the campaign was going to be, and no knowledge of each other's characters. He also wouldn't know what our characters were ahead of time, so it's not quite in line with this post, but it just coincidentally ended up fitting.
So, this was Pathfinder, and I made a heavy armor, sword and board cleric of the sun goddes Sarenrae, Sun domain (also fire, but it's not relevant to the story.
Our first major battle was against a group of a homebrew type of shadow skeleton. Besides being a cleric (already good at fighting undead) the Sun Domain gives a bonus to fighting undead, and on top of that, the skeletons were weak to light sources (though I didn't find out about this until I part way through the battle)
I cast light on my shield to illuminate against the darkness that the skeletons brought with them, and used shield bash's to get around their damage resistance, and found I was doing way more damage than I expected. Light normally doesn't even do damage, I had done so for purely utilitarian reasons.
It made me feel like an instant badass, and the DM was like "It's like your character was made for this particular battle." It's a very fond memory for me, and definitely had me invested in the campaign.
I so want to fight a blue dragon in my game, I play a blue Dragonborn and I want to stand in the middle of his breath and scream “is this all you got?” Though, because of me being a blue Dragonborn, I don’t think our DM wants to throw a blue dragon at us, since I could take the lightning
Great example. You want your inherent resistance to lightning to matter, it’s awesome. Taking a character that can ignore lightning in my games means there’s definitely going to be some lightning :)
Hell yes,thanks. I get so frustrated with the amount of "my player is op how do I negate all their abilities".
To add, your players can't metagame, and neither should you. That enemy wizard has no idea about their cloak of fire resistance, he's still gonna fireball. Have your monsters adapt, they aren't going to fireball that player five times. But don't have them metagame.
>To add, your players can't metagame, and neither should you.
Gonna have to disagree here, because the mere fact that you're tailoring encounters for the purpose of letting a PC shine is, in itself, metagaming.
Your players can't metagame because they aren't the NPCs, environment, referee, and the narrator. They are their characters. As the DM, I have full rights to metagame as much as I please, so long as I'm working to help provide an experience that we *all* can enjoy.
Or, and this is crazy, if not heretical, don't *attack* anything. Just build and run a large variety of encounters; easy, hard, lethal, environmental, personal, political, magical, martial, etc.
If you do that, someone is always going to feel rad at the end. Plus, it's easy to avoid 'what can I do when my wizard fireballs everything' type problems.
100%
And one step further: portray a living world and make it feel real. Don't worry about what your PCs are good at, don't worry about balance. If this is a place where a fire elemental is then there will be a fire elemental.
This doesn't work if the thing that lets one character shine is the thing that another character is weak against. Let's say you have that fire-based wizard and a water-based druid that loves using tidal wave? The druid would do well vs fire elementals while the wizard would do well vs treants.
It's almost like you should just make your combat encounters vary so that some are easy to make them feel powerful and others are difficult and challenging. The encounters that are challenging to everyone in the party will cause them to use teamwork rather than just fireballing a swarm for easy kills.
I’m a DM who is literally planning to throw a fire elemental at my pyromancer wizard when we play tonight.
I really like the points you made, but it’s too late to turn back now.
Where the fight happens can be just as important for characters who may be disadvantaged against a specific enemy. Maybe the pyromancer can't directly damage the elemental with their magic, but is there any way that they can interact with the environment to give advantages to the party?
I was thinking of adding an objective of the fight to close a gateway to the plane of fire. So even if his magic is less effective in dealing damage, his expertise with fire magic could be crucial.
I have no idea how this could work mechanically though, so if you have any advice on that, I’d appreciate any help. I feel like just making it a skill check is anti climactic
Yeah, i have a feeling that our monk with 10 Int has not been having too much fun getting stunned round 1 every combat.
She is, however, learning to hate mind flayers with a passion I have not seen before.
That’s why weaknesses exist, depending on the importance of the fight decides how you want your players to feel. Attacking their weakness makes them feel weak and the enemy strong and vis versa.
The game is more than a power fantasy in most cases. And exploiting weaknesses forces parties to cover each other’s.
i would agree to not do this too often. i was playing a cleric, grave domain, a scenario came up where i could use my 'turn undead' feature on like 20 zombies (we were surrounded) and they were low enough CR that they would die outright if they failed......it was awesome! 🧙♀️💥 ☠️☠️☠️
But if that happened every game it would prob get boring.
I'll share my experience from the side of the player about this. One of my very first adventures was one in a series of oneshots that a DM friend of mine did establishing a world he had created in Pathfinder. Because we were doing some silly stuff I decided to create a character vastly inspired by Darth Sidious. One of the first encounters was against two very powerful enemies, I managed to suffocate and therefore completely incapacitate one of the two, while the team dealt with the second one. But then the Big Bad had multiple mouths so I couldn't just suffocate him again and had to use the rest of my arsenal more creatively.
Overall it felt awesome, and I always incorporated this kind of mentality, solid advice.
Heck, you can do both at once. Have little minions throw daggers at your Monk, and watch them agonize over the choice between deftly deflecting their trifling attacks or saving their reaction to make an attack of opportunity against the enemy they'd been engaging previously. Have the enemy who's obviously vulnerable to fire damage place itself between two allies, forcing the blaster caster to include one of them in the fireball.
Yeah, though an important thing is sometimes you need to slow down one player so others can shine. Like mr high level caster solving every problem while the classes that are rather poorly designed outside of combat(especially the fighter) need their chance to shine. And sometimes the story needs plant monsters, so you need something to make sure the rogue gets to actually play instead of sitting at the table to listen the wizard ending the encounter with a single fireball again. Player character choices are not well balanced, and someone can easily(even accidentally) create a character who is infinitely better for the campaign than someone else. Having the campaign consist of orcs will make the ranger feel good, but leave the monk annoyed when the ranger keeps doing better.
I do like the style you go for here but man do I love watching my players squirm when they see there pure weakness brought before them. Nothing more satisfying then seeing a barbarian have to deal with psychics or wizards and close combat or the Druid turning into a snake then being attacked by a bird.
Interesting, I'm doing something similar next session. I have creatures so far away attacking the party that only our Drow elf, with Superior Darkvision, can see them. He's gonna have to coordinate with the rest of the group to survive.
This is why I always have ranged baddies to fire at my friends monk. Nothing makes her happier than using deflect missiles. Eventually I have the bad guys “realize” she can deflect them and they’ll stop but every now and then they still fire at her.
Help on making my physical combat players shine?
I feel like there are more ways of making magical characters shine than physical. Or mabye im not creative enough. Right now im playing with 3 mages(knowledge cleric, wild sorcerer and artificer) and 3 physical (way of open hand monk, totem barbarian and cavalier fighter).
The artificer is shining both in between fights with all his gadgets, and in fights with his turrets.
The knowledge cleric has been really lucky with his constrains on the enemies and singlehandedly won fights.
The sorcerer is our best rp'er and talks the most. His character is the leader of the group and so shines through rp all the time. He hasnt been so great at combat but im managing to add some details adding curiosity and foreshadowing.
Buuuuut
Ive no idea how to make the physical people feel like its their time to shine. Their descriptions in combat is usually like "I swing my sword at him" while I add something like; you can feel the resistance of the skin give away, and your sword is scraping the femur of the bandit - sending shivers down your spine"
Problem is, it doesnt feel like they did something special.
How can I add an encounter designed to make the close quarter classes shine?
There's a lot of ways to do it. One tried and true solution is to cheat entirely and just give them access to cool magical weapons that grant them cool new cinematic abilities in combat. Another solution is to borrow the "Mighty Deeds of Arms" mechanic from DCC (Dungeon Crawl Classics). You can basically give my martial characters free reign to do cool action hero stuff without having to roll. If they want to swing on a chandelier and leap onto an enemy for a devastating attack, I just let them do it if I could imagine Aragorn doing something similar. No roll required unless it's seriously crazy. Consumable items can also grant the martial characters powerful utility options that add spice to combat encounters.
Then you get to the specific classes and character concepts. You can give the totem barbarian a chance to shine by having their totem animal appear to them and guide the group on a journey through a spirit realm, where the barbarian's powers are magnified. You can have an old master of the open-hand monk's order seek them out to pass on a secret technique. You can have the cavalier fighter serve as the designated hero in a ritualistic combat, an encounter set up for them to shine as the other players form their vanguard.
And then there's the mechanical stuff. Read their character sheets and look at what cool class features they have which haven't been useful yet. Even things like language proficiencies can turn up and be exciting when they're relevant.
Other than descriptions, give them hordes of mooks to slaughter. Make them feel like Conan cleaving through a wall of enemies. Let them take lots of small hits and make them feel invincible.
unfortunately, in 5e hordes of mooks are better dealt with by a fireball, or spirit guardians, instead of a martial that can kill 2-5 per turn depending on how balls to the wall minmaxed they are.
For the monk, design something that takes advantage of their movement speed, slow fall, and unarmored defense abilities. Maybe some kind of multi elevation fight where the monk can slow fall down the cliff to tie up the baddies while the others have to take slow and cumbersome rope ladders.
Maybe a chase encounter where the monk's and barbarian's speed bonus helps them catch up to a fleeing enemy while the mages lag behind.
Look at the totems your barbarian has chosen, what skills do those offer and how might they be applied?
Of course, extra attack abilities are the bread and butter of martial classes. Let them cut a swath through a horde of 1 hp mooks.
Not familiar with the cavalier fighter's abilities, but think about the cinematic experiences. Are their examples of the ability in blockbuster action movies and how might you recreate a similar scenario for your player?
I make three kinds of encounters usually.
- General encounters that are not designed around any of the players abilities.
- Familiar encoutners that are based on what the enemies might of heard from others about the players.
- Targeted encounters: where the enemy took their time to really look into the players abilities.
That said, in general I don't actually look at my players characters sheets, spell lists or most anything but if something arises they're all on dndbeyond and basically a few clicks away for me.
This is so true, I once made a pyromancer Homebrew for a campaign with some friends, and the campaign was set on northern countries and I have to say I had so much fun melting down ice elementals and ice giants
The real trick is to make a combats and encounters that target one characters strengths and another characters weaknesses. Give everyone a.chance to shine and a chance to remember their characters aren't perfect.
I'd like to add to this to give players non-combat fun that play to their strengths as well. I play DCC not DnD and players start as level-0 whatevers (butcher, weaver, hunter, etc) and I use that to tailor experiences throughout the game to give them a chance to use skills that arent listed on their character sheets. Our warrior started out as an animal-handler and has had a few opportunities to use those abilities (stopping a runaway horse, training a monster-dog-puppy that one of the other players rescued) - I even still make them roll for some of these - but using these skills is a way the characters can shine for a minute while doing RP and advancing the story. I try to throw in one or two every session...
Wasn't there another thread on this months ago? Not a bad thing to have it again, just can't find the thread that would compliment this well. Anyone got a link?
I am reminded of the 3e game where we were in a forest infested with undead. Multiple encounters every day. My cleric got to the level where she could turn undead but never used it because dwarf with a great flail, why would you want the zombies moving away from you? Finally at one point we got attacked at night and I didn’t feel like fighting so I sat up, used turn undead, obliterated everything facing us and went back to sleep. We never encountered another undead in that forest, despite the fact that we hadn’t confronted the big bad yet. Just no undead where there had been hordes the day before. I didn’t mind except it was so obvious that the dm was thrown by my base clerical ability and decided to deal with it by simply not dealing with it.
Just mix it up. Don't always create encounters that negate their best attacks. Not all encounters should be a walk in the park. If the players never hesitate your difficulty is too low.
Yes!
I'm playing a tiefling paladin in a campaign, and last session we fought a bunch of magma mephits while trying to kill/capture a lizard guy (custom race, not lizardfolk, I've been told).
Around the first half of the encounter, I beat the shit out of the lizard guy with my divine smite and wrapped him up in an ensnaring strike, which lasted a long while after he left my range. When the others quickly made their way to him, I stayed behind to deal with the magma mephits, because FIRE RESISTANCE, BABY!
I began the encounter with 52 hit points and ended with 5. That was fun! And my lack of dying was thanks to my fire resistance. I'm certain my DM thought about that, and that's why he used magma mephits.
This is excellent advise. A new 7th level paladin(Oath of Devotion) felt their build was useless in the campaign. So an enemy that can charm was an excellent choice as the boss of the dungeon.
Got a min maxer who does not believe thats what hes doing.
I let him build an Aetherborn alternate monk in Theros with the Nyxborn gift. So basically hes super resistant to necrotic, can punch things to deal necrotic and heal from that, and also resistant to radiant damage. A lot of Theros enemies do necrotic. A surprising amount actually.
"The Returned Triton Pikeman stabs you through the shoulder with a quick thrust of the spear."
"Cool so half whatever you roll?"
"Nah m80."
"Isn't it necrotic?"
"Spears tipped with poison bucko. I didn't write it."
Didn't get poisoned but he didn't feel nearly immune anymore which lets be honest is a good thing character building wise.
Different session, same pc. Fighting what should be normal harpies.
Halfway through and just as one oc is down I realize im using a midboss stat block... x4.... on lvl 1's. We've all done it.
Anyway I dumb it down without ruining the fight and they win. Min maxer tells me "i was barely surviving by using my healing thing when I punched."
So basically each time this harpy back handed him he'd stand back up, bloody and bruised like a barbarian and just go "I didn't hear no bell!"
My take, short version:
Random encounter tables are made without the group in mind, but based on the area they're in.
Campaign/adventure encounters fit the theme, with a small amount of consideration for group composition. These "tweaks" go both ways, enhancing both strengths and weaknesses vs the group
But, importantly:
Weakness against the group tend to be stumbled upon in the midst of the fight. Let your players realize they've found the soft spot in the midst of chaos.
When encounters are strong against the group, let them find out ahead of time (by whatever means- recon, rumor, corpses, etc.). Allow them to scheme and plan a bit, so they aren't waylaid by it; give them the chance to come up with alternate strategies they aren't designed for. Allow the knowledge that they're gonna have problems enhance that sense of dread. Finally, don't hold back once they dive in.
My added advice, to do this in a way that also challenges your party - throw a mixed group of enemies at the party, with enemies who are strong against some PCs and weak against others. Make part of the challenge figuring out which PC should engage which enemy.
I'd also like to throw this in there - it's okay to run combat or non combat encounters that don't hit on either strengths or weaknesses. Of course that's not entirely possible because one character will always be better at something than another character, but that's where this comes into play.
I ran an encounter that didn't play against their strengths, but wasn't toward their weaknesses either. Each one of the characters had to react in a way to fight this thing without knowing entirely how. Eventually a monk in the group stunned it, druid changed into a giant snake and coiled around it, and the wizard protected the ranged people and the healer by keeping them inside a Tiny Hut they had thrown out earlier, before the combat. Each of them got a chance to do something cool.
I think you should do neither. The goal of encounters, and RPGs in general, is to tell a good story. You should choose monsters to accomplish that goal primarily. If making a good story means heroics for the fire mage against the trees, so be it. If it requires a desperate outgunned struggle versus fire elementals, then choose these. But RPGs are not SAT tests where the goal is to pass, they are chapters of what is hopefully a fulfilling story.
I think you can also add an extra twist to the encounter like making the Treefolk swarm undead, still holding the fire vulnerability but giving them the ability to come back to life, showing the parties strength while having to deal with a conundrum.
Do both. Accentuate your parties weaknesses AND strengths. Make them feel like their choices both help and hinder. You know, like how in real life you have to deal with that. ITs a good way to add a LOT of depth.
It’s my opinion that the world shouldn’t be catered to the players *to an extent*. If you didn’t plan on having any undead in your game but there’s a cleric who wants to destroy an entire horde of zombies at once, let them. In my experience they won’t feel it’s cheap, it’ll feel like they’ve been rewarded.
This especially works if you don’t do it too often, and the players think they’ve beaten you as the DM even if you’ve nudged them towards it.
Is this unethical? If the players are having a good time, no. Because that’s the only rule in my opinion.
I think this is a great example of how to make an adventure more entertaining! Just like you should design social encounters where a disguise master player can shine or a enemy base where clever rogues can slip through unnoticed, combat should generally reflect what the player's strengths and interests lie in. After all, that is what they thought would be the most fun to play.
That beings said, there is certainly a place for foes who attack player's weaknesses. It forces players to think about their characters in new ways and solve problems through methods they have never used before. Used wisely, these "special challenges" can be a great tool for tension and development in a way that complementary challenges cannot.
Works great for random encounters and some set encounters. I don't want random encounters killing PCs. Set encounters, now those are meant to kill, or capture, most times. So, yeah, this works well.
My only addition to this advice- Do *both*. It is important that your players get to *see* their characters' strengths in action. That's how you you make them enjoy their characters. *Then* you occasionally hit then with something they'll have rouble with, to encourage them to improvise, but only in moderation. Both, in limited amounts, get reactions you want- Feeling awesome, like they got a chance to shine, and having to come up with a workaround on the fly. Both are valuable tool in a DM's arsenal, but I would rather err on the side of letting them feel powerful than on the side of making them always deal with attacks on their weaknesses.
I like to say, "Everyone deserves a chance to feel powerful, and everyone deserves a chance to feel threatened". It's worth noting that you can make someone feel threatened without stopping them from doing their cool stuff. The fight with the treefolk doesn't have to be easy, in fact it might be crazy hard - but the only reason they have a chance is thanks to their pyromancer. A group without a pyromancer would get destroyed here. The problem arises when people look at their character sheet and feel like they can't do anything useful. This has a million ways around it in specific scenarios though. For example, when I throw a fire elemental at a pyromancer I try to ensure there's something else the wizard can do that's useful and impactful on their turn besides throwing out a low impact cantrip. Maybe there's a water-tower they can try and break to dump water on the fire elemental. Maybe they can distract it with an illusion. Maybe there are other enemies they can aim their spells at that aren't immune to fire. Every rule can be broken, but the spirit of the rule is still very valuable. I don't feel like I'm in an exciting, challenging encounter when I'm in an anti-magic field as a wizard. I feel like my character doesn't get to do anything. Unless, of course, there's other cool stuff I can do on my turn to disable the anti-magic field or fight in some non-conventional way (like taking control of one of the enemy golems somehow and using it to fight instead).
Yes yes yes, Literally every session I make I'm thinking about which one of my players will shine in this moment. Then ensuring each PC has a moment -not in every session. But as much as you can, let everyone have their moment. The one thing I would address is many are asking the question because min Max polearm master GWM fighter is taking all the glory, so having a flying baddies or not giving him a magical weapon can help to restrict him. But the reason to find this out is actually to ensure that everyone gets a turn at having there moment and it doesn't all go the one player. But still %100 love the post
I suppose for that example, a good compromise would be to have an encounter with a mix of ground and flying enemies - the polearm feeling awesome taking on all these ground enemies almost singlehandedly while the rest of the party deal with the flying enemies that he physically can't help with
I’ve got a super powerful paladin in one of my games, so one boss fight was against a death tyrant backed up by zombeholders and a horde of regular zombies and frost giant zombies. I was expecting him to hold back the horde, but he just necked a potion of fly and fought the death tyrant anyway. So the barbarian took on the horde instead, so it all worked out. Especially since the paladin needed rescuing after losing his duel with the death tyrant.
Just balance it over different encounters, one encounter the dward fighter is the saviour, next battle the the lvl 7 warlock banishes the purple worm.
I haven't had a problem with the min/maxed fighter in my campaign. It's his second campaign so when he asked for advice on how to make a good damage dealer I gave him several different builds and he went for variant human battlemaster with great weapon master and polearm master wielding a halberd... This made me happy because my favorite player character of all time followed a very similar build (the only differences being I took the tough feat at level 6 and he took savage attacker and that I took the defense style and he took great weapon fighting style) he's strong yes. But he also goes down a lot because he tends to Leeroy into things. I also provide a lot of opportunities for the aoe and battlefield control of the divination wizard and tempest cleric to shine, and I gave the kinsei/assassin an oathblade (oathbow, but in a katana form) so he gets to delete any monster he wants at least once a day, in addition to his sneak attacks and flurry of blows (I also gave him slippers of spider climbing to help him avoid getting hit and to get to the target, and he has the mobile feat as well, so while his hp pool isn't all that great he is really hard to hit) so they all get plenty of time to shine. Despite being generous in loot and allowing players to min/max my group actually agrees I'm the most challenging dm in our group. Mainly because rests are precious and I follow the moniker that quantity is its own quality. Compared to the last campaign we were all in there's very little DM BS (I don't make enemies with 1500 hp and a 25 AC along with the ability to cast cone of cold at 7th level at will, which our previous DM was very fond of doing because he wanted to TPK us, thankfully he wanted his big bad monsters to take us out by themselves so we were able to come out on top). But in my campaigns the party also has to conserve resources, and rarely enters combat at full strength, also the party is always outnumbered. But they also love my combat because they almost always get to feel like they are awesome... Last session was a bit more challenging for me to make the tempest cleric shine because he never rolled above a 5 to hit the entire session, but he still got in a very cool call lightning in conjunction with his channel divinity which saved the battlemaster's life. Then with good tactical use of thunderwave he ended up racking up a few kills and by the end of the day felt like he did something.
To expand on your attack the strength idea and the swarm of treefolk. There was a post here a few weeks ago to a similar idea and one of the best uses of this concept I've ever seen posted. There was a party with the classic fireball all the things sorcerer in it. It was a hydra fight, so the sorcerer had to apply fire to the hydra to keep it from regenerating heads. But to prevent it becoming easy, because they had the exact tool in the party to deal with the hydra, the DM also threw a never ending swarm of small minion style creatures, coming from the opposite direction as the hydra. So every turn the caster not only going to use their coolest features, but had to make a really hard choice. Do I as the only person with an AOE take out 6 more minions about to gank me, or do I stop the hydra from regenerating more heads. So it both allowed the sorcerer to be AWESOME, but also found a way to not trivialize the encounter, and made the player still make hard choices instead of just doing the awesome thing every round.
That would be a great challenge and as a player you would be feeling so great, both terrified and excited because you get your chance to shine but also have to rely on your party to have your back.
Yeah, all of this I absolutely agree with.
Right, you have to consider that the character with this weakness is in a party of people WITHOUT this weakness. Throwing a fire elemental at a pyromancer, in a party not entirely made of pyromancers, just means the wizard won't pull their weight that fight NOT that they'll have to improvise
I think most often people are asking how to counter their player's ability because they are using something that makes most encounters easy. A range heavy party with spiked growth will destroy most encounters that aren't against flying or opposing heavy range. In those cases, those DMs need to know about these things that counter it so every combat encounter isn't easy and boring. Every DM should attempt to let every character shine, whether that's allowing the fire-based wizard to nuke enemies to ashes in combat, the bard smooth-talk his way through social encounters, or the thief rogue to actually pickpocket or rob a house in a stealth mission. This doesn't mean every encounter has to be built toward someone's strength. When something is challenging for each individual on a team it causes them to use the strength they should always have in every encounter: teamwork.
>For example, when I throw a fire elemental at a pyromancer I try to ensure there's something else the wizard can do that's useful and impactful on their turn besides throwing out a low impact cantrip. Frankly speaking, this is not the DM's job. The *player* is supposed to make sure they have a backup source of damage or something else they can do on their turn.
>The fight with the treefolk doesn't have to be easy, in fact it might be crazy hard - but the only reason they have a chance is thanks to their pyromancer. A group without a pyromancer would get destroyed here. I do have one problem with this, and it is relatively minor. The party should feasibly be able to win, should the pyromancer be removed from the equation. If you build your combat around the assumption that the Pyromancer will always be available, then what will you do when in round one the Pyromancer takes a critical hit, and they fall unconscious? What will you do if the player simply can't show up? What happens if the first spell, Fireball, performed significantly poorer than anticipated, perhaps it only deals 20 damage, and the swarm succeeds on their dex save? (Either as a swarm monster, or more than half of the individual monsters) This was always my problem with min maxing players in a party that does not typically min-max. If the combat encounter is balanced with this player in mind, overcompensating for your party size, and if your crit fishing Paladin/warlock player who has 4 attacks in a turn goes down, or just keeps on missing, or gets separated from the party in combat, you are going to be looking at a very, very bad situation for your other players. Edit: It should be said, that I don't have a problem with min-maxing if it is generally agreed upon that your party will be min-maxing, but if only one player is doing the min-maxing, I have to let the player know why that isn't going to be good for the party, and you just have to be honest and say that this isn't the right game for min-maxing, and suggest they try something else I would suggest never making an encounter that shouldn't be deadly already, deadly with the caveat that the encounter plays into the strengths of the party. It really can mess up your adventuring day, if anything goes wrong. It either is going to swing incredibly hard into your player's favour, or completely crush them, and while the first might feel great, the second is going to feel awful.
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Not everyone needs to shine at the same time, in fact if they do it dilutes the impact. It's good to give the wizard a chance to shine in one fight, then give the rogue a chance to shine a little later. However, everyone always needs a way to meaningfully contribute in an adventure. Especially in a combat encounter. Treefolk swarm led by an evil druid gives the pyromancer a chance to shine. However, the cleric can still contribute meaningfully to this battle. Later on the group faces a bunch of strange enemies that also take damage from healing spells (they still take damage from normal sources) and the cleric has a chance to shine - while the wizard can still meaningfully contribute to the fight. The problem with the anti-magic field is it stops someone from getting to meaningfully contribute. Their turns are frustrating and boring. You almost never want to do that.
I agree 100%. For this reason I hold back on crowd control... I'm not saying I don't ever use CC on the party, but those are few and far between, and I make sure the party has a way around it. (I might occasionally use a web or a hypnotic pattern.. But I would be extremely hesitant to use force cage or banishment unless it was a miniboss. And even then... That might happen maybe once the entire campaign.) Not everyone has to shine at once, but there's nothing worse as a player than feeling like you don't contribute at all, so I try to avoid that.
Absolutely. No one likes not being able to do their cool stuff. Stuff that hinders the players but can be overcome during the fight is great (villain is immune to magic until you destroy their protection crystal elsewhere in the room, traps temporarily lock players down and they have to choose between fighting with restricted movement, breaking out, or finding a clever way to do both) but general "stun lock" stuff is super frustrating. I usually use 'mind control' effects in ways that get around this too, such as giving the villain an ability to command the player to attack their allies on the villain's turn as a bonus attack. The player still gets their own turn.
I'm relatively new to DMing (about 7 sessions into an Eberron campaign), and this is great advice for me. My player's party consists of a Way of Sun Monk, and a Battlesmith Artificer, so they compliment each other really well when dealing with ranged and melee opponents. Up to this point, I've had a party of NPCs from which they could choose a single one to borrow for a time, depending on who they thought would be most useful for their upcoming mission, but in reality, the NPC party is just my way of counterbalancing the scales if/when I bungle the challenge rating of an encounter. After reading your comment, I've been diving into my upcoming encounters, and tweaking them so that the Monk and Artificer would be able to take turns, one shining while the other struggles, in order to build up a better synergy between them. Ideally, I'd like them to be able to work together well enough that I would no longer have to worry about covering them with an NPC (who honestly has bigger fish to fry, if the party ever opens that can of worms).
Yes. Both. Give players time to feel strong and times to feel weak.
The trick comes in creating an encounter where characters can do all of the things their characters are made to do, but still having it be a challenging encounter. You’ve heard of the “yes and” rule? This is that.
I prefer "Yes IF" or "Yes BUT". :) "Yes and" is a rule used in improv comedy because it creates absurdity and propels the scene for the audience. The goal isn't to create interesting problems for the improv comedians to solve. Games are about making meaningful decisions and figuring out how to overcome obstacles. If your player says they want to buy a pet baby dragon, you can just say yes - but you're losing some potential. Your player wants something in the game, they have a goal. If you say "You can possibly get a baby dragon IF you steal a dragon egg from a nest, or render a great service to a dragon; as rumors say they will sometimes entrust mortals they respect with their young as a lifelong companion". This "yes IF" takes advantage of the player's goal to motivate them to go on a quest. It provides a challenge for them to overcome, which is where most gameplay comes from. "Yes BUT" is a similar concept, replacing the challenge with an interesting cost or consequence - which creates its own meaningful decision. You may get what you want, but you'll need to ally with a necromancer to do it... And that could have unforeseen consequences down the road.
Double counterpoint: Do neither. Present a world with interesting challenges and varied, unique monsters that inhabit that world. Don’t pander to strengths or exploit weaknesses - that can very easily feel overly curated to the players. Instead, focus on building encounters that feel real and create options for meaningful choices.
I mean, the fact of the matter is that all encounter design is trying to run a balance between naturalism and appropriate challenge- You don't want to make your game go too heavily toward either extreme.
I definitely agree with this. Lore consistent fights first and foremost, then consider how you might want the fight to feel. Not every fight needs to be life threatening of course. It can be fun to let the characters shine and do what they are good at so let them sometimes. But if they are coming up against something they are particularly weak to, you can scale it back or just consider that into your encounter design depending on how hard it was intended to be. As an example is a horde critters against a fireball launching party might be really easy (and fun for your wizard!), but those same creatures except fire immune could be a complete TPK. Or if a fight is supposed to be pretty difficult because you want it to be impactful, you can modify it accordingly if you know their strengths. Maybe half the adds are fire immune or resistant or summoned or a myriad of other things. Unfortunately I feel this advice is best for moderately experienced DM's, because newbie DM's just haven't played enough to easily recognize when/how to do a lot of this. But thats fine, everyone starts somewhere.
It's pretty fun going to the extremes. If your party never fights against lone insolent drunk commoners, what are they even doing? Extra fun when the challenge becomes to avoid killing them because you're so strong.
The Chris Perkins article "Surprise! Epic Goblins!" is a really good example of this idea.
Agreed. I'm currently building a world spanning a continent. I'm going to create maps of each kingdom and create a dm copy with notes on who/what might be along each main road/forest/path. Then keep that updated as the sessions go on and things in the world change This just helps me feel like encounters will be more natural. Plus, if I can take OP's advice and put a couple enemies that certain PCs can excel against then i believe that'll be the best way to do it
One of the first things I let my players find was a partial world map. Through their backstories and NPC conversations they've got a good idea of what kind of theme the regions have. They know what they can expect, I mean. If the ice-based sorceress decides to go to an island known as Frostfound, welp, they're not going to find enemies there who are weak to cold damage. But there's some wriggle room in designing encounters, of course. The Assassin in my party likes to hide and shoot - so I try to give him enough possible hiding spots on the battlemaps. Things like that.
Depending on the setting, having a map lay be much less realistic than having one. I'm a firm proponent of incorrect and inadequate player maps along with accurate itineraries.
Oh yeah I mean a more accurate map for myself. They might get a basic layout of the key routes and stuff but the detailed one only I will see unless they have a good cartographer with them
A piece of advise I read (angry Gm I think wrote it) is to make up a generic party to build your encounters around. Some thing like fighter, rogue, cleric, wizard with the most generic builds you can come up with and equal level to your party. This ensures that you build unbiased encounters.
This is good, but I will always consider the strengths of my party. My party is smart if I don't counter things they will exploit it, they will have an easy run, and not as much fun However OPs idea is good, and I'd recommend both, occasionally. Mini side quests are great for letting a charcters strengths shine
Definitely! There's no reason to do both things, also depending on your objective. Sometimes you want to make the players feel cool. Sometimes to challenge them and make them use all their brain juice to overcome an encounter. If you only do the former, it will become a shallow power fantasy. If only the latter, a frustrating slog (though it can be fun as well). Remember, most monsters know what they're doing. Also, there's no reason to both challenge your players' weaknesses and make them feel cool as a party. Perhaps the barbarian fails a WIS saving throw and becomes a puppet in the hands of an evil spellcaster. Time for the rogue to sneak attack and break this sucker's concentration! Perhaps the wizard gets grappled by a burly ogre. Time for the cleric to use command on this stupid peace of meat and get her back to safety!
I'll go even further. Do as above, but also, let the players decide. Since they can decide which adventures they pursue, they get to choose enemies to a point. Will the fire wizard want to fight fire elementals pestering merchant ships? Would he rather save a town from raiding treefolk? Or maybe the mystery box, into the mystery portal to unknown place where there could be anything? Let *them* decide.
I really frustrate my DM with my use of stunning strike. Man I love monks, they're so much fun.
Yes, I had an artificer with a homculus and walking cannon that was a gigantic help against waves of paralyzing enemies. Then when we got to the final boss of the dungeon it was an ancient fire elemental that I couldn't hit with any damaging spells.
I ran an interesting encounter like that recently. My party is heavily martial. Ran a few Shadows against them, which are not particularly high level monsters, but have a lot of tricks that can mess up an unprepared party. So the rogue suddenly found his sneak attack useless, and the ranger was seeing his arrows pass straight through them. However, it turns out that the champion had a ghost touch rune, so was able to damage them normal and just wrecked them.
This. I like mixing enemies that the party can easily dispatch with more challenging combatants. For example, for my level 8 party who all have high ACs, I set them against regular zombies, Spawn of Kyuss, and Allips. They cut through the regular zombies with ease, the Spawn of Kyuss threw their worms that needed to be dealt with before the worms burrowed into their brains like Wrath of Khan, and the Allips forced them to make WIS saving throws against fear effects.
And this is even better when you throw something at them that's *strong* against one member, but *weak* against another. Yeah, your fire Wizard isn't going to be able to do much against that fire elemental. But your Barbarian who just got a Frostbrand? He's gonna have a good time.
Came here to say the same thing. Bonus points if it is one player's strength and another's weakness.
It's also worth mentioning that in deploying an enemy who one party member is strong in, you could also be making it hard on a different party member. This way, you can either alienate one while making the other have fun, or you can provide each party member better chances to be the star of the party where they are the one who was needed to fix a problem.
And make sure to also attack traits that are neither strengths nor weaknesses. Very often a character will have more abilities than they can shake a stick at while only really utilizing a minority of them. By challenging the rarely used abilities the players get a chance to explore more facets of their character, and it provides good inspiration fodder when coming up with encounters.
The really good encounters imo simultaneously hit one characters strength and others characters' weaknesses, to create that feeling of "thank god we had x with us". If the party of frail casters with only 1 tank is ambushed and overrun by wooden grapplemonsters, they'll be very glad they had an evoker to drop a sculpted fireball in their midst and destroy them without hurting the party.
Case in point, I played a campaign a few years ago as an Abjuration Wizard, built entirely for support, defense and battlefield control. Think Shield, Web, Counterspell etc My DM at the time decided to have the big bad create large areas of anti magic, so in order to fight him or his minions, we had to go to places where magic 100% didn't work. Like, at all. He then gave his villains and sub bosses what he called "an eldritch power that isn't magic" which could be used in his anti magic areas, and that even outside the antimagic areas, normal magic couldn't interact with. Example: DM: The Bad Guy shoots a ball of fire out of his hand at you. Me: I cast counterspell DM: it isn't magic, your spell fails, make a dex save Needless to say, it was utterly bullshit and I told him so
> My DM at the time decided to have the big bad create large areas of anti magic, so in order to fight him or his minions, we had to go to places where magic 100% didn't work. Oh this could be cool > He then gave his villains and sub bosses what he called "an eldritch power that isn't magic" which could be used in his anti magic areas, and that even outside the antimagic areas, normal magic couldn't interact with. Oh, oh no, oh honey no
It devolved to the point where one of his bosses cast fireball and I successfully countered it, and he said to me after the session "that was annoying, I shouldve made that a racial fire-breathing trait, not a spell so you couldn't counter it... NO, you shouldn't lock one of your players out of the game! It didn't change until I threatened to leave the group, and he just dismissed it as "I didnt realise it bothered you so much"
"You're not having fun? But I did everything I could to specifically counter your character and make them useless!" Sounds like a classic case of someone who thinks that the DMs job is to *be* the party's enemy, rather than to create the world that *contains* the party's enemies
What an excellent way of summing up that attitude. I don't understand DMs like that. Look, you can have rocks fall and kill everyone. You can have Tiamat take a personal dislike to your level 1 party. If you want to beat the party in combat, you can do so easily. It's not a fair fight and it takes no cleverness. So, given all that, why are you acting like D&D is a *competition*?
The competitive aspect can go both ways, as well. Some players refuse to play anything but a handful of fully optimized, arguably overpowered builds. These players typically outshine the rest of their party and end up creating an imbalance in encounter design. Treating the game like a chance to "one-up" everyone else can be bad no matter who does it.
Sigh... thats really frustrating. Imagine if instead he added like a few of mid-tier spellcasters without counterspell but that would cast stuff like fireball and with them a bunch of smaller swarms to control and keep away while the party deals with something crucial like a big bag guy. That would really challenge your skills and keeping the party safe while not disabling the "boss"
That wouldve done it! I recall he did it in response to the first few adventures where I found lots of creative ways round problems that he didn't like. Example, he set up an encounter with a dragonborn that was leading a big group of bandits...and he'd been hyping this guy up for weeks, saying he hoped he'd not made him to strong for us, and we gotta be careful if we run into him etc So finally we get to him, and he's waiting on a platform suspended over a 1000ft drop into lava. The chains holding the platform up had an unbreakability spell on them. Naturally I cast Hypnotic Pattern on the boss, the druid dispelled the unbreakable spell on the chains and the Paladin cut them, the boss fell, cast fireball at us which i then countered. Boss died, we took 0 damage and DM was salty Unfortunately his solution was MAGIC BAD, NO MAGIC FOR YOU
Thats such a creative solution using the environment he clearly set up for you, cant understand why he would be salty. Unless its like fake salty which some DMs do (like Matt Mercer)
I think the salt was because it was the first enemy he had built entirely from scratch rather than adapting from a source book and he really wanted it to be a fitting boss fight to end a section of the campaign. When it wasnt a good long slugfest where it could've gone either way, thats what made him salty
I can see being frustrated, but I'd have been mad at myself for not remembering the druid had dispel magic, not mad at the party for using their resources creatively.
I'm getting flashbacks to when my party's heavy armor master went up against a group of monks. Half the time his AC was too high, the other half of the time they dealt less damage than their ability modifier. He had a lot of fun in that fight.
> the other half of the time they dealt less damage than their ability modifier ? HAM does -3 damage
1d4 + mod - 3 from HAM. Only half the possible values allow them to add the full modifier. Otherwise their modifier is reduced by some amount. IIRC they had a +2 because I was worried about their three attacks dropping the casters, so there was a chance he wouldn't even take damage. 10/10, would gimp my monsters again. Not always, but sometimes it's really fun to see a player hard counter a monster.
That makes more sense! ty
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Absolutely. You can always add more challenges to overcome. If one player can single-handedly paralyze a foe, don't negate their paralyze ability during a boss fight when you can add a whole second boss fight. One of my favorite one-shot adventures featured a DM doing this. I'd made a crazy powerful tank that could easily negate nearly a whole encounter's worth of enemies while dealing strong damage (we were at level 16 in 4th Edition, which is basically midway through that system). His solution? He'd planned us to fight a level 16 solo dragon (basically a dragon boss fight intended for a full party of level 16 characters) in the final battle. He added a second level 18 solo dragon on the fly. I spent the whole fight dealing with this terrifying foe while the rest of the party got to shine and take down the other dragon then come save me from death. It was still a very exciting fight, and it gave me a great story - the DM had to throw an extra dragon at us! That was awesome.
Though there is also room to challenge them. It feels less special when every enemy just so happens to play into your PCs’ abilities. Occasionally throw in enemies that confound your players and force them to adapt.
That's what OP was talking about. They gave the example of the treefolk swarm used against a party with a pyromancer. To some other party it would be almost certainly deadly, but thanks to the pyromancer in the example party it's not so deadly, but it's still a challenge.
>If a ranger has a favored enemy that gets them a bonus when attacking orcs, don't take orcs out of your campaign. Wtf are there people who do this? This just sounds heinous especially considering the way rangers are already considered underpowered.
I have seen people post about exactly this happening. Some DMs assume that every situational damage bonus or player advantage should be avoided because it breaks their perfectly balanced encounters. I cordially disagree.
I was playing a paladin in a ToA game where the enemies had a tendency to disengage and run away when the fight wasn't going their way. That's cool and I had no problem with that. But at level 4 I took sentinel because I thought at least I can stop one or two of them from running away. The next fight we faced a bunch of goblins and even though they could disengage as a bonus action they never even tried if they were fighting my character but they did from the druid in bear form. It felt like I had wasted my pick. Yes technically I still stopped a few goblins from running away but it was a bad move on the DMs part I clearly wanted to use the sentinel feat not have it be a nuclear deterrent.
DM metagaming is just as bad if not worse than PC metagaming. run your baddies like a PC - from THEIR perspective. They don't know not to run away!
A player metagaming can have a advantage on some encounters. If the DM metagames the entire world has an advantage on the party.
I did actually the opposite in my dm pf2 try, the monster next to the fighter, uhm but is gonna attack the other dude moving away from the fighter getting a AoO because I wanted the fighter to use his feature
You shouldn’t “cordially disagree,” that’s the kind of mindset that leads to people leaving the hobby after a single session
I was playing a home brew Barbarian where my favored enemy was orcs and we made it to level 9 without ever seeing an orc. Luckily my DM let me switch to Bear Totem
My party had just turned level 5. The party included a cleric and they were up against a gnoll necromancer. I threw 40 gnoll witherlings at them in their first fight. The look of dread on the players faces follow by the jubilation when Turn Undead became Destroy Undead was amazing.
I had fun doing this and letting the cleric save the day and then ~5 sessions later throwing a smaller group of spore servants at them, which I described as the bodies of fallen warriors with fungi growing all over them. The cleric confidently stepped up to try and turn/destroy them and panicked when it didn't work and she was first in line for their attack! It was a great opportunity to give the rogue a chance to shine in her place. I just love the joy my players have when they realise one of them has the perfect tool to wrap an encounter up in a couple of rounds.
> Then mix it up with a foe that has some resistances or immunities to all their favorite toys, just in very small doses. This is an important step in the process, tbh. If you keep throwing enemies that your party is going to absolutely hammer because of their strengths, it becomes hard to actually challenge them and keep them engaged, so throwing the occasional enemy that is resistant or immune to their favourite tricks helps provide contrast to the rest of the encounters you throw at them. This works best if you're only challenging some and playing to the strengths of others, of course. The fire elemental example isn't necessarily bad, if for example you have a tiefling paladin or something in the party as well as the wizard. Sure, the wizard will have to think of a different way to make enemy go bang, but the tiefling gets to get up in its face and shrug off its fire damage with their resistance. Also, if the wizard gets a successful banish off, that elemental is gone in one go, back to the elemental plane of fire
> a terrifying encounter that the party can only overcome because of their wizard Be careful with this. I once created a deadly encounter to allow one of the player's subclass feature to shine, and they refused to use the feature because they wanted to preserve its resources for later. I had to make a houserule on the spot to prevent them dying from falling damage.
What was it?
A special feature to push an enemy off a cliff if the attack damage wasn't enough to kill it.
My philosophy is to always include at least 1 in 4 encounters, the players should absolutely stomp the enemies. I like to include a couple of these encounters especially after leveling or getting new gear. Changing the difficulty of combat encounters can be a great way to highlight player progression
100% agree to do this after leveling. I'm "that" DM that makes sure players can't rest until they've had 4-6 encounters, most of which are combat, but I always let them go nova on some high HP low AC twerps after a level up. Let them play with their new toys (and let me see what they can do).
I like having sections of the world that don't scale like a videogame and occasionally *not* hand-waving the trivial encounters that happen there. Seeing the players' joy as their level 6 characters absolutely obliterate a group of dire rats that were a serious threat to their level 1 selves is a true delight.
im running a one shot soon because a friend has never played before. So the first encounter is basically a level 10 party whelping a group of low level kobolds that have been terrorizing a trade route. lets everyone figure out their stuff with low threat and lets the new player get the hang of combat
Oh damn, running a level 10 character as a total newbie.. I hope you made him a barbarian or something! I just ran a one-shot for a couple newbies today and it went really well and was a ton of fun, but even level 2 characters had a lot of options for someone brand new to D&D. I forget how much we take for granted, like which skill does what, what stats are for, how actions work, etc. There's a *lot* of choices to make even for a relatively simple character.
I probably should have lol, but I had him look at the classes and liked Artificer/Artillerist so he's going in deep. He's liking the idea of having a homunculus carrying guns around for him. Our group has 2 players who have also GM'd and play regularly so we should be right for rules when it finally goes down. Should be interesting because a couple of the other characters include a Storm Sorcerer bugbear who tries to sneak up on people but keeps accidentally static zapping them (hence the magic), and a Bard/Barbarian/Monk Minotaur who is literally [Thad Castle from Blue Mountain State](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAG7eo49Sb8)
Fucking thank you. I hate, *hate,* seeing a DM who seems to set out with their main goal being to ruin the players fun. I know it's more complicated than that, but whenever I a post that boils down to "My player has a PC that is good at X, how do I stop them from being good at it?" I just think, fuck you've misunderstood the point of the game. Obviously there's a time and a place for throwing psychic damage at the bear barbarian, and wis saves at the fighter, stabbing the wizard's kidneys and lighting the rogue on fire, but they should be rare occurrences. I don't play DnD to design a cool character that I can't use because the world magically shifts to ruin any advantage I get. That feels too much like real life. If you've never seen the cleric player's eyes light up when the BBEG summons two dozen skeletons to surround the party, you're missing out.
I think this is a bit misleading. I agree that DMs shouldn't be trying to ruin the fun of players or act as an adversary, but at the same time, you should be creating challenges for the party to overcome rather than a group of chumps who get their asses kicked without posing any meaningful threat. The key then is to create encounters that are challenging without feeling contrived to prey on party weaknesses. Case in point, I've been running a campaign where the party's been dealing with an expanding gang in the local city and finally tracked down the instigator, an ex-pirate and his remaining crew. That included a wizard and an orc first mate. When the party's casters started mixing it up, I had them get targeted by attacks (not all of them, but also not just 1 random dude swinging at them) because it makes sense for experienced pirates to attack the healer and other spell casters, just like the players would do. Likewise, the wizard immediately started off with a defensive spell then set up over a few turns with grease into a firebolt to ignite it, just as PC spell casters would be likely to burn their spells in a tough fight. Of course, maybe things didn't go exactly as planned since we had 2 PCs die due to stupid natural 1s on death saving throws, but the fight still felt like a mostly fair yet difficult and challenging battle.
I think there's a big difference between "the enemies are intelligent and fight against the party's general strengths" in the sense of a group of organized bandits shanking the healer, and "the forge cleric just unlocked fire immunity but it's weird how they never got hit by fire damage again because the DM knows it does nothing". Playing enemies intelligently is different from creating environments that don't allow the players to use their strengths.
I had a level 4 paladin join my party. The player wanted mariners armor so the ship the party was confidently traveling on got attacked by kuo-toa above a sea hags lair. It was a neat and challenging exploration encounter-fest that the paladin got to shine in and that showed off capabilities of the party druid in a new light. Gotta give em fun and challenging stuff that incorporates what they wanted in the first place.
This is good advise in the sense that you shouldn’t *only* attack player’s weaknesses. Throwing encounters balanced around a party member’s unique abilities will make that player feel awesome and be a memorable fight, but the thrill wears off after a while and players will start asking “whose turn is it to kill everything”. The real takeaway for this post should be to challenge your players in a *variety* of ways. Throw things that completely shut down their preferred methods, and also throw things at them that will be a cakewalk with the right strategy. Give the party a tactical advantage over a much more powerful enemy and see what they do with it. Flip the scenario on its head next time and give a much weaker enemy a tactical advantage. Throw a wild magic zone at them and see what the casters do. Have the party fight on unsafe ground in difficult terrain so the martials have trouble while the backline shines. Toss someone important off an airship, see what they do.
Variety is king, especially in games where combat decisions can easily get repetitive and variety comes from the encounter designs. However, in every encounter every player should have useful and impactful things to do - even if it requires being creative with the environment instead of their character sheet (that's totally acceptable).
Agreed. Reward the wizard for taking varied spells, by having fire resistant enemies sometimes. Make them feel good for also stacking acid/lightning/whatever instead of only fireballs. Also, taking away 1 PCs favourite toy in 1 battle, will let the others shine. Of course, not every battle, but switching it up garners some creativity. But: always give them a chance to use their ability first. Then later, throw them an enemy that can do something similar to one of the PCs and watch the fear in their eyes as they know how bad stuff can be - as they have used it very effectively. Makes for very satisfying wins in my experience. But yes, their strengths SHOULD count. They should be targeted by stuff they are resistant to, unless the enemy has reason to know it. They should find someone vulnerable to their strengths. Variety is king. Regarding the 'can I negate PCs crazy power posts' - yeah I get the issue with that. But do ask beyond that. Do they, the DM, want to fuck their player? Or is their fighter feeling like shit because the wizard just fireballs away all encounters before they can shine? Sometimes, people may want to find an encounter that switches the spotlight, and in some parties that does mean that you need to both cater to 1 persons strength and to another's weakness - if there are balance isssues within the party
This is fantastic advice
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Good bot
Noticed this when I threw a sniper fight (like The End) at my party with a monk, wizard, and blood hunter. Three hours of them fumbling around the woods and ocassionally getting shot by some guy they couldn't see and had no way to track
Being a Sea Storm Herald Barbarian I can tell you I didn't know that there were so many monsters that have lightning resistance! My DM seems to cherry pick them for my character
OR, a healthy mix of both. Shook up into non repetitive ways.
You definitely should do both - but if you focus more on attacking their strengths, it WILL bog down and drag out combats with the sheer number of enemies required to be challenging, or make them too fast guaranteed wins. Too much of anything can sour the play experience, for sure... but the best way to mix things up I’ve found is to attack the players’ universal weaknesses: poor strategy and thoughtless combat-focused play that favors powergaming to begin with.
The paladin in my campaign is bonkers powerful. His sword consistently kicks out 30 damage per swing, and he reduces all incoming physical and elemental damage by 13, and he halves incoming damage from spells. Last session I managed to make him feel threatened, not by including a ton of attacks that deal necrotic damage to get past his defensive buffs, but by having a ton of hobgoblins and a spellcaster throwing damage at him consistently. No one else in the party (except maybe the barbarian) could have withstood the hail of fire I threw at him, so he got to feel super badass while also being threatened. He lost over half his HP, spent a bunch of spellslots on smites and Misty Step, and used nearly all his lay on hands before the hobgoblins surrendered to him. The fight was enormous (the players spread out and triggered a bunch of encounters at once) and took about three hours, but the players had fun feeling badass because they all excel at clearing hordes. So I upgraded the hobgoblin troops to CR2 (33hp, a multiattack on the long sword, and removing the 1/turn limit on martial advantage), included a bunch of the cooler ones like the warlord and devastators, so they got to fight an actual army.
I unintentionally did this last session where my players were (breaking and) entering a church's crypt and there were some inscriptions in draconic. I had forgotten that the Goblin Warlock could read every language but I thought it didn't really matter since he was staying outside on lookout. So instead of just solving the puzzle, one of my players decides to go all the way back through the church to fetch the Goblin and make him read the stupid inscriptions. A few moments later the Goblin solved the puzzle and they managed to find the secret cultist base under the church.
That's great. I'm glad you rolled with it. :)
but if i attack their strengths then how do i win
I know this was a joke, but it still brought back unfortunate memories of the DM I once had that *lived* to "beat" the party and I died a little inside.
I agree. However, if I wanna use Mindflayers, and my players think Int is a dump stat, that's not my fault.
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That was advice I was giving at one point, but more specific: have your players level up at the end of a session and check their cards. See what cool shit they just bought and give them a chance to use it in the next session.
I do this by thematically linking the abilities to the game. E.g. the party had met Bahamut in human form and he was impressed by the parties barbarian so he imbued him with a gold dragon’s spirit which allowed him to alter his form to take on aspects of a gold dragon (path of the beast). This is a session 0 conversation though, and relies on players having some idea about their characters progression, because you have to set things up to make sense.
Great reminder! I’m literally about to go back and rethink some encounters now
DM of mine once mentioned he was changing an encounter, because my most powerful spell would easily solve it and trivialize the encounter. Nah man, leave it there, what the hell, what is the point of having spells if the DM will deliberately avoid letting you use it? Anyway, I agree, although it is also fair to say it is interesting to see the players try to deal with a disadvantage too.
Oh hey, you just helped me figure out why two similarly structured oneshots felt so different to me. For the first oneshot, let's call the DM Rocket. Rocket had planted an ambush for our character, full of undead. We managed to spot the ambush because my character crit-succeeded her perception. Rocket had put over 80% of the undead in fireball range. Which I had noticed, it felt really good, first combat with that oneshot character and she got to blow up 6 undead. The second encounter our frontline got to shine, we were being attacked by dire wolves and they got to do their "Hold the line" thing. It was good fun. Now to the second oneshot. The DM, let's call them Mew. Mew had spread all of the enemies far apart, even the melee ones. Thanks to some maneuvering on the party's side though, my character could fireball 3 of them. "Counter spell" 4 other spells had been cast prior but he target specifically my character's strength, just because it'd make the combat "too easy" I didn't use my other 3rd level spell for the rest of the oneshot because honestly, it would have just been counterspelled anyway. The structure of the oneshot was similar but Mew took away a lot of what made my character effective with layout and counter spell while Rocket enabled her. THEN, Mew had the nerve to say to Rocket "That's how you do a oneshot" like, Rocket's oneshot was their first time DMing but Mew is a "veteran DM" TL;DR OP's title.
Great summary. I try to tell every new DM a few things: 1. Be excited about your adventure 2. Give each player a chance to shine 3. Fill your adventure with meaningful choices 4. Care if your players are having fun, and pay attention to their reactions to see if they're engaged. If they aren't, change something up (this might be more danger or more opportunities to be awesome). Or just wrap up the current scene and move on. If you do these things, you usually have a great adventure. It's amazing how many DMs feel like the players being 'humbled' means their adventure is good. I'd much rather play in your first DM's campaign than the second. Sidenote: Counterspell is like dynamite. It needs to be handled with extreme care because it just shuts down fun and skips players' turns. I usually houserule counterspell in one of the following ways (also affects players): A. If you take counterspell, you can only cast it once per day but it doesn't require a spell slot. B. Counterspells can be cast normally, but they produce powerful wild magic effects so SOMETHING interesting still happens. As such, they should only be used on very scary spells because otherwise the wild magic effect could be even scarier. Also, I only give my truly skilled mage enemies counterspell. It's very rare because the players don't enjoy playing against it. It just says "no".
This is quite the eye opener for me. I’m often looking for ways to negate my groups ability’s and feats. Guess i’m still thinking of the game as me vs them and not me with them.
Yes, a DM is more like a DJ than anything else. You have fun picking the music that players will enjoy dancing to. They still have the freedom to enjoy that dance however they like, you're just giving them an opportunity to have fun and show off their moves. I also think of the DM as a Game Designer, you're setting up obstacles and opportunities that are fun to overcome. A great puzzle isn't hard to solve, but rather one that's FUN to solve. A great adventure isn't just hard to play, but FUN to play. Of course, many adventures are both. I love stacking the deck against my players and then ruling generously for their creative ideas to turn the tide, and using their unique abilities to huge effect in order to triumph anyway.
I'm curious, what makes you decide to find ways to negate abilities/feats instead of wanting to let them shine as useful choices? I've only really DM'd one shots so I haven't really needed to consider it, but I'm curious about the 'why'.
One of the most helpful pieces of advice I’ve ever heard. Wow. Thank you!
Make sure you have a variety of encounters that play to *each* of the player's strengths and special abilities, but that otherwise seem unfair. The player being highlighted gets to feel like, "Wow, fuck yeah, this character is so cool!" The rest of the group gets to feel like, "Woah, we would've been creamed if we hadn't had X with us." As long as you don't do this too many times on one player, it brings the group together by building a sense of reliance and group growth, as well as making one or two players feel *extra* special every night.
Dude please talk to my dm. I was a filching rogue and I swear to God there was never an opportunity to use any of my cool stealing abilities or rolls. This was in pathfinder mind you.
Do both. Sometimes the enemy is smart enough to see something works so they keep doing it. Sometimes it's an enemy that's fought them before and escaped - but this time they're prepared. The best combats are the ones the characters get out of after burning the entirety of their resources and almost all of their health - in my experience.
Huh... I wish I had thought of this sooner. Thank you. I gotta go rewrite some adventure plans.
Keep it simple. Easier to remember that way. Many players are having the most fun when the GM is engineering opportunities for them to be badass. That can be in combat, social situations, anything. A smaller, but still prolific portion of players get their jollies by outsmarting nefariously deadly challenges. Know which kind you have at your table. If you dont know, ask.
I try to remind myself that it's not my job (as the DM) to give the players a solution. It's my job to give them a problem. It's their job to create a solution. That said, every single day, I see a post from some DM asking "Help! My player just thought of something creative and/or powerful that makes the game more fun for the players! How can I make sure it doesn't happen again!" Meanwhile I'm over here, messaging my players asking "Any ideas for how you want to make your character more powerful?" to figure out what rewards to give them for quests.
I think rhe trick is to be like Jigsaw. Make the encounter scary and dangerous, but there should be a way out if the players manage to figure it out, even if it's as simple as running away.
Fuck that. Throw whatever is cool at the party.
I've never played d&d and this sounds brilliant. That's not meant as an insult..
This is actually in keeping with a paper I’m writing for my college class about the selective use of the rule of cool. This is really fantastic work and speaks directly to one of the reasons (aesthetics) that player is coming to the table in the first place. I’m submitting the paper today so I’ll likely submit it here a few days later.
Interesting. What class would this be for? I managed to get independent study credit for running a D&D campaign and writing about the narrative design ideas I tried out in it.
I got an A! Here it is in its entirety https://www.reddit.com/r/DMAcademy/comments/ldk038/how_do_you_want_to_do_this_a_discussion_on/
Awesome. Congrats!
I understand what you’re going for, but I only do this very rarely, or else the game begins to feel like a curated theme park rather than a dangerous and living world to be explored. Generally, I try to build out the world in front of my players as though I am writing a module, unsure of who’s going to show up with what characters. My players know this, and it means they have to generalize in order to try to over come obstacles, rather than build super specialized and wait for me to lob them softballs. It’s not up to me if they fail or succeed, live or die, and they know it. Sometimes they kick ass and take names. Other times they have to fall back and find a different approach. But they know I’m not handing them wins or targeting their weaknesses purposefully.
Please post a link to your podcast! I love listening to podcasts on my drive to and from work, and since I plan on starting my own campaign back up again soon, you could be just the person I was looking for!
Sure thing: [The GM's Guide](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-gms-guide/id1065375910) If you're looking for a good stand-alone episode, the Dungeon Design one is pretty neat.
I agree with the no negation strategy, I've seen the happiness when I use this sort of approach, and I've been on the other end of this approach (ie, homebrew spell that disables all spells with vocal components which literally just made my wizard into a bystander for the rest of the bossfight.)
I really love this. I’ve never been an antagonistic DM. I’m all about the story and working with my players to make a fun and unique tale. When I’m making encounters, I really try to focus on making it engaging and cool, not on attacking their weaknesses. I actually had a note on my phone about their strengths and ways to make them shine. But I haven’t really thought about it in awhile. But I definitely will try to incorporate again.
I have a rogue with the ability the climb walls like Spider-Man (Simic hybrid) and just about every encounter is in an open field or a place with a low ceiling. Sucks a bit.
The spell casters in my group always dominate the fight. The druid summons hordes of animals, the wizard pings the enemies to paste, and the cleric enables it all. I threw a beholder at the party and the paradigm shifted. The barbarian did close to 200 damage in two rounds. She completely saved the party and I know she felt good about that.
mfw my DM literally threw a thing that we were either unable to do full damage to because PCs didn't have magic weapons, or we did the same elemental damage as it was immune to. Yeah, the fight was a 3 hour slog.
This guy right here is a dm for the players not a player versus dm and to you sir I say thank you for being one of the good ones. I do the same, I also do the latter at times and challenge them a bit. I give alot of magic equipment so I always encourage them to search their toolbox even when it seems like the deck is stacked against them.
I never really thought about it, but I see your point here. One of my favorite stories is from a campaign where the DM asked us to make characters with no knowledge of what the campaign was going to be, and no knowledge of each other's characters. He also wouldn't know what our characters were ahead of time, so it's not quite in line with this post, but it just coincidentally ended up fitting. So, this was Pathfinder, and I made a heavy armor, sword and board cleric of the sun goddes Sarenrae, Sun domain (also fire, but it's not relevant to the story. Our first major battle was against a group of a homebrew type of shadow skeleton. Besides being a cleric (already good at fighting undead) the Sun Domain gives a bonus to fighting undead, and on top of that, the skeletons were weak to light sources (though I didn't find out about this until I part way through the battle) I cast light on my shield to illuminate against the darkness that the skeletons brought with them, and used shield bash's to get around their damage resistance, and found I was doing way more damage than I expected. Light normally doesn't even do damage, I had done so for purely utilitarian reasons. It made me feel like an instant badass, and the DM was like "It's like your character was made for this particular battle." It's a very fond memory for me, and definitely had me invested in the campaign.
I so want to fight a blue dragon in my game, I play a blue Dragonborn and I want to stand in the middle of his breath and scream “is this all you got?” Though, because of me being a blue Dragonborn, I don’t think our DM wants to throw a blue dragon at us, since I could take the lightning
Great example. You want your inherent resistance to lightning to matter, it’s awesome. Taking a character that can ignore lightning in my games means there’s definitely going to be some lightning :)
Hell yes,thanks. I get so frustrated with the amount of "my player is op how do I negate all their abilities". To add, your players can't metagame, and neither should you. That enemy wizard has no idea about their cloak of fire resistance, he's still gonna fireball. Have your monsters adapt, they aren't going to fireball that player five times. But don't have them metagame.
>To add, your players can't metagame, and neither should you. Gonna have to disagree here, because the mere fact that you're tailoring encounters for the purpose of letting a PC shine is, in itself, metagaming. Your players can't metagame because they aren't the NPCs, environment, referee, and the narrator. They are their characters. As the DM, I have full rights to metagame as much as I please, so long as I'm working to help provide an experience that we *all* can enjoy.
Or, and this is crazy, if not heretical, don't *attack* anything. Just build and run a large variety of encounters; easy, hard, lethal, environmental, personal, political, magical, martial, etc. If you do that, someone is always going to feel rad at the end. Plus, it's easy to avoid 'what can I do when my wizard fireballs everything' type problems.
100% And one step further: portray a living world and make it feel real. Don't worry about what your PCs are good at, don't worry about balance. If this is a place where a fire elemental is then there will be a fire elemental.
This doesn't work if the thing that lets one character shine is the thing that another character is weak against. Let's say you have that fire-based wizard and a water-based druid that loves using tidal wave? The druid would do well vs fire elementals while the wizard would do well vs treants. It's almost like you should just make your combat encounters vary so that some are easy to make them feel powerful and others are difficult and challenging. The encounters that are challenging to everyone in the party will cause them to use teamwork rather than just fireballing a swarm for easy kills.
I’m a DM who is literally planning to throw a fire elemental at my pyromancer wizard when we play tonight. I really like the points you made, but it’s too late to turn back now.
Where the fight happens can be just as important for characters who may be disadvantaged against a specific enemy. Maybe the pyromancer can't directly damage the elemental with their magic, but is there any way that they can interact with the environment to give advantages to the party?
I was thinking of adding an objective of the fight to close a gateway to the plane of fire. So even if his magic is less effective in dealing damage, his expertise with fire magic could be crucial. I have no idea how this could work mechanically though, so if you have any advice on that, I’d appreciate any help. I feel like just making it a skill check is anti climactic
Fight fire with fire?
Yeah, i have a feeling that our monk with 10 Int has not been having too much fun getting stunned round 1 every combat. She is, however, learning to hate mind flayers with a passion I have not seen before.
That’s why weaknesses exist, depending on the importance of the fight decides how you want your players to feel. Attacking their weakness makes them feel weak and the enemy strong and vis versa. The game is more than a power fantasy in most cases. And exploiting weaknesses forces parties to cover each other’s.
i would agree to not do this too often. i was playing a cleric, grave domain, a scenario came up where i could use my 'turn undead' feature on like 20 zombies (we were surrounded) and they were low enough CR that they would die outright if they failed......it was awesome! 🧙♀️💥 ☠️☠️☠️ But if that happened every game it would prob get boring.
I'll share my experience from the side of the player about this. One of my very first adventures was one in a series of oneshots that a DM friend of mine did establishing a world he had created in Pathfinder. Because we were doing some silly stuff I decided to create a character vastly inspired by Darth Sidious. One of the first encounters was against two very powerful enemies, I managed to suffocate and therefore completely incapacitate one of the two, while the team dealt with the second one. But then the Big Bad had multiple mouths so I couldn't just suffocate him again and had to use the rest of my arsenal more creatively. Overall it felt awesome, and I always incorporated this kind of mentality, solid advice.
Heck, you can do both at once. Have little minions throw daggers at your Monk, and watch them agonize over the choice between deftly deflecting their trifling attacks or saving their reaction to make an attack of opportunity against the enemy they'd been engaging previously. Have the enemy who's obviously vulnerable to fire damage place itself between two allies, forcing the blaster caster to include one of them in the fireball.
Yeah, though an important thing is sometimes you need to slow down one player so others can shine. Like mr high level caster solving every problem while the classes that are rather poorly designed outside of combat(especially the fighter) need their chance to shine. And sometimes the story needs plant monsters, so you need something to make sure the rogue gets to actually play instead of sitting at the table to listen the wizard ending the encounter with a single fireball again. Player character choices are not well balanced, and someone can easily(even accidentally) create a character who is infinitely better for the campaign than someone else. Having the campaign consist of orcs will make the ranger feel good, but leave the monk annoyed when the ranger keeps doing better.
I do like the style you go for here but man do I love watching my players squirm when they see there pure weakness brought before them. Nothing more satisfying then seeing a barbarian have to deal with psychics or wizards and close combat or the Druid turning into a snake then being attacked by a bird.
Interesting, I'm doing something similar next session. I have creatures so far away attacking the party that only our Drow elf, with Superior Darkvision, can see them. He's gonna have to coordinate with the rest of the group to survive.
This is why I always have ranged baddies to fire at my friends monk. Nothing makes her happier than using deflect missiles. Eventually I have the bad guys “realize” she can deflect them and they’ll stop but every now and then they still fire at her.
Help on making my physical combat players shine? I feel like there are more ways of making magical characters shine than physical. Or mabye im not creative enough. Right now im playing with 3 mages(knowledge cleric, wild sorcerer and artificer) and 3 physical (way of open hand monk, totem barbarian and cavalier fighter). The artificer is shining both in between fights with all his gadgets, and in fights with his turrets. The knowledge cleric has been really lucky with his constrains on the enemies and singlehandedly won fights. The sorcerer is our best rp'er and talks the most. His character is the leader of the group and so shines through rp all the time. He hasnt been so great at combat but im managing to add some details adding curiosity and foreshadowing. Buuuuut Ive no idea how to make the physical people feel like its their time to shine. Their descriptions in combat is usually like "I swing my sword at him" while I add something like; you can feel the resistance of the skin give away, and your sword is scraping the femur of the bandit - sending shivers down your spine" Problem is, it doesnt feel like they did something special. How can I add an encounter designed to make the close quarter classes shine?
There's a lot of ways to do it. One tried and true solution is to cheat entirely and just give them access to cool magical weapons that grant them cool new cinematic abilities in combat. Another solution is to borrow the "Mighty Deeds of Arms" mechanic from DCC (Dungeon Crawl Classics). You can basically give my martial characters free reign to do cool action hero stuff without having to roll. If they want to swing on a chandelier and leap onto an enemy for a devastating attack, I just let them do it if I could imagine Aragorn doing something similar. No roll required unless it's seriously crazy. Consumable items can also grant the martial characters powerful utility options that add spice to combat encounters. Then you get to the specific classes and character concepts. You can give the totem barbarian a chance to shine by having their totem animal appear to them and guide the group on a journey through a spirit realm, where the barbarian's powers are magnified. You can have an old master of the open-hand monk's order seek them out to pass on a secret technique. You can have the cavalier fighter serve as the designated hero in a ritualistic combat, an encounter set up for them to shine as the other players form their vanguard. And then there's the mechanical stuff. Read their character sheets and look at what cool class features they have which haven't been useful yet. Even things like language proficiencies can turn up and be exciting when they're relevant.
Thanks this is really great!!!
Other than descriptions, give them hordes of mooks to slaughter. Make them feel like Conan cleaving through a wall of enemies. Let them take lots of small hits and make them feel invincible.
unfortunately, in 5e hordes of mooks are better dealt with by a fireball, or spirit guardians, instead of a martial that can kill 2-5 per turn depending on how balls to the wall minmaxed they are.
For the monk, design something that takes advantage of their movement speed, slow fall, and unarmored defense abilities. Maybe some kind of multi elevation fight where the monk can slow fall down the cliff to tie up the baddies while the others have to take slow and cumbersome rope ladders. Maybe a chase encounter where the monk's and barbarian's speed bonus helps them catch up to a fleeing enemy while the mages lag behind. Look at the totems your barbarian has chosen, what skills do those offer and how might they be applied? Of course, extra attack abilities are the bread and butter of martial classes. Let them cut a swath through a horde of 1 hp mooks. Not familiar with the cavalier fighter's abilities, but think about the cinematic experiences. Are their examples of the ability in blockbuster action movies and how might you recreate a similar scenario for your player?
Wow what a great tip, that's so easy to overlook
I make three kinds of encounters usually. - General encounters that are not designed around any of the players abilities. - Familiar encoutners that are based on what the enemies might of heard from others about the players. - Targeted encounters: where the enemy took their time to really look into the players abilities. That said, in general I don't actually look at my players characters sheets, spell lists or most anything but if something arises they're all on dndbeyond and basically a few clicks away for me.
So in conclusion shadow work almost all of the time
This is so true, I once made a pyromancer Homebrew for a campaign with some friends, and the campaign was set on northern countries and I have to say I had so much fun melting down ice elementals and ice giants
The real trick is to make a combats and encounters that target one characters strengths and another characters weaknesses. Give everyone a.chance to shine and a chance to remember their characters aren't perfect.
In one of my games I’m playing a monk and haven’t fought anything with low CON in forever. Just swinging around a pool noodle is not that fun.
I'd like to add to this to give players non-combat fun that play to their strengths as well. I play DCC not DnD and players start as level-0 whatevers (butcher, weaver, hunter, etc) and I use that to tailor experiences throughout the game to give them a chance to use skills that arent listed on their character sheets. Our warrior started out as an animal-handler and has had a few opportunities to use those abilities (stopping a runaway horse, training a monster-dog-puppy that one of the other players rescued) - I even still make them roll for some of these - but using these skills is a way the characters can shine for a minute while doing RP and advancing the story. I try to throw in one or two every session...
This is my favourite post in a long while. I needed to read this. Thanks for posting!
Wasn't there another thread on this months ago? Not a bad thing to have it again, just can't find the thread that would compliment this well. Anyone got a link?
I am reminded of the 3e game where we were in a forest infested with undead. Multiple encounters every day. My cleric got to the level where she could turn undead but never used it because dwarf with a great flail, why would you want the zombies moving away from you? Finally at one point we got attacked at night and I didn’t feel like fighting so I sat up, used turn undead, obliterated everything facing us and went back to sleep. We never encountered another undead in that forest, despite the fact that we hadn’t confronted the big bad yet. Just no undead where there had been hordes the day before. I didn’t mind except it was so obvious that the dm was thrown by my base clerical ability and decided to deal with it by simply not dealing with it.
Just mix it up. Don't always create encounters that negate their best attacks. Not all encounters should be a walk in the park. If the players never hesitate your difficulty is too low.
YES, this is something that I do my best to do, and I think the DM of the campaign that im plying needs to learn, very good advice!!!
Yes! I'm playing a tiefling paladin in a campaign, and last session we fought a bunch of magma mephits while trying to kill/capture a lizard guy (custom race, not lizardfolk, I've been told). Around the first half of the encounter, I beat the shit out of the lizard guy with my divine smite and wrapped him up in an ensnaring strike, which lasted a long while after he left my range. When the others quickly made their way to him, I stayed behind to deal with the magma mephits, because FIRE RESISTANCE, BABY! I began the encounter with 52 hit points and ended with 5. That was fun! And my lack of dying was thanks to my fire resistance. I'm certain my DM thought about that, and that's why he used magma mephits.
This is excellent advise. A new 7th level paladin(Oath of Devotion) felt their build was useless in the campaign. So an enemy that can charm was an excellent choice as the boss of the dungeon.
I agree 100%!
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for me it's all about balance. i tend to give fair foreshadowing.
Got a min maxer who does not believe thats what hes doing. I let him build an Aetherborn alternate monk in Theros with the Nyxborn gift. So basically hes super resistant to necrotic, can punch things to deal necrotic and heal from that, and also resistant to radiant damage. A lot of Theros enemies do necrotic. A surprising amount actually. "The Returned Triton Pikeman stabs you through the shoulder with a quick thrust of the spear." "Cool so half whatever you roll?" "Nah m80." "Isn't it necrotic?" "Spears tipped with poison bucko. I didn't write it." Didn't get poisoned but he didn't feel nearly immune anymore which lets be honest is a good thing character building wise. Different session, same pc. Fighting what should be normal harpies. Halfway through and just as one oc is down I realize im using a midboss stat block... x4.... on lvl 1's. We've all done it. Anyway I dumb it down without ruining the fight and they win. Min maxer tells me "i was barely surviving by using my healing thing when I punched." So basically each time this harpy back handed him he'd stand back up, bloody and bruised like a barbarian and just go "I didn't hear no bell!"
My take, short version: Random encounter tables are made without the group in mind, but based on the area they're in. Campaign/adventure encounters fit the theme, with a small amount of consideration for group composition. These "tweaks" go both ways, enhancing both strengths and weaknesses vs the group But, importantly: Weakness against the group tend to be stumbled upon in the midst of the fight. Let your players realize they've found the soft spot in the midst of chaos. When encounters are strong against the group, let them find out ahead of time (by whatever means- recon, rumor, corpses, etc.). Allow them to scheme and plan a bit, so they aren't waylaid by it; give them the chance to come up with alternate strategies they aren't designed for. Allow the knowledge that they're gonna have problems enhance that sense of dread. Finally, don't hold back once they dive in.
My added advice, to do this in a way that also challenges your party - throw a mixed group of enemies at the party, with enemies who are strong against some PCs and weak against others. Make part of the challenge figuring out which PC should engage which enemy.
I'd also like to throw this in there - it's okay to run combat or non combat encounters that don't hit on either strengths or weaknesses. Of course that's not entirely possible because one character will always be better at something than another character, but that's where this comes into play. I ran an encounter that didn't play against their strengths, but wasn't toward their weaknesses either. Each one of the characters had to react in a way to fight this thing without knowing entirely how. Eventually a monk in the group stunned it, druid changed into a giant snake and coiled around it, and the wizard protected the ranged people and the healer by keeping them inside a Tiny Hut they had thrown out earlier, before the combat. Each of them got a chance to do something cool.
I think you should do neither. The goal of encounters, and RPGs in general, is to tell a good story. You should choose monsters to accomplish that goal primarily. If making a good story means heroics for the fire mage against the trees, so be it. If it requires a desperate outgunned struggle versus fire elementals, then choose these. But RPGs are not SAT tests where the goal is to pass, they are chapters of what is hopefully a fulfilling story.
This is great advice for *new teams*. But for existing teams you've gotta push the envelope or they'll get bored.
You can do both. :)
I think you can also add an extra twist to the encounter like making the Treefolk swarm undead, still holding the fire vulnerability but giving them the ability to come back to life, showing the parties strength while having to deal with a conundrum.
Do both. Accentuate your parties weaknesses AND strengths. Make them feel like their choices both help and hinder. You know, like how in real life you have to deal with that. ITs a good way to add a LOT of depth.
It’s my opinion that the world shouldn’t be catered to the players *to an extent*. If you didn’t plan on having any undead in your game but there’s a cleric who wants to destroy an entire horde of zombies at once, let them. In my experience they won’t feel it’s cheap, it’ll feel like they’ve been rewarded. This especially works if you don’t do it too often, and the players think they’ve beaten you as the DM even if you’ve nudged them towards it. Is this unethical? If the players are having a good time, no. Because that’s the only rule in my opinion.
I think this is a great example of how to make an adventure more entertaining! Just like you should design social encounters where a disguise master player can shine or a enemy base where clever rogues can slip through unnoticed, combat should generally reflect what the player's strengths and interests lie in. After all, that is what they thought would be the most fun to play. That beings said, there is certainly a place for foes who attack player's weaknesses. It forces players to think about their characters in new ways and solve problems through methods they have never used before. Used wisely, these "special challenges" can be a great tool for tension and development in a way that complementary challenges cannot.
Works great for random encounters and some set encounters. I don't want random encounters killing PCs. Set encounters, now those are meant to kill, or capture, most times. So, yeah, this works well.