It can sometimes be difficult to make combat interesting. How many times have you entered a combat with powerful characters and what you thought were compelling statblocks, only for it to divulge into two tokens/minis standing next to each rolling to hit each round?
There’s not much incentive in 5e-style games to do much else without direct thought into how a combat encounter is set up. If there’s one thing I learned from my years of playing Starcraft, it’s that utilizing the battlefield itself can make all the difference in determining the victors of a fight.
Are there parts of the battlefield that are difficult to move through? Are there places where characters can gain half, three-quarters, or full cover? Is there opportunities for high ground? These are things you generally want to make sure you have at least a few of, and make sure you have statblocks that can effectively utilize these aspects.
As opposed to my Theater of the Mind: Combat post, this focuses on utilizing a battlemap, though I plan on writing a future post in how to incorporate some of these ideas in Theater of the Mind.
Alternate Objectives & Complications
Before focusing on designing the battlefield, I wanted to bring up that one of the most common pieces of advice, and it’s a good one, is to add alternative objectives or other complications to a combat.
- The characters are paid for guard duty over a highly sensitive, political meeting taking place in a secure location. A group of thugs jump out to ambush the characters at the front, but a character spots a small dispatch trying to sneak around back, break into the facility, and kidnap the people they’re meant to protect
- A bomb has been armed and it’s being protected by a small contingent of sentry robots. It needs to be defused before it goes off and taking down the entire complex.
- The characters arrived at the MacGuffin they need to bring back to their patron, but a group of enemies arrived with the sole goal of taking the MacGuffin and running off.
This can distract players from focusing entirely on their damage per round to divert their attention elsewhere, and can create very distinct decision making.
Terrain
When creating a more dynamic battlefield, the first thing you really want to think about is terrain. Having difficult terrain, hazards, or some good old fashion walls to restrict movement and line of sight can make a big difference. In a giant open field, the only real tactical decision is to move forward and fight. In an area with tighter corridors/rooms, a pool of acid, and a cliff can make movement a lot more tactical.
NOTE ON FLYING CHARACTERS: Flying characters can largely ignore most, if not all, aspects of a battlefield. This option is obviously limited in combat in indoor spaces, but how do you challenge a flying character in an outdoor environment?
There are largely two simple tactics you can employ. The obvious one is just have your ranged attackers focus them down, but that can feel targeted, might be unfun, and leaves the other players to take out your highest impact targets pretty quickly.
Another option is to find something that forces them to fly down. Remember, if they’re in the air, their options of directly assisting non-flying allies is quite limited. They can’t perform a Wisdom (Medicine) check to stabilize a creature, they can’t provide the Help action, they (mostly) can’t chase any physical alternative objectives on the map, etc. Try to think of a method beyond just attacking them that might entice them to land once in a while, as that’ll keep up the variety of the combat.
DESTRUCTIBLE Terrain
Having aspects of the battlefield that can be destroyed can help add some more unique tactics. Has a ranged attacker climbed atop a wooden balcony and firing from above? Launch an explosive at it and watch it collapse, bringing them to your melee characters and getting a bit of falling damage in. Might even start a fire, introducing a new, hazardous terrain feature to the fight.
Shifting Terrain
Terrain that moves, flips, expands, shrinks, or otherwise changes over the course of a combat can be very challenging to navigate. Putting aside any complications in implementing this in a virtual tabletop or a flip map (and I’ll have some tips for both in a bit), this can be a fun way to keep the combat engaging.
Video games tend to have great examples of this.
- Platforms that move constantly around a central point, some of which collapse and fall away while new ones form.
- Walls that close in every round, putting a timer to defeat the enemies quickly, find a way to stop them from moving, or getting out of there before they get crushed.
- Forcefields that block certain paths and can alternate.
- An avalanche coming down creating difficult terrain and a threat to take bludgeoning damage from a collision.
An easy way to think of this is, “What mechanic can I utilize to make certain areas difficult or impossible to navigate, and have those areas shift around?” This is not for every combat, but could make for very fun and challenging boss fights.
Implementation
In person you can easily use some materials like coasters, drinking glasses, pieces of cardboard, etc. that you can easily move around. If you have access to actual terrain pieces, or enjoy a bit of crafting, you can also utilize those to move things around.
On a virtual tabletop, many of them such as FoundryVTT let you import individual tiles that you can add to the field to represent a moving piece of terrain. Alternatively, you can utilize shapes typically provided in some form of measurement tool to represent these aspects.
Cover
Having ranged enemies keep their distance from the party’s melee characters and bouncing between cover to have protection against ranged attacks can drastically increase the challenge. It can force some characters to use limited resource area of effect abilities to force the enemies to abandon their cover. You can make the cover destructible, giving a way for characters to influence the terrain and affect the battlefield. Remember that you can also have characters go Prone (costs no movement) to gain increased cover, and it puts them in an awkward position to retreat as standing takes half cover, so it requires some strategy to determine when that’s the optimal tactic.
High Ground
High ground also gives ranged attackers safety from melee fighters. They’ll need to find a way up by taking stairs, climbing ladders, scaling cliffs, etc. Even if you don’t have a mechanic like gaining an expertise die in Level Up: Advanced Fifth Edition when you have the high ground, the sheer existence of it can make fights more complicated. A character can also break line of sight more easily with the high ground, simply by moving backwards a bit or falling prone (like with the cover strategy).
Interactables
Having options for your characters to interact with can also add some variety to a combat. The classic example of, “I swing from the chandelier and attack!” is fun and all, but unless it actually has a mechanical benefit, a character is likely to just use it for flavor.
What we want to look for is to sometimes add objects into our combat that provide some sort of benefit if utilized. If it’s especially useful, including a drawback can keep it powerful and not by default the best option.
- A barrel full of oil that can explode, but ignite the room.
- A level that can add some of the other topics of this post, such as lifting barricades to create more cover, shifting the terrain, or creating/removing high ground.
- Traps with their triggering mechanism within reach, allowing a character to turn its attention to the other party.
- Ways to affect lighting by either removing or adding it (snuffing out a torch, flipping a power switch).
These interactables can also easily tie into an Alternate Objective, and multiple could be needed to be interacted with before the alternate objective has been completed.
Not all of these need to be incorporated into every combat. For most combats, just having some cover and possibly high ground is more than enough to keep it dynamic. When you are designing more pivotal combats or boss battles, however, keeping these in mind as you design the encounter can help you make a memorable experience for the whole table.
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