"The Monsters Know What They’re Doing: Combat Tactics for Dungeon Masters" by Keith Ammann is a great book for NPC tactics. Detail about specific monsters as well as general stuff like "creatures with X level intelligence approach a fight like this."
Indeed not low int or creatures that just won't know wtf you are doing like that one bird enemy that saw my druid cast conjure animal and instantly new to focus him instead of the 2 vultures summoned cause they are just that informed about magic and tactical.
@@fightingcorsair7297 lol it was once at least , he said mb to it. it was the once i played druid , played the spore druid but god I was tanky to the point I was "zzz" though but it a fun experience. Oh yeah and I never conjured more than 2 animals at a time cause that just breaks the game.
In many editions this kind of book isn't necessary but for 5e its practically a necessity for a DM. I would rate it more important than any of the books you could buy other than the core books. I've played in way too many games where difficult fights are easy because DMs don't remember monster abilities or don't use them well. Players get to practice using their abilities combat after combat. DMs often just get one shot to do it right with a particular monster.
As you were talking about lair actions the first thing that came to mind was the baddy somewhat exasperatedly saying "dang it, this is really going to raise my insurance rates" or "man, and i really loved this rug" before unleashing an area of effect that would definitely mess up some of their own stuff (fire, water, etc). It would explain why they had waited until now to use it.
Like others here mentioned, don't let your BBEG travel alone. 5e, especially, has ramped up damage in relation to hit points, and a full party will be dealing damage at 5 or 6 times the rate of any single monster. Add numbers to even things out. In groups, even minions can be a serious threat to an experienced party of adventurers. Also, I can't reiterate Ginny's final comment enough. If the party does something clever, don't punish them by not letting it happen. Some of the best stories later on involve a clever turn by the characters that blindsides the bad guys.
I'll tack onto this and say that if you read this and think "But I want my boss to feel strong on its own, not just because it has a bunch of minions" you can just lie and make the minions and their actions part of the boss, even if you give them separate initiatives. If it's a big boss (in literal size, not plot importance) give it a bunch of appendages and separate parts that act outside of its main turn, and give them their own hp that the players can hack at to get rid of them, if it's medium or large size creature, have it create apparitions, or teleport around outside of its turn to engage from different places, and have HP thresholds to slowly remove this ability. Basically, if you want your boss to be strong without minions, flavor the minions as being abilities or extensions of the boss creature, rather than separate creatures working for the boss.
I would say though, while you should never punish your party for coming up with a clever tactic for a particular encounter, if they establish an effective tactic that they keep using for multiple encounters, you should absolutely design enemies that it won't work on to keep thing fresh. Especially important with high level spellcasters and all the gimmicks they can come up with!
Can we please get a steal this side quest with this elf character? I really like her outfit, it looks amazing (especially the gloves), and I think she could have a good quest were the party encounters her, gets a quest or mission to stop her then goes to her home in a castle or something and you fight her there. I could be a fun way to get some new magic items or something similar.
ua-cam.com/video/DkSM-lMKrJU/v-deo.html She already did it. It's Nymwen, the secret necromancer in love with a long dead poet. She also made a POV: ua-cam.com/video/WhkutPEBZBY/v-deo.html
I found a great gauge for whether a monster, a big boss especially, needs beefing up is the player's reactions themselves. I had a group utterly crush (from my PoV) a BBEG in two rounds, taking very little damage and resisting everything the villain threw at them, but the players were *super* tense about it and feeling like every passed save or critical hit was an absolute clutch roll, and like they were dancing on the knife edge of the villain regaining control and sweeping them away. In that situation, I found it pretty much perfect to let the players have their speedy victory, because they *felt* like it had been really hard won, regardless of the reality.
As part of thinking tactically for your boss, also remember: Scouting. The boss probably has spies, and scrying spells. As the characters run around using their schticks to take out monsters survivors and witness' can later report these to the boss who can then be prepared.
Sure, but are we the only existing adventurers in the DnD world? I find this advice quite lackluster. If the dude has eyes and ears everywhere, how come he's having such problems with us taking down his plans in the first place?
For exemple, players often have prefered destructive energies types, just like people tend to have prefered pokemon types for exemple. So if someone has seen that the sorcerer of the party dishes out fireball, the villain might ask his cleric to cast endurance to destructive energies (fire) on itself, for exemple. As much as the party can buff itself BEFORE a fight, if the villain heard fighting in the room beside its own, he probably can use every round of the preceding combat to buff itself with every spells or object that they have!
Tip: prime your players to accept these things as "normal" by building them in to low level encounters too. If they've seen it before during a relatively easy combat, it won't raise suspicions that you're changing things on the fly if (when) you need to use some of them to last minute alter the difficulty of a boss fight.
Having wolves or goblins or something call for help and their family coming to help might be a good call, or maybe the village elder of the goblin colony has a level or two in druid! Or spears start getting loaded into spear guns!
As someone who played video game RPGs far before TTRPGs, one thing I like to borrow for bosses is the puzzle boss. Boss is average strength but is super resilient or untouchable because of X reason, and players need to survive and defeat minions while disabling the spell/item/etc. Once the boss is vulnerable, wiping the floor with them is very cathartic to the players
A good way to set this up is to take inspiration from the roman colosseum (under the floor is the hypogeum which had all sorts of mechanisms to do things like add lions anywhere to the field). Basically home field advantage, if the BBEG expects to be attacked it isn't unreasonable that they would set up "kill boxes" or arenas to engage the players on their terms. To add puzzle aspects let players enter a visible control room where a minion is using their actions (possibly as signaled by the boss) to mess with the part by triggering traps or inserting minions and stuff to be inconvenient. However, once players get into the control room they can use this stuff against the big bad (including locking the door to keep him out). It can be justified however you want narratively but if i had an arena i would want traps everywhere that I won't trigger. (I guess you could think of it as fancy lair actions that the players can hijack) Personally i wouldn't do this too much so it stays really interesting and novel, and reskin as needed to keep it fresh. (Maybe its a fight in a factory, or the security desk in a prison or ancient city, or maybe its litterally a colloseum) but if you give your players buttons to push they will love pushing them.
All my bosses are puzzle bosses, the DM routinely lets me design dungeons because my bosses are puzzle bosses (and I'm better at those than he is). The best puzzle boss I've designed is "The illusionist" who can weave realistic illusions. She was based on a monk-wizard hybrid concept and her arena was part of her fight. Even with Truesight the players weren't able to tell where she was as it only added more duplicates (The walls were the illusion, there were mirrors backed with bombs everywhere). There were plenty of torches, both magical and not, as well as a crystal ball in the ceiling. In the end it turned out she wasn't even in the room, she was controlling an armoured puppet through animate objects and was in a side room 4 rooms down the hall. After 5 near TPKs the party ran out and gave up. The key to this dungeon was simple, all they had to do was not break the mirrors and they would see that the mirrors were all reflecting from the crystal ball. A Dancing Light cantrip (which the party had) and an intelligence check would have revealed this. Unfortunately the party instantly thought to break the mirrors and exploded while doing so. I didn't even get to her second phase. Going up against someone called "The Illusionist" using the direct approach was a bad idea. Doing it 5 times in a row showed me that the party's dump stat was their intelligence. According to the Party I need to make my bosses less confusing and stop using actual tactics and group diversity.
@@inventor121 first of all, that's brilliant, and I'm suddenly rethinking my hexblade baddie (my players don't know what's what they are yet). Second, if your players can't formulate plans or think ahead, that has to be on them after a point. I've told my players that I intend to run encounters with a plan and baddies working together; if they want to survive the tough fights, they'll need to start putting together plans.
@@MajorHickE You should absolutely do that, and while you're at it group together monsters into "squads" where there is a tank, DPS, and support. I like to mix DPS between Melee and Ranged depending on what makes sense in the situation. Also please give me details on your hexblade baddie. For example: City Guard: A squad of 7 men in a 2 column formation, 2 men in heavy armour lead the front with Tower Shields and shortswords, 4 in medium armour carry normal shields and spears (or longswords) as well as a sling and a few stones. A support mage in light or medium armour, or commander (battlemaster fighter) in heavy armour, marches in the center of the formation ready to give orders and bolster allies. This small group provides tactical flexibility while still retaining unit cohesion. Goblin raiders: A pack of 6 goblins have laid an ambush, they have dug a vehicle trap with spikes and are waiting in the ditch beside the road and the nearby trees. As the wagon passes over the vehicle trap the front wheels give way and arrows fly from the treeline 3 goblins with melee weapons make a rush for the wagon to engage the party. from the left. As the party is being engaged from the left a goblin comes in from the right to loot the wagon. One of my favourites for large battles (only against high level characters) though is the "firing line". A line of tower shield heavies and behind it a row of archers or musketmen and a few mages in the back for support. Skirmishers or cavalry can be added to the wings. I've also found that not all the players have to be in the boss room for the boss fight. Some of them can be running around baiting and misleading minions and cause mass confusion. I usually spring a random patrol on a wayward rogue to see what they will do. In some situations it's the right call the split the party, in others not so much.
This and boss stages! All my BBEG and sometimes even “mini bosses” have waves or stages. Ran a one shot for a bunch of players vs. Tiamat and the stages were pre summoning adds, slow emergence of Tiamat, pushing Tiamat back and an in between phase where Tiamat became invulnerable while some more adds showed up. Everyone loved it and it wasn’t a boring smash and grab.
Literally the first "boss fight" I dm'd, I didn't think about one of the characters being a Paladin and my two undead dragon wyrmlings being undead - they failed any and all saves against being frightened and couldn't maneuver themselves in a position where at least their breath weapons would have been dangerous. The players felt very powerful though, so I'm not too mad about it :D
youre a great dm. you dont want to negate or nerf your party all the time. let the paladin obliterate the zombies. let the ranger snipe the orcs at stupid long range. let them use their skills/feats/items/abilities/weapons. so keep being a great dm.
Let them be powerful for a bit. It evens out later. I have a rogue right now that's level 12 and does insane sneak attack damage. A CR 6 creature dropped him after a failed save. It evens out after a while and you won't have to change a thing.
One thing my DM did that I thought was clever: a surprise transformation. We were confronting a tyrannical Arch Bishop who had seized power. This fight had been built up to for half the campaign. We absolutely out-played him, separating him from his focus and giving him no way to fight back. The DM let us kill him, as we had earned it...but then the string-pulling BBEG showed up and turned the Arch Bishop's corpse into a monster. "Some minions are more useful dead than alive!" We ultimately ended the fight by defenestrating the monster-corpse, leading to it being impaled by a pole bearing the country's flag. And when the citizens saw it, one of them said "now he's as ugly on the outside as he was on the inside".
Does that apply to this video though? Very likely that the DM always planned to have a transformation and a phase 2, especially if the stat block for phase 2 was already prepared. It's not necessarily a case of you players destroying the boss, causing him to try to up the power and balance the encounter.
@@envytee9659 It absolutely applies to this video. It was literally one of the examples, no different from revealing a new power or item. And sure, it's possible the GM planned to do this all along. But it's just as possible the GM was thinking on the fly, as is their job, to make the encounter more fun and the drama more interesting. And the point is moot; you're not doing it right if the players can see the puppet strings. As with everything in this entire video, the players shouldn't be able to discern whether you've adjusted things on the fly. That breaks immersion.
@@Eshajori No, the example in the vid was to save a boss fight that was far too easy, without making it seem obvious, by describing the boss entering a phase 2 that you hadn't already planned. In this comment, the player describes a DM that already had a set two phases and stat blocks ahead of time, so it doesn't apply to a video about quick saves for an unexpectedly easy encounter.
One idea of adding a Magic Item that the BBEG TOTALLY had the whole time is from MTG, Liliana's Chain Veil. The Chain Veil is an intelligent magical item that boosts the usurer's power but slowly drains their free will until the Veil is using THEM, instead of the other way around. It gives the BBEG an excuse not to use it ASAP, & leaves the party with a nice cursed item as part of the Loot for the next chapter.
Curses that remove the free will from a character are always problematic in an RPG. Either the DM has to take control of the character (very obvious and many players might not like their character being taken away from them, even temporary) or the player has to play along (difficult if the "new" conscience acts on information the player should not have after the effect ends, and the player will probably still hesitate to actively harm his comrades even if they currently aren't).
My favorite monster tactic when the big bad is losing way to hard? RUN AWAY! Any sane and semi intelligent creature would do this and it makes logical and narrative sense that if the villain is under prepared and caught off guard, they would high tail it to gather their strength and be better prepared next time. If the players find the enemy in their lair or stronghold there would likely even be trap doors or secret tunnels made for exactly that situation. I can be easier to just delay the encounter for another session and rethink your strategy, and if done well can ramp up anticipation a little bit more. A few things to note: give your players loot for driving off the enemy otherwise they'll just feel like you wasted their time. Don't pull this more than once or at most twice with the same boss or it will get annoying. Make sure to mix up the next encounter with some new abilities so it doesn't feel like a %100 repeat.
For monster strategy, major recommendation to read "the monsters know what they're doing" outlines great tactics and motivations for a wide range of enemies.
Saving this to my D&D playlist because it might come in useful once I start DMing. But also, my group's DM doesn't need to worry about this because we're the kind of idiots who fight a ghost on unhallowed ground, barely escape with our lives, break into the mayor's house to get weapons instead of just asking, accidentally give the same ghost a massive power-up *and* nearly get kidnapped by witches who barely had anything to do with any of this. That ghost was supposed to essentially be the *tutorial* villain.
"Definitely, totally had the whole time." This is a perfect place for red herrings to show up. For a villain being set up for so long, the players have been hearing about what they can do, how scary and powerful the villain is. And much of what they learn they can't be certain of what is fully true and what is rumor. Tell the players five or more things that are "false" that can be true if the villain is underperforming. Do this with every villain set up and the players have to worry if the villain is really all they seem. There's a part in the first Avengers that a friend of mine thinks is the same as this video's topic; An enormous snake-like flying creature shows up that's bigger than the buildings in New York. Hulk lands on it and takes it out in one hit. What does the GM immediately do? Summon two more. You want to kill my boss so easily? Deal with more of them XD Also, sometimes luck just isn't on someone's side. There's a "Leviathan Rule" that my first playergroup realized; The bigger the enemy, the faster they die. Coined because every single time (and I mean EVERY SINGLE TIME) a leviathan has shown up, it has somehow died before it got a turn and often on the first player's turn. At this point, it's just how things work, no different than saying that red potions always heal you or that every metal is magnetic in this setting.
One of my favorite D&D moments is when we dispatched a purple worm super fast (I got a hold monster on it early in the first round) and so the dm just had a second purple worm crash down in through the ceiling.
So I’m fairly new to DMing so take this with a grain of salt, but one of my favorite things to do is to assign an “age” to a creature or monster. Because your character generally gain levels over time, and dragons gain abilities over time. So why not everything else? This is super helpful because I can start an encounter with a difficult monster and then judge from there if they can handle the crazy stuff like breath weapons etc. or I can half the dice damage they do, or follow the stats to a T, or add stuff if needed. Then later if they investigate the corpse, I can tell them things like, “It doesn’t seem to be fully developed,” or “Inside it’s flesh you find pockets of mutated flesh and strange scarring.” It gives me a guideline for how tough something can be and a perfectly reasonable way to scale it up or down quickly.
I remember one of my first outings as a DM. I was looking at the monster I'd planned, and thought. "Oh no. This is too big and scary for a group of new players. let me shave off some hit points." Then combat starts, and I'm like. "Oh Wow! I underestimated your abilities. Never mind, regular HP is back in play."
I went the route of giving my players a way to problem-solve ending the healing ability, but at least one of the players thought that was anti-climactic. (There was a huge shelf behind the BBEG lined with clay pedestals each containing the soul of a defeated hero [if they had looked, they would have seen empty ones with their names on them waiting for them], and whenever her health would get low she would absorb one of the souls. The solution was to shatter the soul jars, freeing the souls which could then attack her, eventually weakening her enough to kill her entirely. I should also note that absorbing souls was her contingency plan all along and not something I'd made up on the fly.)
As a DM, I appreciate this. It’s always a fine line of making boss encounters feel like boss encounters, while also maintaining the player agency that D&D is all about. HP augmentation and added abilities are I think more common than anything. That said, funny enough, I think I find the pendulum swinging the other direction more often than not. I’ve had a lot of scenarios where my players were getting absolutely spanked by a boss that I had no intention of using to wipe the floor with them. I think TPK’s are important, but there’s a time and a place.
TPKs should be player fault not DM miscalculation. Challenging and Ancient white dragon at lv 2 is a death sentence, you should be allowed to be that dumb but you will also be killed because actions have consequences. Fighting the boss the DM intended you to fight when they intended the fight should be hard but no deaths without bad roles and no TPK unless the players fought well below their normal abilities. (Like the wizard only using cantrips when they have good spells ready that aren't reserved for something else immediately after the fight) Also DnD is a game about attrition and resource management, players shouldn't be at full strength when entering a boss fight if you want them to struggle.
I think the very best time and place for a TPK is when the party insists on actions they've been steered from taking (in world, not at table). I was running a campaign where they had a helpful yet shady NPC that they all wanted to kill just because he was creepy, despite his saving their bacons several times over the course of the game. They finally made their move and I just let it be their last. There are some creatures in that manual that were never really meant to be messed with.
Ginny, I also wanted to point out something that your last point made me think of: just because a fight early on against what you HOPED would be the BBEG for the rest of the campaign goes your players way (either because of some really great rolls, great tactics, or whatever) DOES NOT MEAN that the BBEG is now dead and the entire campaign now has to be re-written (insert a "death is only the beginning" evil cackle here), there are a LOT of different ways to bring back a BBEG that got curb-stomped by the party unexpectedly...😈 ... Maybe they were working for someone more powerful all along, maybe they have a loved one that can't bear to let them go and would make any eldritch pact necessary to bring them back, etc.
Whenever I want to get the most out of a combat, I spend time doing things like watching the first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan to get the feel and tempo of the kind of combat I want to run. Pullo's fight in the arena in the seventh episode of HBO's Rome is also useful inspiration, as is the movie Thirteenth Warrior. Make things intense, fluid, the enemy always has one more trick up their sleeve. Don't be afraid to make the party run, even if it's to a place where the ground is more advantageous for them. When half the party is unconscious and bleeding out, the last healing spell has been burned, when members of the party are carrying other members to safety, when the character with the most hit points (say about 4) is holding up the fighter's shield to guard the party's retreat---your players will feel like they've been in a fight from hell, and they will talk about it for months if not years to come.
This is really great advice as always! One more I'd add is: Run Away! If your BBEG is getting destroyed, they can flee and live to fight another day - and maybe on that day they'll have more friends with them or more powerful magic items.
This is only a decent advice if you have options for either outcome and also give the players a way to obtain something that will stop him fleeing a second time. Theres nothing more frustrating than fighting the same guy twice with the same abilities only to have him escape a third time. Thats just bad dm'ing.
Some 5e concepts that I really like for building backup plans into stat blocks are Legendary Actions and Lair Actions. The ones in the Monster Manual tend to be along the lines of the enemy getting a free attack or action use, but they can be great opportunities to use the suggestions Ginny has in the video like calling for reinforcements or modifying the battlefield (via traps, portcullises, etc) without going outside the rules as written. For Lair actions, I like having a few benign ones as well (eg, "you hear the sound of ancient machinery creaking somewhere in the distance") so that I can introduce the idea of "things happen on Initiative count 20" without necessarily changing the planned encounter difficulty.
I am quite proud of myself as a DM for already applying all of these. Though I will add that sometimes adding HP can turn fights into a slog and I prefer to add more damage from the enemies instead.
I used the whole "give your BBEGs new abilities (that they totally had the whole time, cough)" strategy to really good effect in a LARP I was helping to run. My group of players were all vampires, trying to prevent Dracula from rising and dominating them all into eternal subservience. So naturally the final boss fight was against a just-risen Dracula. The problem was, the players were too good -- it wasn't the hard, epic fight it should have been at all. So when Dracula was nearly out of hit points (I estimated he had about one turn left), I mentally tossed his character sheet aside, shouted, "No! You are all mine!", and forced all the players to save against a domination effect. One PC was taken out of the fight (not dead, but dominated), one came very close to it. THAT felt like the epic fight it was supposed to have been, and the players were all correspondingly much more enthused when they killed Dracula the next round. I never told them that the domination ability was something I invented at the last minute to make things harder for them lol.
If you had that ability, along with exact %'s to avoid based on player stats, written down and even had a way and a stat necessary to discover the ability up front that was also written down before the session started, then that would be great boss design. Making things up on the fly because things aren't going your way is the definition of cheating.
@@7F0X7 And yet, everyone seemed really happy with how it turned out, and it turned a very lackluster "oh, was that it?" boss encounter into an "OMG WE WERE SO BADASS" boss encounter. :)
Dude, it's only cheating if it's DM vs players. Which it isn't. Also can you talk about over prep? If the players just skip the encounter? Yeah. Great.
@@JacopoSkydweller Encounters can be designed to be unskippable. You can just put the shiny thing the players need in the same room as the boss or do it a million other ways. I just dislike the idea of getting cheezed in a boss fight despite my preparation as the player. I shouldn't be punished for my prep due to the DM's lack of prep.
@@7F0X7 did you... not watch the video? Tweaking a boss character on the fly to ensure an encounter is interesting is the entire point, not "cheating" XD I guess you might be confused if you've never been involved in a table top RPG before, but these aren't "DM vs the player" scenarios. The objective isn't to defeat the DM it's to have a fun game with memorable moments, and the role of the DM is to facilitate that. Your attitude to this dynamic sounds mega toxic with all this "cheating" "cheesing" "unskippable" "punished" "DM's lack of prep" crap, and I'm very glad I've never had a player like you in one of my games!
If you don't mind spending a little money, the "The Monsters Know What They're Doing" books are really really great tools for tactical battles. I personally enjoy playing to a monster or villain's strengths in combat and using tactics in combat.
Depending on player level, I like to give big bads legendary reactions, or an ability to shed/molt/drop armor when they take a high amount of damage. So if they take day 30 damage in a single turn, or or from a single attack, they can use this reaction to take no damage instead, but at the first of AC. So the rogue gets their Sneak Attack and deals 36 damage, their dagger cutting a line across the enemy from shoulder to hip. They can briefly see the creatures internal organs beginning to spill, only to watch in horror as the wound seals itself up, the dead flesh sloughing off and falling to the ground with a sick plop. The new flesh, however, looks tender and vulnerable.
I gave the last BBEG all of it in a challange way. The fight took the hole evening (that wasn't actually planned) and the party succeeded. No one died.
never underestimate the power of a displacer beast cloak or mantle of Spell deflection on a BBEG. or just the shield spell on a BBEG. it does wonders. seriously
Minions are neat, but I fear using invulnerability phases. They feel way too "video gamey" to me, and unless executed really well, I suspect the party will feel the same way. The closest thing I've done is having a really stealthy boss turning invisible and moving silently around the battlefield after calling for minions, going "Bah, I'll have to kill you myself then!" after the minions die.
I'm ending my first ever campaign and I REALLY needed this. I had to stop the game to speak to my players like "I'm REALLY trying to make this climactic and dramatic but it's seeming a little impossible". These are great tips for our final final session
I don't know the specifics of your situation, but in my experience, there are always players who absolutely will undercut the dramatic tension if they can. They'll interrupt the villain's monologue, they'll try to one-shot some big threat with some ridiculous plan, they'll have absolutely no interest in the fact that you're trying to build up to some big epic moment. But, at the end of the day, if you're going to be a DM, in my opinion, you have to just let the players do what they'll do. Player agency is a huge part of D&D. It's what separates it from all other kinds of games. Sometimes the players will one-shot your badguys, or ignore the plot completely, but that's their choice to make. The players WANT to feel like badasses and superheroes and absolutely curb-stomping the badguys is how that can manifest - don't arbitrarily take it away. If there's any advice I could give, it's don't make the final encounter of your campaign the 'ending'. Go on and have a proper ending. Have the players decide where their characters end up. Do they settle down? Do they have kids? Do they become kings and queens? A proper ending will always leave players with a great feeling. The final 'boss' encounter isn't the climax to your game; the 'ending' is. Good luck ending your campaign!
@@josephrossow8901Thank you so much for this advice! I definitely have plans for there to be an aftermath to the campaign and even do a little time skip so we can see how things play out and see how things have changed. (I'm running Curse of Strahd if that gives any context!) But I totally get what you mean by undercutting. And it feels good to know I'm not alone there but I think I'll take that advice to mean in some context that if that's the story we're going to tell together, it makes me feel better about rolling with it!
@@josephrossow8901 Ah yes, the "And Sam lived with his family for a very long time before he, too, left the Shire and as the last bearer of the Ring of Power, took the last ship to the Undying Lands."
@@josephrossow8901*pushes up glasses* Actually, technically speaking, I'm pretty sure that the boss fight is indeed the climax; what happens after would be falling action/resolution.
@@drchicken2477 Let'see... A climax is the most intense, exciting or important part of something, a culmination or apex. I don't know if that's really what a final boss is, in D&D. Like, in terms of the game, the players have faced dozens of difficult encounters and bosses by the time they reach it. All the 'final boss' is, is the characterss at their most powerful, fighting their most powerful opponent yet... which... probably the players have experienced before. I guess I'd argue that the culmination of a character is rarely that they "Defeated Garglenax, the Destroyer of Worlds," but more often that they "Became King, and Lord of the Castle Bob." I guess I'd argue - and maybe I'm wrong - that the climax is what the player ultimately wants to accomplish for their character, and that's often not related to the final boss. Maybe it's starting a school for mages, or marrying the princess and becoming heir to the kingdom, or inventing airships, or creating their own demi-plane. But, in my experience, it often has very little to do with the final combat encounter. By your definition I'd argue that achieving their ultimate goal is the climax, not the final encounter, and that 'living happily ever after' is the falling action/resolution. Maybe I'm wrong though. >_< I dunno.
Okay, the "Were-fluencer" transformation literally took the strength from my legs and had me on the floor in tears. I have been looking to do a Fenrir-inspired Paladin though, so.... think I'm gonna pledge. One tip I just found recently was to have your Big Bad go first in Initiative order. Having that extra turn can be great for showing more of their abilities and preventing the party from ganging up on them for 6-10 attacks before the Big Bad's had their second turn.
another option instead of the first first in initiative is to have them set off a trap while the party approached before initiative get rolled. That should disrupt their planned and prepped tactics and require spending actions to recover from the trap from the get go.
I had one single bard and one single paladin turn what felt like an impossible battle with a lich into no problem when the lich failed a roll that let the bard's phantasmal force hurt him with, I shit you not, 'radiant kittens'.
When you're trying to make an encounter "harder", always keep in mind what type of difficulty you're aiming for. A hard fight can be short and brutal, but it can also be a resource intensive slog. Depending on which one you want as your outcome, you should vary how you prepare and adjust your encounters
What about the 'This isn't even my final form' twist? Basically, the boss could turn out to have been using a shapeshifting spell, and the fight did nothing but reveal their true form? Or would that fall under adding abilities and item?
I'd say it's a combo of adding abilities/increasing HP, but it *is* a classic narrative way to do so. That familiarity can make it seem more normal (and less sus) to players so it's always a good option to keep handy.
A good version of this is the polymorph spell. Surprise! Turns out being an elf wizard was a disguise and they were actually a demon of some sort. You knocked out all of their temporary HP. Now you have to fight them i their true form with access to all the abilities that they didn't have earlier. If you're doing this to sve the BBEG from defeat you don't have to go that far, just reveal it was a fake and the real one will be much more powerful and it can he satisfying too as it makes them smarter and stronger.
That can feel like a cop-out unless it has been hinted at earlier in the campaign. Nothing obvious, just something that the players can look at with hindsight and make the connection. That way, you can use it if you need to.
Love this! I feel like I'm already over the hump with this topic just recently, and finally able to balance encounters. And most of the tips she gave are the exact same ideas I came up with myself, so while I didn't need this video as much, I *can* vouch for it now, lol. Also sparked a few more combat ideas for me, too!
One thing to be careful of about when suddenly giving your boss new abilities is explaining why they weren’t using it before. This can be explained that they thought it was too dangerous, and so only used it when they were going to die anyways. It’s often good to take inspiration from multiphase video game boss fights. I especially love some of FromSoft’s bosses, as a lot of times it makes sense that they only used their most powerful form when the were near death, as it really is a desperate move. Examples include Sister Friede, Ludwig, Lady Maria, Godrick
Personally, what I like to do is create my bosses as kind of modular encounters- I start off with a basic set of stats and abilities, and then start unleashing bigger and nastier stuff if it turns out too easy. This helps to deal with the situation where a boss turns out too easy, but also helps you adjust in the event that bad luck or significant miscalculations have made your boss encounter way *harder* than you anticipated.
A simple trick, and perfectly legal too: You know how the Monster Manual have a set amount of HP for enemies? Don't use that number! Instead what you do is you create a "range" of HP for your monsters, from the lowest they can have to the highest, based on the number of dices they say you have to roll for those monsters HP! That way if the fight is too quick for your players you can ramp up the HP and just say you "rolled high" on that monster HP. Not only that, if it's the other way around and your players are getting their butts kicked you can have them kill the monster early (as long as it's in the HP range) and it'd be like you rolled low on those monsters' Hit Points! Very good way to balance fights on the spot, perfectly legal, since the monster DO have an amount of dices they tell you you can roll for their HP, too! Just because everyone is used to take the set amount that is given ('cause it's faster) doesn't mean you can't do that! :P
The set amount is good for on the fly encounters but for planned encounters you have the time to spend making it more detailed. Also you can just make a binder of various encounters like goblins in cave with a couple variations and appropriate party level this way you have prebuilt encounters for unplanned fights.
@@brandond2768 But that's just it, you're not really changing HP on the fly, you're creating a range of HP in which the monster dies! Like, let's say they fight a Cambion. Officially a Cambion has 82 HP, that's what DMs would use. But his HP is also 11d8 + 33! So it can actually have a wide variety of HP, and it's still official, rulebook stuff! So when you make them face the Cambion, you decide that he has an amount of HP between 44 and 121, and every single one of those number is legal! You can then gauge how the fight is going and, as long as it stays within those margins, determine when the Cambion dies! Don't be a d**k about it, like, don't be the guy who at least wants to kill one PC before having your monster die, obviously! Players want fights that feels challenging but that they end up victorious in the end. Use what you have at your disposal to give them that!
@@ChevaliersEmeraude except by giving your self a range fir the fight instead of a concrete number ahead of time you are cheating your players of the experience of over coming the challenge you set before them without deus exing it. You're just hiding it better.
RE: adding items. Beware that anything you give to the enemy, the players can potentially acquire for themselves. Be careful not to give them something tooooo overpowered.
@@GinnyDi also, some items are like the Tome of Horrible Evilness or whatshisname - they only work for the bbeg and any remotely decent pc would take 15d8 necrotic damage from just touching them. MUAHAHAHAH
@@robertnett9793 yup, there's a Charm that lets you cast Lightning Bolt three times, then it's gone. Even even if you're not a Caster. Good Ace up the sleeve - possibly literally!
@@danielmclellan1522 Oh... Imagine magic items in form of playing cards - I don't talk about the Deck of Many things - just cards you can use and maybe combine... and then have one special effect if a character holds two black aces and eights and another card.
Never use "NPC" class levels for enemies. Stack the enemies with classes and/or numbers higher than your player group. Work to make them act tactically to defeat what you put against them. Only pull your punches when its absolutely narratively neccessary(or to avoid irl mutiny or loss of game).
We had a decent blood toll harpy fight in our last game which was meant to be easy but when the first person to go (who got a surprise round) melted the first one of them super easily our dm was like, right, that one was a runt, the other two need a few more hitpoints, because there is a difference between easy and trivial
My campaign that's been going for over 2 years now has its grand finale this Sunday (2 days away from watching this) so this video has come at LITERALLY the perfect time for me, thank you so so much!
Good tips. One thing I think should be mentioned is to be careful about using the advice to give the enemy a new item. If the players see the enemy using it, they're going to want it for themselves. Be careful you don't add in something in haste that winds up in their hands that completely breaks your whole world in half.
A good idea may also be to prepare beforehand some measure of responses from the villains. For exemple, you could prepare a "rescue party" or a group of "loyal bodyguards" that are just on the other side of the building, and if the fight seems too complicated or your players get a little bit too much traumatised by your boss, you could always take send them to help the villain, or save him if his life gets really shitty low. It's also easy to imagine a villain that feels his end is coming to use teleportation to live for another day. Also you didn't mention it, but the villain could just plain stop fighting and start trying to not get rekt by giving information or something. Villains are often more intelligent than their minions and are more likely to try diplomatical approach to surviving :p.
Being relatively new to DMing, I REALLY appreciate all these tips in your videos. Being able to go back & watch some of these that are a year+ old still helps me a lot & I thank you for each and every one of these videos left up for us to keep on learning from. Much appreciated.
I once made a character semi-immortal, allowing him to come back to life a few times, but my players made that encounter a complete joke by grappling him in the middle of boss fight.
There is also the textbook maggufin play. Boss can’t take any damage until a small device is found and destroyed. Bonus points if you make it a very durable item. I had a game where I had a mage in a one way shield bubble. He knocked half the party with mass fireballs and cloud kill. Players found the button and pushed it. It was obvious on the opposite wall. It was mad dash across a cave to get to it. They pushed it. The boss died in one fighter turn.
Goodrich the grafted is a perfect example of adding abilities. He cuts off his arm and grafts a dragon head onto it so it can breathe fire on you. That could definitely work in RPG’s.
For Tactis's I can only point to Runesmith's Series about that. At this time he has done, Guards, Kobolds, Bandits, a Bounty Hunter, Archdruid and much more.
I absolutely love those videos! The ideas in his vids are amazing. Making a wall of men to prevent an invisible player from running out of an ally for example is so clever! You wouldn't expect gaurds to be a threat because they aren't dangerous. But they can be very smart!
The Monsters Know What They're Doing (both the blog and the actual book) are both GODSENDS as well. The author's insight is borderline genius sometimes.
@@elfberry I reckon he's been running games since AD&D, you're bound to learn how to handle encounters by that point. But yes, impressive insight into how to rp and play tactically. Major kudos to Keith Amman.
Way better than other videos detailing what to do to ramp up fights. Thinking tactically and on the fly is something all DMs should strive to learn, but never forget creating an interactive fighting space for both the party and baddies to take advantage of. Think of it like a video game when you enter a space and there's obvious bits of cover laying around. =)
There're two awesome spells to use in cases like these: Glyph of warding (spell version) and Contingency. And now you can use any spell you need because your boss had them prepared on them. And this is even better than pulling up magic items because then you'll worry that your party got your op item from the villain and that's could be a HUGE problem. Also you can use these spells even if you BBEG isn't a spellcaster or even any of theirs minions, because they could just hire a spellcaster to cast these! Oh, and if this is really A BOSS you should give them legendary resistance! That's said, for the players don't do as Ginny said and don't you fireball on single target. There should be always better spell to cast - for example just banish them and set a trap with that time and prep your actions when the BBEG comes back or simply use single target spells, they usually have greater damage than aoe.
I just got a sick idea because of this video thanks. (What about an item with limited lifetime uses with 1-3 uses left) this gives a reason for the mob to hold their use until they get desperate and also adds an option for it to be loot at the end of the fight which could be interesting. I love this holy.
Simple tip: give monsters and hostile npc's a shield. +2 to AC boosts their survivability by a great deal, and sometimes I think WotC took out their shields on purpose to make certain enemies weaker.
I'm really loving your DMing videos, you actually think about what makes it fun. So many other DM-content-creators just talk about how sad and shocked they felt when their players didn't follow the rails they thought they had laid out. I feel like you and Matt Mercer are the only DM-content-creators I know of who actually have a philosophy of collaborative storytelling.
Alternative - The BBEG, seeing that their plans are failing, unleash all their might! They ignite their very soul ablaze to simply kill the characters. They get X rounds of invincibility to anything and everything but after that they begin to die at an alarming rate/instantly. The party needs to learn to be defensive suddenly instead of being offensive.
I see this recommended a lot, and it is one of the worst suggestions. Because it becomes super obvious very quickly, and players stop caring when they realize none of their actions, character choices, spell choices, etc ever make the slightest bit of difference. You're not really playing a game any more at that point, because games have rules, and that's essentially a giant flag saying there's no rules and combat doesn't matter. Might as well pick a different RPG system that has less of a combat focus if you're gonna throw out all the combat rules. Because then any time a player makes a character choice to help them in combat, it's the "wrong" choice by definition.
I had a vampire battle strategist / monster hunter, so I played him super smart, strategic long game, with layers of tactics. For example, he had 3 layers of coffins, the first of which was a total trap for the PCs. He had mage armor, plus elven chain mail, plus he had an adamantine shield implanted inside his ribs to protect his heart (from pesky wooden stakes). And he had waves of minions - “normals” city militia & archers, plus guardian elementals he’d duped into protecting him (which the PCs later turned against him), plus his half-vampire squad of 4 personal Red Guards plus 2 lieutenants. These latter two groups had some very cool gear that the players really wanted! So after I rolled in the open to show that they had accidentally but totally destroyed 1 of the Red Guard - and all his gear - they paid a little more attention to what spells and damage they used. The final battle was in a massive cavern with 5-6 levels, a huge pyramid in the center, arched stone walkways & paths, large light sources on top of giant pillars, even rolled for a minor earthquake which changed up the terrain again. And BBEG’s spells called in a lightning storm, which rolled in 20ft per round over 5-6 rounds & stayed another 2-4 rounds. Lots of interactive opportunities for the players!! That BBEG fight was the culmination of a 2 1/2 yr campaign, and that battle lasted 3 full 4-5 hr sessions! And one of the lieutenants escaped, as a potential on-going BBEG.
The single easiest tip I can give after 7 years of DMing, that endures from level 1 to 20, is give your BBEG Greater Invisibility if you want to them to stick around for a bit. At low levels it makes them a terrifying foe your players need to overcome cleverly or prepare a way to stop the spell ahead of time. Helps if you show them it first by squashing them in an encounter that leaves them alive but hurt. This also helps incentivise them to pursue your lovely villain and gives them immense catharsis when they eventually win 😂 At high levels it buys the BBEG time to deal with the interfering arcanists without getting pelted with sharpshooter shots and GWM strikes! At this stage, for the love of God, give your BBEG counterspell, shield, both, or spell casting minions who have those abilities, otherwise it might end rather quickly (especially if your players are as strategically savvy as mine!) This is a great video, just file my small tip here under "add abilities and items" or "fight tactically."
The way you come at things from the players' perspective is really great and gives me brand new takes on things I thought I knew. Hands down my favorite D&D-tuber I've discovered in...months, actually.
the ad was great ginny! and i loved the video too. it's a bit worrying though that NPC spellcasters in the new "monsters of the multiverse" stat blocks seem to have fewer spell slots and more once a day spells and a "magical effect" option instead. can you do a video on how DMs should adjust to the new stat blocks please? I've just got Call of the Netherdeep and there are a lot of spellcasting NPCs!
@@fizzledimglow3523 I have a suspicion that's not RAI, and the new magic effects are a nerf for counterspell. has Jeremy Crawford said anything about this?
Ah, the effects on this are so good! And the acting! This was a really helpful resource. I'd love to see a video on what to do when your BBEG is dealing too much damage and you want to slow down
Hey real quick just wanted to say that I like how the segments are broken up by the villain giving little dialogues related to the subject, that’s a neat touch!
This is all great for 5e. Meanwhile you have high level Pathfinder where the name of the game is stomp or be stomped. I had my players fight a Wyrm Black Dragon (essentially a step above ancient in Pathfinder) with mythic abilities and everything. They were level 14 and tier 3 mythic. 3 PCs managed to deal over 800 damage to this monster in about 3 rounds. That’s with the bloodrager missing all but one lucky critical hit with her bow on turn one and the wizard not using damaging spells till turn 3. Sometimes you just have to ride the power wave and have fun with it, because at the end of it all a good narrative can save a middling combat session, especially if you sell the idea of a previously extremely cocky enemy suddenly starting to panic as their plans fall apart due to a critical feat and 3 nat 1 stunning fist saves.
I tried 2nd edition and the party almost always curbstomped my bad guys. It got laughable when they killed the ancient magma dragon in 1 round. ONE. Tactics and prep should be the bare minimum to win against such a beast, not the nail in his coffin... I so missed the vrock who wiped the floor with their asses a few adventures before...
@@roswynn5484 That's because action economy is the king. Challenging a party with solo monster is hard because the monster gets to take one action in a turn while the party as many as there are members in it. The next time send more magma dragons.
@@tuomasronnberg5244 magma dragon + 2 useless fire elemental things, as per AP. Last fight I ran before giving up I ADDED a mate to the solo bbeg described in the adventure - it was just prolonging the inevitable. One would expect the APs to give you good encounters...
@@roswynn5484 Well, think it from the point of view of AP designers. They cannot possibly account for every possible party composition and player skill, so they have incentive to make encounters that are on the easy side so even a mediocre party has a fair chance of beating one. If your players are strong optimizers then they're going to steamroll encounters that are run as is.
@@tuomasronnberg5244 true. And mostly they have pretty good tactical minds. I dunno, I just didn't have the skills to give them the right encounters mostly, Ginny's advice will definitely come in handy next time.
A great bait and switch is goblins that change into barghests! RUN! Another idea is to predetermine how many hits it will take to down your BBEG or even rounds he/she/it would survive.
One of my favorites to use now and again is boss phases. Let the PC's get comfortable fighting a boss for a few rounds, let them get their strategy in place, then pop into phase 2 and completely shift the dynamic of the fight. Really helps to take players off guard and keep them guessing for literally every single bossfight to follow.
Ginny ? You are saving my life ! x) My last boss was based on a Zombie Clot, CR 6 + optional minions CR1, my paladin (lvl 4) Just DESTROYED it with a nat 20 with his divin smite + great damage rolls... Left it with a third of its HPs in one hit XD The fight lasted 3 turns instead of 6 mini >< Thanks for the tips I'll make sure my next boss fights will be a better challenge for my players ! (Btw I don't comment often so just wanted to say that I love your content ! Keep it up ! You are one of my favorite DnD related UA-cam channel !)
Be careful with the stuff in the first half of the video - if your players catch a whiff of this you can drive a session into the ground. Once had a DM that couldn't account a rogue hiding and the mage and cleric flying so he gave the fighter npc the ability to shoot laser beams from his sword.
This is so helpful. I had planned a necromancer encounter with my party, they're level 5 and I the necro is CR 9, they got him in 3 turns. They told me I should've added some zombies or undead to help him, but all these tips are amazing. Thank you!
The initial encounter of the BBG was a major illusion to make the party waste resources at the forefront...then bring her out to really challenge the party.
I mean, Lich NPC's can be hella strong. And if they are raising undead meat shields to mess with the party, then the fights can easily ramp up in difficulty pretty quickly.
@@Magus_Union exactly. It would awesome and probably be fun for the players. Seeing how their previous actions informed her. It makes their things matter. It would also be fun to make her the mastermind of the whole campaign. Imagine they kill who they think is the main villan and then they see her.
Good to see a video touching on some of the the 5 'T's. Tactics - Play well, find ways for enemies to attempt to plan ahead where appropriate. Target players that are doing well. Jump out of cupboards, ambush or even attempt to plead for mercy before you attempt to plunge a dagger into a player's ribs. Learn from the Soulsborne games and use those tactics too. Terrain - Use the area of the map effectively. Use difficult terrain, drops, changes in elevation and chokeholds to your advantage. Teamwork - If you can, make your baddies work together as a group and find ways to synergise with each other where possible. Technology and Gear - Sometimes, there's a random Kobold that built himself a working cannon or an orc that taught themselves Wizard spells. That, or the evil lord has poured plenty of his money into a nice, hefty Staff of Healing to ensure his lazy layabout guards give more than 100%. Tenacity and Spite - Sometimes, deliberately unbalance a fight. Throw in a monster that they weren't expecting. Have an enemy do the most dickish thing possible and blow themselves up, or chop down that rope bridge everyone is on. From hell's heart, stab deep and true! But remember, only when it's going to improve your game.
A minor caveat to the "fight tactically" approach. Be careful to avoid metagaming. Just because you know that the Paladin has Sentinel and that you need to keep away from it doesn't mean your monsters know. If you've already experienced that particular ability or you are playing an intelligent villain that would have already investigated their enemies strengths and weaknesses then go ahead and play or even plan around it but it's never fun for a wild animal with an Int of 6 to suddenly realise that the reason three of it's enemies are flying is the Wizard over 100ft away and proceed to charge at it like a rhinoceros independent of opportunity attacks. If there's multiple enemies then have them call out information to each other the same way players communicate at the table. Yelling things like "get that Sorcerer" not only threatens the squishy mage but also gives your players an incentive to adjust their fighting style. Maybe the Figher/Paladin needs to fall back and interpose himself between the ADDs and the backline, maybe the Sorcerer needs to drop concentration on the Rogue's Greater Invisibility to put up a Wall of Force. The other thing to be careful of when planning against party strengths is to not make the game unfun to play. If a player takes Sentinel that's not a reason to give every other enemy the Mobile Feat. If a player is really invested in focusing their damage on a specific element (tactically unwise obviously but it can work well for roleplay) don't give them hordes of tiny little monsters immune to Fireball or or a 100ft corridor filled to the brim with Lightning-proof golems. Or do actually, a one-shot/short adventure in a mystical dungeon designed to counter every players strengths could be hilarious.
A good rule of thumb I've found for this comes from the blog The Monsters Know What They're Doing (which is a fantastic resource, though I do not know if this rule is the author's creation). Essentially, a creature's INT and WIS scores should inform how knowledgeable it is about the player's abilities and, to a lesser extent, how the creature itself fights. On a score of 11 or lower, all a given creature should know is who is wearing armor, who looks sick or old, and which PC is the biggest. Magic users shouldn't be readily obvious to these folks, and might be especially terrifying if the monster party lacks their own caster(s). From 12-15, the NPC will have a rough of idea of what each PC is capable of, but won't be able to differentiate one type of spellcaster from another, or a fighter from a paladin if both are similarly equipped, at least not until the attacks start flying. At 16+ INT or WIS, the monster absolutely knows what each PC can do, and will plan accordingly, whether that means negotiating, Banishing the problematic brutes, or showing up with minions. I've found these guidelines to be incredibly helpful when planning encounters and ensuring that there's a good balance of the party kicking ass, meeting equals, and realizing (usually) that they're in over their heads.
Personally I feel like major battles are the best to amp up the difficulty like against the BBEG, if you are about to ask how to tell if a battle is important enough to have difficulty changes, ask yourself “What is the relationship with the BBEG?” The closer to the BBEG (including BBEG themselves) the more sensical it would be for it to get harder! (Hope this helps)
@6:32 "I have given thee courtesy enough." Another relatively simple method to bulk up a boss, while giving the impression they were holding back, is to give them legendary traits. Specifically legendary resistance and actions. The boss was willing to tie his hands to balance the playing field, but the characters have proven more threatening than he thought so now he shrugs off that stun and blindness and starts reaching through space to smash the backs of their heads with a hammer outside his turn.
Great job! You just keep getting better. I like to front load my BBEG with “rainy day” items and make reference to them throughout the encounter. If the encounter hits certain thresholds, I break out an ability or item that I had already alluded to. Otherwise, I’ll use it like the timer on a movie bomb - just as the BBEG was going to use that option, the characters triumph (but just barely).
Watching this one day after my players wiped out an entire platoon of enemies and nearly killed the boss (that ran away) with what was essentially a nuke I gave them months ago and did realize how powerful it was. Them using the said nuke was done in such a brilliant fashion that I didn't dare to tweak a single HP from a fight that would probably had them arrested, but had the ties turned in a whim. Having an easy BBG fight is not boring when players do something smart. And great video as always. ❤️
I have yet to DM but I might have to soon. I think I got some interesting ideas from MMORPG's and history battles which I wonder might work in D&D: - Lord of the Rings Online had a pretty infamous raid at some point where the players had to kill 2 massive trolls (with additional adds of course). The trolls were twins; If you brought down a troll's hp unevenly, the other troll would become a lot stronger due to rage. (in game it would happen if 1 troll would have 3% less hp than his brother). A similar setup could prevent players from nuking down enemies 1 by 1. - In similar fashion; The Sacred Band contained pairs of warriors that were often romantically involved. There's multiple ways it could influence combat. They could be stronger while closer together, while both are alive, or the opposite similar as above. - Formation fighting. A (slow) moving spearwall (phalanx) could force players to move in order to not get hit by multiple spears at the same time, while denying short range attacks and certain tiles. A testudo on the other hand would force players to close in as projectiles either don't work or won't be as effective. - Artillery. Flaming ammunition could work as a random AOE attack that could deny access to x tiles for x turns. Low chance to hit a player, but chances could increase if target player would be standing still for x turns. Just some ideas I had myself to make combat more interesting, but not sure whether it would work. Advice/feedback appreciated.
Thank you. I'm currently DMing my first campaign and I've had a few encouters that the party have dealt with far quicker than I had envisioned when I created them. There's some really great tips here that I will definately be using going forward!
Been DMing a long time and you learn that no matter how much you prepare or how challenging you think an encounter should be, the players will always find a way to throw you a curve ball. Adjusting on the fly is one of the best tools in a DM's arsenal imo.
one thing that wasn't mentioned is to turn the boss into a victim half way through. you could have it so that the boss realizes they are losing and panics, and either throws themselves at the mercy of the party for protection from a bigger bad that has some hold over them (it becomes a quest hook) if the players have been playing 'good aligned' (trying to legitimately save people rather than just trying to do as their characters would do) which would create a moral conundrum in which you would help a villain to do good or defeat a villain to aid evil (which only works if the villain still is evil and doesn't give up their ways). now if the players have been a bit more murder hobo then the boss could do some sort of suicide thing that has them go out in a bang in an effort to appease their evil overlord that then has decided to step in and take at least some of the reward the players were expecting (quest hook in that the big bad has a lot more loot or revenge for stealing 'their' treasure but be sure they still get the appropriate amount for the resources they use in the fight and aren't under leveled), which allows for the villain to step things up in a way inconsistent with long term survival (and so should be harder) as well. in either case this allows you to potentially create a much more challenging encounter or series of encounters for use down the line using the knowledge you gained from this encounter to make it much harder. this also feels like the boss was more of a mini boss and not the true boss, mitigating the feeling that it was too easy.
One of the things I'm planning for my first campaign is (since I'm working exclusively by challenge rating) all encounters I plan will have an obstacle that makes fighting harder. Sometimes it's a thick fog to allow them to be ambushed, or a magical item effecting the battlefield, or difficult terrain. Basically something where they COULD brute force it if they wanted to or they otherwise have to find a work around.
"The Monsters Know What They’re Doing: Combat Tactics for Dungeon Masters" by Keith Ammann is a great book for NPC tactics. Detail about specific monsters as well as general stuff like "creatures with X level intelligence approach a fight like this."
Indeed not low int or creatures that just won't know wtf you are doing like that one bird enemy that saw my druid cast conjure animal and instantly new to focus him instead of the 2 vultures summoned cause they are just that informed about magic and tactical.
@@CyberPunkBadGuy I play a druid as well. I feel your pain.
@@fightingcorsair7297 lol it was once at least , he said mb to it.
it was the once i played druid , played the spore druid but god I was tanky to the point I was "zzz" though but it a fun experience.
Oh yeah and I never conjured more than 2 animals at a time cause that just breaks the game.
In many editions this kind of book isn't necessary but for 5e its practically a necessity for a DM. I would rate it more important than any of the books you could buy other than the core books. I've played in way too many games where difficult fights are easy because DMs don't remember monster abilities or don't use them well. Players get to practice using their abilities combat after combat. DMs often just get one shot to do it right with a particular monster.
There's also a website! Definitely recommend it!
As you were talking about lair actions the first thing that came to mind was the baddy somewhat exasperatedly saying "dang it, this is really going to raise my insurance rates" or "man, and i really loved this rug" before unleashing an area of effect that would definitely mess up some of their own stuff (fire, water, etc). It would explain why they had waited until now to use it.
Like others here mentioned, don't let your BBEG travel alone. 5e, especially, has ramped up damage in relation to hit points, and a full party will be dealing damage at 5 or 6 times the rate of any single monster. Add numbers to even things out. In groups, even minions can be a serious threat to an experienced party of adventurers.
Also, I can't reiterate Ginny's final comment enough. If the party does something clever, don't punish them by not letting it happen. Some of the best stories later on involve a clever turn by the characters that blindsides the bad guys.
5e has massively INFLATED hitpoints.
in AD&D fighters could chop through any printed enemy (like say orcus) in a single round.
I'll tack onto this and say that if you read this and think "But I want my boss to feel strong on its own, not just because it has a bunch of minions" you can just lie and make the minions and their actions part of the boss, even if you give them separate initiatives. If it's a big boss (in literal size, not plot importance) give it a bunch of appendages and separate parts that act outside of its main turn, and give them their own hp that the players can hack at to get rid of them, if it's medium or large size creature, have it create apparitions, or teleport around outside of its turn to engage from different places, and have HP thresholds to slowly remove this ability. Basically, if you want your boss to be strong without minions, flavor the minions as being abilities or extensions of the boss creature, rather than separate creatures working for the boss.
I will say you CAN create monsters that can solo fresh parties... but you have to design them METICULOUSLY!
I would say though, while you should never punish your party for coming up with a clever tactic for a particular encounter, if they establish an effective tactic that they keep using for multiple encounters, you should absolutely design enemies that it won't work on to keep thing fresh.
Especially important with high level spellcasters and all the gimmicks they can come up with!
Yup, if they roll good or just make really moves.... just accept it.
Can we please get a steal this side quest with this elf character? I really like her outfit, it looks amazing (especially the gloves), and I think she could have a good quest were the party encounters her, gets a quest or mission to stop her then goes to her home in a castle or something and you fight her there. I could be a fun way to get some new magic items or something similar.
ua-cam.com/video/DkSM-lMKrJU/v-deo.html She already did it. It's Nymwen, the secret necromancer in love with a long dead poet.
She also made a POV: ua-cam.com/video/WhkutPEBZBY/v-deo.html
We got a mini steel this side quest in her introduction video!
ua-cam.com/video/DkSM-lMKrJU/v-deo.html
Her first video is here: ua-cam.com/video/DkSM-lMKrJU/v-deo.html And she has another one here: ua-cam.com/video/WhkutPEBZBY/v-deo.html
and their is her character builder if you want to interact with her ua-cam.com/video/WhkutPEBZBY/v-deo.html
I found a great gauge for whether a monster, a big boss especially, needs beefing up is the player's reactions themselves.
I had a group utterly crush (from my PoV) a BBEG in two rounds, taking very little damage and resisting everything the villain threw at them, but the players were *super* tense about it and feeling like every passed save or critical hit was an absolute clutch roll, and like they were dancing on the knife edge of the villain regaining control and sweeping them away.
In that situation, I found it pretty much perfect to let the players have their speedy victory, because they *felt* like it had been really hard won, regardless of the reality.
As part of thinking tactically for your boss, also remember: Scouting. The boss probably has spies, and scrying spells. As the characters run around using their schticks to take out monsters survivors and witness' can later report these to the boss who can then be prepared.
An intelligent or wise villain will definitely do this. Especially stealthy or sneaky or spy types!
Oooh, love this
Just remember not to go overboard building the perfect counter to the party, as that could be really frustrating.
Sure, but are we the only existing adventurers in the DnD world? I find this advice quite lackluster. If the dude has eyes and ears everywhere, how come he's having such problems with us taking down his plans in the first place?
For exemple, players often have prefered destructive energies types, just like people tend to have prefered pokemon types for exemple. So if someone has seen that the sorcerer of the party dishes out fireball, the villain might ask his cleric to cast endurance to destructive energies (fire) on itself, for exemple. As much as the party can buff itself BEFORE a fight, if the villain heard fighting in the room beside its own, he probably can use every round of the preceding combat to buff itself with every spells or object that they have!
Tip: prime your players to accept these things as "normal" by building them in to low level encounters too. If they've seen it before during a relatively easy combat, it won't raise suspicions that you're changing things on the fly if (when) you need to use some of them to last minute alter the difficulty of a boss fight.
When. No if.
@@nightfall89z62 Do. Or do not. There is no try.
Having wolves or goblins or something call for help and their family coming to help might be a good call, or maybe the village elder of the goblin colony has a level or two in druid! Or spears start getting loaded into spear guns!
Yes! Just sprinkle it in though -- when a DM uses a trick too often it gets sort of transparent and uninteresting. (DMing is hard you say?? Pfah! Lol)
As someone who played video game RPGs far before TTRPGs, one thing I like to borrow for bosses is the puzzle boss. Boss is average strength but is super resilient or untouchable because of X reason, and players need to survive and defeat minions while disabling the spell/item/etc. Once the boss is vulnerable, wiping the floor with them is very cathartic to the players
A good way to set this up is to take inspiration from the roman colosseum (under the floor is the hypogeum which had all sorts of mechanisms to do things like add lions anywhere to the field).
Basically home field advantage, if the BBEG expects to be attacked it isn't unreasonable that they would set up "kill boxes" or arenas to engage the players on their terms. To add puzzle aspects let players enter a visible control room where a minion is using their actions (possibly as signaled by the boss) to mess with the part by triggering traps or inserting minions and stuff to be inconvenient. However, once players get into the control room they can use this stuff against the big bad (including locking the door to keep him out). It can be justified however you want narratively but if i had an arena i would want traps everywhere that I won't trigger. (I guess you could think of it as fancy lair actions that the players can hijack)
Personally i wouldn't do this too much so it stays really interesting and novel, and reskin as needed to keep it fresh. (Maybe its a fight in a factory, or the security desk in a prison or ancient city, or maybe its litterally a colloseum) but if you give your players buttons to push they will love pushing them.
All my bosses are puzzle bosses, the DM routinely lets me design dungeons because my bosses are puzzle bosses (and I'm better at those than he is). The best puzzle boss I've designed is "The illusionist" who can weave realistic illusions. She was based on a monk-wizard hybrid concept and her arena was part of her fight. Even with Truesight the players weren't able to tell where she was as it only added more duplicates (The walls were the illusion, there were mirrors backed with bombs everywhere). There were plenty of torches, both magical and not, as well as a crystal ball in the ceiling. In the end it turned out she wasn't even in the room, she was controlling an armoured puppet through animate objects and was in a side room 4 rooms down the hall. After 5 near TPKs the party ran out and gave up. The key to this dungeon was simple, all they had to do was not break the mirrors and they would see that the mirrors were all reflecting from the crystal ball. A Dancing Light cantrip (which the party had) and an intelligence check would have revealed this. Unfortunately the party instantly thought to break the mirrors and exploded while doing so. I didn't even get to her second phase.
Going up against someone called "The Illusionist" using the direct approach was a bad idea. Doing it 5 times in a row showed me that the party's dump stat was their intelligence.
According to the Party I need to make my bosses less confusing and stop using actual tactics and group diversity.
@@inventor121 first of all, that's brilliant, and I'm suddenly rethinking my hexblade baddie (my players don't know what's what they are yet).
Second, if your players can't formulate plans or think ahead, that has to be on them after a point. I've told my players that I intend to run encounters with a plan and baddies working together; if they want to survive the tough fights, they'll need to start putting together plans.
@@MajorHickE You should absolutely do that, and while you're at it group together monsters into "squads" where there is a tank, DPS, and support. I like to mix DPS between Melee and Ranged depending on what makes sense in the situation.
Also please give me details on your hexblade baddie.
For example:
City Guard: A squad of 7 men in a 2 column formation, 2 men in heavy armour lead the front with Tower Shields and shortswords, 4 in medium armour carry normal shields and spears (or longswords) as well as a sling and a few stones. A support mage in light or medium armour, or commander (battlemaster fighter) in heavy armour, marches in the center of the formation ready to give orders and bolster allies. This small group provides tactical flexibility while still retaining unit cohesion.
Goblin raiders: A pack of 6 goblins have laid an ambush, they have dug a vehicle trap with spikes and are waiting in the ditch beside the road and the nearby trees. As the wagon passes over the vehicle trap the front wheels give way and arrows fly from the treeline 3 goblins with melee weapons make a rush for the wagon to engage the party. from the left. As the party is being engaged from the left a goblin comes in from the right to loot the wagon.
One of my favourites for large battles (only against high level characters) though is the "firing line". A line of tower shield heavies and behind it a row of archers or musketmen and a few mages in the back for support. Skirmishers or cavalry can be added to the wings.
I've also found that not all the players have to be in the boss room for the boss fight. Some of them can be running around baiting and misleading minions and cause mass confusion. I usually spring a random patrol on a wayward rogue to see what they will do. In some situations it's the right call the split the party, in others not so much.
This and boss stages! All my BBEG and sometimes even “mini bosses” have waves or stages. Ran a one shot for a bunch of players vs. Tiamat and the stages were pre summoning adds, slow emergence of Tiamat, pushing Tiamat back and an in between phase where Tiamat became invulnerable while some more adds showed up. Everyone loved it and it wasn’t a boring smash and grab.
Literally the first "boss fight" I dm'd, I didn't think about one of the characters being a Paladin and my two undead dragon wyrmlings being undead - they failed any and all saves against being frightened and couldn't maneuver themselves in a position where at least their breath weapons would have been dangerous. The players felt very powerful though, so I'm not too mad about it :D
youre a great dm. you dont want to negate or nerf your party all the time. let the paladin obliterate the zombies. let the ranger snipe the orcs at stupid long range. let them use their skills/feats/items/abilities/weapons. so keep being a great dm.
@@Atma_Weapon Agreed. The players probably remember that fight as a good one.
Let them be powerful for a bit. It evens out later. I have a rogue right now that's level 12 and does insane sneak attack damage. A CR 6 creature dropped him after a failed save. It evens out after a while and you won't have to change a thing.
You will never be a woman.
One thing my DM did that I thought was clever: a surprise transformation. We were confronting a tyrannical Arch Bishop who had seized power.
This fight had been built up to for half the campaign. We absolutely out-played him, separating him from his focus and giving him no way to fight back. The DM let us kill him, as we had earned it...but then the string-pulling BBEG showed up and turned the Arch Bishop's corpse into a monster. "Some minions are more useful dead than alive!"
We ultimately ended the fight by defenestrating the monster-corpse, leading to it being impaled by a pole bearing the country's flag. And when the citizens saw it, one of them said "now he's as ugly on the outside as he was on the inside".
Does that apply to this video though? Very likely that the DM always planned to have a transformation and a phase 2, especially if the stat block for phase 2 was already prepared.
It's not necessarily a case of you players destroying the boss, causing him to try to up the power and balance the encounter.
Separating from spellcasting focus... chefs kiss... well played :)
@@envytee9659 It absolutely applies to this video. It was literally one of the examples, no different from revealing a new power or item. And sure, it's possible the GM planned to do this all along. But it's just as possible the GM was thinking on the fly, as is their job, to make the encounter more fun and the drama more interesting. And the point is moot; you're not doing it right if the players can see the puppet strings. As with everything in this entire video, the players shouldn't be able to discern whether you've adjusted things on the fly. That breaks immersion.
@@Eshajori No, the example in the vid was to save a boss fight that was far too easy, without making it seem obvious, by describing the boss entering a phase 2 that you hadn't already planned.
In this comment, the player describes a DM that already had a set two phases and stat blocks ahead of time, so it doesn't apply to a video about quick saves for an unexpectedly easy encounter.
@@envytee9659 the dm could have just looked up a different stat block once it was obvious the fight wasn't working out correctly.
One idea of adding a Magic Item that the BBEG TOTALLY had the whole time is from MTG, Liliana's Chain Veil. The Chain Veil is an intelligent magical item that boosts the usurer's power but slowly drains their free will until the Veil is using THEM, instead of the other way around. It gives the BBEG an excuse not to use it ASAP, & leaves the party with a nice cursed item as part of the Loot for the next chapter.
Curses that remove the free will from a character are always problematic in an RPG. Either the DM has to take control of the character (very obvious and many players might not like their character being taken away from them, even temporary) or the player has to play along (difficult if the "new" conscience acts on information the player should not have after the effect ends, and the player will probably still hesitate to actively harm his comrades even if they currently aren't).
@@Milkymalk try having the item refuse to cooperate unless demands are met
(Any/all)
@@eliotoole4534 That's one option, but the player will most likely be like "lol no".
My favorite monster tactic when the big bad is losing way to hard? RUN AWAY! Any sane and semi intelligent creature would do this and it makes logical and narrative sense that if the villain is under prepared and caught off guard, they would high tail it to gather their strength and be better prepared next time. If the players find the enemy in their lair or stronghold there would likely even be trap doors or secret tunnels made for exactly that situation. I can be easier to just delay the encounter for another session and rethink your strategy, and if done well can ramp up anticipation a little bit more. A few things to note: give your players loot for driving off the enemy otherwise they'll just feel like you wasted their time. Don't pull this more than once or at most twice with the same boss or it will get annoying. Make sure to mix up the next encounter with some new abilities so it doesn't feel like a %100 repeat.
Great advice!
For monster strategy, major recommendation to read "the monsters know what they're doing" outlines great tactics and motivations for a wide range of enemies.
Great book!
Came here to recommend this. The book is great, and a lot of it is available on the blog too.
There's also a version for PCs 😉
@@khayyin359 have you seen the second book that covers Volo's and Mordekainen's? It's a bit more mathy than the first one, but still really helpful.
Saving this to my D&D playlist because it might come in useful once I start DMing.
But also, my group's DM doesn't need to worry about this because we're the kind of idiots who fight a ghost on unhallowed ground, barely escape with our lives, break into the mayor's house to get weapons instead of just asking, accidentally give the same ghost a massive power-up *and* nearly get kidnapped by witches who barely had anything to do with any of this.
That ghost was supposed to essentially be the *tutorial* villain.
"Definitely, totally had the whole time." This is a perfect place for red herrings to show up. For a villain being set up for so long, the players have been hearing about what they can do, how scary and powerful the villain is. And much of what they learn they can't be certain of what is fully true and what is rumor. Tell the players five or more things that are "false" that can be true if the villain is underperforming. Do this with every villain set up and the players have to worry if the villain is really all they seem.
There's a part in the first Avengers that a friend of mine thinks is the same as this video's topic; An enormous snake-like flying creature shows up that's bigger than the buildings in New York. Hulk lands on it and takes it out in one hit. What does the GM immediately do? Summon two more. You want to kill my boss so easily? Deal with more of them XD
Also, sometimes luck just isn't on someone's side. There's a "Leviathan Rule" that my first playergroup realized; The bigger the enemy, the faster they die. Coined because every single time (and I mean EVERY SINGLE TIME) a leviathan has shown up, it has somehow died before it got a turn and often on the first player's turn. At this point, it's just how things work, no different than saying that red potions always heal you or that every metal is magnetic in this setting.
One of my favorite D&D moments is when we dispatched a purple worm super fast (I got a hold monster on it early in the first round) and so the dm just had a second purple worm crash down in through the ceiling.
“No! They killed Jerry!”
That sounds INCREDIBLE
Worms fall, everyone dies
The DM had a backup worm on standby.
So I’m fairly new to DMing so take this with a grain of salt, but one of my favorite things to do is to assign an “age” to a creature or monster. Because your character generally gain levels over time, and dragons gain abilities over time. So why not everything else? This is super helpful because I can start an encounter with a difficult monster and then judge from there if they can handle the crazy stuff like breath weapons etc. or I can half the dice damage they do, or follow the stats to a T, or add stuff if needed. Then later if they investigate the corpse, I can tell them things like, “It doesn’t seem to be fully developed,” or “Inside it’s flesh you find pockets of mutated flesh and strange scarring.” It gives me a guideline for how tough something can be and a perfectly reasonable way to scale it up or down quickly.
I remember one of my first outings as a DM. I was looking at the monster I'd planned, and thought.
"Oh no. This is too big and scary for a group of new players. let me shave off some hit points."
Then combat starts, and I'm like.
"Oh Wow! I underestimated your abilities. Never mind, regular HP is back in play."
I went the route of giving my players a way to problem-solve ending the healing ability, but at least one of the players thought that was anti-climactic.
(There was a huge shelf behind the BBEG lined with clay pedestals each containing the soul of a defeated hero [if they had looked, they would have seen empty ones with their names on them waiting for them], and whenever her health would get low she would absorb one of the souls. The solution was to shatter the soul jars, freeing the souls which could then attack her, eventually weakening her enough to kill her entirely. I should also note that absorbing souls was her contingency plan all along and not something I'd made up on the fly.)
Cool idea! Did she have to do something to absorb a soul, like break the jar?
As a DM, I appreciate this. It’s always a fine line of making boss encounters feel like boss encounters, while also maintaining the player agency that D&D is all about. HP augmentation and added abilities are I think more common than anything. That said, funny enough, I think I find the pendulum swinging the other direction more often than not.
I’ve had a lot of scenarios where my players were getting absolutely spanked by a boss that I had no intention of using to wipe the floor with them. I think TPK’s are important, but there’s a time and a place.
TPKs should be player fault not DM miscalculation.
Challenging and Ancient white dragon at lv 2 is a death sentence, you should be allowed to be that dumb but you will also be killed because actions have consequences.
Fighting the boss the DM intended you to fight when they intended the fight should be hard but no deaths without bad roles and no TPK unless the players fought well below their normal abilities. (Like the wizard only using cantrips when they have good spells ready that aren't reserved for something else immediately after the fight)
Also DnD is a game about attrition and resource management, players shouldn't be at full strength when entering a boss fight if you want them to struggle.
@@jasonreed7522 Exactly.
I think the very best time and place for a TPK is when the party insists on actions they've been steered from taking (in world, not at table). I was running a campaign where they had a helpful yet shady NPC that they all wanted to kill just because he was creepy, despite his saving their bacons several times over the course of the game. They finally made their move and I just let it be their last. There are some creatures in that manual that were never really meant to be messed with.
Ginny, I also wanted to point out something that your last point made me think of: just because a fight early on against what you HOPED would be the BBEG for the rest of the campaign goes your players way (either because of some really great rolls, great tactics, or whatever) DOES NOT MEAN that the BBEG is now dead and the entire campaign now has to be re-written (insert a "death is only the beginning" evil cackle here), there are a LOT of different ways to bring back a BBEG that got curb-stomped by the party unexpectedly...😈 ... Maybe they were working for someone more powerful all along, maybe they have a loved one that can't bear to let them go and would make any eldritch pact necessary to bring them back, etc.
Good ideas
Or have them cutscene escape at 0hp...
Ginny has the ability to read minds, just what i wanted, thanks for the great video!
Whenever I want to get the most out of a combat, I spend time doing things like watching the first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan to get the feel and tempo of the kind of combat I want to run. Pullo's fight in the arena in the seventh episode of HBO's Rome is also useful inspiration, as is the movie Thirteenth Warrior. Make things intense, fluid, the enemy always has one more trick up their sleeve. Don't be afraid to make the party run, even if it's to a place where the ground is more advantageous for them. When half the party is unconscious and bleeding out, the last healing spell has been burned, when members of the party are carrying other members to safety, when the character with the most hit points (say about 4) is holding up the fighter's shield to guard the party's retreat---your players will feel like they've been in a fight from hell, and they will talk about it for months if not years to come.
I have a player who has self-described as “wanting every combat to feel like I’m on the edge of death,” so this is very helpful!! Thank you Ginny!!
This is really great advice as always! One more I'd add is: Run Away! If your BBEG is getting destroyed, they can flee and live to fight another day - and maybe on that day they'll have more friends with them or more powerful magic items.
This is only a decent advice if you have options for either outcome and also give the players a way to obtain something that will stop him fleeing a second time. Theres nothing more frustrating than fighting the same guy twice with the same abilities only to have him escape a third time. Thats just bad dm'ing.
Some 5e concepts that I really like for building backup plans into stat blocks are Legendary Actions and Lair Actions. The ones in the Monster Manual tend to be along the lines of the enemy getting a free attack or action use, but they can be great opportunities to use the suggestions Ginny has in the video like calling for reinforcements or modifying the battlefield (via traps, portcullises, etc) without going outside the rules as written. For Lair actions, I like having a few benign ones as well (eg, "you hear the sound of ancient machinery creaking somewhere in the distance") so that I can introduce the idea of "things happen on Initiative count 20" without necessarily changing the planned encounter difficulty.
I am quite proud of myself as a DM for already applying all of these. Though I will add that sometimes adding HP can turn fights into a slog and I prefer to add more damage from the enemies instead.
I used the whole "give your BBEGs new abilities (that they totally had the whole time, cough)" strategy to really good effect in a LARP I was helping to run. My group of players were all vampires, trying to prevent Dracula from rising and dominating them all into eternal subservience. So naturally the final boss fight was against a just-risen Dracula. The problem was, the players were too good -- it wasn't the hard, epic fight it should have been at all. So when Dracula was nearly out of hit points (I estimated he had about one turn left), I mentally tossed his character sheet aside, shouted, "No! You are all mine!", and forced all the players to save against a domination effect. One PC was taken out of the fight (not dead, but dominated), one came very close to it. THAT felt like the epic fight it was supposed to have been, and the players were all correspondingly much more enthused when they killed Dracula the next round. I never told them that the domination ability was something I invented at the last minute to make things harder for them lol.
If you had that ability, along with exact %'s to avoid based on player stats, written down and even had a way and a stat necessary to discover the ability up front that was also written down before the session started, then that would be great boss design. Making things up on the fly because things aren't going your way is the definition of cheating.
@@7F0X7 And yet, everyone seemed really happy with how it turned out, and it turned a very lackluster "oh, was that it?" boss encounter into an "OMG WE WERE SO BADASS" boss encounter. :)
Dude, it's only cheating if it's DM vs players. Which it isn't. Also can you talk about over prep? If the players just skip the encounter? Yeah. Great.
@@JacopoSkydweller Encounters can be designed to be unskippable. You can just put the shiny thing the players need in the same room as the boss or do it a million other ways. I just dislike the idea of getting cheezed in a boss fight despite my preparation as the player.
I shouldn't be punished for my prep due to the DM's lack of prep.
@@7F0X7 did you... not watch the video? Tweaking a boss character on the fly to ensure an encounter is interesting is the entire point, not "cheating" XD I guess you might be confused if you've never been involved in a table top RPG before, but these aren't "DM vs the player" scenarios.
The objective isn't to defeat the DM it's to have a fun game with memorable moments, and the role of the DM is to facilitate that. Your attitude to this dynamic sounds mega toxic with all this "cheating" "cheesing" "unskippable" "punished" "DM's lack of prep" crap, and I'm very glad I've never had a player like you in one of my games!
If you don't mind spending a little money, the "The Monsters Know What They're Doing" books are really really great tools for tactical battles. I personally enjoy playing to a monster or villain's strengths in combat and using tactics in combat.
Simple, give them minions, meatshields or phases where the villain is invulnerable until the players perform a difficult task.
Depending on player level, I like to give big bads legendary reactions, or an ability to shed/molt/drop armor when they take a high amount of damage. So if they take day 30 damage in a single turn, or or from a single attack, they can use this reaction to take no damage instead, but at the first of AC. So the rogue gets their Sneak Attack and deals 36 damage, their dagger cutting a line across the enemy from shoulder to hip. They can briefly see the creatures internal organs beginning to spill, only to watch in horror as the wound seals itself up, the dead flesh sloughing off and falling to the ground with a sick plop. The new flesh, however, looks tender and vulnerable.
I gave the last BBEG all of it in a challange way.
The fight took the hole evening (that wasn't actually planned) and the party succeeded.
No one died.
Lair actions are key.
never underestimate the power of a displacer beast cloak or mantle of Spell deflection on a BBEG.
or just the shield spell on a BBEG. it does wonders. seriously
Minions are neat, but I fear using invulnerability phases. They feel way too "video gamey" to me, and unless executed really well, I suspect the party will feel the same way. The closest thing I've done is having a really stealthy boss turning invisible and moving silently around the battlefield after calling for minions, going "Bah, I'll have to kill you myself then!" after the minions die.
I'm ending my first ever campaign and I REALLY needed this. I had to stop the game to speak to my players like "I'm REALLY trying to make this climactic and dramatic but it's seeming a little impossible". These are great tips for our final final session
I don't know the specifics of your situation, but in my experience, there are always players who absolutely will undercut the dramatic tension if they can. They'll interrupt the villain's monologue, they'll try to one-shot some big threat with some ridiculous plan, they'll have absolutely no interest in the fact that you're trying to build up to some big epic moment.
But, at the end of the day, if you're going to be a DM, in my opinion, you have to just let the players do what they'll do. Player agency is a huge part of D&D. It's what separates it from all other kinds of games. Sometimes the players will one-shot your badguys, or ignore the plot completely, but that's their choice to make. The players WANT to feel like badasses and superheroes and absolutely curb-stomping the badguys is how that can manifest - don't arbitrarily take it away.
If there's any advice I could give, it's don't make the final encounter of your campaign the 'ending'. Go on and have a proper ending. Have the players decide where their characters end up. Do they settle down? Do they have kids? Do they become kings and queens? A proper ending will always leave players with a great feeling. The final 'boss' encounter isn't the climax to your game; the 'ending' is.
Good luck ending your campaign!
@@josephrossow8901Thank you so much for this advice! I definitely have plans for there to be an aftermath to the campaign and even do a little time skip so we can see how things play out and see how things have changed. (I'm running Curse of Strahd if that gives any context!) But I totally get what you mean by undercutting. And it feels good to know I'm not alone there but I think I'll take that advice to mean in some context that if that's the story we're going to tell together, it makes me feel better about rolling with it!
@@josephrossow8901 Ah yes, the "And Sam lived with his family for a very long time before he, too, left the Shire and as the last bearer of the Ring of Power, took the last ship to the Undying Lands."
@@josephrossow8901*pushes up glasses* Actually, technically speaking, I'm pretty sure that the boss fight is indeed the climax; what happens after would be falling action/resolution.
@@drchicken2477 Let'see... A climax is the most intense, exciting or important part of something, a culmination or apex. I don't know if that's really what a final boss is, in D&D. Like, in terms of the game, the players have faced dozens of difficult encounters and bosses by the time they reach it. All the 'final boss' is, is the characterss at their most powerful, fighting their most powerful opponent yet... which... probably the players have experienced before.
I guess I'd argue that the culmination of a character is rarely that they "Defeated Garglenax, the Destroyer of Worlds," but more often that they "Became King, and Lord of the Castle Bob." I guess I'd argue - and maybe I'm wrong - that the climax is what the player ultimately wants to accomplish for their character, and that's often not related to the final boss. Maybe it's starting a school for mages, or marrying the princess and becoming heir to the kingdom, or inventing airships, or creating their own demi-plane. But, in my experience, it often has very little to do with the final combat encounter. By your definition I'd argue that achieving their ultimate goal is the climax, not the final encounter, and that 'living happily ever after' is the falling action/resolution.
Maybe I'm wrong though. >_< I dunno.
Okay, the "Were-fluencer" transformation literally took the strength from my legs and had me on the floor in tears. I have been looking to do a Fenrir-inspired Paladin though, so.... think I'm gonna pledge.
One tip I just found recently was to have your Big Bad go first in Initiative order. Having that extra turn can be great for showing more of their abilities and preventing the party from ganging up on them for 6-10 attacks before the Big Bad's had their second turn.
another option instead of the first first in initiative is to have them set off a trap while the party approached before initiative get rolled.
That should disrupt their planned and prepped tactics and require spending actions to recover from the trap from the get go.
I had one single bard and one single paladin turn what felt like an impossible battle with a lich into no problem when the lich failed a roll that let the bard's phantasmal force hurt him with, I shit you not, 'radiant kittens'.
The bane of liches everywhere...
Bard: “No one ever expects…” radiant kittens!
Liche: “W! T! F! is thaaaaat ?!?!!”
If that's not DnD, I don't know what is.
When you're trying to make an encounter "harder", always keep in mind what type of difficulty you're aiming for. A hard fight can be short and brutal, but it can also be a resource intensive slog. Depending on which one you want as your outcome, you should vary how you prepare and adjust your encounters
What about the 'This isn't even my final form' twist? Basically, the boss could turn out to have been using a shapeshifting spell, and the fight did nothing but reveal their true form? Or would that fall under adding abilities and item?
I'd say it's a combo of adding abilities/increasing HP, but it *is* a classic narrative way to do so. That familiarity can make it seem more normal (and less sus) to players so it's always a good option to keep handy.
Depending on the kind of campaign this seems great.
Just don't overdo it, lest your players get bored really quickly :D
A good version of this is the polymorph spell. Surprise! Turns out being an elf wizard was a disguise and they were actually a demon of some sort. You knocked out all of their temporary HP. Now you have to fight them i their true form with access to all the abilities that they didn't have earlier.
If you're doing this to sve the BBEG from defeat you don't have to go that far, just reveal it was a fake and the real one will be much more powerful and it can he satisfying too as it makes them smarter and stronger.
That can feel like a cop-out unless it has been hinted at earlier in the campaign. Nothing obvious, just something that the players can look at with hindsight and make the connection. That way, you can use it if you need to.
I much prefer the, "You thought I was the top of this organization?"
Love this! I feel like I'm already over the hump with this topic just recently, and finally able to balance encounters. And most of the tips she gave are the exact same ideas I came up with myself, so while I didn't need this video as much, I *can* vouch for it now, lol. Also sparked a few more combat ideas for me, too!
One thing to be careful of about when suddenly giving your boss new abilities is explaining why they weren’t using it before. This can be explained that they thought it was too dangerous, and so only used it when they were going to die anyways. It’s often good to take inspiration from multiphase video game boss fights. I especially love some of FromSoft’s bosses, as a lot of times it makes sense that they only used their most powerful form when the were near death, as it really is a desperate move. Examples include Sister Friede, Ludwig, Lady Maria, Godrick
Personally, what I like to do is create my bosses as kind of modular encounters- I start off with a basic set of stats and abilities, and then start unleashing bigger and nastier stuff if it turns out too easy. This helps to deal with the situation where a boss turns out too easy, but also helps you adjust in the event that bad luck or significant miscalculations have made your boss encounter way *harder* than you anticipated.
A simple trick, and perfectly legal too: You know how the Monster Manual have a set amount of HP for enemies? Don't use that number! Instead what you do is you create a "range" of HP for your monsters, from the lowest they can have to the highest, based on the number of dices they say you have to roll for those monsters HP! That way if the fight is too quick for your players you can ramp up the HP and just say you "rolled high" on that monster HP. Not only that, if it's the other way around and your players are getting their butts kicked you can have them kill the monster early (as long as it's in the HP range) and it'd be like you rolled low on those monsters' Hit Points!
Very good way to balance fights on the spot, perfectly legal, since the monster DO have an amount of dices they tell you you can roll for their HP, too! Just because everyone is used to take the set amount that is given ('cause it's faster) doesn't mean you can't do that! :P
changing hp on the fly just feels cheaty to me. if we die, we die.
The set amount is good for on the fly encounters but for planned encounters you have the time to spend making it more detailed.
Also you can just make a binder of various encounters like goblins in cave with a couple variations and appropriate party level this way you have prebuilt encounters for unplanned fights.
@@brandond2768 its not cheating if it is used too fix DMs mistake. I dont want a tpk because I did a bad job with encounter design.
@@brandond2768 But that's just it, you're not really changing HP on the fly, you're creating a range of HP in which the monster dies!
Like, let's say they fight a Cambion. Officially a Cambion has 82 HP, that's what DMs would use. But his HP is also 11d8 + 33! So it can actually have a wide variety of HP, and it's still official, rulebook stuff! So when you make them face the Cambion, you decide that he has an amount of HP between 44 and 121, and every single one of those number is legal! You can then gauge how the fight is going and, as long as it stays within those margins, determine when the Cambion dies!
Don't be a d**k about it, like, don't be the guy who at least wants to kill one PC before having your monster die, obviously! Players want fights that feels challenging but that they end up victorious in the end. Use what you have at your disposal to give them that!
@@ChevaliersEmeraude except by giving your self a range fir the fight instead of a concrete number ahead of time you are cheating your players of the experience of over coming the challenge you set before them without deus exing it. You're just hiding it better.
RE: adding items. Beware that anything you give to the enemy, the players can potentially acquire for themselves. Be careful not to give them something tooooo overpowered.
Great point! The positive side of that warning is that cool items that you give your bosses can also be fun loot for players when they finally win!
@@GinnyDi also, some items are like the Tome of Horrible Evilness or whatshisname - they only work for the bbeg and any remotely decent pc would take 15d8 necrotic damage from just touching them. MUAHAHAHAH
There's always consumables. Once they're used, they're gone.
@@robertnett9793 yup, there's a Charm that lets you cast Lightning Bolt three times, then it's gone. Even even if you're not a Caster. Good Ace up the sleeve - possibly literally!
@@danielmclellan1522 Oh... Imagine magic items in form of playing cards - I don't talk about the Deck of Many things - just cards you can use and maybe combine... and then
have one special effect if a character holds two black aces and eights and another card.
your voice at 0:24 reminded me SO much of this girl on tiktok who parodies early 2000s anime English dubs
Never use "NPC" class levels for enemies. Stack the enemies with classes and/or numbers higher than your player group. Work to make them act tactically to defeat what you put against them. Only pull your punches when its absolutely narratively neccessary(or to avoid irl mutiny or loss of game).
GIRL DID I JUST SEE YOU COSPLAYING JESTER WITH LAURA BAILEY?! Officially "MADE IT", that's the dream
We had a decent blood toll harpy fight in our last game which was meant to be easy but when the first person to go (who got a surprise round) melted the first one of them super easily our dm was like, right, that one was a runt, the other two need a few more hitpoints, because there is a difference between easy and trivial
My campaign that's been going for over 2 years now has its grand finale this Sunday (2 days away from watching this) so this video has come at LITERALLY the perfect time for me, thank you so so much!
This is great advice. Ginny, you are such a great part of this community. Thank you!
Good tips. One thing I think should be mentioned is to be careful about using the advice to give the enemy a new item. If the players see the enemy using it, they're going to want it for themselves. Be careful you don't add in something in haste that winds up in their hands that completely breaks your whole world in half.
A good idea may also be to prepare beforehand some measure of responses from the villains. For exemple, you could prepare a "rescue party" or a group of "loyal bodyguards" that are just on the other side of the building, and if the fight seems too complicated or your players get a little bit too much traumatised by your boss, you could always take send them to help the villain, or save him if his life gets really shitty low. It's also easy to imagine a villain that feels his end is coming to use teleportation to live for another day. Also you didn't mention it, but the villain could just plain stop fighting and start trying to not get rekt by giving information or something. Villains are often more intelligent than their minions and are more likely to try diplomatical approach to surviving :p.
Being relatively new to DMing, I REALLY appreciate all these tips in your videos. Being able to go back & watch some of these that are a year+ old still helps me a lot & I thank you for each and every one of these videos left up for us to keep on learning from. Much appreciated.
Oh, I've had my shotgun carrying kobold turn a few into watermelon mist! I can only laugh when that happens.
Such great points about the importance of balancing improv with player experience!
I once made a character semi-immortal, allowing him to come back to life a few times, but my players made that encounter a complete joke by grappling him in the middle of boss fight.
There is also the textbook maggufin play. Boss can’t take any damage until a small device is found and destroyed. Bonus points if you make it a very durable item. I had a game where I had a mage in a one way shield bubble. He knocked half the party with mass fireballs and cloud kill. Players found the button and pushed it. It was obvious on the opposite wall. It was mad dash across a cave to get to it. They pushed it. The boss died in one fighter turn.
There’s also the old trick of using some item or something to just run.
Goodrich the grafted is a perfect example of adding abilities. He cuts off his arm and grafts a dragon head onto it so it can breathe fire on you. That could definitely work in RPG’s.
I feel like the last few videos you have put out I have found PARTICULARLY useful as a DM. I am really loving this streak of videos so much :P
For Tactis's I can only point to Runesmith's Series about that. At this time he has done, Guards, Kobolds, Bandits, a Bounty Hunter, Archdruid and much more.
I absolutely love those videos! The ideas in his vids are amazing. Making a wall of men to prevent an invisible player from running out of an ally for example is so clever! You wouldn't expect gaurds to be a threat because they aren't dangerous. But they can be very smart!
The Monsters Know What They're Doing (both the blog and the actual book) are both GODSENDS as well. The author's insight is borderline genius sometimes.
@@elfberry I reckon he's been running games since AD&D, you're bound to learn how to handle encounters by that point. But yes, impressive insight into how to rp and play tactically. Major kudos to Keith Amman.
Way better than other videos detailing what to do to ramp up fights. Thinking tactically and on the fly is something all DMs should strive to learn, but never forget creating an interactive fighting space for both the party and baddies to take advantage of. Think of it like a video game when you enter a space and there's obvious bits of cover laying around. =)
There're two awesome spells to use in cases like these: Glyph of warding (spell version) and Contingency. And now you can use any spell you need because your boss had them prepared on them. And this is even better than pulling up magic items because then you'll worry that your party got your op item from the villain and that's could be a HUGE problem.
Also you can use these spells even if you BBEG isn't a spellcaster or even any of theirs minions, because they could just hire a spellcaster to cast these!
Oh, and if this is really A BOSS you should give them legendary resistance! That's said, for the players don't do as Ginny said and don't you fireball on single target. There should be always better spell to cast - for example just banish them and set a trap with that time and prep your actions when the BBEG comes back or simply use single target spells, they usually have greater damage than aoe.
"Don't use fireball on a single target"? Bold words for someone in fireball range.
"Just banish them" oh like it's EASY (said with a laugh btw)
I just got a sick idea because of this video thanks.
(What about an item with limited lifetime uses with 1-3 uses left) this gives a reason for the mob to hold their use until they get desperate and also adds an option for it to be loot at the end of the fight which could be interesting. I love this holy.
Simple tip: give monsters and hostile npc's a shield. +2 to AC boosts their survivability by a great deal, and sometimes I think WotC took out their shields on purpose to make certain enemies weaker.
I'm really loving your DMing videos, you actually think about what makes it fun. So many other DM-content-creators just talk about how sad and shocked they felt when their players didn't follow the rails they thought they had laid out. I feel like you and Matt Mercer are the only DM-content-creators I know of who actually have a philosophy of collaborative storytelling.
One strategy I saw was simply don't track the BBEG's health. Just keep them alive for as many rounds as you feel is still fun.
This is an illegal technique and if the players learn of it, they'll call the rpg police. Good thing we're all GMs here 🤫
Alternative - The BBEG, seeing that their plans are failing, unleash all their might! They ignite their very soul ablaze to simply kill the characters. They get X rounds of invincibility to anything and everything but after that they begin to die at an alarming rate/instantly. The party needs to learn to be defensive suddenly instead of being offensive.
@@omnigenesis8823 love this one!
Why did I never think of that? I think it'd be a great solution
I see this recommended a lot, and it is one of the worst suggestions. Because it becomes super obvious very quickly, and players stop caring when they realize none of their actions, character choices, spell choices, etc ever make the slightest bit of difference. You're not really playing a game any more at that point, because games have rules, and that's essentially a giant flag saying there's no rules and combat doesn't matter. Might as well pick a different RPG system that has less of a combat focus if you're gonna throw out all the combat rules. Because then any time a player makes a character choice to help them in combat, it's the "wrong" choice by definition.
I had a vampire battle strategist / monster hunter, so I played him super smart, strategic long game, with layers of tactics.
For example, he had 3 layers of coffins, the first of which was a total trap for the PCs. He had mage armor, plus elven chain mail, plus he had an adamantine shield implanted inside his ribs to protect his heart (from pesky wooden stakes).
And he had waves of minions - “normals” city militia & archers, plus guardian elementals he’d duped into protecting him (which the PCs later turned against him), plus his half-vampire squad of 4 personal Red Guards plus 2 lieutenants. These latter two groups had some very cool gear that the players really wanted! So after I rolled in the open to show that they had accidentally but totally destroyed 1 of the Red Guard - and all his gear - they paid a little more attention to what spells and damage they used.
The final battle was in a massive cavern with 5-6 levels, a huge pyramid in the center, arched stone walkways & paths, large light sources on top of giant pillars, even rolled for a minor earthquake which changed up the terrain again. And BBEG’s spells called in a lightning storm, which rolled in 20ft per round over 5-6 rounds & stayed another 2-4 rounds. Lots of interactive opportunities for the players!!
That BBEG fight was the culmination of a 2 1/2 yr campaign, and that battle lasted 3 full 4-5 hr sessions!
And one of the lieutenants escaped, as a potential on-going BBEG.
The single easiest tip I can give after 7 years of DMing, that endures from level 1 to 20, is give your BBEG Greater Invisibility if you want to them to stick around for a bit.
At low levels it makes them a terrifying foe your players need to overcome cleverly or prepare a way to stop the spell ahead of time. Helps if you show them it first by squashing them in an encounter that leaves them alive but hurt. This also helps incentivise them to pursue your lovely villain and gives them immense catharsis when they eventually win 😂
At high levels it buys the BBEG time to deal with the interfering arcanists without getting pelted with sharpshooter shots and GWM strikes! At this stage, for the love of God, give your BBEG counterspell, shield, both, or spell casting minions who have those abilities, otherwise it might end rather quickly (especially if your players are as strategically savvy as mine!)
This is a great video, just file my small tip here under "add abilities and items" or "fight tactically."
The way you come at things from the players' perspective is really great and gives me brand new takes on things I thought I knew. Hands down my favorite D&D-tuber I've discovered in...months, actually.
the ad was great ginny! and i loved the video too. it's a bit worrying though that NPC spellcasters in the new "monsters of the multiverse" stat blocks seem to have fewer spell slots and more once a day spells and a "magical effect" option instead. can you do a video on how DMs should adjust to the new stat blocks please? I've just got Call of the Netherdeep and there are a lot of spellcasting NPCs!
Make it so that the magical effects are subject to counterspell and calculated as a spell with the same modifiers and stats.
@@fizzledimglow3523 I have a suspicion that's not RAI, and the new magic effects are a nerf for counterspell. has Jeremy Crawford said anything about this?
@@rantdmc is not RAI, or RAW. It's just an easy enough fix for the purposes.
Ah, the effects on this are so good! And the acting! This was a really helpful resource. I'd love to see a video on what to do when your BBEG is dealing too much damage and you want to slow down
Yes I’ve added hit points to the BBEG in mid battle to make it a better encounter
Me too, I'm embarrassed 😬
Hey real quick just wanted to say that I like how the segments are broken up by the villain giving little dialogues related to the subject, that’s a neat touch!
This is all great for 5e. Meanwhile you have high level Pathfinder where the name of the game is stomp or be stomped. I had my players fight a Wyrm Black Dragon (essentially a step above ancient in Pathfinder) with mythic abilities and everything. They were level 14 and tier 3 mythic. 3 PCs managed to deal over 800 damage to this monster in about 3 rounds. That’s with the bloodrager missing all but one lucky critical hit with her bow on turn one and the wizard not using damaging spells till turn 3. Sometimes you just have to ride the power wave and have fun with it, because at the end of it all a good narrative can save a middling combat session, especially if you sell the idea of a previously extremely cocky enemy suddenly starting to panic as their plans fall apart due to a critical feat and 3 nat 1 stunning fist saves.
I tried 2nd edition and the party almost always curbstomped my bad guys. It got laughable when they killed the ancient magma dragon in 1 round. ONE. Tactics and prep should be the bare minimum to win against such a beast, not the nail in his coffin... I so missed the vrock who wiped the floor with their asses a few adventures before...
@@roswynn5484 That's because action economy is the king. Challenging a party with solo monster is hard because the monster gets to take one action in a turn while the party as many as there are members in it. The next time send more magma dragons.
@@tuomasronnberg5244 magma dragon + 2 useless fire elemental things, as per AP. Last fight I ran before giving up I ADDED a mate to the solo bbeg described in the adventure - it was just prolonging the inevitable. One would expect the APs to give you good encounters...
@@roswynn5484 Well, think it from the point of view of AP designers. They cannot possibly account for every possible party composition and player skill, so they have incentive to make encounters that are on the easy side so even a mediocre party has a fair chance of beating one. If your players are strong optimizers then they're going to steamroll encounters that are run as is.
@@tuomasronnberg5244 true. And mostly they have pretty good tactical minds. I dunno, I just didn't have the skills to give them the right encounters mostly, Ginny's advice will definitely come in handy next time.
I love that you quoted Colville, he is on the short list with you on my favorite D&D YTers - great video Ginny!
A great bait and switch is goblins that change into barghests!
RUN!
Another idea is to predetermine how many hits it will take to down your BBEG or even rounds he/she/it would survive.
The amount of work you put into your embedded endorsements is really next level. Great job!
One of my favorites to use now and again is boss phases. Let the PC's get comfortable fighting a boss for a few rounds, let them get their strategy in place, then pop into phase 2 and completely shift the dynamic of the fight. Really helps to take players off guard and keep them guessing for literally every single bossfight to follow.
Ginny ? You are saving my life ! x)
My last boss was based on a Zombie Clot, CR 6 + optional minions CR1, my paladin (lvl 4) Just DESTROYED it with a nat 20 with his divin smite + great damage rolls... Left it with a third of its HPs in one hit XD The fight lasted 3 turns instead of 6 mini >< Thanks for the tips I'll make sure my next boss fights will be a better challenge for my players !
(Btw I don't comment often so just wanted to say that I love your content ! Keep it up ! You are one of my favorite DnD related UA-cam channel !)
Be careful with the stuff in the first half of the video - if your players catch a whiff of this you can drive a session into the ground.
Once had a DM that couldn't account a rogue hiding and the mage and cleric flying so he gave the fighter npc the ability to shoot laser beams from his sword.
This is so helpful.
I had planned a necromancer encounter with my party, they're level 5 and I the necro is CR 9, they got him in 3 turns. They told me I should've added some zombies or undead to help him, but all these tips are amazing. Thank you!
The initial encounter of the BBG was a major illusion to make the party waste resources at the forefront...then bring her out to really challenge the party.
That is evil and I am going to use it
@@MajorHickE Please do. My first D&D character was a human illusionist from 1st edition, so...
Gotta say, Gin - could just be me, but your elf villainess is really giving off a 'Curse of Strahd' vibe. Well done, and cheers for the advice!
A good thing about dnd is that it has a max possible damage
Loved all this great advice and the cuts to your BBEG adapting to make the battle more challenging were SO AWESOME!
Death is only the beginning. Yes have her come back sooner as an undead or something. Have her study the players and fight harder next time.
I mean, Lich NPC's can be hella strong. And if they are raising undead meat shields to mess with the party, then the fights can easily ramp up in difficulty pretty quickly.
@@Magus_Union exactly. It would awesome and probably be fun for the players. Seeing how their previous actions informed her. It makes their things matter. It would also be fun to make her the mastermind of the whole campaign. Imagine they kill who they think is the main villan and then they see her.
Good to see a video touching on some of the the 5 'T's.
Tactics - Play well, find ways for enemies to attempt to plan ahead where appropriate. Target players that are doing well. Jump out of cupboards, ambush or even attempt to plead for mercy before you attempt to plunge a dagger into a player's ribs. Learn from the Soulsborne games and use those tactics too.
Terrain - Use the area of the map effectively. Use difficult terrain, drops, changes in elevation and chokeholds to your advantage.
Teamwork - If you can, make your baddies work together as a group and find ways to synergise with each other where possible.
Technology and Gear - Sometimes, there's a random Kobold that built himself a working cannon or an orc that taught themselves Wizard spells. That, or the evil lord has poured plenty of his money into a nice, hefty Staff of Healing to ensure his lazy layabout guards give more than 100%.
Tenacity and Spite - Sometimes, deliberately unbalance a fight. Throw in a monster that they weren't expecting. Have an enemy do the most dickish thing possible and blow themselves up, or chop down that rope bridge everyone is on. From hell's heart, stab deep and true!
But remember, only when it's going to improve your game.
A minor caveat to the "fight tactically" approach. Be careful to avoid metagaming. Just because you know that the Paladin has Sentinel and that you need to keep away from it doesn't mean your monsters know. If you've already experienced that particular ability or you are playing an intelligent villain that would have already investigated their enemies strengths and weaknesses then go ahead and play or even plan around it but it's never fun for a wild animal with an Int of 6 to suddenly realise that the reason three of it's enemies are flying is the Wizard over 100ft away and proceed to charge at it like a rhinoceros independent of opportunity attacks.
If there's multiple enemies then have them call out information to each other the same way players communicate at the table. Yelling things like "get that Sorcerer" not only threatens the squishy mage but also gives your players an incentive to adjust their fighting style. Maybe the Figher/Paladin needs to fall back and interpose himself between the ADDs and the backline, maybe the Sorcerer needs to drop concentration on the Rogue's Greater Invisibility to put up a Wall of Force.
The other thing to be careful of when planning against party strengths is to not make the game unfun to play. If a player takes Sentinel that's not a reason to give every other enemy the Mobile Feat. If a player is really invested in focusing their damage on a specific element (tactically unwise obviously but it can work well for roleplay) don't give them hordes of tiny little monsters immune to Fireball or or a 100ft corridor filled to the brim with Lightning-proof golems. Or do actually, a one-shot/short adventure in a mystical dungeon designed to counter every players strengths could be hilarious.
A good rule of thumb I've found for this comes from the blog The Monsters Know What They're Doing (which is a fantastic resource, though I do not know if this rule is the author's creation). Essentially, a creature's INT and WIS scores should inform how knowledgeable it is about the player's abilities and, to a lesser extent, how the creature itself fights. On a score of 11 or lower, all a given creature should know is who is wearing armor, who looks sick or old, and which PC is the biggest. Magic users shouldn't be readily obvious to these folks, and might be especially terrifying if the monster party lacks their own caster(s). From 12-15, the NPC will have a rough of idea of what each PC is capable of, but won't be able to differentiate one type of spellcaster from another, or a fighter from a paladin if both are similarly equipped, at least not until the attacks start flying. At 16+ INT or WIS, the monster absolutely knows what each PC can do, and will plan accordingly, whether that means negotiating, Banishing the problematic brutes, or showing up with minions.
I've found these guidelines to be incredibly helpful when planning encounters and ensuring that there's a good balance of the party kicking ass, meeting equals, and realizing (usually) that they're in over their heads.
Good points. Like the encounter version of when a DM sees your ranger's favored terrain(s) and enemies and avoids using them. Ever.
Personally I feel like major battles are the best to amp up the difficulty like against the BBEG, if you are about to ask how to tell if a battle is important enough to have difficulty changes, ask yourself “What is the relationship with the BBEG?” The closer to the BBEG (including BBEG themselves) the more sensical it would be for it to get harder! (Hope this helps)
So many dead bosses
@6:32 "I have given thee courtesy enough."
Another relatively simple method to bulk up a boss, while giving the impression they were holding back, is to give them legendary traits. Specifically legendary resistance and actions. The boss was willing to tie his hands to balance the playing field, but the characters have proven more threatening than he thought so now he shrugs off that stun and blindness and starts reaching through space to smash the backs of their heads with a hammer outside his turn.
I'm DMing my first session in three days. I appreciate the timing of this video!!
Great job! You just keep getting better. I like to front load my BBEG with “rainy day” items and make reference to them throughout the encounter. If the encounter hits certain thresholds, I break out an ability or item that I had already alluded to. Otherwise, I’ll use it like the timer on a movie bomb - just as the BBEG was going to use that option, the characters triumph (but just barely).
I love your video format, getting more into film and videography. Also love the special effects!
Watching this one day after my players wiped out an entire platoon of enemies and nearly killed the boss (that ran away) with what was essentially a nuke I gave them months ago and did realize how powerful it was.
Them using the said nuke was done in such a brilliant fashion that I didn't dare to tweak a single HP from a fight that would probably had them arrested, but had the ties turned in a whim.
Having an easy BBG fight is not boring when players do something smart.
And great video as always. ❤️
I have yet to DM but I might have to soon.
I think I got some interesting ideas from MMORPG's and history battles which I wonder might work in D&D:
- Lord of the Rings Online had a pretty infamous raid at some point where the players had to kill 2 massive trolls (with additional adds of course). The trolls were twins; If you brought down a troll's hp unevenly, the other troll would become a lot stronger due to rage. (in game it would happen if 1 troll would have 3% less hp than his brother). A similar setup could prevent players from nuking down enemies 1 by 1.
- In similar fashion; The Sacred Band contained pairs of warriors that were often romantically involved. There's multiple ways it could influence combat. They could be stronger while closer together, while both are alive, or the opposite similar as above.
- Formation fighting. A (slow) moving spearwall (phalanx) could force players to move in order to not get hit by multiple spears at the same time, while denying short range attacks and certain tiles. A testudo on the other hand would force players to close in as projectiles either don't work or won't be as effective.
- Artillery. Flaming ammunition could work as a random AOE attack that could deny access to x tiles for x turns. Low chance to hit a player, but chances could increase if target player would be standing still for x turns.
Just some ideas I had myself to make combat more interesting, but not sure whether it would work. Advice/feedback appreciated.
I really think the videos this year have been consistently well written. Keep em coming.
I'm planning to dm my first campaign later this year after previously only being a player. Your videos are so helpful AND funny. Thanks ^^
Thank you. I'm currently DMing my first campaign and I've had a few encouters that the party have dealt with far quicker than I had envisioned when I created them. There's some really great tips here that I will definately be using going forward!
Never thought I'd say this in a UA-cam comment section: I LOVE your product placements. ❤️
Been DMing a long time and you learn that no matter how much you prepare or how challenging you think an encounter should be, the players will always find a way to throw you a curve ball. Adjusting on the fly is one of the best tools in a DM's arsenal imo.
one thing that wasn't mentioned is to turn the boss into a victim half way through. you could have it so that the boss realizes they are losing and panics, and either throws themselves at the mercy of the party for protection from a bigger bad that has some hold over them (it becomes a quest hook) if the players have been playing 'good aligned' (trying to legitimately save people rather than just trying to do as their characters would do) which would create a moral conundrum in which you would help a villain to do good or defeat a villain to aid evil (which only works if the villain still is evil and doesn't give up their ways). now if the players have been a bit more murder hobo then the boss could do some sort of suicide thing that has them go out in a bang in an effort to appease their evil overlord that then has decided to step in and take at least some of the reward the players were expecting (quest hook in that the big bad has a lot more loot or revenge for stealing 'their' treasure but be sure they still get the appropriate amount for the resources they use in the fight and aren't under leveled), which allows for the villain to step things up in a way inconsistent with long term survival (and so should be harder) as well. in either case this allows you to potentially create a much more challenging encounter or series of encounters for use down the line using the knowledge you gained from this encounter to make it much harder. this also feels like the boss was more of a mini boss and not the true boss, mitigating the feeling that it was too easy.
Ginny, your graphics department budget has increased and it shows 😉
Loved the video examples!
I started DMing a campaign, and one of the players is a Kensi monk. This is information is helpful. Thank you!
One of the things I'm planning for my first campaign is (since I'm working exclusively by challenge rating) all encounters I plan will have an obstacle that makes fighting harder. Sometimes it's a thick fog to allow them to be ambushed, or a magical item effecting the battlefield, or difficult terrain. Basically something where they COULD brute force it if they wanted to or they otherwise have to find a work around.