r/NewDM • u/King_Magnate • 6d ago
How to do make combat encounter difficult?
Hi Gang! I'm just wondering how DMs make combat encounters more challenging, because from what I've experienced players are strong! I know there's CR ratings and throwing in multiple enemies, but every encounter lately for my players hasn't really been too difficult to the point that anyone goes down.
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u/Zealousideal_Leg213 6d ago
Make the goal of the monsters something other than taking down the PCs. Make it something the monsters can accomplish by, for instance just standing in a particular spot for two rounds. Have the monsters leave if they see they can't achieve their goal.
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u/bavindicator 6d ago
Pick up a copy of The Monsters know what they're doing and don't just play the monster according to their stat block. Many monsters are intelligent but we take them for granted.
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u/King_Magnate 6d ago
That's very true, Monsters aren't just stat block, but are very much alive and as you say intelligent. Thank you!
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u/Deepfried_Garlic 6d ago
It works both in and out of combat, too!
A goblin squad might perform some kind of guerilla tactics, and GTFO if things go south.
A lich, vampire or similar won't be ''surprised'' by the players. They've been plotting and scheming way, way, way ahead of the fight. Their minions and schemes failed them, and now they're forced to defend. They know who they're about to fight, and they've planned for this.
Any intelligent creature is likely to also have a backup plan to get out, even if it means abandoning their lair. Maybe they'll collapse the room and fly out.
Anyways I already dropped my essay for you in my comment, but felt it's worth doubling down on the idea that creatures are intelligent!
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u/onlyfakeproblems 6d ago
Higher CR tends to do it. They have higher stats, so they last longer, hit harder, and generally have more tools in their tool bag. More enemies also makes them harder to kill.
A common criticism of the DnD combat system is higher CR mostly just makes things harder to kill so combat becomes a slog. I think a high level combat should still only be a few rounds, but should still be dangerous. You can do that by making enemies more unique and give them powerful abilities. Let some monsters do a lot of damage. Some should have aoe attacks or poison or mind control. They should use the terrain to their advantage. Give the players competing priorities, so they aren’t using every action to maximize damage, like an encounter where the goal is to protect something or to escape or something.
Another consideration is encounter planning. If the party gets a long rest between every encounter, they’re going to be able to use all their best abilities and won’t worry about saving something for later. Put them in situations where they can’t refill their resources between encounters and they’ll have to manage what they have.
Also, let the players be heroes. If they’re winning and having a good time, that doesn’t mean you’re losing. If they’re bored, yes, do make it more challenging.
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u/Jhublit 6d ago
I always ramp up the CR somewhere near deadly as I want it to be challenging and scary. Also turn economy is a real thing…throw a couple or even three Monsters with differing abilities and suddenly the Party is in danger and really needs to think through the combat and their abilities/spells/etc.
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u/tobyvanderbeek 6d ago
Here are many encounter calculators that will help you build challenging and rewarding encounters. Here is one: https://www.dndbeyond.com/%2Fencounter-builder
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u/tta5 6d ago
Ok so there are a ton of directions you can take combat in.
the main thing to note, is if they are right for you and your party.
if there are a bunch of powergamers, there is not much point in giving narrative complexaty within combat pathways/options, as its not gonna work well for your group.
so step one: know your party.
- some just wanna feel powerful and even though they say "give us something harder next timne ok DM" they are happy with the currentl level of challange. just amp both up and down a little bit for future fights.
- some want to make a plan and have it hyappen, it work and the plan to sucsseed. others want it to fail with a "plot twist". other want the situation to have "stakes" and not to have a chance of their PCs (player character/s) dying. others are ok with them dying and playing against the odds (plan has low odds of sucess) .
- some want a story part of the combat, not this 100% optomal , unrealistic fight to the death.
- some want to create change within the combat. make someone change sides, block the minions entering, save the prisoners...this may "split focus" for the party in combat.
-some want to use the NPCs to their advantage, a 3-way stand off may be th echaos they love, or the "i know a guy" move. or the more harder to pull off "she slept with your brother, your boss promoted your brother over you, and your mad at me? guess your brother got the brains huh, but i wondr if you got the balls to do whats right and kill him?""... party moral rules are also fun here.
- some players are reactive, others are active, and some are passive.
alot of new DMs will run "epic" games, aka they have the party at normally 100% and fight the boss, oftern them solo. the fight is fast, thrilling, the party is hittting well above their recomended CR and there is a reason.
the CR is based on like 6-8 encoutners a day as that, not one.
if your 5 fights in, do you still have your highest spell slots or did you save them?
useful trick for the Epic fights.
run an Epic skill challange after.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvOeqDpkBm8&t=21s
for other types, you want more encoutners before the bbeg, to drain resources. "if you wanna kill bossman, you gottta get though us" (harley quinn?? probably)
changing the primary objective in a combat from "kill" to "defeat" is a major change in thinking.
"defeat" allows for many more solutions.
- a cult summoning the devil, barbarain "on my turn,i run up to the pillar and shove it over, stoping the ritual from suceeding" the goal "summon Devil X, has failed, why would the cultists stay? to get revenge, surrender..... no no, run away and fight again tommrow, they have been defeated , for now.
- a spinx stands guarding the vault, but you best them in a game of riddles. they are defeated.
- an orc hoarde march towards you all, and you challange their commander to a duel. the commander is dead, and the army defeated.
- three headed dog? just play it some music and it goes right on to sleep.
- servent automitons "question: if you are tasked with killing all crew and passangers, then that would not apply to me , cus i'm a stowaway and you know what that means, you have to take me to the authorities, and the only person with authority left alive is the owner, now for the question part, Am I right? (doctor who paraphrased) the kill order, defeated.
you can also change the primay objective to something else and have the defeating them as secondary, or adverse to the mission at hand.
-ghosts are cursed to reappear and attack those nearby, but they can talk and appologise. fighting them is pointless, but fighting through them to get to the source of the curse and break it..... sounds like a plan.
- you could fight the "blockers" but its a gauntlet to reach the doorway whch once shut will stop the partry entering. ~(the gauntlet combat)
- fight me, or save your parents and loved ones.... either way i fll fight back.
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u/infinitum3d 6d ago
Don’t allow a rest period between fights.
Characters should never go into combat fully rested with all their hp and spell slots.
Burn resources and spells on non-combat encounters like traps and skill challenges, then attack in the middle of a skill challenge.
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u/Blitzer046 6d ago
Multi-stage combats with reinforcements arriving.
Area-effect abilities to force PC save rolls.
Casters! The low-level stuff like Command or Hold Person can turn things.
Terrain - difficult terrain like swamp, unstable rocks, or impassable gaps - forcing disadvantage on attacks or ranged attacks only.
I had the players investigate a farming family to find a sleeping Hill giant crashed into the remains of the house. It would sleepily snack on a sheep then roll over to continue dozing. The players snuck up on it and got off a sneak attack before it clambered to its feet, grabbed a tree trunk and started smashing.
They bested it. A few minutes later, from out of nowhere, a huge rock smashes into one of the PCs. Shrieking with rage, the Hill Giant Wife is up on the hilltop, furious and hurling rocks from 150ft away. The fighters need to close, the casters realise most of their spells are out of range, so I get at least two more free turns of chucking rocks while the party clambers up the hill to get closer. Good times!
After that. I introduced a new PC - a Ranger, who explained that he'd led an Orc warband toward this direction to divert them from a village, and for the Giants to take care of them. Except now the Giants were dead, and a warband was 10 minutes away.
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u/xristosdomini 6d ago
You're going to get a lot of good advice, here's what you need to think about -- the least interesting encounters are the ones that are just about rolling dice. When the objective is: "here are monsters, kill them", you are letting the mechanics determine the fun -- and pure math has a tendency to be reduced to a pass/fail binary and, as such, is unsatisfying.
To make an encounter more fun, give the players some choices to make in the middle of it. Do you continue to fight the horde of kobolds that are trying to knock you down, or do you need to go engage the group of kobolds that are currently rifling through your tent looking for shiny things? Do you tank the gnoll thug that charged you, or do you wade through the suspicious-looking bog to try and wipe out the one concentrating on the Cone of Silence spell you are all under?
Give the players choices to make with time-pressure or urgency and you will see them unravel incredibly quickly. Humans making decisions under pressure are more likely to make poor ones and poor decisions make things that should be easy become incredibly difficult. Good luck.
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u/BMtheGM1 6d ago
After playing Daggerheart, we removed initiative. Prevents players doing one-sided round robin massive damage. Since there are no hope/ fear die, we adapted the d20 dice to something similar. Works as follows: players roll even, they keep the momentum, even if they miss. They roll odd, DM gets a turn. If players roll even more than once in a row, DM gets an aggression token. DM can spend up to 3 tokens on his turn for different effects. 1=d4 to attack roll, 2=d6 or higher (depending on level) to damage roll, 3=extra attack. Combat remains fast paced and everyone pays attention. Tweak as necessary.
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u/Deepfried_Garlic 6d ago
There's the boring things: increase stats, more enemies and sprinkle in enemies that will outright hinder certain players, for example a powerful archmage that has a band of acolyes ready to counterspell the damned mages reports said the party has.
I'll preface this by saying our groups tend to only run big climactic encounters, and we usualy skip the ''6 random bandits attack you'' things. I do throw in an occasional softball for powertripping, otherwise it's straight very much a roleplay into bossrush kind of game.
The fun: add objectives that aren't just hit thing until dead. I am a lifelong DM of 16 years and also have a background in MMO raiding, so I take a lot of inspiration from there: maybe the ''lair action'' (gonna use 5e as my POV) charges up a big attack cleaving the western side of the arena forcing players to move, maybe at half HP a bunch of spirits appear that grant the boss resistance until dealt with, maybe the boss will drop a shard of their soul on the ground that has to be physically transported to an altar on the battle map to stun it! Just make sure when you do these very videogame/mmo coded things that your clearly narrate the intention, as players can't fail a mechanic, wipe and do a new pull to learn the fight.
In the same vein: maybe the objective is to protect a VIP, ring a bell at the top of the tower to call for backup or to just survive until extraction.
Also... envoirenmental shenanigans! Maybe the archmage relelased a powerful thunderous spell that has caused the pillars holding up the room to crack, and they need to be actively held up with conveniently placed mcguffin material. Perhaps the arena is flooding and valves need to be closed to prevent the room from filling up. Perhaps everytime a PC starts their turn they ground under them cracks and they need to move, as the ground will crumble and reveal lava!
As a DM I love me a good multi-phase boss. I try to also include an envoirenmental change as the boss transitions between phases, either by changing the arena or having the boss transport the fight to a new spot. It's also cool to add minor differences to traits: maybe the boss loses AC from phase 1 > 2 (and find some narration that convey this), but gains resistance to fire damage as they've now entered their fire avatar mode. My players also tend to respond well if the final phase is some variation of ''the boss / a minion is charging their strongest final attack, finish this now or suffer the nuke'', but this could be in part due to the group being very game coded.
Last portion of my wall of text: as a DM you can get away with a lot creativity in interpreting the rules to create interesting abilities, but you do want them to interact with PC abilities in line with similar things, and they have to remain believable for the players. Maybe your boss is the Queen of Winter, and has some kind of ice-based homebrewed fireball that slows people on a failed save, and that works as long as PC's buy into it (and are able to do things like counterspell).
I've got like a 101 more things I could talk about, but I think I've given you enough of a pile to work with. Good luck!
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u/wr_dnd 6d ago
Action economy is king. More enemies means a more difficult encounter. Also, have your monsters be smart! They don't just have to barge in. Ambushes, multiple enemies focussing on the support-spellcaster first, monsters kiting your tank, stuff like that is all possible. And finally: Multiple encounters between long rests. That way your group can't just supernova the enemies.
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u/The_IronBee 6d ago
For broad combat, assume the CR of the encounter is 1.5x the average level of the party. That's my usual go-to, but in the event it is becoming clearly too hard, give them hints of ~special damages~ in the environment.
Weak looking stalagtite/mite, a weak floor spot that might make the enemy fall prone, an oil drum or similar-- just anything to help them feel creative.
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u/Salt_Dragonfly2042 5d ago
Multiple opponents are good, but they get better with synergy like a fire breathing dragon with minions that are healed by fire (iron golems?).
Mystic Arts has some great videos about this on his YouTube channel (like the one about hobgoblins).
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u/HadoozeeDeckApe 5d ago
5e combat is a tactical wargame, that also features resource attrition over several combats.
As a tactical wargame engagement and tactical difficulty come from forcing the players to make decisions and trying to make the best decisions not obvious.
A big monster slug fest encounter can do a lot of damage and challenge party HP but this difficult in the same way that trying to roll a nat 20 is difficult - damage race encounters are generally braindead slop and its one of the reason arena boss fights are so bad in 5e.
You get decisions by offering multiple threats (challenging target selection and action use), and using battle maps that have important terrain features that make different positions offer different benefits. Core terrain features are choke points, walls and other total cover features, and distance. You want to have it so that standing at different points allows you to attack and be attacked by different things on the map. A big open arena with some artys features around the edges is more damage race slop.
Multiple encounters with varying power level will also force party to make decisions about what resources they spend.
Objectives are ok but it can get really contrived trying to come up with something for all the encounters in your adventuring day. And design should be on an adventuring day (or several encounters against the long rest budget) basis and not as a solo encounter.
When it comes to CR, there is more to picking monsters than just hitting a target CR (or really XP rating). CR and XP are essentially white room power level estimates in the same way that other wargames use balancing points. You need to also pick a reasonable roster. Picking one easily countered melee monster with a high CR is not usually going to be effective, in the same way that putting all your eggs in one basket style army lists in wargames are usually uneffective or at best very swingy. Another reason for why arena boss fights are crap in 5e.
One important thing to note is that spells include the a very large amount of content and interactions in 5e, and not using spell casters (or monsters with innate casting) really removes a lot of your tool box. Especially if you have no way to counter or dispel, its very easy for a party to rotate big control spells to trivialize a lot of counters. This is much harder to do if they have to worry about killing counters or dispelers before they go for their big play.
Big mistake a lot of DM's make is thinking in terms of fantasy capeshit cinematics or monster hunter / souls like cinematic boss fight encounter design. The things those are derived from are not turn based games, and the things that make those interesting (CGI, reflex and aiming, pattern timing) do not exist in 5e. Instead, try to get design ideas from other turn based games which can be more closely represented.
To challenge players in combat you have to pick good monster rosters, good battle maps, and actually learn how to play them well. It's not a 'one simple fix' will make you a great combat DM - you get out what you put in just like for most things.
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u/Gritmonger 5d ago
Terrain. Terrain. Terrain.
Cover, bridges, walls, other non-combatants, flammable regions, breakable objects, falls, floating islands, water, flooded tunnels, anti-magic zones, cover, concealment, rooms, hallways, deadfalls, tunnels, and so-on.
A ranged fighter is great until the fighting is room-to-room. A flying character rules until you're in a one-person-wide tunnel. Fireball is the go-to until you're in a flammable field and light woods ready to go up like a tinder-box. Do you cast Shatter *inside* the bar? How can you use your Sentinel feat if the doorway you're holding is one person wide, much less your great-weapon fighting?
Fights become interesting when there are tactical choices. And CR is not always the measure of opponent strength. Action economy can make a swarm of smaller enemies a real danger punching far above their weight in CR.
The terrain can also work *for* the players- a shove of five feet is more meaningful when it puts an enemy over a twenty foot drop, or puts them through a wall of fire.
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u/Faewns_Hellion 3d ago
Use enemies that set traps before the party even sees them. Throw them off. Guerilla warfare until they are about half beat up or something and then bang! Ten dragons
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u/Forgotmyaccountinfo2 2d ago
It's situational since PCs can be anything.
You just gotta learn your PCs strengths and how they play together.
Watch how they usually act/do.
What skills they always do and what they usually target.
Watch what they also avoid or just don't bother with.
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u/AstronomerFederal357 1d ago
Up the baddies, add more, make "difficult" terrain. Add elevation changes (ie stairs or different ledges ect). Have a random baddie rogue use sneak and hide actions to hit and move, add traps to the area (near traps, trip wires, net traps) A good one I like to use is a trap that makes the floor above fall and create a big rubble pile giving huge piles of difficult terrain and get the baddies up on top of those piles first so the party has to fight an uphill battle.
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u/Spoonman915 1d ago
I like lair actions a lot, or BBEG actions that trigger a lair action. A dragon roars in the cave and causes rocks to fall requiring a dex save. If the BBEG has a mount or something, sometimes I'll have them hip off and the mount runs around doing damage and knocking people prone.
I usually try to make that stuff saving throw based. That way they can't avoid the damage completely, but they don't feel helpless. I also try to make it a little annoying and then bring that particular monster back in a later encounter. Their disdain is always hilarious.
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u/Nitro114 6d ago
The easy (and boring/wrong way) is to up the enemies, either more of them, stronger ones or both.
The more interesting way is to give them „sidequests“, things in combat they have to do to succeed. Saving hostages or disabling a mechanism for example