Dungeons and Dragons Necromancer and Death Knight enemy characters preparing for battle
It's no secret that Dungeons and Dragons combat can be a struggle to complete, with 5th Edition rules creating a steady, but oftentimes time-consuming approach to encounters. To avoid combat taking up the majority of your sessions, you may have to bend or break some rules to speed up fights for your party.
Difficult encounters in D&D often take much longer when you have a large party of characters or many enemies for that group to fight. While a standard D&D party is usually four players, having up to six or seven isn't uncommon. Larger parties almost have to use different strategies for quicker battles, especially since standard 5e mechanics tend to emphasize detailed turns for most combatants. Lower Enemy Health Values Don't Strictly Follow One Monster's Normal Vitality An easy trick for making combat faster is to lower the health value of whatever monster your party is fighting. This can be done in a variety of ways, but it is especially useful if your characters have to take on multiple opponents who all have higher stats or Challenge Ratings . For example, say your party of six players is fighting 2–4 Vampire Spawn, who each have 82 HP each, with Regeneration and resistances to multiple damage types. If your party doesn't have a source of sunlight to force these vampires into, you might want to reduce their total health so it doesn't take as many turns for players to defeat them. Create Mini Bosses Rather Than Entire Armies Consolidate Enemy Forces Into One Terrifying Foe With too many turns in combat, it takes forever for one round to finish. You can solve this by combining stat blocks of multiple creature types into one mini-boss, or an "elite" enemy that players have to fight. This could be anything, from a Bugbear commander using the skills of multiple Goblin types, to a Cultist leader casting many different kinds of spells their subordinates had wielded before. One enemy with a higher health pool turns a 15–20 turn round into a much more manageable 4–6 in smaller parties. This gives players more freedom for creative strategies, but doesn't take away from the intensity of the fight. In fact, this approach will likely turn even deadly enemies in D&D into nearly legendary opponents, who players might remember for a long time. Increase Monster Damage For Higher Stakes Glass Canons Create An Appropriate Pace While using the average damage of monsters for every attack is another way to pick up the pace of combat, making enemy damage greater pairs well with lower HP changes. If enemies don't do any damage and have no health, there are hardly any thrills to combat for your party. You want to be reasonable with changes to a monsters damage, in ways that are exciting to players. A common way to implement this is to add a small amount of a non-traditional damage type to an enemy's attack, such as Necrotic damage to a Zombie's punch or Acid damage to a Ghoul's strikes. An enemy with high damage can justify smaller groups of monsters that battle against characters. As an example, a group of multiple Goblins that all do low damage are an annoyance, but 2–3 Goblins that can take down a party member in a couple hits are a menace. Allow Player Characters To Use Their Strongest Tools Don't Be Afraid To Make Fights Easier The fastest combat encounters in D&D are the ones that are easy, where characters use their best abilities to eliminate some monsters almost instantly. A Paladin's Divine Smite can make quick work of Undead creatures, or a Monk's Deflect Missile skill can make short work of any foes trying to use ranged attacks against the party. The trick here is to avoid coming up with reasons for a player character's ability to get negated or thwarted in some way. Although you can easily "beat" your party's spellcaster by having an enemy use Counterspell, this can prolong combat encounters if done more than once. If you're going to counter a player's ability, it should be sparingly in a way that makes sense for your story rather than to increase a combat's stakes. Give Hordes Of Monsters The Same Numbers Link Stats Together For One Turn Instead Of Several Similarly to the mini-boss trick, you can combine stat blocks of monsters together to create fewer turns in combat. However, if you don't want to make a complex enemy, you can simply generate a horde of monsters that all have the same skills, but with much higher HP, AC, or damage values. Whenever you roll for a horde's initiative, they can use a single value and all go at the same time during a round. This prevents you from having to roll multiple initiative numbers, and then take the time to run every enemy's turn individually. Whenever characters deal damage to a horde, enough damage to its health pool could kill one, two, or perhaps more of the larger group. This can naturally reduce not only its HP, but also its damage, giving you a better way to wield a single stat block that's interesting, and most importantly, less time-consuming. End Combat Through Goals Instead Of Enemies Slaying Every Monster Can Take Up Entire Sessions Most D&D battles boil down to defeating every enemy through multiple rounds to win, but a smart DM can turn battles into puzzles for players to solve. Not every fight needs to end with every enemy dead, as they can have other conditions for victory that quickens the pace of the overall combat. For example, you could have a party facing off against a deadly group of devils trying to summon their master. Instead of killing every devil, players may just need to destroy a specific artifact allowing a connection to the Nine Hells. Having a short, simple goal for a party during fights allows for more diverse abilities to shine, with a group's teamwork and cunning on display more than sheer might. Remove Traits That Place Restrictions Prevent Monsters And Magic From Making Everything A Struggle Some spells and monster abilities can adjust how a battlefield interacts with players during a combat. While interesting and dynamic in small cases, you might want to get rid of secondary effects that create too much clutter that lengthen a fight unnecessarily. Battle maps in D&D benefit from having environments players can interact with to gain an advantage in combat. On the other hand, you don't want too many restrictions on a battle map, as that might create too many interactions for players to engage with. This could include one piece of magic in D&D's system creating difficult terrain, which slows down movement of characters. Another might be too many monsters in one fight with Legendary Actions, Lair Actions, or additional abilities that add far more into a combat round to get through. Using unique obstacles infrequently can be interesting, but if they are suggested too often, you may want to bend the rules by not including them. Change Smaller Monsters Into One-Shot Minions Let Some Enemies Be Taken Out Fast If your party needs to have large-scale encounter, either against a boss or a number of enemies, one good strategy is to allow some foes to be defeated as soon as characters hit past their AC. Being able to one-shot enemies can make players feel powerful, but also instantly remove an entire turn from initiative rounds to speed up combat. This technique completely ignores a monster's base HP, changing it to 1 and focusing more on their abilities and standard AC. This way, enemies still feel unique, but you can have more of them at one time to make an encounter feel more threatening. Play Out Entire Fights Without Character Turns Theater Of The Mind Can Be Just As Effective As Turn-Based Rolls Some combats don't even need to have Initiative rolled, as you can simply go through the action without the need for a complex map or turn order. Using this method, you ignore regular D&D combat in favor of every character taking an action in an order the party chooses instead. Technically, you can go through entire adventures in D&D while using "Theater of the Mind" combat. There's no law saying you have to always do turn-based combat, so for smaller fights, you can go for a simple, quick approach. This could be a great method for a quick ambush, where enemies act first before everyone in a party gets a chance to act back before the enemy group flees. This is a specific example, but this unorthodox approach to combat won't take more than 10-20 minutes, allowing for brief, but still meaningful, chances for players to battle. Run Character Initiatives Together Create Groups Of Party Members Working At The Same Time One of the most unlikely methods to speed up combat in D&D is to run "group Initiative," or a method that pairs party members together to go at the same time during combat. This is a feature already seen in games like Baldur's Gate 3, but isn't a part of the normal rules of 5th Edition. When you roll Initiative to start combat, this strategy asks you to put characters in the same turn. One, two, or three characters acting at the same time not only ramps up the pace in which they act simoltaneously, but it also opens up the door for unique synergy between players. If two players act together, they can set each other up to succeed far more. As an example, a Monk and Paladin acting on the same turn can coordinate a Stunning Strike into a devastating Divine Smite all at the same time. This prevents combat from taking forever in Dungeons and Dragons, creating a freeflow nature to fights that emphasizes multiple turns getting done at a much faster pace. Your Rating close 10 stars 9 stars 8 stars 7 stars 6 stars 5 stars 4 stars 3 stars 2 stars 1 star Rate Now 0/10 Your comment has not been saved Like Follow Followed Dungeons and Dragons Franchise Dungeons & Dragons Original Release Date 1974 Publisher TSR Inc., Wizards of the Coast Designer E. Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson Player Count 2-7 Players
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