Prepping Combat Encounters

#combat

Mystic Arts: 5 encounters to STEAL for your game tonight

Encounters for each proficiency level (2-6)

Kobolds & Kobold DragonShields. The DragonShield acts as a tank.

Shambling Mound & Will o'Wisps. Shambling Mound is healed by
electric attack of Wisps that move quickly.
Mind Flayer & Intellect Devourer. Intellect Devourer can use Steal
Body on incapacitated players after Mind Player incapacitates them
with Mind Blast.
Mage & Shield Guardian. Shield Guardian can store 1 spell for Mage
and can protect them with Protection reaction when next to Mage.
Ancient Red Dragon & Iron Golems. Iron Golems gain HP from Fire
Absorption when Dragon breathes fire all over them.

Pointy Hat: I Made a DnD Combat System & I CAN'T Play Without it
👍
See PH Battlefield Actions.

Mystic Arts: D&D Has 8 Types of Combat, Actually 👍

1. The Skirmish

Octavia the Paladin opens the door ahead of her, and inside she finds a
bugbear and three goblins. It's a skirmish. I think of the Skirmish as D&D's
most common type of encounter. It's never inappropriate, it's reliable, and
it's good fun. And for those same reasons, it's very popular and probably
overused, in my opinion. What makes fights good is the stories they tell,
not just in D&D but in any media. We tend to become interested in fight
scenes in movies and television when we're invested. Usually, this
investment is brought on by convincing us, the audience, that our heroes
are in fatal danger, but that's not the only way you can become invested.
In lots of ways, even with a skirmish, despite the lower investment, the
investment is almost never zero. You're playing D&D after all, and the
game's main strength is the combat system. But skirmishes tend to have
issues: they can drag on, there might be an overall lack of objectives, or
there might be a lack of novelty. And while there's a dozen ways to fix all
that, something I'll talk about in an upcoming video, maybe there is a
simple solution: change what type of combat you're running. If you change
a few fundamental assumptions while keeping everything else the same,
like the PCs, the stat block, those boring old goblins might suddenly seem
fresher than before.

2. The Ambush

Instead of opening a door and finding the Goblins, what if the Goblins find
the players first? The Ambush. An ambush immediately presents a story
to the players: you're flat-footed, you don't know what's going on, and
crucially, you're about to find out. A good Ambush presents a narrative
hook, a dramatic question: what happens next? First, an arrow comes out
of the Eastern tree line and hit Silas the Barbarian. That's fine, he's a big
lad, he can take it. But then another arrow hits Carla the Rogue. Now
there's a panic; she doesn't have uncanny Dodge yet, and if a goblin so
much as sneezes on her, she's going to drop. We Roll initiative and
prepare for an assault. Ma the ranger casts fairy fire into the tree line and
hits three goblins. Thank the gods, it's just a skirmish, and we can see
them all, and we have Advantage. We can relax. But on the next turn, on
initiative count 20, a war-riding hobgoblin comes charging out of the
western tree line on the other side of the battlefield, and on his command,
another band of goblins attacks the party, only now it's the party's rear
since they all turn to face the Eastern Tree Line. Suddenly, Suie the Druid
is in melee. At this point, everything is upside down, chaos ensues, and
now the encounter has a story. Your players will spend the whole
encounter wondering, "Is there another surprise coming? Was that the last
of them? Will there be more?" You know you run a good Ambush when
the fight's over and your party is paranoid, wondering if they've seen the
last of that fight, if there's more around the corner, if this was just a
beginning of a lengthier invasion. You can run ambushes whenever. If the
players get stuck on a puzzle, or if they're getting bored with exploration,
throw monsters at them. If the players think they're safe, show them
they're not. The party is standing in the throne room of a castle, newly
returned from a bounty hunt. They've just been showered with praise and
are approaching the Lord for their reward. As they reach over to shake the
Lord's hand, he smiles and says, "Thank you for your service," before you
watch his head crack open from the top of his skull to the bottom of his
chin. Blood covers your face, and his body drops to the ground in front of
you. A devil stands behind him, flicking blood off of a long, thin blade. Roll
initiative. What just happened? What's going to happened next? Now the
players are invested.

3. The Targeted Strike

But what happens when the players get the drop on the enemy? Well,
you're thinking of the targeted strike, which is a lovely gift to give your
players. Octavia the Paladin spots the enemy she's been tracking for a
week: Aros the storm wielder, a towering Cyclops with a magic battle axe,
and with him is his War band of elite ogres and Goblin Minions. Only
Argos hasn't seen our heroes yet, neither have the ogres or the Goblins.
They're just sitting around a campfire, unaware of the heroes, plotting the
destruction of a nearby town and drinking to the occasion. Tomorrow
morning, they destroy this town unless you can get the drop on them
tonight. Octavia instructs the party to prepare. They cast preparation
spells, drink potions they've been hoarding, coat their weapons with that
wyvern poison they found in the dungeon a few miles back, and then they
prepare a volley of ranged attacks. It's going to be fantastic. A targeted
strike allows your players to feel in control. They might not feel all
powerful, since they never would have been able to take this encounter
under normal circumstances, but by getting the drop on the bad guys,
they've tipped the scales in their favor. Players will feel smart, in control,
like they're punching above their weight. That's what this encounter is
about. Plus, you as the DM get to deploy an encounter that's well beyond
the players's reach. Suddenly, The Impossible becomes possible. What's
great about a targeted strike is they become an excellent tool to deploy as
a part of a non-linear game, like a reward. It's like a reward.

4. Horde of Bad Guys

Let's say you're 13th level then, and this Army of goblin minions aren't
much of a threat. Then you're dealing with a horde of bad guys, not just a
large Skirmish or a fight with lots of bad guys, but a huge fight with hordes
of monsters flooding the battlefield. 60 goblins come along, and you're
fighting them all. Fights like this aren't about being in Mortal danger;
they're about Resource Management. Usually, the horde of bad guys
works best when it's a Prelude to another type of fight, so what happens
to your resources in this fight matters in the next one. What exactly does
resource management look like in a fight like this? Maybe the horde of
bad guys fight could be won by breaking an elemental gem to summon a
fire Elemental, which might then set the monsters on fire, and they burn to
death. But maybe you want to keep the fire Elemental for later, keep
hoarding your items for another month; you'll use them one day. You could
have Suie the Druid use all her high-level spell slots to cast cone of cold
to make short work of the bad guys, but then she can't use her high-level
slots in the next fight. Then again, if you don't spend any resources, the
horde of bad guys is going to whittle down your hit points, and then you'll
be low when the next fight around the corner picks you all off like sitting
ducks. If A then B, if B then A. So the players have to mix and match,
making moment-to-moment decisions based on chance. That's a game.
Plus, it gives your players the feeling of being The Avengers, tearing
through an army of faceless CGI bad guys.

5. The Elite Team

The opposite of a horde of bad guys then is the elite team: a handful of
powerful, named villains with a large variety of abilities, obvious class
roles, and legendary Powers. That's an elite team. This encounter is built
up over multiple sessions. These Elite villains might have already shown
up as boss fights in the past, or maybe terrifying NPCs that have
threatening dialogue with the players, NPCs who praise the arch villain of
the campaign. What's great about an elite team is they provide a unique
spin on the average combat experience, some of the most out-of-the-
ordinary combat you'll ever experience. And the joy for you, the DM, is to
create them. You get to give these guys special abilities and
characteristics, basically make a character like a player character. You
can finally pretend to play D and D, 'cause Lord knows you're not going to.
Still, you're probably better off using stat blocks; a character sheet is a lot
for this. I never Managed IT. You could even make custom stat blocks; I
love doing that. If you're familiar enough with a monster manual and in a
crunch, you could always mix something together. Here's a few combos to
try: a chain devil might be joined by a necromancer, a bow deck, and a
white or two. Or if your players have been really bad, you'll run a planetar
and his trusty Steed, a unicorn, and their compatriots, the war priest and
the gynosphinx. You know an elite team encounter is going well if it feels
boss battle adjacent. The elite team offers a story of equally matched
teams duking it out, like versus like, fighting fire with fire. Of course, what
you thought might have been one combat type could turn out to be a
completely different one. I once introduced three elite soldiers for my
players to fight. I gave them names, titles, the works. I thought I'd made
an elite team encounter, but then two of the players found out where
these guys were held up, and they initiated a targeted strike. What
followed was a blood bath; my elite team was annihilated by two PCs in a
couple of rounds.

6. The Stomping Ground

Which brings me to The Stomping Ground. Sometimes your players really

want to be reminded of how much they kick ass. Give them that Joy. Have
your high-level party be threatened by some roadside Bandits, only to
send them packing. Have a goblin boss threatened to tear the party limb
from limb, only to be subsequently crushed. What makes these
encounters especially fun is how you roleplay the bad guys. I see a few
approaches: you could have a resounding surrender, bad guys throw their
weapons to the ground and beg the players for Mercy. You could depict
complete denial, the bad guys never for a moment question their mortality
up until the moment they're crushed. You could even depict the monsters
as being Wicked until death, gnawing away at the PCs until they die
horribly violent deaths. Your job here, just like in every fight by the way,
but especially here, is to lose gracefully. You're the bad guys, and in
stories, bad guys lose. The heroes are swatting flies; you're the Flies.
Buzz, buzz. I like making little barking death noises when these guys go
down, just to emphasize the players's might. The more spectacularly you
lose, the better. You'll have opportunities to Humble the PCs later.

7. The Boss Battle

Speaking of which, let's talk about the boss battle. Am I the only one who
plays Cleric Beast every time a boss battle starts? I just love the
Pavlovian response my players have at this point. When talking about
boss battles, I'm of course talking about Adventure ending fights,
campaign Enders, the climax of your epic Saga. Most of the fights I
mentioned before now, I don't consider particularly deadly. Players
probably shouldn't die to an ambush or a targeted strike, and certainly not
to a stomping ground. But in a boss battle, lives are supposed to be on
the line. That's why we're here. We're at the end of the adventure.
Everything we've done so far was in service to getting us to this moment.
It should be the most dramatic, the most deadly, the most insane thing
you've done so far. I think it's okay for PCs to die in boss battles. I
certainly have never minded being killed in a boss fight, and I think most
players understand that when they face the final villain, death is on the
line. When I ran my level 20 end boss for a six-year campaign, my seven
PCs died 13 times. The players had some diamonds, some spells, deals
with the Raven Queen, you know, level 20 stuff. Only one of the players
died and didn't get better. "I'm getting better." "No, you're not, you'll be
stone dead in a moment." That sucks, but it was the end of the adventure.
Rest in peace, Larus. Bosses should have legendary actions, abilities that
work without a saving throw, abilities that challenge the rules of the game,
break convention, and yes, humble players. I really like giving my bosses
a second phase, like in video games. Mythic Odyssey of Theros and
Fblthp's Treasury of Dragons both outline rules for Mythic creatures.
Basically, work like this: when a Mythic creature reaches zero hit points,
instead of dying, they go back to Max hit points and get a couple of new
and improved legendary actions, and the Fight Continues. Simple.
Defeating a boss feels best when it's maximally difficult. That way, when
the boss finally dies, it gives the player a feeling of catharsis, like they can
lean back in their chair and relax. The stress that's built up over the
course of an entire campaign can start to melt away.

8. The Puzzle Actually

Didn't I say eight fights? I think there's one type of fight we haven't talked
about yet, and that's "the puzzle actually." Some fights aren't really fights.
They look like fights: We Roll initiative, we take damage, cast spells, take
turns, blah blah blah. There might be monsters in there, or there might be
elements of danger that's solved by fighting, but this encounter is really
more like a puzzle. Let's use an example from popular fiction. This might
be something like being stuck in the trash compactor in Star Wars. "What
an incredible smell you've discovered!" There's a monster in the water,
and for the D and D example, that monster is trying to eat the players. But
ultimately, both the players and the Monsters will be crushed unless the
trash compactor is halted. The story here is a dramatic question: will the
players spend their actions building a barricade to Halt the compressor or
attack the monster that's trying to eat them? So the puzzle element might
be environmental, but it could also be the villain itself. I recently played in
a game where the monster could, as a reaction, grab our attack and
redirect the damage back at us. So the encounter became a game of
trying to attack the monster with bad attacks and then laying into it after it
had spent its reaction. Another encounter in the same game featured a
titanized monster with a thousand hit points and a thousand arms, Each of
which could attack us. We had no chance of dealing that much damage,
but the monster wasn't trying to kill us; it just wanted to steal the McGuffin
we needed before we could get it. So we couldn't kill it; we had to race it. I
think puzzle fights are maybe the most advanced item on this list, even
above the elite team, so maybe start small and experiment your way up to
the 1,000 armed creature.

Conclusion: Mixing Combat Types

That's all eight types: the Skirmish, the Ambush, the targeted strike, the
horde of bad guys, the elite team, The Stomping Ground, the boss battle,
and "the puzzle actually." You're best served with some kind of mixture
here. I'm sure as I talked through this list, you already had some stories in
mind that lead from one type of combat to another. If you're looking for
structure, I say start with the Ambush, chase the monsters to their Lair
where the players can plan a targeted strike. Then you build up to an elite
team and a horde of bad guys and a boss down the line. Sprinkle in some
skirmishes, puzzles, and stomping grounds to taste. Hell, you could
prepare an 8-session adventure, and at each session, roll out one of
these encounters. Wham, you're done, you've made a story.

Mystic Arts: D&D Has 12 Combat Objectives, Actually 👍

When your combat feels like it's taking forever, it's probably because
somewhere along the way, it turned into a slog. So after killing the scariest
monster on the map, the players all just stand around hitting the bad guys
until it's all over, and that part drags on forever. It's because your fights all
have the same objective, and when that happens, you're destined to end
up running slogfests. But if you shuffle in fights with different objectives,
then you've introduced a second level of tension. Beneath the surface
level appeal of hit points versus hit points, there is the tension of, "Yes, but
will we actually succeeded in our mission?" So, let me run you through
our list of combat objectives, and you'll be able to chuck them on top of
your next D&D encounter to guarantee it's a good time for everyone. And
together, we will end the slog.

1. Deathmatch

The fight is over only once one side is dead. I love death matches, and I
think you can run entire campaigns with nothing but death matches,
especially if you mix up your combat types. They're never inappropriate,
they're reliable, and they're good fun. And for those same reasons, they're
very popular, and they're probably overused. I think I'd be a better DM if I
ran more mixed objectives, because they lend themselves to the situation
where the players go, "Oh great, we've killed the enemy tank. Now we just
have to sit here for the next 30 minutes slowly reducing the hit points of all
the creatures on the field so we can finally stop playing this endless
combat encounter."

Think about it like this: whenever I'm watching a film and the fight scene
starts and I find my eyes glazing over, it's usually because the combat, the
fight scene, isn't about anything. The good guys will continue to punch the
bad guys lights out, and the bad guys will continue to stand up moments
later and charge back at the heroes. And on and on it goes for as long as
the movie thinks it can get away with it. And then at the end, the bad guy
doesn't stand up, and we know that the fight can finally be over. So here's
my question: how do you know the fight is over? You introduce new
objectives. In video games, if you play loads of team shooters or hero
shooters, there is almost always an objective. Killing bad guys helps with
the objective, but doing the objective helps win the fight. Are you with me?
The fight is over once you've won the fight. So you need to communicate
what the objective is, and when it's achieved, the fight is won, and you
can stop with endlessly whittling down hit points. No need to slog. The
fight is over before all the bad guys are dead.

2. Stop the Ritual

Okay, you open the big double door at the end of the dungeon. Now
you're in the final room, and the bad guys are in the process of ritually
sacrificing the Merchant's son to the screaming mass or completing the
ritual that will sink the Eastern Seaboard and raise property prices east of
the San Andreas fault line. Yes, Superman! Double Jeopardy, where is it?
Anyway, you've got to stop the ritual. Really, this is the first kind of
objective one thinks about. It's so simple too. In 3 to five turns, the ritual
completes, and the worst case scenario happens. So it's a race against
the clock. Only, there's a few problems, aren't there? For one, you can't
actually summon the screaming mass on your third level PCs. The
screaming Mass is like a CR25 bad guy. I mean, you can do that and kill
them all, but don't. So the consequences for failure can't be the BBEG
shows up, but maybe the BBEG's best Lieutenant can show up. It's still
enough for the PCs to probably lose the fight, but not so bad that they
can't at least try, or run away, or try to run away. Problem number two is
that the players have to have a way to stop the ritual. If it automatically
completes in three turns unless everyone is dead, your encounter is still a
death match; it's just wearing a silly mustache. The objective has to
matter. Maybe discerning how the ritual works require someone taking the
study action and succeeding a religion or Arcana check. That's up to you.
Maybe the boss monster, the main cultist, is concentrating on a spell, and
disrupting the concentration would end the ritual or delay it by a few
rounds. Maybe there's runes, vases, crystals, or other ritual materials
scattered around the ritual chamber. Each piece has AC 10 and 10 hit
points. Once all are destroyed, the ritual is halted. I've run a dozen
variations of this kind of encounter, but the most recent one was against a
necromancer summoning a bone claw. The ritual couldn't be stopped, but
destroying the runes nerfed the hell out of the bone claw. As the DM, you
can decide the consequences of failure and the prize of Victory. Just be
sure to communicate that to the PCs so they can make informed
decisions. Remember that without informed choice, there's no gameplay.
You don't need to make this overly difficult to solve either. The challenge
comes from the fact that you're being attacked by the monsters while this
is happening. You're in initiative too, so spending your action on halting
the ritual feels right when it's all happening in 6 seconds. And you might
think it'll feel bad to spend a whole action on stopping the ritual, but I find
that a lot of the time, players who are anxious about not being particularly
useful during their next turn are relieved to focus on a concrete and
achievable objective instead.

3. Daring Escape

So, what if the BBEG's lieutenant was summoned, and the ritual
completes, and the screaming white draws his blade of Starlight, and your
players are desperate to get the hell out of there? Well, you need to make
a daring Escape. In order to create a daring Escape, you must first
designate a point where the players know they'll be safe. That way, the
goal, the informed goal, becomes: go there. You say, "You can see the
way you came from is blocked by cultists charging into the ritual chamber,
and you see the screaming white is summoning his Legion of Madness."
And then you turn to the player with the highest passive perception and
say, "You can see there's a small crack in the wall just behind the white.
It's a secret door, and through it, sunlight." When they open the secret
door, the white and his Legion flinch at the sunlight but brave it to charge
after you. While they're not in direct sunlight, you make it obvious that the
Agents of the screaming Mass won't follow you into the Sun. So you keep
everyone in initiative, and now they must charge through the legion into
the secret tunnel that leads to the sunlight. And you make sure the
message is clear: if you get to a sunlit place, you're safe, and we're out of
initiative. Now the question is, how do they get there? Do they use their
actions to Dash, disengage, attack to cover their flank? It becomes a
game of how best to escape, and it doesn't require a skill challenge or a
Chase sequence. You can just use the combat rules to run this whole
thing. Really, when you make the objective obvious, you make everything
clear and easy. I find that a lot of creatives are afraid of being obvious or
melodramatic. For them, everything is about subtext. And listen, you're
allowed to just state the obvious.

4. Hold the Fort

Let's say the players are in a pickle, and they can't escape. You can just
say, "You see the reinforcements are coming. They'll be here in five turns."
And now the PCs know they just have to hold the fort until then, literally
stay in this one place until the reinforcements arrive. Maybe they see the
reinforcements coming, maybe they know they're coming, maybe a
member of the reinforcements has sending unless the heroes know
beforehand telepathically. And now the players have a simple goal: just
hold the fort, be the King of the Hill. They'll spend their turns healing each
other, taking Dodge action, tanking hits from the enemy, suppressive fire
or artillery, occasionally slinging out attacks. This can be full of surprises
too, as the enemy teams bust out all kinds of tricks to try and get the
players off the point: explosives, maybe. Really, "hold the fort" is all about
hit points, the most important resource, but it can take on another flavor.

5. Waves of Bad Guys

What if you have to survive the waves of bad guys for as long as
possible? Each turn, or every couple of turns, you add a new wave of
enemies onto the field. Ideally, you make sure each wave sort of fits into
one of the combat types, but at a few challenge ratings lower than normal,
because eventually they're fighting the remnants of one wave, and in the
middle of another wave, and at the end of a third wave. And then you've
got a very different sort of fight on your hands. In video games, this game
mode usually ends with everyone dying. And maybe that's the kind of
game mode you're running, explicitly a Last Stand. If everyone's on board
with that idea, it might be a lot of fun. But otherwise, you're going to want
to provide some sort of release lever: either an extraction, an escape
opportunity, or reinforcements. Which one you go for is up to you. This
one can be especially fun for players if the waves consists of baddies that
aren't tough on their own, so the players get to mow down minions and
mooks, and you get to have the fun of outnumbering The Players.

6. Save the NPC

Let's say it was an extraction. Then it might work well with another combat
objective: save the NPC. You find some excuse to put an NPC at risk, and
then the encounter doesn't even need to challenge the players; it just
needs to threaten the life of an NPC. Or hell, it could just threaten the life
of a specific player, like the elaborate scheme from our video on
ambushes. The baddies are just after a specific Target, so they steal them
at camp in the night or attack them in the streets, and the PCs leap to the
rescue. During the entire fight, the party's main concern is, "What if the
bad guy doesn't attack me and attacks the NPC instead?" Maybe the
players hear about the NPC in danger, and they make a special Mission
just to get there and save the character. Or, if the NPC is a tough
customer, someone otherwise high level, they could make an encounter
be so incredibly tough that the best course of action is to steal the NPC
and then get the hell out of there. That can be a lot of fun, especially since
that way you can introduce the main bad guy early enough that the
players can't reasonably fight them, but they're still in the initiative
together because the really tough main bad guy has the NPC hostage.
This creates asymmetry and draws your players in by introducing the
scary bad guy earlier and makes them an active participant in the
campaign. The objective works best when you really are okay with the
NPC dying. If you make the game about whether or not someone lives,
you have to be okay with the outcomes. This way, you put the NPC's life
into the player's hands, and then you get the joy of not knowing what
happens next, and you and your players get to find out together at the
table.

7. Sabotage

Another way you can introduce the monster early is by a player driven
Mission. Maybe they learn about a way to infiltrate the enemy base and
sabotage them somehow. Let's imagine the BBEG, the recently
summoned screaming white, has a fortress in the wilderness. The players
know they'll have to go there one day, and they'd rather not have to deal
with the entire Fortress in one combat encounter. So they want to take out
the Watchtower. You can then run an encounter where, if they fail, they
might have to contend with the entire Fortress, but if they succeed, the
enemy loses their watchtower in the next encounter, becomes much
easier. These are best when the players create their own Creative
Solutions, and all you have to do is be ready to package their insane
ideas as combat encounters. Really, that's a lot of the DM's job. Players
come up with something; you figure out how to make it a game. The
combat system is a resolution mechanic, so if you're unsure of the
outcome, have a big combat to see if they get away with it or not.

8. Escort the Thing

What if, instead of sneaking in, they wanted to go through the front door
with a bomb? Or maybe they had a huge battering ram they they chanted
to. The bad guys wouldn't like that very much, so they might try to stop the
heroes while they escort the thing to where it needs to go. In video
games, this is called the payload. The idea being that you have something
precious but big and obvious, and you need to escort it to a place guarded
by the bad guys. In RPGs, it could be an NPC too. Maybe the players
befriended a powerful giant or a sexy gold dragon, and you don't want that
to mean the NPC does all the work and nothing interesting happens. So
you try and package it into an encounter. So you decide to have the
dragon say that he can take care of this problem if they can provide him
with a cover on the way in. Concerned about an approach to The Fortress
from the air, the Gold Dragon suggests that he adopts his sexy human
form, and they March at the gates. Once inside, he'll sexily transform and
breathe sexy fire on the exposed artillery. AB, what did I tell you about
editing the scripts? You're supposed to let me know. Anyways, now you've
got an encounter. The enemy targets the payload, the dragon, while the
players protect it, taking out the sentries, the watchtowers, or whatever
else, until they're in position to deploy the payload. There's a clear end to
the encounter: the payload is where it needs to be in order to be
maximally effective, which, I suppose, implies there's a half success too.
The payload is almost at the optimal spot, but not quite, so it could be
partially effective.

9. Base Defense

What If, instead of attacking the enemy's base, the player's own base was
attacked, and now they're playing base defense? You create a tangible
threat and strike at the root of their operation. A threat might not be
enough to kill the players, but it's enough to destroy their Bastion, set fire
to their favorite Tavern, or destroy their defensive artillery, or steal their
magic items. Losing would be a huge blow, but only to the players'
defenses. The enemy has no intention of fighting to the death; they're
here to pillage and leave. And if the players don't stop them from leaving,
they will strike again. This can be great fun. I most recently did this by
setting a Tavern of innocent people on fire, and the players rush to put out
the Flames, forming lines with buckets to pour on the spreading fire. I've
also had enemy soldiers sneak explosives onto the player's main ship to
destroy all their artillery pieces. If the enemy has good Intel, they might be
able to do all kinds of targeted damage with their own targeted strike.

10. Yoink and Skedaddle

And our 10th one: what if the players had good Intel and they wanted to
steal something from someone way more powerful than them? The old
yoen scadaddle. Y your scadaddle. Break in, take the goods, and be out
of there before anyone notices. Well, remember what we said about
combat being an excellent resolution mechanic? You could decide that a
small group of guards spot them. No super challenging stat blocks,
because the encounter is actually about whether or not the players can kill
the guards before they raise the alarm. Or, as a middle stage, maybe the
guards raise the alarm a little, and a few more guards show up. This way,
it's down to the combat whether or not this objective succeeds, or if the
players have to transition into a daring escape.

11. Peacemakers

And since we're going, let's add a couple more. What if there's two sides
in the fight already at each other's throats, and if they kill one another,
there will be a huge War, hundreds or even thousands dead? This one,
we'll call "the peacemakers." Your players will be incentivized to subdue,
restrict, grapple, disarm, use influence actions, and overall try to
deescalate the situation while everyone else is going at each other's
throats. If they fight, it's War. So, can the players get everyone to just chill,
daddy chill? Or, as a variant on this encounter, could you decide that one
of the sides is far stronger than the other, but the weaker side is backed
by a more powerful faction somewhere out in the world? So the players
must avoid the massacre because it's obvious who would win the fight,
and maybe even more obvious who would win the ensuing War.

12. The Arrest

Let's do one more variant on this: "the arrest." When the players want to
talk to someone who's been openly hostile, can they get them without
killing them? This one's a little tricky if you're playing 5e because they
have a way of handling non-lethal damage that makes it so that you can
just decide that your natural 20 that did 50 damage was actually an attack
to subdue. I've got a little Homebrew rule on that: attacks that would have
massive damage kill the creature cannot be non-lethal. That's often
enough to introduce a little wrinkle. On top of that, you could build in a
ticking clock that'll make the player want to avoid having to use healing to
bring those creatures back up to one hit point, so they're trying to Grapple
instead of knock out.

Fight vs Objective

One thing that's great about objectives is the fact that we're introducing a
whole second layer to the fight. It opens up design space. Winning both
the objective and the fight will make your players feel incredibly proud of
themselves, but there are other possibilities. You might win the fight but
lose the objective, or win the objective and lose the fight. This way, there
is tension throughout the encounter. As the party dispatches the bad guys,
you can raise tension on the objective, or if they're really handling the
objective, you raise tensions on the fight. This way, you can design
encounters that keep the players on their toes, always guessing and
second guessing their decisions. Do I kill this Goblin or focus on the
objective? When that starts to happen, the slog is gone.

Any combat type can have any combat objective. You just marry them. Let
me explain. If you're struggling with your next session, here's what you
can do: two tables, a d8 and a D12. Roll on table one for combat types.
Oh, a five, "the elite team." We're fighting an elite team. But why? Roll a
D12 for combat objective. A 10, "the yink and scadaddle." Well, we want
to steal something from them. Then you ask yourself, what does the elite
team have that we want to steal? It's up to you: magic sword, a scroll of
Titan summoning, the crown of the true king of England. You have a
questgiver NPC tell your players about it, and then tell them that the elite
team might be a lot more powerful than they are. They won't win a straight
on fight. Best of you against scadaddle. But let's be honest, a lot of the
time, your players will pick their own objectives and their own targets, and
then you run the game accordingly. In those cases, though, I find it good
to have a structure like this one to remind myself about the purpose of
each encounter, to understand what they're about, what the story is, to
avoid the slog.

Conclusion: More Variety is More Fun

Obviously, I'm not saying every fight needs to have complex objectives or
that you're not allowed to just run death matches. They can be a lot of fun.
I love running death matches, and I do them all the time. In fact, I
probably run more death matches than all the other kinds of objectives put
together. But an occasional combat encounter with an objective can
Elevate the whole story and your play experience. It'll make combat as a
pillar of the game more engaging across the board.