So, sometime in the near future, I might have the opportunity to run a game of E6. I have not run D&D in years and have never run a 3E game. As you may have read in another post, I have been observing some games recently and in most of them the combats seem a bit slow. I am not talking about time-wise (though that might be the case) -- these combats have seemed to degenerate into motionless battles of attrition.

So here is a question for the experienced D&D players here:

In your mind, what characterizes an exciting D&D combat? Is it balance, action, coming down to the last handful of hit points? What can a GM do to make combat more interesting to you? What are common mistakes you have seen that cause combat scenes to become dull?

Thanks for your help,

The setup and environment can have a big effect -If they can just all mob the bad guy, they have to figure out what they are going to do.  If there are more than 2 sides and they are not quite sure who to help/attack.  The bad guy should have some immunity/resistance and a weakness so they can't use the same strategy every time.
 
Hordes of low level creatures are ok every once in a great while but can really turn into die rolling drudgery, wehre they need a 20 to hit, but the characters will need a dozen rounds to get through all of them.

Lots of carnage. If things aren't dying quick enough we tend to get to a point of rolling dice and marking off hit points. If things are dying and more enemies are replacing them, then at least one side is actually moving around the scenery.

Also, you might think about instigating a house rule similar to Exalted's stunts. +1 to hit and damage for saying more than "I attack" and +2 to hit and damage for giving a good description that also uses the scenery. +4 to hit and damage if everyone at the table agrees your description rocked.

I've never tried it in D&D, but it's been a godsend in our Exalted and Scion games. The battles that last the longest are usually because you can't hit or can't hurt your enemy. That means that the longer fights sometimes turn out to be the most exciting, because those are the ones where you're forced to stunt left and right.

Its a real problem in AD&D 1, AD&D 2 and AD&D 3. Could be a problem with classic D&D too, and to a great extent that was spotted and corrected with the Weapon Mastery system within that game.

You don't have that in 3rd ed unfortunately, and it ain't a straightforward conversion. But you can approximate it; give characters a real level of motivation to try the unexpected, give meaningful bonuses if they try difficult tricks to gain advantage over their foes. And keep it moving.

(1) Cool environments.  I can't say this enough.  A big blank mat with nothing more than a few boulders here & there doesn't give PCs much to do.  Add some trees, maybe cliffs, different elevations, pools of acid...  All of a sudden your players will start thinking about tactics rather than just bashing people.

(2) Varied opponents.  Party vs. BBEG fights are boring 98% of the time.  Add some minions with different abilities.  Mixed groups are way more interesting than homogenous ones.

(3) Get your prep-work in ahead of time.  Know the enemies' capabilities and know what (for example) their spell-like abilities do.  This helps things move faster.

(4) This one takes time, but...  Never penalize a player for trying something innovative.  If his swashbuckler wants to grab a rope and swing around, make it worthwhile.  Sure, make it risky - like a Tumble check or whatnot - but if it succeeds, let it succeed grandly.  Giving a +1 or +2 to hit quickly becomes kind of boring.  Most players are smart and good at estimating risk vs. reward.  If they are discouraged from trying new things, they won't try new things.

By the same token, so long as it's reasonable, try to work with their plans rather than against them.  If they're sneaky and the opponents aren't very canny, let them use trickery and deception.

If you want cinematic fights, you have to be prepared to act as a cinematic DM.  Let them try risky things, and let the dice tell the story - just don't stack the odds against their innovations.

-O

Low AC. If good guys and bad guys have low AC, they're getting hit and the tension is increasing--who's going to go down first? If they both have high AC, it's a whiff fest. If one has high AC, it's a chore.

Maybe have there be something at risk other than just hitpoints. Some NPC they party cares about, some choice piece of equipment, or something that's historically/politically important would be a few ideas.

Not knowing exactly what's out there is creepy. Play up the inky darkness if they're fighting in a dungeon. Even if it's just a pack of kobolds they're hearing coming up as reinforcements, it will likely freak them out.

Unfortunately, it is a fair cop that in D&D/D20 the rules are set up to make combat fairly repetitive. Characters will usually have one or two types of attack that they have the best bonus with, and so they will have no motivation to do anything differently.

This has really shown itself in my Roman campaign, where (just for an example) Jong's character is very good at bluffing, and so he does a feignt attack every single round. This makes perfect sense for Jong to do, there's no reason not to try it, and its the attack he has the best chance at doing, with the best chance for success. So why would he try anything else?

There are a few things you can do to offset this situation.  Using interesting terrain can sometimes help, or having opponents with special attacks or defenses (make them up yourself) so that PCs have to improvise too.

Finally, for a bit of unabashed self-promotion, Forward...to Adventure! has as one of its best features the fact that no two combats seem to EVER play out the same way.
Lately I've started running FtA! on a regular basis again (every second week) and its just amazing how the combat is different every single time.
The reason this happens in FtA! and not in standard D&D/D20 is simple: the stunt system and the collective nature of combat.
Now, you can't really do much to change D&D over to collective combat; but the existence of Feats instead of Stunts is a major culprit in the less-original nature of D&D combat. Feats create fixed specialties for characters, where they must make the SAME kind of attack each time to take advantage of the feats they have; on the other hand, since stunts are freeform it means that players can adapt their tactics and try out all kinds of different special maneuvers that are based on the reality of the combat they're involved in at the moment, rather than on some kind of fixed ability bonus.

So if this is a really serious concern for you, and assuming you don't want to just switch to FtA! (heh) you could always consider trying to scrap the feat system and replacing it with some kind of free-form special-maneuver rules. Pretty radical change, I know, but it might be worth a shot.

We could start a thread about it...

RPGPundit

Ahem.

if 3.x does only one thing right, it´s providing choices for combat.
Real choices, wrapped up in rules.

You know, that´s what all this balance stuff, Monster Manuals and Feats and Spell books are about.

So, if you want diverse, entertaining combats with a plethora of equally powerful but different player options, play vanilla D&D.

That´s what it´s really, really good at.

Big, diverse environments are key. Most lame battles happen in small, boring areas. Lots and lots of difficult terrain is always good.

Use circumstance bonuses to encourage PCs to attempt interesting maneuvers. Circumstance bonuses are one of the most underused DM tools in the game.

Diverse enemies pursuing diverse tactics. Try spring attackers, scoot-and-shooters, enemies that change the way the battlefield operates, grapple-kings and so on.

Some examples of exciting D&D combats I've been in:

The party is moving between a series of magical floating platforms each large enough to support two people and that ascend in a helix shape hundreds of feet up the main interior shaft of a volcano. Two nimblewrights wielding rapiers come leaping down the platforms, and use their superior maneuverability and extra move action (under 3.0) to move, attack, and move before the party can strike back. On multiple occasions, they try to bullrush party members off the platforms to their deaths.

The party is on a barge/riverboat going downstream through a jungle. Initially a pair of juvenile green dragons flies overhead and begins circling, using their breath weapons and diving down to try and smash the boat / knock PCs into the water / swoop them up into the sky. More dragons begin to arrive as the fight goes on. The fight escalates as the riverboat approaches a dam with attached watermill where the PCs are suddenly able to disembark and force the dragons into close confines.

The PCs are in a giant nuclear reactor (though they do not understand it as such) complete with cooling tanks, catwalks, a reactor pile containment unit, a control booth, etc. The big bad (an enchanter PC) is trying to activate the reactor, while they are trying to reach him. In the room, robotic demigods (it's a long story) that look like the xenomorphs from Aliens are roaming around trying to kill anything they see. The big bad wants to activate the reactor and leave the area using a subway tram nearby, and as he goes through the activation process, the various parts of the room move and change - cranes swing and machines clang. A turbine that was previously an easy set of handholds becomes a death trap as it hums into thousands of RPMs and fills with superheated steam.

J think varied terrain, be it bottle-necks, uneven ground, a staircase, etc.  Any situation where manuever is key, and non-damage spells come into play as valuable either before or during combat.

Lull the players into a comfort zone, then chase them out of those zones.

Keep them on the move, force them to change weapons and locations.

Use the rules. Have orcs with wargs show up and have the wargs do rushes and runovers to break through the fighter ranks and land in the middle of the party doing grappling and forcing players to change weapons and MOVE. Being a fighter thats good at the greatsword and getting knocked prone by a pack of worgs while orcs spray arrow fire down on you can be pretty exciting and makes your greatsword useless.

That bluff attack, sick a mindless killing machine that doesn't care about defense on him. Can't bluff something that has no fear or doesn't give a shit about defense.

Have the first monsters run then when the PC's give chase have ambushers follow on, a running skirmish should ensue, and if they are in unknown territory, get them lost.

The D&D podcast talked about a dryad using the plants to essentially teleport around the players and flank them. Gives a whole new picture to dryads for me, especially ones with rouge sneak attacks. It stated that dryads can do this trick with treants as well... moving teleportation platforms for dryads.

The podcast had another idea, it was for 4th but cool and could be done in 3.5. They had a owlbear encounter, but the owlbear was being stealthily followed by fae and wearwolfs who were taking advantage of the owlbear by atacking what it did and stealing the prey. Would be a good way to surprise the players and make them readjust and rethink just when they started to attack that owlbear to be surpised from behind by fae (wild elves?) and werewolfs.

Hey everyone,

I have been reading this thread as new posts come in and I do appreciate the advice.

Thanks,

Best fight I ever ran happened in a soup kitchen in a dungeon... buncha low level threats with one or two kobold sorcs... called in ogre reinforcement about halfway through. What made it awesome? I'm still not totally sure... I think it had as much to do with that the players took it and ran with it. Some creative conjurations, setting a trap for the ogres, boiling soup attacks... it made no sense and really didn't have to.

So... to some extent it's varied foes and interesting terrain (can't be repeated quite often enough). To some extent it's just a willingness to indulge in a little insanity not explicitly spelled out in the rules.

I agree with many of the ideas that have been posted above. My ongoing Ptolus game has had a fair number of memorable copmbats which owed much to the following factors:

1) An objective other than kill-or-be-killed.

Sucessful uses of this ploy have included holding off superior foes long enough for the Rogue to pick a lock, grab the loot and help the less combat capable members of the party to escape up a rope, through a skylight and on to freedom.

On another occasion, the party was transporting an prisoner/informer to safer ground through a series of narrow alleys when a squad of assassins from the informer's gang jumped them. The challenge was not just for the party to survive, but also to protect the informer who was bound at the wrists and so could not fight back.

2) Unusual terrain.

Always a winner. Whether it be the alley way mentioned above with narrow, rubish strewn passages (impeding movement) and numerous doors (any one of which might emit new attackers), or the warehouse full of crates (opportunities to climb and pounce) this makes each fight different.

I also tend to mark the corpses of fallen foes on the battlemat and treat each corpse as difficult terrain. A multitude of weaker foes can become a threat if the PCs find their movement inhibited.

3) Unusual circumstances.

One one occasion the group was atacked in their rooms at the inn in the middle of the night. The PCs started out unarmed and unarmoured making many of their usual tactics either unavailable or exceedingly dangerous, and turning an otherwise minor threat (2 hitmen vs 5 PCs) into a serious challenge. Jumping from bed to bed on springy matresses was an added bonus!

4) Monsters with significant strengths amd weaknesses.

My group recently fought a large rat brute in a classic dungeon/sewer system. the Rat had superior reach and could have flattened the rogue or sorcerer in a single lucky hit (they were both a little low on hit points) so neither was willing to stay anywhere near melee range with it. The only competent ranged attacker was the ranger (rat creatures as favoured enemy), but the group had to work together to lure the Brute into situations where the ranger could pull off a clear shot without getting thumped for her trouble. Much use was made of narrow doorways and circular passages to slow down the Brute and distract it (as a mindless chaotic creature it tended to charge for the player who most recently wounded it) while the rnager did her thing. This goes back to the second point on terrain.