Dungeons And Dragons tips

(I'm well aware there isn't a huge D&D audience on spacehey but I went to the effort of writing this I may as well post it)

I feel like I've been getting a lot better at making interesting combats and I'm starting to create a formula for it so here are a few tips.

Stakes There's a section in the Call of Cthulhu 7th edition keeper rulebook that mentions that in that ruleset, any time dice are rolled, the keeper should tell the player what the result will be on a failure vs a success. This obviously doesn't translate straight into D&D as CoC makes a point of not having degrees of success, which is very different to how most people run D&D. However, this can be very useful for conflicts. As I'm going to mention later, every conflict should have a specific goal, and the uncertainty is whether the characters achieve their goal or not. The characters should know exactly what their goal is, and have a decent idea of what will happen if they succeed or fail. Say you have a classic demon summoning, the party should know at least vaguely what the consequences of allowing that demon to be summoned would be. This gets the players engaged because they know that if they fail then the world will be changed in a way they have no control over.

Emotion Ideally at least one oppononent will be someone the characters have emotional investment in. This can be positive or negative, so long as the characters feel something when they come to blows. This creates instant drama. If the party looks up to this character then you have the fun betrayal moment (be careful to make it very clear that this character is their enemy, you don't want them siding with the villain and removing all the stakes) but it's equally as fun if the characters hate the enemy because that hate can lead them make decisions differently than they might otherwise, and it's decisions that make this game interesting

Moving Parts So here we get into the actual mechanics of the fight. The biggest tip you usually see is "Have environmental hazards" and that's all well and good, but your environmental hazards might be boring. The best environmental factors are those that can be interacted with. Something I did recently was a fight with a dragon atop a tower in a storm. The storm would deal lightning damage depending on how many squares you move, encouraging people to teleport when possible. In addition to this, the dragon and his minions had abilities that interacted with lightning damage, this worked because there was a druid with control weather in the party, who could cast control weather. This meant that as soon they think to do that, the dragon loses his cloudy hiding spot and a significant amount of damage. This plus some antimagic courtesy of the wizard, and the dragon circling with the breath weapon plus a timer on the fight makes it impossible to just sit there and swing a sword, forcing people to engage in the fight.

different goals "Kill the other guy" is fine, but it's done to death and it's far more interesting to add something else. Something as simple as "kill the other guy before the timer runs out" can make it more engaging. A great one is "Escape with the MacGuffin before the other guy does" this means that dealing damage is not the best option if it's even an option at all. Having goals other than blind murder lets you use enemies much stronger and more interesting than you otherwise could if rather than kill the party the creature want to do something that the party wants to stop them from doing, better yet, the enemies goal conflicts with the party and the parties goal conflicts with the enemies but they don't necessarily need to be the same. Perhaps "The party wants to explore the lost city but the bad guy is using it to perform an evil ritual with the MacGuffin that will detroy the city, because the city has records of how to defeat him" this way, the parties goal isn't "stop the bad guy" it's "find the bad guys weakness" and the bad guys goal isn't "destroy the city" it's "Stop anyone from finding my weakness" and these create lots of different ways the party can come into conflict. Perhaps they try to steal the bad guys weakness before the city is destroyed, maybe they go and stop the ritual, and maybe they try and brute force defeat the villain without knowing his weakness. Building different goals like this is what allows you to improv, and know how characters react to situations

I realise that last section in particular went a bit beyond combat, but it still applies, at least I think it does. I hope this helps someone out there :3