Combat

Combat Encounters

The following features can make a combat encounter more interesting or challenging:

Changes in Elevation. Terrain features that provide a change of elevation (such as stacks of empty crates, ledges, and balconies) reward clever positioning and encourage characters to jump, climb, fly, or teleport.

Defensive Positions. Enemies in hard-to-reach locations or defensive positions force characters who normally attack at range to move around.

Hazards. The “Hazards” section in the Dungeon Master’s Guide describes dangerous features, such as patches of green slime, that characters or their enemies can use to their advantage.

Mixed Monster Groups. When different types of monsters work together, they can combine their abilities—just like characters with different classes and origins. A diverse force is more powerful.

Reasons to Move. Use features that encourage characters and their enemies to move around, such as chandeliers, kegs of gunpowder or oil, and rolling stone traps.

Combat Encounter Difficulty

Use the following guidelines to create a combat encounter of a desired level of difficulty.

Step 1: Choose a Difficulty. Three categories describe the range of encounter difficulty:

Low Difficulty. An encounter of low difficulty is likely to have one or two scary moments for the players, but their characters should emerge victorious with no casualties. One or more of them might need to use healing resources, however. As a rough guideline, a single monster generally presents a low-difficulty challenge for a party of four characters whose level equals the monster’s CR.

Moderate Difficulty. Absent healing and other resources, an encounter of moderate difficulty could go badly for the adventurers. Weaker characters might get taken out of the fight, and there’s a slim chance that one or more characters might die.

High Difficulty. A high-difficulty encounter could be lethal for one or more characters. To survive it, the characters will need smart tactics, quick thinking, and maybe even a little luck.

Step 2: Determine Your XP Budget. Using the XP Budget per Character table, cross-reference the party’s level with the desired encounter difficulty. Multiply the number in the table by the number of characters in the party to get your XP budget for the encounter.

XP Budget per Character

||——— Encounter Difficulty ———| | | |—|—|—|—| |Party’s Level|Low|Moderate|High| |—|—|—|—| |1|50|75|100| |2|100|150|200| |3|150|225|400| |4|250|375|500| |5|500|750|1,100| |6|600|1,000|1,400| |7|750|1,300|1,700| |8|1,000|1,700|2,100| |9|1,300|2,000|2,600| |10|1,600|2,300|3,100| |11|1,900|2,900|4,100| |12|2,200|3,700|4,700| |13|2,600|4,200|5,400| |14|2,900|4,900|6,200| |15|3,300|5,400|7,800| |16|3,800|6,100|9,800| |17|4,500|7,200|11,700| |18|5,000|8,700|14,200| |19|5,500|10,700|17,200| |20|6,400|13,200|22,000|

Step 3: Spend Your Budget. Every creature has an XP value in its stat block. When you add a creature to your combat encounter, deduct its XP from your XP budget to determine how many XP you have left to spend. Spend as much of your XP budget as you can without going over. It’s OK if you have a few unspent XP left over. Examples are given below:

Example 1. A low-difficulty encounter for four level 1 characters has an XP budget of 50 × 4, for a total of 200 XP. With that, you could build any of the following encounters:

Example 2. A moderate-difficulty encounter for five level 3 characters has an XP budget of 225 × 5, for a total of 1,125 XP. With that, you could build either of these encounters:

Example 3. A high-difficulty encounter for six level 15 characters has an XP budget of 7,800 × 6, for a total of 46,800 XP. With that, you could build this encounter:

Troubleshooting

When creating and running combat encounters, keep the following in mind.

Many Creatures. The more creatures in an encounter, the higher the risk that a lucky streak on their part could deal more damage to the characters than you expect. If your encounter includes more than two creatures per character, include fragile creatures that can be defeated quickly. This guideline is especially important for characters of level 1 or 2.

Adjustments. A player’s absence might warrant removing creatures from an encounter to keep it at the intended difficulty. Also, die rolls and other factors can result in an encounter being easier or harder than intended. You can adjust an encounter on the fly, such as by having creatures flee (making the encounter easier) or adding reinforcements (making the encounter harder).

CR 0 Creatures. Creatures that have a CR of 0, particularly ones that are worth 0 XP, should be used sparingly. If you want to include many CR 0 critters in an encounter, use swarms from the Monster Manual instead.

Number of Stat Blocks. The best combat encounters often pair one kind of creature with another, such as fire giants paired with hell hounds. Be mindful of the number of stat blocks you need to run the encounter. Referencing more than two or three stat blocks for a single encounter can be daunting, particularly if the creatures are complex.

Powerful Creatures. If your combat encounter includes a creature whose CR is higher than the party’s level, be aware that such a creature might deal enough damage with a single action to take out one or more characters. For example, an Ogre (CR 2) can kill a level 1 Wizard with a single blow.

Unusual Features. If a monster has a feature that lower-level characters can’t easily overcome, consider not adding that monster to an encounter for characters whose level is lower than the monster’s Challenge Rating.

Running Combat

This section builds on the combat rules in Playing the Game and offers tips for keeping the game running smoothly when a fight breaks out.

Rolling Initiative

Combat starts when—and only when—you say it does. Some characters have abilities that trigger on an Initiative roll; you, not the players, decide if and when Initiative is rolled. A high-level Barbarian can’t just punch their Paladin friend and roll Initiative to regain expended uses of Rage.

In any situation where a character’s actions initiate combat, you can give the acting character Advantage on their Initiative roll. For example, if a conversation with an NPC is cut short because the Sorcerer is convinced that NPC is a doppelganger and targets it with a Chromatic Orb spell, everyone rolls Initiative, and the Sorcerer does so with Advantage. If the doppelganger rolls well, it might still act before the Sorcerer’s spell goes off, reflecting the monster’s ability to anticipate the spell.

Using Initiative Scores

You can get to the action of combat more quickly by using Initiative scores instead of rolling. You might decide to use Initiative scores just for characters, just for monsters, or for both.

Initiative Scores for Characters. A character’s Initiative score is typically 10 plus all modifiers to the character’s Initiative roll (including their Dexterity modifier and any special modifiers). If you want your players to use Initiative scores, have them record those scores on their character sheets, and keep your own list of those scores.

Initiative Scores for Monsters. A monster’s stat block includes its Initiative score after its Initiative bonus.

Advantage and Disadvantage. If a creature has Advantage on Initiative rolls, increase its Initiative score by 5. If it has Disadvantage on those rolls, decrease that score by 5.

Tracking Initiative

The following sections describe different methods for keeping track of who goes when in combat.

Hidden List

You can track Initiative on a list your players can’t see using any of the following tools:

  • Paper or a notebook behind the DM screen
  • A spreadsheet or document on a laptop or tablet
  • An app on your tablet or phone
  • Index cards for each character and each group of identical monsters, placed in Initiative order in a stack you cycle through

A hidden list allows you to track combatants who haven’t been revealed yet, and you can use the list as a place to record the current Hit Points of monsters, as well as other useful notes.

If you use this approach, you tell the players when it’s their characters’ turn. When you call out the character whose turn is starting, consider also mentioning who’s next, prompting that character’s player to think ahead.

Open List

You can track Initiative on a list that is visible to the players using any of the following tools:

  • A whiteboard on a wall or propped up nearby
  • A battle mat you use for miniatures
  • Folded index cards for each character and each group of identical monsters, placed like tents in Initiative order across the top of your DM screen
  • A virtual tabletop program you’re using or a group text chat
  • Magnets, clothespins, or an accessory designed to represent the Initiative order spatially

An open list makes everyone aware of the order of play. Players know when their characters’ turns are coming up so they can plan their actions in advance. An open list also lets the players know when the monsters act in the fight, although you can hold off on adding monsters to the list until they take their first turns.

Tracking Monsters’ Hit Points

During a combat encounter, you or a player should track how much damage each monster takes. Most DMs track damage in secret so their players don’t know how many Hit Points a monster has remaining.

It helps to have a system to track damage for groups of monsters. If you aren’t using miniatures or other visual aids, one way to track your monsters is to assign them unique features. For example, imagine that you’re running an encounter with three ogres. You might attach descriptions such as “the ogre with a big scar” and “the ogre with the helmet” to help you and your players track which monster is which. Once Initiative is rolled, jot down each ogre’s Hit Points and add notes (and even a name, if you like) to differentiate each one:

Krag (ogre w/ scar): 68

Thod (ogre w/ helm): 71

Mur (ogre smeared w/ dirt): 59

If you use miniatures to represent monsters, one way to differentiate them is to give each one a unique miniature. If you use identical miniatures to represent multiple monsters, you can tag the miniatures with small stickers of different colors or stickers with different letters or numbers on them.

For example, in a combat encounter with three ogres, you could use three identical ogre miniatures tagged with stickers marked A, B, and C, respectively. To track the ogres’ Hit Points, you can sort them by letter, then subtract damage from their Hit Points as they take it. Your records might look something like this after a few rounds of combat:

Ogre A: Crossed-out:68 Crossed-out:59 Crossed-out:53 Crossed-out:45 Crossed-out:24 Crossed-out:14 Crossed-out:9 dead

Ogre B: Crossed-out:71 Crossed-out:62 Crossed-out:54 33

Ogre C: 59

Some DMs prefer to track how much damage a monster has taken, adding to that number as characters deal damage (instead of subtracting from the monster’s Hit Points). Adding is generally easier than subtracting, and you can track damage on a visible list of Initiative (such as a whiteboard) without revealing to the players how many Hit Points the monsters have. The tracking might look like this:

Ogre A: Crossed-out:9 Crossed-out:15 Crossed-out:23 Crossed-out:44 Crossed-out:54 Crossed-out:59 dead

Ogre B: Crossed-out:9 Crossed-out:17 38

Ogre C:

Using and Tracking Conditions

Many rules and features in the game apply conditions to creatures. You can also apply conditions on the fly when it makes sense to do so. For example, the Poisoned condition can reflect a variety of impairments, from influenza to intoxication.

You can track monsters’ conditions wherever you track their Hit Points. Players should track any conditions affecting their characters. Character conditions can also be marked on index cards or a whiteboard.

You might also mark index cards or sticky notes with conditions and their effects or use tokens or some other tangible reminder. Then hand the cards, notes, or tokens to players when their characters have a condition. Putting a sticky note with a condition’s rules on a player’s character sheet can help that player remember the effects of the condition. You can also place tokens or colored plastic rings (the rings from soda bottle caps work well) on a creature’s miniature, helping everyone remember which creatures are affected by conditions.