Hi everyone,
I have started DMing a while ago and for the most part my group (including myself) really enjoys the game. There is just one big problem: As soon as we get into Combat my group starts getting bored.
I tried to work around this issue, making most situations not require a open fight. This seems to work, and usually our game nights are the most fun when there is no fight at all. But it is not like the players do not want to fight, they normaly are eager to test their new skills in battle and they start asking me when they will find something to try their new axe on.
Let me give you an example of where the interest usually drops in a fight:
Lets say the group has finally tracked down the main villain of the story. As the Combat starts they are interested and try to set up some strategies (we use minis for the combat). But as soon as the opposing groups meet and start attacking each other the interest rapidly drops. My players get bored when the enemy does not die in like 3 turns. I tried using stronger enemies to create a real threat, but this does not work eather. It all comes down to an boring "I hit with my sword"... oh it is my turn again? "I hit with my sword again". I believe Combat does not feel involving for my players.
Recently I was thinking about changing the way you roll attacks. Maybe some of you know the X-Wing Miniature game, where you roll attack dice against defense dice. Even if there is more randomness in this system, I believe it makes the players more involved, because they are "actively defending" against the enemy. Does someone know a similar system for D&D?
I really hope someone can help me with this issue.
Happy gaming,
McSloth
In one of the other topics we recently covered the topic of narrating combat. Because combat can be more than just rolling damage. Both the players and the DM can narrate what they do, which makes it part of the story, rather than a case of knocking away all those hitpoints. Maybe this is something you can try to get your players more involved with what is happening.
If that fails, you can also try and make the encounters themselves more exciting. Making enemies difficult is probably not the way to go about it. I think you'll want to look at what makes a fight fun for them. You can tailor your combat environments so they offer more possibilities for clever strategies, and you can include lots of height differences and interactive elements.
McSloth wrote:
Your combats are boring because they are hit point attrition races. Which side hits zero first?
This is completely understandable, because the game doesn't really explain the "why" of a fight, just the "what" and "how." As a result, many new (and plenty of veteran) DMs have these sorts of issues where combat degenerates into a "by the numbers" affair.
Some advice surrounds describing and narrating the consequences of actions in a more exciting way. Partial credit for this advice. This is a game of imagination and playing up the fantasy is generally a great idea.
But we also have to think about the game as a whole. Why are we having this fight? What is it all about? What central conflict does this bit of violence resolve?
We also need to consider that the combat is over when the conflict is resolved. Mama Bear defends her den against all intruders. If the intruders are driven from that den, she won't pursue them, the combat is over. The players need to pass mama bear's den to get through the mountain pass. They don't have a quarrel with mama bear but she attacks them as they approach. They can try to slay mama bear, or run. Either way, once the central conflict is resolved, the combat is over.
Which means, as DM, you need to know what the players' goals are. You need to know how they go about achieving those goals. You need to know what obstacles are in the way and WHY those obstacles are in the way.
So it's time for you to start thinking about central conflicts, or dramatic questions, and stakes. It's time for you to frame those conflicts and stakes to your players. It's time to treat combat as an approach to achieving a goal. Which means there must be an identifiable goal, and an identifiable obstacle, and a meaningful consequence. No more fighting just to fight.
That's the start of what needs to happen to make combat interesting. It's not the combat itself, but the overall situation that must be interesting.
As a thought experiment, let's consider Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The film culminates in a College Professor fighting a paunchy cult-leader on a suspension bridge. Meh. But the central conflict is where is at. Indiana Jones desperately wants to recover that Sankara stone possessed by the cult so that he can return prosperity to the small village that saved his life, and also to return the children the cult has taken as slaves. The cultists have taken both children and the stone to complete their set of evil holy relics that grant them frightening magical powers. The final fight isn't just a fistfight on a bridge - it's the lives and health of a village of innocent people hanging in the balance, and the fanatic struggling of a cultist to finally achieve their long-held dream of conquest.
Fist fight on a bridge is fine. Epic battle of competing goals is better. Y'dig?
PS it's not enough to simply know the central conflicts yourself. You also have to say them out loud to the players. It's called framing or setting the stage.
So you'll basically need to tell them what their enemies want, remind them what they're trying to do, and what hangs in the balance should they succeed or fail, or not succeed fast enough.
I experienced that narrating the combat does help a little. Some of my players are a little shy and when I start to play the different roles (I usually like to "over-act" a litte) they do get more involved.
From my experience a fight only seems fun to them when they complety overpower the enemy and have no real struggle at all. I usually have a lot of interactive elements in the fights. But most of the time my players dont even use them, or even look for a way to use the environment. I have tried to do describe the environment in more detail before the fight, but no one enjoyed that.
It gets really frustrating for me too when I put a lot of time and energy in setting up a "stage" for a big fight and all the players do is go to the enemy and say "I hit him with my sword". When I don't spoonfeed the interactive elements to them (basicly painting the lever for the trap door bright red and make it scream "pull me"), they will not use it. Instead they will stand infront of the enemy an hit him until he is dead or they are bored.
I have tried a lot to adress this issue in the past:
-playing with minis
-playing without minis
-using tactical stuff like flanking
-giving advantage to players who try to be innovative in battle
-even telling players in battle "why dont you try to kick this guy into the fireplace instead of hitting him?" (Just to give them an idea of what they could do)
In the end none of this really worked 
Over-narrating isn't usually helpful. At best, set your scene in 3-5 sentences. Use loaded but vague words.
"You've reached the ornate throne room of the Emperor, who sits on a lavish throne. Along the walls, there are ancient, battered suits of armor, maybe a dozen total. The Emperor holds the orb of dragons, giving him total control over the dragons in the empire. If you can seize this, you'll be able to stave off the invasion of your homeland. Suddenly, the Orb flashes, and before you can blink, 2 large green dragons smash through the windows, roaring at you. What do you do?"
iserith wrote:
McSloth wrote:
I'm not sure I can add that much to what has already been posted, but I don't believe mechanical changes to the rules systems will necessarily help much. There were some alternate combat/defense rules in a recent unearthed arcana you may want to give a shot.
Personally I look at combat as just another role-playing opportunity. The bad guys growl insults, I describe what attacks look and feel like (both PC and NPC) and have dynamic envirnments.
For example an interesting fight is one where they PCs are fighting pirates on a boat. If the PC misses, the pirate calls them limp-wristed-pretender-land-lubbers. The pirate may get right in their face while fighting and the PC can smell their breath that reeks of bad rum and rotting teeth.
Meanwhile the ship is rocking, ropes may be coming undone requiring a variety of checks.
In the meantime a fire has started because the mage missed with a scorching ray, I'd let a PC put it out with a creative flourish that doesn't necessarily require an extra action.
I use accidental fires (and smoke) quite a bit along with wooden floors of old buildings creaking under the weight of combatants, battles on sloped (and potentially slippery) rooftops, caves collapsing as an unintended consequence of thunderwave, etc.
Along with this I do sometimes "guide" players who are taking too long. I try not to rush them, but if the situation is clear they only have a few moments to decide what to do, just like their characters.
Reward people for doing "cool" things by giving them inspiration points or just advantage on an attack because they're swinging in from a chandalier.
Unfortunately there is no "magic sauce" to making combat fun. It's an art more than a science. You can also just try sitting down with your people (perhaps individually) and just straight out ask what the issue is and see if they have any suggestions.
Good Luck!
Thank you all for your suggestions, I believe I found the source of the issue now. I will try to follow your suggestions during the next game night!
I wanted to pick up on Bawylie's excellent advice.
Combats with a story of their own are the way to go. Every combat needs to have stakes beyond just killing the bad guy and looting the corpses.
In old-school D&D, the modules had a lot of monsters and a lot of traps, but mostly it was "go to room B, kill monsters. Go to room C, get by trap. Go to room D, kill monster." Old D&D had more of a wargame feel than an RPG feel. That was good for what it was, but it was also horribly limiting. In my opinion, DMs who learned this way and continue to design & run modules like this are doing their players a disservice.
In my game, we only play every other week for about three hours. We don't have a ton of time to crawl through long adventures. At first, I inadvertently solved this by making self-contained mini-adventures with a couple of encounters. I did this because everyone started at level 1 and I wanted to present a challenge that would task all their abilities' but then let them rest up fresh for the next one (the low levels are the deadliest). I coincidentally made every combat fun. It was two combats (or traps or whatever) to get to the goal and win.
Later, I made longer adventures that would take a few nights to finish. I still had the big goal, but because many of the encounters were simply more "obstacles" in the way for that main goal, many of the encounters were boring. After some time, I realized this axiom: just about every combat needs it's own goal that is clear to the players. "Deceive the guards to sneak in the back door." "Find the castellan and get his key." "Figure out where the princess is and unlock her chains." "Escape the castle with the princess." Do not just put in room after room of monster to defeat. Give every encounter a goal.
This does kill dungeon design, though. Traditional dungeons are full of rooms that don't advance the plot or have a goal of their own. Look at Against the Giants, 3/4 of the rooms have no purpose but killkillkill. So you have to set aside all those awesome dungeon ideas you have. Instead you're designing cool encounters & individual rooms/small suites of rooms.
My overall campaign is coming up on a section where the party has to sneak into a town under siege and find an NPC who has some information they desperately need. I was going to make a whole bunch of encounters they needed to handle before finding him, but instead I'm only going to make three encounters for the whole thing: one for the party to cross the blockade to enter the dangerous city (fight, sneak, deceive, whatever); one for the party find out where the NPC is hiding (may include traps here); and one to escape with the NPC before the invading force swarms their position. And that's it! Each one has its own purpose, its own goal, and its own flavor.
I actually have a fourth encounter, which I call "pseudorandom". This is an encounter I use to harass the party if they dawdle (to keep the pressure on). This is only used if needed.
Make combats matter. :-)
I've had the same problem with some of the encounters in my Lost Mines of Phandelver campaign.
In particular, some of the solo monster encounters have been a push over for a group of 5 PCs, and the encounter has quickly turned to hit point attrition. Part of this is my responsibility as DM, and I strongly recommend following the advice of Bawylie and others up-thread to ensure that you understand what the goals of the monsters are and why they are fighting.
The other part of the problem can be the actual design of the encounter. I've tweaked some of the encounters for my future sessions in LMoP to include multiple monsters and a variety of monsters in each encounter. This gives more interesting choices for me as a DM, and prevents the situation where the PCs simply surround the lone bad-guy and whale on him until he is dead.
Also, don't be afraid to end a combat early if the dramatic question has been answered. If the PCs have driven off or killed most of the monsters, don't be afraid to narrate how they cut down the last remaining orc, before resetting the scene and asking "what do you do?" rather than going through another round or two of combat for the sake of it.
One thing is where the GM decides which combats the PC's will go into. This is something that makes for a boring combat. The players know the GM decided it and thus feel zero responsibility if their PC's die (instead they'll say the GM should take it back because he forced them)
I've read a lot of great suggestions above and I concur with most all of them but I'd like to add a couple of things from my own experiences.
It may sound like babysitting but in our campaign, we pretty much ban cell phone or other devices unless they are solely being used for the game. We used to have the problem of people zoning out and checking their phones between their turns and when it would come back to them, they would always have to ask what had happened and they'd never invest in the battle. Once we banned phones and tablets, people became way more invested because a) they knew what was happening and b) the rounds would go faster since people were on top of their game.
Another thing we've been doing, as someone has stated above, has been to encourage people to be descriptive about what they are doing in combat rather than just saying "I attack this guy" or letting the DM describe the action. Because of things like that, we've had some really great roleplay during combat, such as our fighter attempting to cut animated armor in half rather than just attacking it or our bard beat-boxing to cast a spell with his arcane focus rather than just casting the spell. People get more invested in the combat and it becomes less of a chore.
The biggest thing to help us, in my opinion, was the decision to time limit. For the most part, our turns are relatively quick and everyone knows what to do. Sometimes, we need a minute to think about something and when we do, the DM is gracious enough to give us time but in the normal, mundane turn combat, we have around 30 seconds to declare an action. This makes people pay attention to the turns of others and have a plan for their character when their turn arrives. It isn't for everyone and honestly, since we record our sessions as a podcast, we really need to keep combat at a good pace. In a home game, this might not be the best thing.
If you want to check out combat for us to hear the pacing, check out our podcast, Dungeon Mastered, from our website or on iTunes. We'd appreciate the listens and downloads.
I've always observed players reaching for phones and tablets to be a symptom of an underlying problem, not the problem in and of itself. It generally means it's taking too long for people to be brought back into the spotlight or that the scenes being presented problems like running too long after the dramatic question has been answered or lacking an engaging conflict (conflict not necessarily being a fight). It can also be an issue of players not understanding that when they're not in the spotlight, they should be supporting those who are.
iserith wrote:
I tolerate phones and tablets because a third to half of my playerbase are adults with adult Responsibilities.
Case in point, I was in a game 2-3 weeks ago and a family emergency happened.
Most of the time, that's not the case, but I still trust my players to be courteous and to participate.
WRT my advice about dramatic questions, etc. OP has said that aspect of his game is fine. While I appreciate the agreements etc, my advice in this instance was mis-aimed. Issue was table management.
If you notice a player slacking off or losing interest, that is the moment for you as a DM to engage that player. Describe the situation to him, and ask him what he wants to do.
I think if too many battles dissolve into this typical hitpoint attrition war, that you need to raise the stakes. Bawylie and Iserith already talked about this at length, but what you could also do is present them with more than one goal. Is the fight just about defeating the pirates? Or is it also about preventing the pirates from setting fire to the powder room? Are the players just fighting a villain in a bar, or is the bar on fire, and is the fire slowly spreading?
A good example of this is the bar-fight early on in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The fire in the bar is slowly spreading, Indy has to defeat the nazis, but the main villain is also trying to get a hold of the medallion. Presenting the players with multiple goals at the same time, is a great way to engage them. It gives your players a reason to discuss tactics with each other.
What I also do a lot in sessions, is ask my players directly to describe what their attacks look like. I do this especially when a player scores a critical hit, or deals the final blow to an opponent. And I give them plenty of opportunity for good one liners, and reward them with bonus exp if they say something really witty or memorable. And if the player is not feeling creative, then I fill in the blanks myself, and describe how the opponents meets its end. But getting your players to come up with something awesome, is the best I think.
Also be sure to keep combat exciting and surprising. Make sure you have some unexpected twists for your players. All of a sudden the villain unleashes a huge monster from its cage, or he cuts a weighted rope, and rides it to the top of a wooden tower. Or in the middle of fighting the pirates, a crocodile shows up! Bawylie had an excellent thread on making your encounters "metal", which is a great inspiration for any DM I think. You want your villains to do something unexpected before they die. Every round your villains should be competent to ask themselves, is this working? And if they are losing, its about time they changed their tactics. Maybe a retreat is better for the group of bandits? Maybe the bandit leader doesn't want his men to retreat, and he has to make a check to keep them from doing so? Maybe the players can intimidate the bandits to affect the outcome?
In my campaign I had an assassination. A cowardly cultist stabbed a captain in the back with a poisoned dagger. Rather than wait for the players to kill him, he took off, and an exciting chase followed. I had a whole parcours set up, and had the villain try to do all sorts of stunts to try and get the players off his trail. He swung on the rope of a crane, and cut through a bathhouse, and pushed a stack of crates over to slow the players down. All players were engaged, and they all tried to stop him from escaping in their own unique way. One player dove through a window to go after the cultist. Another opened fire from afar. A third player tried to take a different route to cut him off. And the druid transformed into a dog, and chased after him too. Eventually the players caught up with him, and he was brought before a pirate trial. Each pirate captain got to vote on his type of execution, and the players got to vote too.
My Tiamat group has spent almost 5 weeks going through one dungeon, with wildly varying week-to-week attendance. ( 
Summer Vacation )
I recap 'what happened last week' in a short paragraph; this helps everybody get up to speed, even those who were out. We have a 'group conceit' that if a player isn't there one week, his character just fades against the background and takes no action. Rather than 'poof-ing away". (My now-NPC Paladin has even ghost-like shown up twice so a new player with no character could try out the game.)
In combat, I will - usually, sometime I forget - call whose turn it is and announce who is next. This allows the Next guy to decide what he wants to do, check out options, think of questions to ask, read up on rules, &c. So he is ready to go when his turn comes up.
I've also found it helps to address the PCs by character name rather than player name when I have to describe something happening to them, like a monster attack.
One week I had TEN players at the table. This is the only time I was told (after the session was done) "the game moves too slow". I must be doing something right, but another person will have to watch me and figure out what...