D&D: Make Your Encounters Dynamic With These Five Tricks
Dynamic encounters aren’t as hard as you think. In fact, these five tricks can make it easy to make memorable fights.
Dynamic encounters crop up a lot in tabletop RPG advice ideas. But what does that mean? In a nutshell, it means a fight that moves. A fight that changes instead of ending in the D&D conga line of death, where combbatants line up around whatever they’re fighing, and stay there until someone dies.
Not that those are bad. But you want a mix of encounters, ideally. And in this case you can mix it up by making your encounters dynamic with a few different tips. You can use them all, use one or two, these are like little salad toppers to sprinkle onto encounters to help crunch them up.
Keep a Ticking Clock
One way to guarantee that a fight changes is to introduce a ticking clock. The easiest way to do this is to have something that ticks down on a set Initiative count (usually 20, 10, or 0 depending on how dire you want it to feel). There are a number of options here. You could have cultists who are completing a ritual, and it’ll finish in however many rounds (3-5 is a good “oh no it’s about to complete” while something like 10 rounds is a good “and it’s beginning to reach its epic”). And on every initiative count it gets that much closer to being complete.
But it could also just be “and the volcano erupts when the timer hits 0”. Whatever you decide, it’s up to you then if players have ways of pausing or reversing the clock. Either way this immediately gives players something else to think about besides just wiping everyone off the map.
Hazardous Conditions
Some of the best fights I’ve ever been in have also been surprisingly deadly because they were over lava magical fusion reactor core. And the same can hold true for you. Put your fights in interesting environments.
And by interesting, I mean make it dangerous. Have superheated gas vents that might turn areas into little cloudkill zones. Or make the fight happen on a big bridge suspended over a pit of lava. Have an astral storm that threatens to sweep through.
Whatever you decide, the important thing is to make it clear to yourself (and then later the players) how it works, what happens round to round, and how the monsters might utilize it. Just know that whatever your monsters do, the players will do too. And sometimes they’ll do worse – this coming from a guy who had a whole bridge worth of a demon army get knocked into the sprawling abyssal chasm below because the players decided it was easier to blow up the bridge than fight a demon army.
Waves of Enemies
If you want your fight to change, the easiest way to do that is to have new batches of enemies show up a few rounds into the fight. In order to do this right, you want to make sure that the first enemies your players encounter aren’t too tough that they decide to run, but also not so weak that they are dead within two rounds.
But nothing says “this encounter just turned up the heat and got a lot more dynamic” than having the guards rush in. Plus, if you know it’s coming, you can have an NPC shout somehting like “guards! more guards!”
Changing Objective
Another great way to shake things up is to change the objective of your fights as they progress. A typical fight might be something like “kill all the goblins” but you can change that mid-fight by having them decide to set something on fire. Or kidnap an NPC or whatever. Basically look for places where the fight can shift in terms of what everyone is doing, and it shakes people out of the move, attack, repeat way of thinking.
On the Move
Also, one easy way to make your encounters dynamic is by putting them on something moving. Like a boat. Or a lightning train. Or an airship. Even a giant sea serpent gliding across the ocean. Whatever you decide, fighting atop a moving platform of some kind is a fantasy classic.
Built in drama and action. But also it’s an opportunity to have people jump from things moving at different speeds, to maybe even work in the chase mechanics. And of course, make a memorable encounter!
Happy adventuring!
