A Realization as a High-Level DM
Long before I entered the beloved and utterly brutal career path of game design, I was designing adventures and campaigns for my friends within the Dungeons & Dragons game setting. From the dining room of my parents house, to the living room of my first college dorm (using my drawing table as a makeshift table as there was no furniture), to the conference room of a now-default game company in NYC, I have a long and storied history in the realm of DMing (known to insiders as “Dungeon Master-ing”).
However, I have now been entering into the realm of DMing high-level adventures for the current edition of D&D, something new to not only me, but also the players, and I have been finding my game design muscles being exercised in new and unusual ways, particularly in the arena of combat encounters.
You see, as a DM, it is my cherished responsibility to present the players with an appropriate challenge: something that will neither be a cakewalk for them, nor a Sisyphean task. The trick is at these higher levels all of the characters have a buttload (and by “butt” I of course am referring to Wiki-defined version: “the obsolete English measure of liquid volume equaling two hogsheads, being between 450 and 1,060 liters”) of abilities. Likewise, their opponents often have an equal number of actions and abilities. Balancing things out can be a challenge, but the biggest obstacle we ran into was a surprise to me: time.
As we have played deeper into the catacombs of adventuring, we have noticed that it has been taking longer and longer for a single combat encounter to finish. This is not a bad thing in particular, but with everyone’s abilities to sort through and act on, it was getting to where sometimes it would be 10 minutes between a character’s turn. That’s kind of boring for the player, and is what we professional game designers refer to internally as “a bad thing.” We play online, and this definitely contributes to a slower pace, but even so, I really wanted to make combat more intense and engaging by streamlining various elements.
Hence, after some review and game design know-how, I made some changes to how combat encounters were run, both for myself and the players.
For me, as the DM, the two major changes I made were reducing the size of the battlemaps and condensing the number of opponents to a more manageable amount. Now the players don’t have to spend 3 minutes scrolling around to find their target on the map, and I wouldn’t be chewing up half the combat running through the attacks of dozens of enemies.
For the players, I put together the following handy list, in classic old-school Buzzfeed-style:
You Won’t Believe These 8 Easy Steps for Quick n’ Easy High-Level Combat!
Prepare before the game. Read over your character sheet and know your abilities and powers, and how they interact. This is the time to ask me for any clarifications, or ask others about how you can combo-wombo your powers.
Be ready on your turn. Pay attention to the battle. Know what your action(s), bonus action, movement, and free actions (yelling, screaming, whimpering, etc.) will be.
Have a back-up plan. Be prepared to get punched in the face, which may throw off your original plan; be ready with a Plan B.
When your initiative number comes up, you have 30 seconds to declare your actions. When you are up, it is not the time to take an in-depth inventory of your character abilities and weapon powers. If you have not declared your actions and movement in time, your character is too overwhelmed and we skip your turn.
The 30 second limit includes any and all minions that you control and act on your turn. This includes summoned creatures, henchmen, your lucky cricket, and so on.
No retro actions. After initiative moves off of you, you are not allowed to "go back" to do something else that you could have done but forgot. This includes if there are bonuses that could have helped your or another’s die roll.
Each player has command of their own turn. Don’t interject suggestions or warnings unless specifically asked for by the player.
Skill checks, unless asked for by the DM, use your action for the turn.
This past Friday was our first chance to play with the new approach, and things definitely went smoother. The actual real time of the battle was still well over an hour in length, but this time instead of having a lot of dead time, it was packed with elegant cursing, exploding goblins, and wails of despair from the characters. All good things.
I can still see ways that I, as the DM, can tweak a few more elements to keep things on track, but overall, it was a much better experience, and also had the added benefit of being able to add a sense of urgency and slight chaos to the battle, something that I think heightened the emotions of the players.
It all reminds me of what I used to tell my students back when I taught game design: you don’t become a game designer because you are hoping to get rich, you become a game designer because even if you are getting paid, you can’t help but continue to design games.