An Alterntate Morale Interpretation

Morale is an old mechanic that’s jumped in and out of D&D since near its inception. I am not here to propose some mechanical solution to this problem, though that doesn’t preclude me trying later.  In many cases, the system would be ignored for its complexity, if it even worked. Instead, I seek to solve the problem of NPC behavior by giving DMs a perspective on how the NPCs would act. More specifically, I want to give an overview of how NPC enemies should act in combat with the PCs—how they balance the twin objectives of victory and survival in a variety of ways. In addition to creating more immersive combat, it allows you to make even very basic minion NPC enemies into complex characters with internal conflicts!
 

Loyal Soldiers

Let’s start by defining what I think ‘default’ NPC enemy behavior is in combat for most people. These ‘Loyal Soldiers’ will follow the plan of battle as well as they realistically could with the knowledge they currently have. This, I think, is basically the way that most enemy NPCs are played in combat most of the time. It’s certainly the way that I played them until I started thinking about it. Now, there’s certainly nothing wrong with this behavior, I just think it would be a lot more impactful if the party were impressed by the coordination and dedication of their enemy, rather than regarding them as basically a video-game AI that might do some cute moves or have some witty responses once and a while. When I started running enemies with plausible morale and behavior in combat and then pulled out enemies that knew what they were doing, my players were suitably impressed! If you make something rare, you often make it special, and in this case, it worked.
 

Loyal Dullard/Fanatic

Two variants on this are the ‘Loyal Dullard’ and the ‘Loyal Fanatic’, the first of which is very common in games and the second of which can help emphasize the point made by the first, if used sparingly. The Loyal Dullard is a default behavior for enemies that are minions, or enemies when the DM is bored or tired or distracted by something else. It basically means—an enemy that uses the simplest possible attack in the simplest possible way. There’s nothing wrong with that—you should save your energy for the important enemies! If there’s a lesson to take away from this, its to know your limits! The Loyal Fanatic is the opposite of the Loyal Dullard in many ways. If the Loyal Dullard lacks creativity, the Loyal Fanatic can be a story beat in and of themselves. While many Loyal Soldiers will fight to the death, they will rarely make the sacrifice needed to achieve victory with total abruptness. The Loyal Fanatic, on the other hand, may destroy a rope bridge with a fireball while still on the bridge, simply to drop the party into the pit below, crying out a prayer to their god of choice with their last breath. This is not for every enemy and will lose its effectiveness if used too often or to no effect, but if used sparingly and with impact, the fanaticism of your party’s foes can’t be doubted.
 

Fallible Soldier

Next up is the ‘Fallible Soldier’, which introduces the possibility of retreat, surrender, and other sub-optimal combat behaviors that introduce character into a battle that would otherwise be purely tactical. The Fallible Soldier will attempt to act like a Loyal Soldier when things are easy (they’re starting the fight, they have a commander nearby, they’re nearby allies, etc), but when the going gets tough, they’re liable to get going, going, gone. As simple as they might be (just nameless, faceless minions), the desire to retreat or surrender or simply take the Dodge action when bloodied, surrounded, or outnumbered makes them complex, three-dimensional characters! This behavior also gives you a critical excuse to wrap up combat when things look like they’ve come to their natural conclusion, or at least to give it a reason to exist by making ‘stop the fleeing enemies’ the new objective once ‘team deathmatch’ is off the table. You can also use the idea of the Fallible Soldier to build encounters that look tougher on paper, as you can simply have the enemies make sub-optimal decisions to keep themselves alive instead of focusing on ensuring a TPK. This may even allow you to encourage that oh so rare event—an orderly retreat by the party! An alternate version of the ‘Fallible Soldier’ that harkens back to the ‘Loyal Fanatic’ is the ‘Aggressive Soldier’. Like the Loyal Fanatic, they are all too willing to give their life for the cause. Unlike the Loyal Fanatic, however, they are liable to commit many errors in doing so, giving up any organization in order to engage with the party as quickly and violently as possible. This sort of behavior works great with Orcs, Barbarians, or other impetuous enemies that would otherwise not suffer from the drawbacks of the Fallible Soldier.
 

Hungry Beast/Mindless Monster

Everything I’ve mentioned up to now has mostly been a variation on an organized force fighting the party under a single banner. This, however, covers only half of the enemies that an adventuring party will face. Most of the others can be either described by the ‘Hungry Beast’ or the ‘Mindless Monster’. The Hungry Beast, while being best understood with hunger, doesn’t have to be hungry or even a beast. It describes a combat enemy that is wholly focused on fulfilling some basic need, like a hungry monster or even a hungry bandit. While these enemies will attack aggressively out of the gate, they will focus on getting what they want instead of on winning the battle, sometimes attempting to drag a downed party member away from the fight instead of seeking to knock down everyone in the battle. When wounded, like the Fallible Soldier, they will often reconsider their position and retreat, but unlike the Fallible Soldier, they don’t have a commander or sense of duty that can rally them back into battle—they are here for the loot, not the victory. You can often treat unintelligent monsters like Hungry Beasts when they attack the party… unless they’re fighting in their lairs to protect their young, in which case they act like Aggressive Soldiers. Never corner a tiger! A Mindless Monster, on the other hand, will rarely change behavior based on circumstances. The Mindless Monster describes something like a zombie or a golem—they never retreat unless ordered to and rarely care about the state of the battle. These play a lot like a Loyal Dullard, except that they will often fall for extremely obvious gambits. Creatures they can’t sense might as well not exist. There’s no difference between a hapless civilian and a hardened and over-armed adventurer. If their enemy retreats and their order is to guard something, the enemy might as well be teleporting to the moon. Traps? What are those? Mindless Monsters, like Fallible Soldiers, can be deployed with larger numbers than the party could deal with on paper, if the party has the mental and physical space to manipulate their behavior to victory.
 

Compassionate Warrior

Finally, we have the ‘Compassionate Warrior’. The Compassionate Warrior is an archetype that is best combined with the other behaviors I’ve described, but, if you go full tilt on it, can function well on its own. The Compassionate Warrior cares about their fellow warriors. These are the sorts of enemies that use the same death rules as the PCs. They’ll use healing potions and healing spells and Sanctuary spells on their downed comrades and will fight inefficiently in order to keep their friends alive. This offers a lot of opportunity for roleplay from the DM, and, if used effectively, will make your players think twice about butchering their enemies. As fun as that sounds for you, I recommend you not do this with every fight, as D&D is a game about fighting, and going all Red Badge of Courage on every enemy your party faces can make actually fighting them feel pretty awful for the party. Still, when used in the right context, it can help create a world that feels alive—where the party aren’t the only group that care about keeping their friends alive. If you want, you can extend this compassion to the party, where the enemies are unwilling to double-tap the party and will even act to stabilize them in certain contexts. Perhaps you use Compassionate Warriors to put the party into a fight that they can comfortably lose. Likening back to my previous post about combat objectives—creating threats besides death allows you more room to maneuver as the DM.
 

Variations

Obviously, these aren’t the only possible variations on behavior an enemy can have in combat, but having some idea of morale and the reasons that enemies actually fight the party can go a long way towards making fighting different enemies actually feel different, as well as lending a sense of plausibility towards the combat itself. Combining these behaviors can add an additional level of complexity. For example, the ‘Fallible Dullard’ is a good way to add the Fallible Soldier behavior to a combat with too many moving pieces for you to track. Simply have the Fallible Dullard act as a Loyal Dullard until a certain other enemy (their ‘commander’ or some such) begins to falter, upon which they will falter as well. You could combine the Aggressive Soldier, the Hungry Beast, and Compassionate Warrior to characterize a mother monster defending a nest of baby monsters, and so on and so forth. These titles are not set in stone, and mostly exist to help condense a bunch of complex advice and behavior into a few memorable lines. Hopefully it’s done its job! Remember, if you take nothing else away from what I’ve written here, remember this—the enemy’s priority is rarely “kill the heroes”. It’s almost always some variation of “achieve my objective” and “survive this fight”. If you remember this, not only will your battles be more fun, they’ll also have much more verisimilitude than nearly any video game. And in the end, isn’t that part of the reason we play?

Originally posted here.

Alternate Combat Objectives

Combat in D&D is clearly the focus of the core of its mechanics as well as much of its content, however, the objectives are rarely given the variety they could receive. Typically, the only practical objective of battles is the elimination of all hostile actors. This almost always manifests in a fight to the death—taking prisoners or accepting a retreat is a rare occurrence. This is perfectly acceptable in some fights, but if used in every battle, it can lead to the feeling that combat is bland or soulless—simply a numbers game about dropping the enemy before they drop you. I present to you a series of alternate combat objectives that you can offer your players to break of the monotony of what I will call “Team Deathmatch” combat from now on.

VIP

The simplest variation on Team Deathmatch style combat is to assign outsize influence on a single combatant—a VIP. It’s probable that you’ve created VIP combat objectives before without really thinking about it. After all, a boss fight can basically use a VIP combat objective if the boss has minions that don’t need to be defeated to achieve victory. However, this isn’t all you can do with VIPs. An escort mission, where the PCs escort a hapless NPC ally, is a genre staple, but it’s fallen out of fashion for a reason. A ‘reverse escort mission’, where NPC allies act to support the PCs, or a PC focused escort mission, where one of the PCs becomes the focus of a battle seem to be options that feel generally more fun to play. In the latter case, you use this focus from a characterization perspective—find an element from the PC’s backstory or personality and make the combat a way to explore that facet of the character. Perhaps a barbarian warrior needs to prove that they’re tough enough to remain standing during a battle or a cleric of a light god is channeling the force of their god—the only thing enough to push back the darkness that threatens to consume the entire party. This can be a great way to put the spotlight on a specific character and allow them to shine (sometimes literally).

Capture the Flag

A classic variation on Team Deathmatch is Capture the Flag—instead of protecting a VIP, you’re fighting over an inanimate McGuffin, like a magic rune or bag of gold. As the MacGuffin trope is an extremely versatile tool in writing, this is an extremely versatile objective in combat design! Maybe once the party defeats the warlord, her underlings will try to grab the body and escape to resurrect her! Maybe the party’s goal is to steal a magic gem that’s guarded by a horde of eternally reanimating skeletons! Maybe the party has reached the end of the dungeon at the same time as a rival adventuring party, with both approaching the artifact contained within from opposite entrances to the final room! Now, in many Capture the Flag combats, battle may eventually degenerate back to a Team Deathmatch state, but simply having an objective can force battles to happen in circumstances that aren’t ideal to either side.  Besides, it’s not like there’s anything wrong with Team Deathmatch combat, and the times it doesn’t lead to that can lead to some very hectic chases and clever uses of non-damaging combat abilities.

King of the Hill

If VIP seeks to control a person, and Capture the Flag seeks to control an object, King of the Hill seeks to control a location. Now, this location can start under the control of either faction or start as initially neutral depending on circumstance, and each situation leads to a very different type of encounter. If the location is initially neutral, this functions like a Capture the Flag scenario where the dominant strategy of ‘just run away’ isn’t possible. If possible, try to make ‘tanky’ characters like paladins and fighters really feel dominant when the battle reaches maturity, but favor speedsters like monks and rogues during the initial phase of battle. You can do this by applying a two turn ‘countdown to victory’ for controlling the location uncontested, and deliberately setting up the scenario so it takes a ‘normal’ character one-and-a-half movements (two turns, with an action left over) to reach the location. This means that fast characters can get in an initial advantage but can’t win the scenario outright. A reasonable scenario like this might be taking a bridge. One side wants to hold it so that it can be destroyed, another side wants to hold it so that an approaching army can cross. A ‘defensive’ King of the Hill might involve the PCs holding a specific door against enemies that want to burst in and assassinate whoever’s inside. An ‘offensive’ King of the Hill might involve the PCs trying to remain inside a ritual circle to disrupt the summoning of a dark god. The potential combinations are nearly endless, just realize that, just like with the Capture the Flag variant, the PCs will come up with all sorts of janky strategies to completely circumvent fighting the encounter. To a certain extent, let them. That’s part of the way that D&D is different from a video game. It’s part of the fun!

Wave Defense

Leaving MacGuffins behind, what if enemies didn’t all attack at once? This is Wave Defense, and it’s probably the most common of these suggestions in actual play. Still, I figure it’d be worth mentioning here in part because fighting one big battle is more fun than fighting a bunch of little ones. However, it’s easy to overwhelm PCs though the use of the action economy (a lot of enemies, few PCs). The solution is to throw the enemies at them in waves! This also can make combats last longer than the traditional three round length. That’s not all, however. The ‘alternate objective’ comes in with what I call the ‘Cross the Finish Line’ objective for enemies, which is a classic component of the Wave Defense in other game. Perhaps the party is defending a wall breach against attacking soldiers, or a holy gate against a horde of demons. The enemy can’t attack all at once due to the size of the gap, so they come in waves. Either it’s defeat a certain number of enemies or hold out for a certain amount of time (another alternate combat objective) in order to achieve victory. 

Free for All

Another sort-of alternate combat objective is the Free for All, in which survival is focused on as the goal over body count. Though it’s become popular in the modern consciousness with the Battle Royale genre, the Deathmatch is a long and storied tradition in video games which can be applied to your D&D game with the appropriate level of worldbuilding. A classic of the mega dungeon is the existence of multiple warring factions within the dungeon. Perhaps this comes to a head with a battle between two factions? If either faction wins decisively, it makes the PCs lives much harder, so it falls the the PCs to ensure that any victory is pyrrhic. Perhaps an otherwise normal battle is interrupted by a wandering monster looking for an easy meal? Perhaps the Big Bad’s underling sees the climactic battle with the PCs as the perfect opportunity to betray their boss an eliminate both groups in one fell swoop? The Free for All is the perfect gift for the Diplomacy player in your game group—a challenge in which strategic thinking and diplomacy RP becomes just as essential to winning an encounter as optimal character design and tactical ability!

Combine and Conquer

Each of these strategies is not terribly complex in and of themselves, but they suggest two important conclusions that I will state outright. First, these elements may be combined with each other and with other complexity-increasing elements to make totally unique scenarios. Consider a bank robbery (a scenario I have run multiple times, each successfully). In addition to stealth and social elements, it carries with it a lot of potential combat complexities! You might need to hold down a vault door, grab the money or loot you’re looking for and run with it, or seize hold of a VIP who has the magic touch (literal or otherwise) needed to access the goods! A hostage scenario can offer a similarly complex scenario, this time with a focus on the VIP element! Finally, if you take one thing away from all this, know that a good alternate combat objective allows failure to occur without massive player death or forcing player retreat! This is a massive boon to you as a DM, as it allows you to construct scenarios where the players can fail and continue to exist as characters. This allows a lot of complexity from the PC end (how does your character deal with failure, does your character focus on the objective or on saving their own skin) as well as allowing you the ability to screw with the difficulty curve in interesting ways without risking the lives of your PCs (little sucks more as a DM than accidentally killing PCs with an overturned encounter). Finally, some of these objectives allow for partial failure to occur (a topic I will cover more later). Perhaps the PCs destroy the MacGuffin instead of allowing it to remain in enemy hands? Perhaps the Big Bad leads an orderly retreat when outmaneuvered by clever PC problem solving, living to fight another day? Perhaps some of the enemies make their way past the wall breach—enough to cause havoc amongst the defenders, but not enough to win the day? Scenarios where the players must face consequences for failure but still feel like they haven’t been utterly crushed can, in many cases, produce the most interesting encounters, and generally are a lot more interesting than a trivial victory or crushing defeat.

Alternate Maps Interpretation

Maps are clearly a staple of D&D games from the very beginning (just look at Hippo’s campaign notes), but it’s clear from posts like this that a lot of people in the D&D community take too narrow of a view of the limitations of maps as a creative medium. I am here to help! As gorgeous as they are, maps don’t need to look like this or this for you to use them in your game! I’ll go over five possible types of map you can use that subvert some of the limitations of ‘traditional’ maps. These ideas are by no means intended to disparage traditional maps (which I love) and are not the limits of what you can do with non-traditional maps (please comment below if you have any additional techniques), I just want to spread ideas to those who might benefit from them! Let’s start with…

Sketch Essentials

The ‘Sketch Essentials’ map is a map that focuses on the essentials of maps to the exclusion of non-essential detail and visual fidelity. Basically, it’s a sketch that’s as simple as possible—a map for people who don’t envy cartographers. To make a good Sketch Essentials map, you should consider what’s important to the people using it. If it’s a battlemap, draw a few lines for walls, some dotted lines for obstacles or cover, and scribble a dark area for hazards. If it’s a town map, a few boxes for important buildings and lines for important roads is enough. For a world map, straight lines for roads, squiggly lines for coast, dots for cities, zigzags for mountains, and dark areas for ‘wild’ areas like forest or desert. Distances don’t need to be exact, nor do all details need to be filled in. If you ever reach a point where you’re thinking “it doesn’t matter what goes here, I don’t care”, then stop filling in the map. If you need your canvas to expand, simply keep moving in the direction you need to move—the simplicity of this technique helps prevent the rigidity associated with traditional battlemaps. Sketch Essentials maps exist to fill the gap between theater of the mind and full battlemaps. It helps act as a memory aid-- so players aren’t required to memorize the relative positions of at least a dozen separate entities on a turn by turn basis (something some people literally cannot do). It does so without constraining the imagination, if you make sure to specify that the map does not include everything that exists in the in-game space (the map is not the territory). In fact, I recommend you add detail to the map as it becomes relevant. This brings me to the next map type…

Here Be Dragons

The ‘Here Be Dragons’ map is simply an incomplete map, based on Dungeon World’s encouragement to ‘Draw Maps, Leave Blanks’. Unlike a Sketch Essentials map, it isn’t predicated on being a sketch, though it certainly can be. Further, while the Sketch Essentials map are predicated on the idea that they intend to efficiently and easily convey critical information, the Here Be Dragons map is based on the idea of leaving room for future creativity. Completed maps can feel creatively limiting if they are based on the idea that all critical information is already contained within them, so for those who don’t want to be creatively restrained, I recommend that you simply not complete the map. Instead, simply write vague notions of what might be there (Doom lurks here!) and allow the greater context of events within your game inform exactly what ‘Doom’ is. This technique works especially well with diegetic maps (i.e. maps that your player’s characters have, not that the players have). Pre-modern maps were often highly incomplete and inaccurate, especially in the wild places in which adventure is typically found. This also allows you to tidily recton geography if you need to—the mapmapker simply got it wrong! If you don’t feel interested in going through the process of making an even half-complete map, try out the…

Player-Build World

The ‘Player-Build World’ map neatly subcontracts the work of making a map out to your players. There are plenty of games that allow for collaborative worldbuilding (Microscope is the classic example) and some that allow for collaborative map building. The Quiet Year produces maps like the example for this map type, which are the sort of thing that you’re aiming for with the Player-Build World. You can use either of these games without change (they’re both very cool games) or you can do something simpler, like giving a sector of the map to each player, perhaps with certain preconditions based on elements you want to include in your world. I recommend you do all this as part of session zero (before the game starts) to minimize perverse incentives on the part of your players. Perhaps you can ask directed questions of specific players using the document found here as a guide. Collating these questions into a cohesive whole is work, of course, but a different kind of work from the open-ended creativity necessary to turn an empty canvas into a complete map. Perhaps all this seems like too much work—if so, let me present the…

Point-to-Point

The simplest possible form (even simpler than the Sketch Essentials) of map is the Point-to-Point map. While this type of map needs some modification to work for battlemaps, it’s elegant in its simplicity for all other levels of detail. You simply mark every meaningful point of interest (i.e. the ones you care about) on the map as a dot or other icon. You then draw lines between any two points that have common routes of travel between them and mark each line with a travel time (not a distance, a time). If you’re feeling fancy, you can mark the routes with notes like “hazardous” and “bandits”. For battlemaps, it may help to create ‘zones’ that are boxes with labels like ‘parlor’ and ‘crater’, which should have a similar effect. This method is not only the simplest possible way to communicate essential information to players about travel time, it’s also the most plausible form of map. Pre-modern societies did not have detailed surveys. What information they had was in linear maps like the above, listing coastal towns or towns on a road in order. These maps could also represent the information received in the form of questions asked at taverns and waystations along the route, giving you free reign to update the map as the players explore the world. This system, while very simple to use and create, runs into issues if the players acquire non-standard methods of transportation. The solution is fairly easy to implement—create another web of travel times that the players discover as they try to travel from point to point. Why do travel times matter? So time constraints can exist, of course! Why should time constraints exist? Drama and challenge—the twin dragons of good D&D design can be fed a great feast through the implementation of a dramatic countdown! I generally think that information helps make drama and challenge, and that’s what these maps have tried to focus on. All the examples I’ve listed so far have been attempts at simplification while still retaining essential information. The maps I create, however, take a different approach with the…

Data Dump

One of the biggest misconceptions that repel people from mapmaking is the belief that their maps must look pretty. They do not. The ‘Data Dump’ method won’t be pretty, but in my personal experience, it offers the players an unparalleled ability to strategize and manipulate geography to their advantage in their quest. The important thing to remember when creating a Data Dump map is to only include information that is relevant to the players. If you’re a habitual worldbuilder, you can get bogged down in details that may be interesting to you but may prove to be distractions to the players. Here, a cohesive understanding of the central tensions of your campaign is essential. Marking out the wealth levels of various cities is a waste of time in a high fantasy battle to control the magical ley lines of the world, but it’s very valuable information in a campaign where the players are engaged in a cutthroat battle between merchant guilds. A Data Dump map is not appropriate to every campaign, but in games that are highly political, it can help introduce meaningful complexity and enable the players to engage in complex and dramatic problem solving in a way that enriches your campaign.

Hopefully this can help dispel some of the stress associated with using maps in your D&D game. Not every map needs to be a work of art! Your maps don’t need to be one-to-one representation of your simulated reality and they don’t even need to be complete or made by you! Remember, all you need is to find what works for your game. There’s no one method that’s perfect for everyone, but if you shut out a type of medium completely, you can end up missing out. Non-cartographers out there, give this method a try! If you have any techniques that may add to this plethora of mapping strategies, put them in the comments!

Originally posted here on September 25, 2019.