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.