D&D Combat Examples From A Professional Dungeon Master
Our DND combat guide will show you the art of running DND combat your players won’t soon forget!
Running Dungeons and Dragons (DND) combat encounters that are exciting, engaging, and fun can be a difficult task – believe me, I know! There’s so much to do from remembering the DND combat rules to tracking initiatives, hit points, and resources. Plus, your players will inevitably throw a wrench in your plans, forcing you to come up with something on the fly. This leaves Dungeon Masters (DMs) looking for a DND combat guide, advice for how to DM combat, and DND combat examples to help inspire their own games. I’ve been running DND at least once a week for the last five years, so I’ve learned from experience what works (and what doesn’t!) when building and running a DND combat encounter. I’ve already shared how DND combat works and the principles for running good DND combat. Now it’s time for examples (pulled from my actual games!) to show you how to pull it all together. Each exemplifies at least a few of the core principles (motivation, flavor, strategy, environment, and surprise) to help you build your own DND combat encounters.
Running D&D Combat with a Published Adventure
This excellent adventure features our first DND combat example
My first D&D fight example is not of my own construction. It’s the opening scene of Midnight in Moonlight Grove, a published D&D adventure by Karl Kreutzer in which a party investigates the dark past – and chaotic present – of a quiet forest village. For the opening scene, I brought the party to The Orb and The Flagon, a tavern whose clientele were celebrating an upcoming festival. As the evening went on, they were hit with quite the surprise. [MiMG Spoilers Ahead!] The townsfolk were being influenced by the magic of a moon spirit, amplifying their emotions until they boil over into bar brawl (with some animated kegs thrown in to add both chaos and flavor).
This fight was unlike a traditional monster-in-a-dungeon-style encounter, and so it demanded unique strategy. For starters, there was a mess of riled-up villagers and magical kegs all fighting one another; my average-sized D&D party needed to decide where to focus their attention. And because it took place in a small tavern with innocent civilians, the characters who want to avoid damage to the environment or the innocent needed to think carefully about if and how to use force in such a way as to avoid it. Finally, everyone in the fight had unique motivations to work through. Instead of terrible villains or horrifying monsters, enemies were just villagers: normal people with petty rivalries, hurt feelings, and unrequited crushes that spilled over into a fight. The PCs had some choices to make. Did they want to jump into battle? Calm them down? Find the source of the magic? When I ran this encounter, each character had a different response: one slashed at the villagers with a sword, another cast Calm Emotions, and yet another tried to investigate the cause of the emotional overflow – very different motivations for each character!
Fight In A Hurricane with This D&D Combat Encounter
Here’s a DND combat tip: throw your players into a totally new environment!
My next D&D battle example comes from a wholly unique environment. The party was sailing their ship, following a series of riddles to find a lost treasure (a classic motivation). The clues lead them to a strange supernatural occurrence; a hurricane in the middle of the sea, with sounds of chuckling coming from inside. The party sailed right in, sending their ship straight in the whirlwind! Inside was a surprise: both another ship spinning alongside them and a Marid, a powerful water genie who was causing the gale. If you’ll allow me to toot my own horn a bit, the flavor on this was impeccable: huge waves crashing over the sides of the ship, a large floating water creature the party could barely see, and a two whirling ships that could bash into one another at any point (or, if the dice comply, make way for some Legolas-style platforming),
The distance of the ship from the Marid, the implausibility of getting closer, and the disadvantage of limited visibility also forced the party to use strategy. Rather than just choosing the biggest damage dealer, they had to carefully select the most likely to hit from among their ranged attacks. They started off with a clever maneuver: casting the area-of-effect spell Cloud of Daggers to narrow down the Marid’s location. They then hit it with a flurry of ranged attacks: arrows, bullets, Magic Missiles, an exploding ice projectile, a Ray of Frost, and, cleverly, Vicious Mockery (which doesn’t require an attack roll at all, just a saving throw from the Marid – who was very upset to have its mother compared to a flatworm). When they had finally turned the tide of the battle and the Marid tried to cast Plane Shift to escape, the party stopped it with a well-placed Counterspell, followed by Destroy Water. It was such a great moment, that, even though the lead designer said that it shouldn’t work, I went with the Rule of Cool and let them defeat the Marid, ending the magical hurricane and letting the two ships crash into the water.
DM Combat Guide: Big Boss Battles
This DND combat example comes from one of my favorite places: the public library!
The next D&D combat examples come from one of the highest-stakes kinds of combat in the game: boss battles. These are the big fights that come at the end of the adventure, when the party has defeated the other baddies, solved the mystery, and made it to the final battle. Even more than other combat, boss battles need to be epic, and they need to be memorable. So incorporating surprises is an important component of crafting battles that your players will remember. But throwing in a plot twist that comes out of nowhere isn’t actually that fun. Be sure to lay the groundwork for your boss-battle reveal ahead of time (or even rework your combat encounter to incorporate elements of the campaign so far – your players may just assume you planned it all along)!
One of my favorite plot twists came straight from one of my players. They were playing a gnoll, a hyena-like creature. This gnoll, called Jaminor, had resisted the pull of Yeenoghu, the demon lord who rules over the gnolls. Over time, Jaminor became more and more bloodthirsty, dropping hints to the party about the lore of Yeenoghu and his own struggle to resist. When the party faced down Yeenoghu, I placed a giant figurine on the table and had them roll for initiative. But as a lair action on the very first round, Yeenoghu grabbed Jaminor, infusing him with a spirit of destruction and teleporting away. Then I subbed out the Yeenoghu mini and the Jaminor mini for the true boss – a warped, twisted version of the party’s former friend – and had Jaminor’s player sit behind the DM screen. This boss fight had it all: the motivation of stopping or saving their friend and the flavor of a gnoll’s struggle with his nature. It was genuinely one of the most epic D&D moments I’ve ever experienced - and it was all that player’s idea!
Running DND combat got very interesting when more fighters showed up! I added this graphic of a spinning portal to the Virtual Table Top; each time the Stand got a turn, I’d roll a d6 and summon the corresponding fighter. Simple, but effective.
Another boss battle came from a campaign with elements from the manga JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. [Final Boss Spoilers for JJBA Part 7!] In the original, President Valentine (long story) can summon a spirit of sorts called a Stand. His Stand has dominion over alternate dimensions (in the manga, it hides Valentine into a pocket dimension, pulls people into other dimensions, and even summons alternate-universe versions of the protagonists that explode if they touch their counterparts)! This last one was so juicy that I just had to put it in the campaign. The battle had some good flavor; it took place at a victory celebration for the party – who of course, were surrounded by innocent civilians. When President Valentine arrived to give a speech, the party attacked. Without missing a beat, Valentine called forth his Stand, which created a portal summoning AU versions of PCs and NPCs - even surprising the JJBA fans in the group! This mechanic introduced a strategic element; with Valentine, his Stand, and a growing entourage of AU fighters, would the party split up or focus their efforts? How would they defeat an enemy that could hide away at any moment? How would they prepare themselves for whoever came through the portal? They were motivated to end the fight quickly to avoid more summons, but were torn, facing off against versions of their friends (and even the party’s pet Grell). One of them cast Hunger of Hadar, a field of tentacles that slowed down and blinded Valentine, the Stand, and every summoned fighter. Another brought the Grell to safety, while another made sure the party guests were out of danger. The rest of them focused fire on Valentine with ranged weapons and attacks: a bow, a shotgun, and Hail of Thorns. Every fighter reveal brought a new round of gasps; it was one of the most epic finales I have ever run!
Learn to DM Combat with Young Dragonslayers
If you want to learn more about how to be a good Dungeon Master, we’ve got you covered. Our Dragon Leaders course will help you come up with cool campaign ideas, prepare all the material you need ahead of time, and craft an interesting (but balanced!) villain for the perfect boss battle. The course is online, self-paced, and pulled together by our crew of experienced professional Dungeon Masters. If you’d rather play through some D&D combat encounters yourself to better understand how it works, you’re in luck there too. We run online games of D&D for tweens and teens, where we’ll craft a homebrew adventure, combat and all, for you to play through and enjoy (with the exception of Jaminor, all my examples came straight from my Young Dragonslayers groups)! Wherever you land, we hope you get a chance to run combat in D&D – and have a blast doing it.
