Combat Boosters: RedRaggedFiend's Dice Drop Tactical Features
On the Sly Flourish Discord we have a channel where people can share things that they've made - which could be art, an adventure, a blog post, etc. It is great to see all the amazing creativity and talent that everyone has. A little while ago, Theo from Starships & Scoundrels shared a blog post with advice on making combat dynamic. Theo has some good advice on how to make sure there are interesting tactical elements in your combat encounter, especially about terrain and objects that gives interesting challenges or opportunities: ways to get cover or high ground, interactable objects like a trap that can be triggered on an enemy, terrain that might move or be destructable, etc. This is definitely an area that I want to focus on improving for my upcoming campaigns (looks like I will now be running two different Curse of Strahd games in the near future) - intentionally adding things to a combat scene to give the players more interesting tactical options. I've been collecting resource for a while with tips and tools for this, so I thought I might start a series here where I share some of my favorites.
RedRaggedFiend's Dice Drop Tactical Features
One challenge for me is that I'm rarely designing a location with the starting point of it being a combat arena. Usually I am taking an existing dungeon map or a location I have developed for story reasons, and then maybe trying to add some tactical elements on top. So, tools that easily allow me to retrofit an existing location with some additional tactical interest are particularly valuable for me. The streamer RedRaggedFiend shared in this video a nice dice drop method for adding combat-relevant features to an existing map to help you avoid the problem of fighting in a plain boring room. Basically you grab a couple of d10s and roll them onto the battlemap. The location of the dice tells you where to add the features, and the value of each die tells you what tactical benefit the feature should have:
| Tactical Elements |
|---|
| 1. half cover |
| 2. 3/4 cover |
| 3. total cover |
| 4. light obscurement |
| 5. heavy obscurement |
| 6. difficult terrain |
| 7. impassable terrain |
| 8. minor elevation change |
| 9. major elevation change |
| 10. hazardous terrain |
You then decide on some thematically appropriate object or terrain element that would fit the setting. I have also been collecting blog posts that have good lists of terrain features for battlemaps that can be a good source of inspiration for deciding what fits the location: Frog Factory has Three d100 Battlemap Generators and Hipsters & Dragons has 101+ Terrain Features for Better Combats.
What I like about this approach is that it starts with the tactical effect you want to add, and then you decide what location-appropriate feature might provide that - rather than starting with the location and its contents and deciding what benefit it will provide. Because I'm generally thinking about locations first from the practical/narrative "what would make sense to be here" perspective, getting a nudge to come at it from a very different starting point will probably make it easier for me to not get stuck in a rut. I also like the mix of benefits on the table - they're all your basic nuts and bolts of combat, which give players reasons to take up particular locations or change their pathing (rather than just standing next to the monster and then not moving). Something more dramatic like a Monument of Power can be great for a big setpiece battle (like a boss battle), but these elements can work for any fight. I will be playing mostly online, so I won't be able to directly roll on the map. However, I can probably just have a sheet of paper with nine boxes for general locations ("top left", "top center", etc.) that I can roll on, and then just add the element to the digital map. I'm definitely looking forward to giving this a try!