Tactics and Strategy

> *Strategy is what we want to do and tactics is how are we gonna do it.*
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*You may have noticed that these different types of encounters don't just represent tools you can assemble in order to create an adventure, they also have an order to them. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end.*

*And you can nest them within each other, and you can vary it from one to the other. There can be Guards in front of mini Bosses, that lead to Guards in front of Bosses. There can be Scouts or Patrols thrown in there...*

*All you need is a handful of different encounters that you could assemble in any order, and you become a lot more confident as a Dungeon Master when it comes to running the game, and even creating stuff on the fly, improvising.*

# The Four Basic Flavors of Combat Encounters

These four are:

* Patrols
* Scouts
* Guards
* Boss Fights

And Boss Fights come in two varieties:

* Mini Boss Fights
* Major Boss Fights

## Patrols

Patrols tend to be a small group of mobile bad guys, and they tend to be composed of the same monster. So, a Patrol might be two or three goblins, or two orcs, or you know, two gnolls.

And the hook of a Patrol is that it's not really a combat challenge.

This Patrol only has a couple of bad guys in it. They are highly mobile, they're easy to hit, and they do, probably, medium damage. So, they don't present an existential threat to the party, they're more like a puzzle.

The idea is they are on a regular Patrol, and that Patrol might be around the outside of the keep, which would be a quite big Patrol... Or it could be they're going on a circuit of rooms through the dungeon, or it could be on the battlements of a castle. Or it could be something as simple as the top of a tower: there's a watchman who goes from one part of the tower and looks and watches, and turns around and walks back, on a regular pattern.

The goal here is to make it so that if the players are smart, and thinking tactically, and taking their time, they will see this Patrol... And they'll be able to watch it, and they'll be able to see its pattern, and they'll be able to strategize!

Strategy is what we want to do and tactics is how are we gonna do it. Strategy is a high-level goal, tactics is how are we going to achieve it.

That's the fun part of a Patrol! If the players charge forward, heedless of danger, then the Patrol will see them and go report back to the dungeon, or the keep, or the tower, or whatever, and tell the Big Bad Evil Guy that the heroes are coming! That's the purpose of a Patrol.

A Patrol is pretty easy to design, you just need a couple of bad guys and you need them to be on a pattern so the heroes can watch, and detect it, and you need to know what they're going to do when they see the heroes.

If the heroes fail their stealth check, or if the heroes fail to throw up a grappling hook to the top of the parapets, then what is the Patrol going to do?

So, we're giving the heroes a fail state.

If they're successful, they will be able to take out the Patrol, or neutralize it, without the Patrol reporting back.

If they fail, the Patrol will alert the rest of the dungeon!

But, I like making sure that there is a middle ground... I like making it so the players can fail forward.

If they are thinking tactically. If they're being, you know, responsible. And they're not charging forward, heedless of danger...

Then, if they do something like fail a stealth role, or they throw the grappling hook up to the top of the parapet and it ends up missing and falling back and hitting them on the head, and they make a little bit of noise... I might have the the bad guys on Patrol say, "what was that!"

In other words, there's a middle ground between "we don't know they're there" and "let's go tell our Boss." And that middle ground is "let's investigate."

And that not only gives the player the opportunity to fail without it being catastrophic, it also ratchets up the tension.

## Scouts

Scouts are not on a circuit.

Scouts range far away, and they go and they look for trouble. They go, and they're looking to see if there are heroes that are approaching the keep.

Unlike a Patrol, a Scout is a mixed unit. So, instead of there being only two orcs, for instance, there are two orcs and a direwolf. Or, if I've awarded the players too many magic items, it might be two orcs and a hellhound.

The purpose of mixing this unit up is to give the enemies different sets of tools. So, the orcs arc intelligent, and can do a lot of damage, and make intelligent decisions... But, this direwolf, or this hellhound, has really good perception and is more likely to notice the heroes as they're hiding in their camp.

Unlike a Patrol, I think Scouts should have the chance of noticing the heroes before the heroes notice them.

But, then if that happens, if the Scouts roll very high on their perception and the players have rolled very poorly... Or, some of them have rolled well and some of them are in big heavy, noisy armor, then typically I will make sure that when the Scouts act -- they make a noise, they step on a twig or something, so the players know there's something going on.

But, the Scouts job is not to engage the heroes. The Scouts job is to alert the people, like a Patrol, back at the keep.

So, now the challenge to the players again, it's not an existential threat, the players characters lives aren't in jeopardy, they're just trying to figure out "can we stop these Scouts from getting back to base and informing their Boss?"

Scouts are hard for the heroes to see, a Patrol is easy for the heroes to see if they're paying attention, in other words if they're being conservative and they're moving slowly, they will notice the Patrol on its circuit.

## Guards

The third type of encounter, Guards. are very easy to see.

They are literally just standing there, waiting to see if someone's going to come up to the gate, or the door. In which case they're gonna say, "halt who goes there!"

The great thing about a good Guard encounter is that you don't have to explain what's going to happen.

When the players see a couple of heavily armored soldiers with shields, and pikes, and helmets standing outside the door they will instantly know, "it's Guards, if we don't neutralize them somehow they're gonna go alert the Boss!" And you didn't have to say anything!

That is good encounter design, when the players know what the outcome of failure is without you having had to tell them, then you've done something extraordinary, I think.

Like Patrols, like Scouts, Guards do not present an existential threat.

None of the characters lives are in danger, it's another type of puzzle, and part of that puzzle is "if we screw up, the Guards will go alert their Boss."

But, unlike a Patrol, and unlike Scouts, Guards can be fooled.

Because, as we've said, the Guards will say, "halt, who goes there!" Which means, if the players are clever, they can do things like: lure the Guards away, they could disguise themselves, they could roleplay their way past the Guards!

Like a Patrol, the Guards can be detected ahead of time, and that gives the players something to talk about, and something to strategize!

If you feel like, "I don't have enough prepared for tonight," you were under estimating yourself, because something like a Guard encounter can result in the players talking and strategizing for 20 minutes with competing theories and ideas about how to deal with these Guards!

And, often my Guards job is not to go and report to the Big Bad Evil Guy, only to let the people in the next room know that the heroes are coming.

## Boss Fights & Mini Boss Fights

These are existential threats. These are places where the players are going to be tested, and if they fail, life and death are on the line.

The only difference between a Boss fight and a mini Boss fight is the scope and scale of it. But, in both instances I tend to use a lot of different kinds of bad guys.

### Boss Fights

When I'm thinking about designing a Boss encounter, I essentially break all the monsters in the Monster Manual into a handful of categories:

* Infantry
* Glass Cannons
* Brutes
* Artillery
* The Boss

#### Infantry

Infantry are kind of the meat and potatoes of our encounter. They tend to be medium mobility, they need to be able to get into position, they tend to have a high armor class, but they don't do a lot of damage. They've got medium hit points, they can survive, but their goal is to get up in front to engage the heroes and protect some of these squishier characters in the back.

**That is the goal of the Infantry: to make it so that the heroes cannot ignore them, but the heroes cannot easily get past them without dealing with opportunity attacks.**

Infantry are not the bad guys the heroes need to worry about. They don't do a lot of damage, they just make it so the heroes can't get into position easily.

As opposed to the Glass Cannon.

#### Glass Cannons

These are the Thieves and the Rogues... These are highly mobile characters, with very low armor class, and very few hit points, that do a lot of damage.

They can get into position, where they need to, and really make the players lives difficult.

**The Glass Cannons job is to make it so the heroes can't just concentrate on solving one problem: "How do we get past the Infantry, to get to the Artillery?"**

If that was the only problem the players had they would solve it pretty quickly, and pretty easily.

Throwing something like a Glass Cannon in makes it so the players have to be thinking on more than one level: "We do have to deal with the Artillery, and in order to do that we have to get past the Infantry, but at the same time we've got to deal with this Rogue, this Striker, this Assassin this invisible Wizard, because otherwise we are going to fail."

Giving the players more than one thing to think about at the same time, make it so they have to spin all these different plates, is a key component to engaging encounter design.

And I don't think it's difficult to do.

So, we have our Glass Cannons making it so the players can't just focus on getting past the Infantry to get to the Artillery... which means it's time to talk about the Artillery.

#### Artillery

Artillery tend to be low mobility.

If the players can get to them, the Artillery is probably screwed.

They don't have high armor class, they don't have a lot of hit points, and they don't necessarily even do a lot of damage.

**But, they can do that damage to anyone they want, so you can have archers, for instance, that don't do a lot of damage but there are a bunch of them and they can pick and choose who they attack on a round by round basis.**

And that lets you, as the Dungeon Master, choose who is the problem character, who is the linchpin, among the PCs. Which of these is the character that, if I remove, the entire house of cards falls down.

And remove does not just mean to make unconscious. Remove can also mean push out of range of their supporting effects, for instance.

Your Artillery can make it so your Cleric cannot get close enough to the other heroes to safely heal them.

Artillery can be many characters that do a little damage or one character that does a lot of damage. A Sorcerer with, you know, a lot of fire damaging spells, or it could even be Wizards, and Priests, and Shamans, and Necromancers who can do things like cast Hold Person, or a Charm, or change the character's behavior, a monster, or an attack, or spell qualifies as Artillery -- if it has a range of more than thirty feet.

If it has a range of less than thirty feet, it's too easy for the characters the heroes to use their movement to get into melee with them. That's the Infantry's job, to keep the heroes from being able to just move and attack the Artillery.

#### Brutes

The Brute is the is the low mobility, high damage equivalent of the Glass Cannon.

**Brutes tend to have low armor class, they're quite easy to hit, they have tons of hit points, so they're pretty hard to kill.They do a ridiculous amount of damage, but they have very low mobility.**

As a result the players can, if they're careful, if they're tactical, they can sort of kite the Brute. They can always stay out of range of the Brute, but they know if we ever fail, if the Infantry ever block us, then this Brute is gonna come and wreck our day.

#### The Boss

The Boss tends to have many different abilities.

The Boss is often more than one of these types of enemies combined. They often have to have a high armor class, lots of hit points, good resistances, they need to be able to survive the entire party attacking them at once...

I think good Bosses need to be able to act on the player's turns. That's why I will often give, even relatively low level Bosses, Legendary Reactions and stuff like that. Reactions and the ability to take actions when it's not your turn, really make a Boss feel special.

And a Boss should also have a wide variety of attacks. They should have ranged attacks and melee attacks, or melee attacks and spell attacks. They should be able to deal with multiple different problems, depending on what they're facing. Unlike the other actors in our play, each of these other types of enemy: the Glass Cannon, the Infantry, the Artillery, the Brute -- all have a role. They're all easy to identify. But, the Boss challenges all these roles.

The player should understand that if they can take out the Boss, the entire encounter will collapse. But, that might not be perfectly obvious.

That's one of the reasons I like early on using Necromancer as bad guy, because the players will eventually intuit that if they can take out the Necromancer then all of these undead that are only alive because of the Necromancers will will collapse.

But, if the players don't understand that, I will often just explain it to them because it's a critical component of the encounter design and it's something their characters would probably be able to figure out even if the players can't.

I might say it'll force them to make a Morale Check, and the players, especially if they're new players, will not realize that there is no there are no rules for Morale in fifth edition -- but it is normal language the players will understand as soon as you say it. The players will go, "Ah!" and they understand what the result of that will be.

So it's super important, considering you want the players to take crazy risks, you want them to ignore the Infantry, and force attacks of opportunity, you want them to ignore the Glass Cannon, or try to get past the Brute in order to get to the Boss monster, and the way you're going to entice them to do that is by letting them know that if the Boss goes down the rest of the people in this encounter, the rest of the bad guys, will scatter and run or there's a chance of it!

### The Fifth Flavor

These encounters don't fit into the previously mentioned 'basic four' categories. They tend to be one-off things that are fun puzzles or challenges or narrative beats. Like, for instance, if the players come across the kitchen with the cook, and all the workers, that is in the castle, or the keep, that might turn into a combat encounter... But, it's not one of the [basic four].