Keith Ammann - Live to Tell the Tale: Combat Tactics for Player Characters

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Copyright 2020 by Keith Ammann

Cover illustration by Lily Pressland

Interior illustrations by Jonathan Elliott, Thomas Andrea Fummo, Chukwudi Nwaefulu, Aviv Or, and Emily K. Smith

Battle maps by Keith Ammann

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Interior design by Michelle Marchese

Jacket design by Emma A. Van Deun

Jacket illustration by Lily Pressland

Author photograph by Jen C. Marshall

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-9821-2269-0

ISBN 978-1-9821-2271-3 (ebook)

T he shape in the middle of the trail turns out to be the carcass of a dead donkey, with its saddlebags lying open. As you inspect them to see whether anythings been left behind, a volley of arrows comes whizzing at you from all directions. One of them hits Lennie for 8 damage; another one bounces off his chain mail. One hits Daria for 3. One hits George for 8he falls down unconscious. You look around in the directions the arrows came from and see several grinning goblins with bows, scuttling through the woods. As you watch, they all scramble behind trees, and you lose sight of them again. Daria, you think you hear one of them to the west, but the forest foliage is too dense for you to see it. Lennie, you dont hear anything; ine and Tolmac, youre too far away. Roll for initiative. Okay, Daria, youre up first.

[pause]

What do I do?

Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons is a greatly streamlined edition of the classic fantasy role-playing game, built upon the three pillars of exploration, social interaction, and combat. Even as its shorn away much of the (in my opinion) needless complexity and hyperspecialization of earlier editions, making it a much more accessible entry-level game for players without previous RPG experience, it can still be overwhelming at first. After all, this is a game whose Players Handbook is three hundred pages long; even hard-core board gaming enthusiasts are rarely confronted with rules that stretch for more than eight pages.

Role-playing gaming is like improvisational theater, with an audience comprising no one but you and your fellow players. Theres plenty of room for imagination and creativity, heroism and humor, silly clichs and subversions of those clichs. The rules are the scaffolding within which players and Dungeon Masters improvise, setting some boundaries around what player charactersand the non-player characters and monsters they encountercan and cant do. But even within these boundaries, the choices available to players are vast. Sometimes bewilderingly so.

Exploration isnt hard to get a handle on. Usually, theres a hook, a MacGuffin, some person or object or location to search for, some mysterious event in need of an explanation. And theres a localewoods, ruins, caverns, a dungeon, a fortress, a temple, a quasi-medieval village or citywhere the search unfolds. You look around, find a clue, proceed to the next one. Most people dont need to be taught how to do this: Curiosity and intuition are usually enough, and deductive reasoning fills in any gaps.

Social interaction can be trickier, especially for players unaccustomed to improv. Conversations sometimes bog down when players maintain too much distance from their characters, speaking in the third person rather than the first person and pausing after each NPC reply to discuss with their fellow players what to say or ask next. (Sassy DMs sometimes respond to this by saying, in the NPCs voice, Im standing right here!)

To get past this difficulty, however, requires only an awareness of your characters voice and motivations and a willingness to immerse yourself in the scenario. Beyond these two things, social interactions in D&D are no different from social interactions in real life: They consist of friendly conversation, compliments, insults, taunts, threats, jokes, banter, pleading, shaming, bluffing, lying, haggling, bartering, wagering, asking for favors, offering food and drink, giving gifts, and so forth.

Combat, however, is legitimately challenging, for several reasons. First, in D&D, combat is far more tightly rule-governed than exploration and social interaction are. Second, few of usplayers or DMshave real-life experience with small-unit armed combat. Third, the media weve grown up with dont offer much insight into the decisions people make when they fight: As far as we can tell, they just run at each other, weapons swinging and clanging against each other, until the better fighter lands the telling blow. And fourth, if you screw up, your beloved characters may die, and then you wont get to play them anymore. The Lord of the Rings would be an awfully dispiriting story if the Ringwraiths killed Frodo on Weathertop and Sam, Merry, Pippin, and Aragorn all had to go on without him, picking up some rando in a tavern in order to get their number back up.

Contrary to stereotype, we Dungeon Masters dont want to murder our PCs. We want to strike a balance, confronting you with threats just dangerous enough to give you a thrill when you finally prevail. We want to be tough but fair.

But we also want these encounters to be interesting. Dumb monsters are boring. One is no different from another. I wrote The Monsters Know What Theyre Doing to help other DMs give their combat encounters flavor and sophistication, discovering monsters unique combat personalities through analysis of their stats and features. Theres a pitfall to this, though: Monsters that are too sophisticated may prove unexpectedly deadly to less sophisticated PCs who encounter them.

Thats why Ive written this guide to combat tactics for players. Ive unleashed a wave of clever, highly evolved monsters upon the D&D world. Its only fair that I give you, the player, the tools you need to fight back. And live.