Co-Geeking

Part of the appeal of Dungeons & Dragons as a tabletop role-playing game is that it provides a robust and detailed set of rules for paying out fantasy fights, from smashing your way through pesky goblins to assaulting the lair of an evil dragon. You can see the tabletop war games in D&D‘s roots when you have a table full of figurines maneuvering and trading blows. Unfortunately, that same detailed set of rules for combat also means that fights tend to drag. Everyone who’s played the game knows how one large combat can eat up an entire gaming session, leaving little room for character development or story progression. That’s where narrative combat comes in.

Narrative combat is an alternative to the full combat rules that lets you as a DM challenge your players and put them in danger while also speeding up the action so you can move on with the game and make room for other activities. You might not want to use it all the time, but it is a useful technique for getting your party through an encounter that is meant to build the story more than to present a tactical challenge.

Narrative combat is a battle-focused version of an old D&D standby: the skills challenge. Instead of making attacks or casting spells by the usual combat rules, players declare what their characters are attempting to do in order to win the fight. The DM (or the DM and players working together) decide on an appropriate skill check or other d20 roll for the action. When the players have scored enough victories on the skill checks, they win the battle. Failed skill checks bring consequences.

Preparing the encounter

As a DM, you need to prepare for a narrative combat, just like you need to prepare for a traditional combat, but in a different way.

First of all, make sure that the encounter you’re planning is appropriate for narrative combat. This method isn’t well suited to encounters that could potentially be deadly for the adventuring party. It serves to speed up combat, but that comes at the expense of characters not getting to use their full suite of abilities, and most gaming groups won’t be happy about seeing a character die just because they didn’t have the chance to use an ability that could have saved them. If an encounter is meant to push your players’ character to their limits, it’s better to opt for traditional combat.

Once you’ve decided to make a fight narrative rather than traditional, describe the encounter in narrative terms, laying out what role it plays in your story. How would you describe this event in a novel or a screenplay? Think about not just the monsters your characters will face but their motivations, goals, and personalities. Instead of “One Vampire Spawn (CR5) and five Skeletons (CR 1/4),” try describing your scene something like: “A recently-turned vampire spawn, drunk with her newfound powers, gathers her own minions from the ancient dead of a nearby graveyard, and ambushes the party as they journey toward their next destination, hoping for an easy kill to add to her subservient throng.”

Next, you need to make three mechanical decisions which will determine the difficulty of the encounter:

• Number of successes needed to complete the encounter
• DC for the encounter’s skill checks
• Consequences of failure

The number of successes required to complete the encounter determines how long the encounter will take to play out. The more successes required, the more opportunities for failure and consequences. I recommend making the number of required successes a multiple of the number of player characters involved.

I don’t recommend going above 5x; at that point, you may not be saving much time over just running a regular encounter. If you are planning for a longer encounter, it’s also a good idea to plan for a few changes in the fight after a certain number of successes to give your players new problems to think about—the monsters change tactics, reinforcements show up, a sudden snowstorm hits, parts of the floor give way, etc.

Our example encounter with a Vampire Spawn and Skeletons could be a significant challenge to a novice adventuring group, warranting a multiplier of 4x or 5x, but to an experienced group this encounter would be more of a speed bump, a way of alerting the players to the presence of a larger threat lurking in the shadows without putting their characters in much danger. For such an encounter, I would choose a multiplier of 1x or 2x.

The DC for the skill checks is the most direct way of setting the difficulty of the encounter. If you have a specific set of monsters for your encounter, you can use the average of their ACs. For our example above, Vampire Spawn has an AC of 16 and Skeleton has 14. Five Skeletons and one Vampire Spawn have an average AC of 14.3, which you can round down to 14. Feel free to tweak the DC if it doesn’t feel right for your encounter; you might decide that the Vampire Spawn’s control makes the Skeletons more coordinated than mindless undead usually are and bump the DC up to 15.

If you don’t have a specific set of monsters in mind to check the AC of, here’s a guide for choosing an appropriate DC.

Finally, you need to decide the consequences of a failed roll. The easiest and most obvious one is to do damage to the character whose attempt failed, but the circumstances of your story might suggest other possibilities, such as losing vital resources or reputation with the local community.

To determine the amount of damage a failure should cost, if you have a specific set of monsters in mind, you can again use an average of one round’s damage from their standard attacks. A Vampire Spawn’s Claw attack does 8 damage on average (2d4+3), and it can use the attack twice, making a total of 16. A Skeleton’s Shortsword attack does 6 average damage (1d6+3). Our example monsters therefore have an overall average damage of 7.6, rounded up to 8. You can just use the average damage, or to keep some of the fun of rolling, you can make it 2d4+3, 1d6+4, 1d8+3, or something else that gives the same average.

Instead of doing damage as a consequence in the example encounter, you might instead decide that characters who fail fall victim to the Vampire Spawn’s bite and must make a Charisma save (same DC as the encounter overall) or temporarily fall under the villain’s sway, telepathically revealing information that the spawn’s Vampire Lord will later use against the party. Play into the story of the encounter; if a good alternative to damage for a consequence presents itself, use it!

If you don’t have a specific set of monsters in mind for your encounter, just look for one at the appropriate CR and use its basic attack damage. The whole point of narrative combat is to reduce the amount of time it takes to play out an encounter, so don’t make things more difficult for yourself than you need to.

Playing the encounter

As the encounter begins, give the players a narrative description of how the combat begins. Again, imagine you are narrating a novel or setting the scene in a screenplay.

“As you walk through the heavily-shadowed avenues of the decrepit graveyard, slow, shambling movements in the undergrowth on your left catch your eye. Everyone make a Perception check… Those of you who failed the check are distracted by the movements of five skeletons lumbering out of the thicket on the left, but those who succeeded realize that the skeletons are a diversion and prepare yourselves to face the sudden attack of a red-eyed, sharp-fanged shape that lunges out of the sepulcher on your right, reaching for you with her sharp, talon-like hands!”

Once you’ve given your players the set-up, it’s now time for them to act. Your players narrate how their characters engage with the challenge in front of them. There are no rounds or turns in narrative combat, just contributions to the story. If your players are good at making room for each other, you can just invite everyone to contribute a story moment whenever they feel moved to. If you think it’s better to impose some order on who talks when, you can go around the table one at a time, or have them roll for initiative. The monsters do not get a turn of their own; they only get a chance to hurt the player characters when characters fail a check.

Players describe their character’s acts not in terms of game mechanics but as if narrating a story. Their options are limited only by their imagination and the constraints of what you as DM are willing to accept. Instead of “I use my bonus action to rage and my action to attack with my axe,” a player might say, “I yell my warcry and charge into the thick of the enemy, hacking furiously away,” or “I slip into the shadows waiting for a chance to strike at an enemy when their back is turned,” or “I open my senses to the currents of magic in this area and try to disrupt the monsters’ sources of power.” A character’s act might be something closely tied to their abilities, but they can also be more creative, such as “I create a distraction on one edge of the fight to set up my allies for a better shot,” or “I help the innocent townsfolk caught in the middle of the fight get to safety.”

Players have a lot of leeway in describing how their characters engage in the battle, as long as they play fair. No one gets to just say “I kill all the monsters and save the day single-handedly.” As DM you can always say no to a poorly-thought-out or bad-faith act, but it’s also good to let the players have agency to shape the story of the fight themselves. If someone wants to push the monsters onto uneven ground, impersonate an enemy leader and confuse them with conflicting orders, or start an avalanche, as long as it’s something their character could reasonably pull off in the circumstances, go with it and let the fight evolve accordingly.

Once a player has described their character’s contribution to the story, pick an appropriate skill for them to roll. You can do this yourself as DM, or collaborate with the player on picking something that plays to their strengths. In place of a skill roll, you might also use an attack roll, or even a saving throw if it seems appropriate (“I raise my shield hurl myself into the line of fire to take the brunt of the attack so it doesn’t hit any innocent bystanders” could merit a Constitution save, for example).

For a character fighting in the front lines, a weapon attack may be the best roll, but look for opportunities to call for other skills like Athletics (like tackling and grappling with an opponent), Acrobatics (nimbly jumping from tree branch to tree branch to stay ahead of a pursuing enemy), Perception (watching enemy movements and calling out their maneuvers to one’s allies), or Insight (analyzing the enemy’s tactical plan and devising an effective counter-strategy). Characters relying on magic can always roll a skill relevant to their particular variety of magic such as Arcana (wizards, sorcerers, and warlocks), Religion (paladins, and clerics), Nature (druids), or Performance (bards), but consider also using magic as a bluff to distract the enemy (Deception or Intimidation) or to create hazards in the field of battle (Survival). If a player uses a spell or other special ability of their character’s, or if they come up with a particularly original or interesting twist in the story, let them roll with advantage.

If the roll succeeds, mark down a success for the party; if it fails, the character in question suffers the consequences. A player who takes damage has the opportunity to mitigate that damage in any way they could in regular combat, like the resistance granted by a barbarian’s Rage or a ranger casting Absorb Elements.

When the party has scored enough successes to complete the encounter, narrate how the remaining monsters flee or are destroyed. Then the characters can lick their wounds, and the adventuring day continues.

Employing narrative combat effectively

There are advantages to using narrative combat in place of full combat. There are also times when it’s not a good choice.

Pros of narrative combat

• It’s quicker than traditional combat. It can be a good way of dealing with encounters that are of little mechanical threat to the party but contribute to the ongoing story.
• It makes much less work for the DM—no tracking monster abilities or hit points, just the party’s successes.
• It keeps the action with the players. There are no separate monster turns.
• It encourages creativity and storytelling, which can be rewarding for a group that likes those aspects of play more than the hard tactical thinking of traditional combat.

Cons of narrative combat

• It takes time to explain to a group of players who haven’t tried it before, and may be confusing to players used to the routines of regular combat.
• It sacrifices detail for speed, sometimes leading to results that could feel unsatisfying—will a wizard player casting Fireball feel good about having the same effect on the outcome of the battle that a fighter using Action Surge does?
• When confronting a particularly dangerous or important enemy, players may be unhappy about not having their full range of combat options open. Narrative combat is not a good choice for such fights.

Narrative combat is a useful tool to have at your disposal as a DM, but make sure your players understand how it works, and know when to use it and when not to. It’s a good thing to introduce to new players in a short, trivial encounter that poses no real risk so that they can learn how to play it without the pressure of a dangerous fight. Once your players know how to do it, though, it can save time for more exploration, role-playing, social encounters, plot advancement, and other fun things.

Images: Algorithmically generated images made with Night Cafe: A winter battle, Temple ambush, The untouched armory

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