5 DM Combat Tricks to Challenge the Toughest PC Parties

Not every D&D fight should be a 2-hour slugfest for the party’s lives. But at the same time, how often does it feel like the party is steamrolling everyone they meet without having to break a sweat? Adventuring should be dangerous. Not every encounter should be deadly, but it’s important to challenge the party in combat when it’s time to rumble – and not just by running hordes of monsters or tougher CRs at them.

Here are 5 tactics I use to make combat more dangerous when I want to challenge the party. They’ll put the PCs on the back foot and make them feel less than comfortable on the battlefield. Don’t bring these tricks out for every fight, but when you want to throw a brush-back pitch and make the party a little more cautious at the plate, this is how you do it.

1. Mix Your Monster Types

One of the best ways to make combat tougher is to use different types of monsters that attack in different ways from different angles. Just like the party has front-line warriors and back-line archers and spell-slingers, some encounters should have different kinds of threats arrayed against them.

This is important not just for variety, but for flexibility. With different unit types, you can have a few holding the line and the ones in the back either concentrating fire or sniping at the party’s soft targets. Or maybe the bad guys brought a few fireballs, too.

Highly mobile monsters are another way to shake up combat. It’s one thing to take a shot at the wizard, it’s another to have a Gnoll Witherling blitz through a gap and try to chew his face off.

2. Flank the Party

Building off of those fast guys, most PC parties are built around some guys who tank in the front and artillerists throwing spells, projectiles or support from the back. One of the best ways to destabilize this comfortable force is to have the bad guys attack them from the back, or even just surround them or pop-up in the middle of the formation.

I’m not even talking about flanking to get advantage (we don’t actually play with it). 5E isn’t the highly tactical minis game that 4E was, but formations still matter. The ranged characters are less effective when they’re bodied up with hostiles, and the front-line guys tank a lot less effectively when they’re getting swarmed and the healer’s got their own problems.

Our party in Dave’s Curse of Strahd game is pretty combat efficient. One of the hardest fights we had was when scarecrows scattered around the square in Wallachia came to life and started attacking from everywhere while Baba Lysaga flew around throwing fireballs. We were scattered, getting attacked from all around, and it was almost a TPK. Even after Lysaga flew off to cause other mayhem, we barely stabilized.

Another way to flank the party is to have another force show up a few rounds into the fight from behind them. In forest encounters, maybe have some giant spiders drop down from the trees onto the casters or just behind them. Make the players calculate something other than the optimal place to center that fireball.

3. Concentrate Fire

It can be tempting to split the bad guys evenly between party members, or even just the front line. This is no way for a smart enemy to approach combat. Your players probably know they should focus on getting one enemy down then move on to the next, your monsters should, too. Focus fire of one PC until it drops, then move on to the next. (I would not usually attack an unconscious PC just to kill it, there’s a fine line between bringing a challenge and being a jerk.)

Again, this is not for every fight. But when you want to crank up the danger, bring more monsters than party members and have the extras focus their damage on one PC, and preferably not the barbarian who was built to soak damage (if he wants those hits, he can figure out a ways to draw them).

4. Plan to Survive the Fireworks

One problem you run into with mid-level and later parties is the fireworks. Fireball, Dawn, Hunger of Hadar … any of these spells and a slew of others can turn a battle. If you have 2 or 3 casters who want to throw them before the battle even starts, encounters that were supposed to be tricky can disappear in a montage of explosions only Michael Bay could appreciate.

It’s fine to let the party pre-empt some encounters with the artillery strike. But when you want the fight to last more than a couple rounds, you need some tricks to help your bad guys, or maybe just the toughest one, survey that salvo.

One way to do that is by spreading the bad guys out and mixing them in with the PCs. Flanking, as discussed above, has the added benefit of making it hard for the entire enemy force to be wiped out with one well-placed inferno.

Evasion (on something like the Kobold Assassin) and elemental resistance are also good ways to survive the big AOE effects. Another is Globe of Invulnerability. Yes, it’s a 6th level spell, but if someone has the ability to o this up, it can soak a lot of would-be area-effect spells.

5. Use the Magic Items

I first read this piece of advice in a Dragon magazine article in the 90s, and it holds true across every edition and every RPG: If you planted magic items for the players in the treasure, the bad guys should be using them if they can.

Obviously, that doesn’t mean a demon should be wielding a holy avenger, or that the Gelatinous Cube should be able to use the wand of fireballs it ingested. But some of your bad guys should be smart, and they shouldn’t be putting that +3 armor in storage when it’d look spiffy on the bandit chief.

Some of my bad guys, especially NPCs, are essentially big, hostile piñatas. You’ve heard us talk about the NPC Aur’k Ka’ang on the podcast: He’s the Aarkocra Monk (with 1 secret warlock level due to his entanglements) who’s bedeviled the party.

Ka’ang is highly mobile and has evasion. But beyond that, one of the things that made such an impression was that he was sitting in a globe of invulnerability when the party first attacked him. They threw two fireballs, a polymorph, a dispel magic and, I believe, two cheese pizzas at that thing before it came down.

That globe came from a Staff of Power I gave Ka’ang as a way to give it to the wizard. He has items for everyone in the party. He’s just using them to try to kill the PCs first.

Know When to Push Their Buttons

I’ve said it throughout this article and I’ll reiterate it here: These are also not tricks to use in every fight.

No one likes to get their ass kicked. Even if the bad guys are smart, the part should still probably win in the end (or at least still have a way to advance their aims). For every challenging fight that reminds the party they are mortal, give them two or three that make them feel badass.

But when you absolutely, positively, must have a fight that makes the party respect the bad guys, these 5 tricks are a good place to start.

What tricks do you use? Tell us in the comments, and it might make a podcast episode.