Nothing kills a Dungeons & Dragons 5E game faster than combat becoming a bore. And nothing makes combat more boring than long turns, people not knowing who’s up next, and, the worst, a DM who takes longer to move his monsters than the party takes to kill them.
The combat slog can turn into Artax in the Swamp of Sadness pretty quickly.
Managing D&D combat is one of the most quotidian things a DM has to do, but all the dramatic storytelling and tension-building atmosphere fall apart if the players are waiting for you to move it along. So let’s look at a dead-simple way to keep your combats moving and get the ball back into the players’ court.
Dungeons & Dragons Combat Mastery: Efficiency Over Frills
There are a lot of tools and hacks that supposedly help DMs track initiative and monsters for D&D 5E. But for me, these systems introduce more needless complexity. Time spent managing your clothespins, initiative markers or erasing and rewriting the whiteboard is all, still, slowing down combat.
Plus, I’m not really Sir Preps A’Lot the DM. I’m not a guy who spends a ton of time building encounters. I put flexibility over prep: I like to leave the players as much freedom as possible to choose what they’re going to do next, which means I need to be ready to spring an encounter that fits whatever they decide to do.
Sure, if they’re in a dungeon, I may have mapped out what kind of death hides in every room. Even when they have free choice, I have an idea of where those choices can go and the monster available for them to fight.
But I don’t usually come to the table with encounters pre-built and prepped for. I pick the monsters on the fly from a set I’ve curated before coming to the game and launch into it. That can put additional stress on combat management, but it works!
For me, the trick to making it work is simple pen-and-paper tracking behind the DM screen.
Setting up the Combat Sheet
I DM with books. I have the Monster Manual and other Dungeons & Dragons references open with page markers on the enemies I’m using, and I have a notebook in front of me with the combat details.
In that notebook, I use a dead simple, 2-axis marking system to track what’s going on in combat.
- Vertically, along the left margin of the page, I list initiatives from first to last in the round. I usually use character and monster names here as a reference. If anyone moves in the initiative order, I mark it with an arrow pointing to the new position, or sometimes just cross out and rewrite the names (whatever’s easiest to follow).
- Horizontally across the top of the block (I usually fit 2 to 3 of these on am 8×11 page), I list the monsters, grouped by type, with the starting HP number for each individual monster. The numbers go left to right in each group to match the monsters’ map position to begin the fight or, if we’re not using a map and minis, I’ll go left to right based on which players they’re engaging.
In the interest of speed, I usually give every monster in the group the same HP. That’s often the average number listed in the Monster Manual. It might be higher if I decide they’re elites or lower if they’re starving, etc., but keeping HP uniform cuts time spent customizing a thing the PCs never see.
Running D&D Combat the Easy Way
I roll monster initiative in groups, so each type will go on a different initiative, but that’s still usually only 2 or 3 entries on the initiative list. I find this is enough variety to break up the party’s initiative and make things more interesting, but not so many individual initiatives that it will have a negative impact on tempo. I seldom use more than three monster initiative slots.
I call out each player or monster to go on their initiative turn. If I feel like the players are running a little slow, I’ll start reminding whoever is up next that their turn is coming. I don’t usually push players to speed up their turns because that’s part of them playing and enjoying their game, but I do start nudging them if things bog down. (How to do that while balancing everyone’s fun is a topic for another post.)
As each monster unit takes damage, I write their remaining HP vertically under their HP number, crossing them out when they die. I try to keep the figs matching the numbers left-to-right to make it easy to remember who’s HP are whose, but if that changes, I mark it with a simple arrow to the new spot.
I use the area below the HPs to make notes about the loot and XP, or to draw a small reference map if we’re not using minis.
Simple = Fast
You’ll notice that I don’t spend any time before the game printing out monsters, digging up encounter cards or setting up fancy markers for initiative. I did that a lot while DMing 4E, and I felt like it had diminishing returns. I want the players to be focused on the fight, not a lot of accessories. Minis and maps are great, especially if some of the players are into them and help bring them to life, but I want to keep it simple beyond those.
Plus, as I said, I come to the game with an open plan, so I need to be flexible in encounter rollout (more on that in the future).
This system supports that DMing style. It’s a little old-school, but it doesn’t take a lot of time to set up and keeps the combat moving as much as I can as the DM.
Keeping the players’ turns moving is another challenge, and another issue we’ll look at in future posts.