Make Your DnD Combat Encounters Easy

Ok. Maybe not ALL of your combat but every now and then, throw an easy combat encounter at your players. You won't regret it.

Picture this:

The party stands atop the city gate, in the distance, a bandit clan drives a giant from the hills toward the city walls. The ground rumbles with each monstrous footstep as the creature grows ever closer. The party stands tall awaiting the inevitable clash.

It is a good encounter. You have put a lot of work into making sure that it is well-balanced. Just difficult enough but not impossible and your players will like it a lot. That is cool, but if you want to make it one that your players will talk about for years, you should make it easy.

Instead of battling the giant and bandits and just barely striking the final blow and saving the city, imagine if they stood strong atop the gate and unleashed the fury of their combined abilities. The wizard raining fire down on the bandits as the fighter and rogue take down the giant with a well-executed tactical maneuver. They are heroes. Powerful enough to smite armies. As the giant falls, they stand in the remains of the city gate unscathed their armor shining in the first rays of dawn. The citizens stream out and lift them into the air. They are saviors, heroes, legends.

I know that as a GM, it can be hard to see that as a successful encounter. It breaks all of the rules we traditionally think of as important when we do our session prep, but it follows the most important rule of being a GM: Help the players have fun.

They will love that feeling of invincibility and they will carry that on for a long time (just long enough for you to use it against them anyways). A good campaign needs tension and stakes, but it doesn't always need deadly encounters to make breaking the tension fun.