My favorite combat ever was when I was playing in an adventurers league game and the gm hadn’t balanced the session for missing a player. Our objective was simple—get the hostages out of the enemy stronghold. We used choke points, healing surges, spells to create illusions, tower shields to block line of sight from targeting the hostages, everything. I almost died, but we got the hostages out. It was exhilarating, no boss battle needed.

And for the players, a "kill everything" attitude can lead to a TPK, as they do not seem to realize that retreat in always an option.

Very good points! One of the most memorable fights I did with a high level group of players: They were at a magic mountain and knew it was infested by demons, but when standing at the top, you could ask basically any question - but must wait for the wind to answer. It took 1d4 rounds after asking a question until the answer started, with 1d4+1 words per round. They were looking for 4 specific magic items and wanted to ask for each items location. But they knew the stream of demons would be basically endless, plus the wizard was the only one who could understand the words so he had to spend his reaction on listening and needed to be protected by the rest, plus spending a turn to ask the next question after one answer was complete. I threw hords of low level demons and the occasional mid-sized one at them but they were well prepared and had the high ground, plus they had an escape scroll prepared, once the situation became to dicey. It was very different feel of encounter and they fled after 2,5 answers and the paladin being in single digit hitpoints without healing left. It was an awesome fight, took like 2 hours to go through, but everyone was captivated the whole time. Each word from the wind was sucked up like it was embrosia xD

Yes- it’s always been like that. Combatants act like “rock’em, sock’’em robots” - exchanging blow for blow until one side falls- dragging on- everything comes down to who is luckier with dice rolls

When facing "monsters" the "kill 'em all fast" approach is easily default, with "run away" mostly a possibly.  When facing sapient opponents there are more implicit options; dominate and force surrender, disable but don't kill, etc.  I think a main failing here isn't that the options are presented weakly as much as it's not obvious that experience should be awarded for "defeating" the encounter using any method or partial experience for "failed" encounters.

These are some great ideas. One of my favourite combat encounters I ever ran was one where something like this happened as a result of me remembering that the monster still had a personality and objectives, just like the PCs.

They were in a cave inhabited by a Behir and got ambushed by him. He managed to restrain the Sorcerer who then used Misty Step to escape. The Fighter got caught on the next round and was not so lucky. He critically hit them with a bite and had them restrained in his mouth. I then looked at the players, them expecting me to say his turn was over and went “Well, he has what he came here for… He’s leaving!”

They scrambled, knowing that if he reached the end of the tunnel on the ceiling, our character would be dead. They threw everything they could at him, even doing what they could to collapse the tunnel and cut off his escape. They succeeded at it and killed the Behir, even being forced to use Featherfall to save the Fighter.

Once the battle ended, they looked at me and asked “How did you come up with that?!” I told them simply “The start of combat does not mean the end of roleplay. He had one objective: getting food. I kept that objective in mind and the rest just happened.”

The more D&D videos I see, the stronger I root for the LANCER system with its customizable enemies, diverse SITREPs with objectives, and resource attrition being baked into the game, as well as each player getting almost guaranteed spotlight moments with their powerful but often limited core powers

Of course I'm subscribed (and just signed up for Patreon)! Yours is the one -- the only -- channel that actually makes a difference for me. I've been DM'ing for close to 50 years now (D&D and Traveller mostly) and your videos are still teaching me new things. Almost more useful is that you're also explaining, clearly and simply, things I've been doing right but didn't realize. As a result, I can examine now my own DM-ing and say, "This worked well because..."

That's invaluable. Once you can put words to not only what you're doing wrong, but also recognize and analyze what you're doing RIGHT, that's where DM-ing hits another level. That's when players can come back week after week expecting a good game every time. Your channel makes that happen for me.

Thank you. As a DM and a player I often forget how much more entertaining a confrontation can be if you don't jump into rolling for an optimal attack immediately. Of course you sacrifice some safety and stability, but it can lead to more immersive and rewarding experience. Though it can be really hard for stick to the rules players/DMs as they think from mechanics first and everything else later and as you've said, eventually it just becomes an algorithm/chore

I still remeber 20 turns dungeon for 4e. Small dungeon where you need to kill boss within 20 turns. No short rests, no narative shortcuts, every action matter, you can even just run through rooms full of enemies in hope to get to chokepoint for your tank to keep them in place

Last encounter I ran my players were fighing a bunch of enemies on a train, but they had no idea what their enemies were doing. So I just gave them a number counting up at the start of each round. 1...2...3...
"Hey DM, what's that number counting up to?"
I told them not to worry about it. Their pace increased dramatically. They managed to stop the train from crashing on the literal last round on the counter. Most fun part was how they kept adapting their strategy as the counter got higher. One round they're trying to damage rush the boss hoping to stop whatever he's doing. When the boss escaped and the counter kept rising though they had to shift their strategy to move faster and faster until by the end they were circumventing the fights altogether, a tactic which was available from the start but which they didn't want to resort to until they got truly desperate. It was a great sequence, I really felt like I pushed them to use everything they had to win.

A lot of these suggestions come down to "Make better encounters". The problem is when most people hear this suggestion they simply think terrain, enemy composition, and etc. which is because they are stuck in the encounter = kill all enemies mindset. So when they think of "improving" the encounter they think adding more tactical variety to reduce optimization. I've seen tip videos which talk about this and how unique enemy types/abilities can spice up combat by forcing players to go against their normal habits. It's the old when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail mind set. When instead DMs should be thinking of making more/better objectives to the encounter other than just kill everyone.

Here's an exmple I like: The party is after an ancient relic in a ruin made up of decayed but relativly advanced mechanical structures and they fight simple automatons to gain access to the central chamber.
The robots deal lots of damage but vary in their endurance: some are fast but don't take much damage, while others are very spongey and still hit really hard but are slow. The first few encounters stick with the fast robots and slowly introduce the slower ones. Then, deeper into the ruins, more robots get added to the encounter at a steady rate, placing a strain on the party's resources, but an NPC acting as a guide to the party -- maybe some kind of archeolgist familiar with the basic outline of what this place really is -- directs them to special contraptions that can shut the automata off if the party can deal enough damage to them. The contraptions can be placed around corners, making them treacherous to navigate to; up elevations, such that only ranged combatants can reach them; or only respond to specific types of damage, meaning focus shifts away from defeating the enemies as fast as possible and instead towards figuring out how to disable the horde, covering the party member best suited to taking out the contraption, and keeping everyone healthy and working together.

Once the final room is reached, removing the relic locks the party inside the room and activates the boss. The boss cannot be defeated, but dealing damage to it can slow it and it targets whichever party member has the relic, meaning you can give it to the tankiest party member and have the cleric heal them continuously. The boss' damage output ramps up at a continuous rate and it can deal AoE attacks that target additional party members. The only way to get out is to unlock the door, but the mechanism is broken and not funcitoning properly and requires delicate work, so the party has to hold out long enough to get the job done and even rotate roles if necessary.
However, regarldess of how qucikly they work with the lock, it becomes aparent that it's jammed and only a powerful strike will be enough to force it to work. The DM can then hint at the idea of using the relic to lure the boss towards the door mechanism (which is not necesarily situated near the door itself) and tricking the boss into smashing the final peice of the proverbial puzzle into place and opening the doorway out of the dungeon.
The boss gets jammed inside the machinery in doing so and can no longer harm the party.

At first I was nodding in agreement thinking "yeah this is a good idea!"
then I realized I've been doing this for decades, and so has my group.
Sometimes the players even CAUSE this to happen, by changing the conditions of the battle mid-fight to surprise the DM.
For example, use a Charm spell on the enemy lieutenant to capture and (later) convert them to our cause, and suddenly that lieutenant becomes an asset both sides are trying to secure.
When I was playing The Wrekkoner, in one of our biggest battles in an astral demiplane, we discovered one of the enemies was unkillable for cosmic / divine reasons, and so I wrote a song mid-combat and made a huge perform check. The party had to protect me for 3 rounds while I concentrated on a song to attract a godling nearby, offering this invincible enemy as a living sacrifice. The DM was so blown away by the creativity and the flexible thinking that he changed the story for it.

The best "mini campaign" i ever ran was one where the players played a group of adventurers escorting diplomats through a fairly hostile environment, the diplomats had slightly better stats than commoners but not very much and 2 of the 4 diplomats died on the journey; one player actually sacrificed her charecter's life to save one of the diplomats at one point by deliberately failing a dex save against a fireball and jumping in front of the blast to knock the diplomat out of the way, it was epic as fuck. The players were so invested in the lives of the diplomats it totally changed combat from "kill things as quickly as possible" to "protect our charges at all costs" and they held funerals for the diplomats that were lost when they happened. Now i'm always trying to think of new objectives for my encounters but sometimes, my players just want to hit things and thats ok too.

This channel, toghter with Mystic Arts,  RPG PHD, and Tales from Else Where represent  the new wave of RPG content, you guys are making a huge impact in the hobby, thank you very much!

I still run the original basic expert companion DND. And I had one group about a year ago doing to keep on the borderlands dungeon, crawl through the caves of chaos, they had run across a band of orcs that had killed a merchant train. And we're taking back the spoils, which were a lot of colorful umbrellas amongst digging tolls and other general gear. And they didn't want to stop to take the wagon loads of stuff back. So they brought it with them when they got trapped and surrounded by goblins, one of them who could speak goblin, convinced the goblins that they were looking for the goblins, that they were merchants, come to sell the goblins gear to improve their home in the caves, and they sold the colorful umbrellas as protection from small falling rocks, and they got out of there alive with all of the goblins, gold, that's the kind of thinking an inventiveness.I like to see in players

I've had some luck using "trivial" monsters (often big spiders, they terrify me), in conjunction with a time limit/movement and difficult terrain.
"You hear literally hundreds of hurrying feet behind you in the cave. Up ahead is the sinkhole you saw in the vision, with a narrow ledge, barely a trail, running up into freedom. It's a good bet the spiders won't follow you into the sunlight, but right now, all you know is, if you stay here, they will overwhelm you! What do you do?"
Between the narrow, rubble-strewn trail, dodging rays of web, rearguard fighting, and the ambush just before the cave opening, they got a good exercise :D

I've always tried to have the Party's opponents act according to their INT / WIS.  So, if they getting their butt's kicked, they'll try to run away ~ either to survive or to get help.  If it's a mindless / low INT critter, then they tend to fight to the death, or until fleeing is really too late (unless the party is also almost dead and declines to pursue).
Heck, just last night my PCs were taking a short rest after defeating some monsters.  I had the BBEG (a young red dragon) pop in and drop a breath weapon on them!  Freaked them right out!  But they rallied and drove it off (dragon was down to 1/3 hp by the time it escaped).  Sure, it probably could have dropped one or two down to death saves before it died, but it doesn't want to die... so it fled.  It wasn't dice rolls made me decide this, it was "what would a dragon do?"

I'd also add that you need to make sure if you're going to give them a puzzle to solve or something non combat related they need to achieve, don't make it entirely reliant on a dice roll like a skill check, even if you get multiple tries at it. For instance, defusing a bomb while the team fights off the enemies, sounds great, adds a timer, builds a lot of tension, but bad rolls happen and to have the team lose everything because someone has cursed dice hurts when there was nothing they could've done to avoid the outcome. Give them something to solve mentally rather than just going "ok, roll for it, oh that's too bad"