Make Your Battlemap Worth Fighting Over
A quick trick to make melees more exciting from this week’s GM’s Log.
Ankhegs are one of my favourite monsters. Looking at their stat block, they’re a one-trick pony. Just a brute that deals damage. But their strategy involves verticality, making the critter agile, reusable, and always a challenge.
Ankhegs burrow, but most characters cannot. I drop these monsters into soft terrain so they can tunnel up from below for constant ambushes. They’ll harry the party for hours this way unless the players address the situation.
This creature taught me how dangerous asynchronous play can be when we view a battlefield as something to be shaped like a puzzle, instead of being a flat grid where combatants meet (meat?) in the middle to slug it out.
The problem is most battlefields lack anything worth racing toward. There are no spots worth defending, controlling, or seizing for an advantage.
My solution is to add position.
Position means any spot on the battlefield that changes what a combatant can see, reach, avoid, control, or threaten.
A great position acts like a carrot and a stick. It gets players doing the calculus of, “Should we seize this spot before our enemy does?”
Next Session
When prepping your next combat encounter, give your map 1d3 positions worth fighting over.
Put on your combatant hat and ask yourself these quick questions:
- Where do I want to be?
- Where are the ambush spots?
- Where would my foes not want to go?
Then, make at least one of those places valuable enough so both sides care about it. For example:
- A balcony with line of sight over the whole room for controllers and ranged attackers.
- A trench that ankhegs can turn into a reverse Uno murder hobo tunnel.
- A ruined statue that offers cover and holds a pair of valuable eye gems worth escaping with.
Do this, and you prevent PCs from just milling about and smacking heart points out of their foes. It gets players looking up from their characters sheets and puzzling over the map. And with luck, some teamwork might even break out.
Make Combats More Dynamic
Creating and adding positions to your battlemaps is the focus of this week’s GM’s Log.
It goes deeper into how to add verticality, cover, vantage points, and battlefield Moves that will lure characters into breaking static formation to defend prize positions.
Join The GM’s Log today and immediately get past GM’s Logs plus today’s on CombatScape Positions.
Cheers,
Johnn
roleplayingtips.com
https://discord.gg/6MxTRAqQ76
Have more fun at every game!
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