Reflection

Last week I noted a flaw in some of the speed of my combat encounters and set the groundwork to hopefully combat it in the future. With only one week of experience recorded so far, the results are in: Things are looking good!

My players jumped right into a combat encounter as soon as the session began so I immediately got to crack open my new bag of tricks. I had designed an encounter with a number of reanimated knights around a round table as an original idea created by me. I wanted there to be a lot of them despite the risk of dragging the combat on, so I put two new systems into place.
1. There was a way to resolve the combat immediately by deciphering the runes on their armour.

2. They had significantly reduced hp and increased damage.

The difficulty of the check to resolve combat was initially very high, but the more knights they defeated the easier it got. Rather than the fit needing to be about defeating all the enemies, they needed to focus fire a couple of them and protect the player with the best chance at succeeding on the check.

An alternate goal kept the players focused between their turns and the reduced hp of the enemies made each hit feel satisfying. Increasing their damage worked out well too! As ultimately I am still controlling where most of the attacks go, so I can ramp up the tension with a few well placed attacks. There is such a wealth of knowledge being shared online by hundreds of skilled DM’s. It’s a humbling reminder to find a weak spot in my games, learn about how other players are fixing it and immediately start seeing positive results.