Posted on April 4, 2011 by Mike Shea
Dave Chalker‘s “Out” is one of the best advanced DMing techniques you can pick up. It keeps encounters unique and interesting, keeps your game focused on your story, and keeps your battles short and tidy. If you haven’t yet learned about the out, start with Dave Chalker’s The Combat Out and my previous article, Three Examples to End a Battle Early. Sometimes, however, you might accidently end a battle TOO early. Either your players trigger your out sooner than you expected or you gave them the answer too early. Today we’ll look at a few ways to avoid triggering an Out too early.
Know when to reveal the out
A good “out” depends on more than just a mechanic for ending a battle early. It also depends on how and when you reveal it to your players. Reveal it too late and it might not matter, the battle is already over. Reveal it too early and your big battle might end before it ever really began. When you’re designing the out, pay careful attention to when you reveal it.
Example: The mummy lord
In a battle I ran recently, I had a mummy lord and his four spectral servants. Time was running late, this was the third battle of the night and we had about 45 minutes before I wanted to finish up the game. Within the first couple of turns, after asking for a religion check, I revealed that the spectral servants were directly tied to the negative energy of the mummy. Destroy the mummy and you destroy the spectral servants. It’s not a bad out if it is a little typical.
Unfortunately, I had given it away too early. The party completely ignored the spectral servants and made a mad rush for the mummy. Within a round and a half, he was defeated along with his spectral servants. The battle was over in the first 20 minutes.
This battle would have worked far better if I revealed this only after the first two full rounds, when the party is already mixed up and engaging the spectral servants and getting over to the mummy isn’t as easy as it was in the beginning. Knowing when to reveal my out would have made this battle excellent.
Plan your rounds
As shown in the mummy lord example, it is important to know how your rounds might play out when deciding the right time to reveal the out. Statistics have shown that most of the action takes place in the first couple of rounds. For that reason, it is probably best to reveal your out at the end of the second or or third round of combat. At this point, monster effectiveness goes down every round as more and more of them are killed and the initial interest of your players begins to wane. Figure out the best time in each combat to reveal an out and maximize the interest of your players.
Build in flexibility
You don’t know how your battles are going to play out. For this reason, its important to build some flexibility into your outs. Give yourself the room to change them during the game when you’re able to determine the best time to bring it into play. Also, give yourself the freedom to determine what your “out” really does. Maybe it wipes the battle clean or maybe it just makes monsters easier to hit. Design them so you can change them at the table.
Example: The vampire’s obelisk
In my recent PAX East DM Challenge adventure, Gravemyst, I had a battle against a big pile of vampires, two skeletal tomb guardians, and a dark obelisk. The obelisk itself was the main component for the out in this battle. After some skill checks to identify that the obelisk was the primary source of evil in the chamber, the players could either choose to run more skill checks or complete a puzzle. Either way and they trigger the “out”. The cool bit is that I never really defined what it does when its disabled. If its disabled early, it might only destroy the skeletal tomb guardians. If it is triggered late, maybe it kills every remaining creature on the board. Right in the middle and maybe it kills the tomb guardians and bloodies everyone else. I got to choose what it did depending on when they triggered it.
You can take a look at the “outs” designed into all three of the battles in this adventure.
Balancing time and emotions
At a PAX East panel on house rules, Phil Menard and Quinn Murphy mentioned that long battles aren’t a matter of time but of interest. If you’re group is into it, a long battle might be just fine. Your job as a DM is to keep the pace of battle where it fits bests with the interests of the players and your own interests. Designing your battles with the flexibility to fit the mood of the players is one of the greatest techniques you can pick up as a dungeon master.
Posted on March 14, 2011 by Mike Shea
You’ve heard me talk a lot about Dave the Game’s “Out”. Though a bit of an advanced trick, once you get your head around building “outs” into your encounters, they will run smooth and fast and every one of them will be unique. Understanding how exactly outs work, however, isn’t so easy. Today we’ll show five specific examples of outs so you can get a feel for how they work and how you can build your own into your own battles. Let’s jump right in.
Intimidating the Wraiths
In this example, we have a room with five wraiths attacking the party. The wraiths, once concubines of a long-dead king, seek to draw the life out of any who enter their lair. The lair itself continues to hold their ashes in large urns in the corners of the room. A fountain in the center of the room steals the their very minds. The fountain is actually a trap that randomly targets one PC within 5 squares with a dominate attack.
The Out: There are two ways to end this battle early. First, when a wraith becomes bloodied, it can be sent away with diplomacy, bluff, or intimidate checks. Depending on how the player chooses to send away the wraith, you might make it one or more skill checks. How easy or hard it is to get rid of the wraith depends on how the player chooses to do it and how you feel the pace of the battle is going. If it’s better to be rid of the wraith, make it easier to do so.
The second out focuses on the urns themselves. Four urns in the corners of the room are connected to the wraiths. PCs trained in religion can sanctify the urns and inflict damage to the wraith connected to the urn. If the battle is dragging on, they might be able to destroy the wraith outright once the wraith has become bloodied.
Now we have two additional ways to end this battle besides simply killing all the wraiths.
The Necrotic Pipes
In this example we have a chamber containing a skeletal tomb guardian and four piles of bones. Necrotic gasses flow down from tubes in the corners of the room to the skeletal bone piles. At the end of the tomb guardian’s turn, up to four skeletons spawn and activate at the bone piles due to the necrotic gasses. Anyone beginning or entering a square adjacent to the bone pillars takes 5 necrotic damage.
The Out: A complicated mechanical contraption in an alcove in the room controls the necrotic gas that flows in on the bone piles. Someone trained in thievery can manipulate the contraption with three standard action thievery checks. He or she can do these as minor actions instead but risks triggering traps and taking damage. Once the three thievery checks are completed, the gas stops pouring in and the minions stop spawning. Depending on the pace of battle, this might reduce the tomb guardian’s hit points as well.
If the skeletal tomb guardian is killed, the skeletons also stop spawning and the gas stops pouring in.
Like other “outs” this example loads the damage and risk of danger in the first few rounds. As the battle reaches over the tipping point to clear success, it can end very quickly. You get to decide when the battle is dragging and ensure the group has multiple ways to end it early.
Also, note how the players have a choice of adding actions and risking damage by using minor actions for skill checks instead of standards. This gives players a choice to put an immediate threat on the PC without taking any extra time at the table. It’s a great trick.
The Chamber of Serpents
In this example, a large crack or pit in the center of the chamber houses hundreds of poisonous snakes. When the party enters, the eyes of three serpentine statues on the opposite wall begin to glow and fire beams of radiant energy at the party. The statues also begin to whisper and hiss, drawing four of the more powerful serpents out of the crack. The party must fight the serpents while dodging the beams firing from the serpent statues.
The Out: A squat statue in one corner of the room is covered with arcane runes. A few minor action arcana checks reveals a strange series of sigils on the statue’s face. Someone trained in arcana can perform three standard action arcana checks to disable the beams and quiet the hissing statues. When quieted, the serpents slither back into their pit. Instead of three standard action checks, the arcane-trained PC can use minor actions but risks arcane damage on failed checks. You might even replace these skill checks with a puzzle of some sort such as a Strimko puzzle with numbers replaced by symbols.
Multiple options for ending combat early
These are just a few examples of “outs” you can build into your encounters. The key is to always give yourself and your players options to finish up a battle without simply stepping out of the game and calling it over or sticking around to the bitter end. In-game skill checks, alternative goals, and battle-ending puzzles can give you a few different options for keeping your battles fast, unique, and fun.
Combat speed in D&D is an oft-debated topic, and while much of the conversation is useful, I have one method that I trumpet above all others to make your combats take less time and work better as a scene in your game, and that’s the combat “out.” Since this technique is primarily in the hands of the DM and takes place in the story instead of the rules, it’s easier to implement than a lot of suggestions and is useful for most RPGs, not just D&D.
Though it’s a technique I’ve discussed before, to recap the core of the method:
To start, put yourself in the situation and in the mind of the adversaries. Now make sure you know their goals. Why are they fighting? What do they want to get out of it? Would they be open to negotiation? Is their heart really in the fight, or is there something else forcing them? Is one of the bad guys in the fight in charge? And so on.
From there, you can develop alternatives to having the fight just go all the way to the bitter end. Some examples that could result from the above questions:
The elven brigands want an item from the PCs, and will focus on the PC with the item. If they can steal it, they’ll run away from the fight with it.
The bad guys are a mercenary company. If too many of them are bloodied or killed, they’ll stage a tactical retreat. Alternatively, they respond well to offers of gold pieces.
The orc is bossing around the goblins and getting them to fight. If the orc drops, the goblins take parting shots, grab their payment from the orc’s body, and get out of there.
The hobgoblins operate as a brave unified fighting force- until there’s only one of them left. Then he pleads for his life to fight another day.
The crazed wizard has summoned a group of elementals to help him fight. They are bound to his life force, so if he is killed, they’re banished back to the Elemental Chaos where they came from.
The only thing keeping the zombie horde controlled is the will of the vampire necromancer. Stake him, and they begin to attack randomly.
Caiphon, the Whisperer in Dreams, destroys the dream world around the PCs. They can’t fight him, they can only hope to escape through the portal… which is being guarded by ravenous beasts.
The summoned primordial is bound to a powerful artifact. By severing it from its wielder, the primordial returns to slumber.
The demon queen draws her power from multiple portals to abyssal planes. By closing those portals, much of her power is cut off.
The flight of dragons is only interested in hit and run tactics. They will not stand and fight, but instead engage, deal out some damage, then fly away.
The homunculi are all armed with self-destruct spells, in case their gnomish master is killed.
As you can see, not only do you have a technique to shorten combats, you also have an effective technique to build interesting encounters. Use of this method encourages skill checks/challenges, dialogue, roleplaying, and creativity in combat. Not only that, but it makes it easier to use a wider range of relative power level of creature- it just means that fighting becomes less of an option, and using the out becomes more important.
Will this work for every fight? No. While there are plenty of options to create outs in fights with fighting mindless killing machines, it’s not going to always be an option. As the always insightful Sly Flourish says, sometimes you just want to fight a Gelatinous Cube and not have it take an hour, which this technique doesn’t help with.
What it does help with, however, is to take those encounters that are fights to the death and make them more important by comparison. If there’s usually a chance that the fight isn’t going to end with death on both sides (or that death can be sped up due to thoughtful play), the ones that are more serious have a bigger impact. That’s when the players know to pull out some of the big guns. Thus, your overall time in combat is reduced, and I hope, more rewarding.
In a given fight, have alternate means for the combat to end beyond the D&D default “one side is dead.”