Alongside exploration and social interaction, combat is one of the three pillars of play in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dungeons & Dragons. Every action that your players take in D&D or any other roleplaying game will fall neatly into one of these pillars.🅷 While some roleplaying games fa🐓vor one of the other pillars, combat is undoubtedly D&D's sacred cow.

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Dungeons & Dragons: 10 🔴Environmental Hazards To Use In Combat

As a DM, you can use these environmental hazards to make comba🅘t in your D&D campaign more int😼eresting.

All you need to do to confirm this statement is take a look at the game's rules. Well over eighty percent of them are concerned with combat. Consequently, getting the most out of our combats is paramount to running a great D&D session꧃ and factoring in the weather is one easy way to always make your combats feel different and dynamic.

Obscuring Vision

A kobold thief is overwhelmed by dust in the city streets
You Look Upon The Tarrasque by Kekai Kotaki

Perhaps the simplest way to involve weather in your combats is to make it reduce the sight range of creatures. A heavy precipitation, thick fog, or snow storm might reduce vision to 60 feet, 30 feet, or less. This will force ranged combatants into close quarters whe꧙re they will be much less comfortable.

Instead of outright disallowing ranged attacks, one of these weather effects might just apply disadvantage to attack rolls made outside of a certain range. Alternatively,🅘 bad weather li🦄ke this could only have the effect of causing perception checks to be made at disadvantage.

Applying disadvantage to attacks made at a certain range willℱ severely hamper rogues in particular as it will prevent them from making Sneak Attacks at range.

If you really want your opponents to have a leg up on the party, make the effect asymmetrical. The adventuring party might suffer disadvantage on attacks at a certain range while the monsters don't. This might seem unfair, but there are tons of explanations for why monsters😼 wouldn't have an issue with a weather effect.

For example, they could b𓃲e natives to a foggy environment experienced in peering through the haze,♔ elemental creatures who are one with the snow or rain, or simply have some kind of magic ability or spell cast upon them that allows them to ignore the weather effect.

Asymmetrical combat circumstances are great for providing a challenge but using them too often will get under the players' skin. Most combat▨ encounters should feel fair.

Saving Against Exhaustion Or Status Effects

Ropes pinned into a mountainside
Mountain by Sam White

Another common way to involve the weather is by forcing your players to save against exhaustion when exposed to certain environments. The interior of a volcano, a winter storm on a mountainside, or a flooding river in the middle of a battlefield are all exa𓆏mples of places where you might call 🐈for characters to save against exhaustion.

While you can make an entire battlefield force the characters to save against exhaustion while in combat there, it can be more inte🌳resting to make only portions of the battlefield force characters to save against it.

Exhaustion c🦄omes in multiple levels that continually worsen as a character fails more saves. If enough of these rolls are failed, a character will end up outright dead. Here's a table examining the consequences.

Exhaustion Level

Penalty

1

Disadvantage on ability checks

2

Movement speed halved

3

Disadvantage on attack rolls and saves

4

Hit point maximum halved

5

Movement speed reduced to zero

6

Instant death (no death saves)

The exhaustion mechanics found in Fifth Edition have been viewed by some as especially harsh. Thankfully﷽, you can use the exhaustion mechanics coming to the next edition of D&D if you or your players feel this way.

Having all your players make their saves against exhaustion simultaneously at the 💦end of a combat round is easier to manage than reminding each player to save at the end of their turn.

In the next edition, a level of exhaustion provides a -1 penalty to a character's d20 rolls and spell save Difficulty Class (DC). This penalty can stack up to a total of -10. If a cha༺racter reaches ten levels of exhaustion, they die.

A failed save while in an area of bad weather might also impose 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:status effects such as blinded, deafened poisoned, and restrained. In extreme cases, weather might even paralyze or stun a creature. Exiting the area of bad weather might immediately cure the associated status effect. Then again,𝔍 it might not. As always, the harshness of your encounter design is left to yo📖u.

It might feel nice to chanꦕge how weather affects a character that's struggling against it, however, players will notice if someone is receiving pre🌠ferential treatment. Better to be harsh and fair than kind and partisan.

Slippery Surfaces

A warrior approaches a whirlpool in a ruin
Morphic Pool by Chris Ostrowski

Rain or ice can make for especially slippery surfaces that require a Dexterity saving throw to cross without falling prone. Charaꦚcters with a decent passive perception might notice that they could slip on these surfaces while those who aren't as perceptive will have to just move through them to find out.

You can rule that slipping on one of these surfaces either interrupts your movement or reduces your speed to zero entirely. It's up to you how punishing you want the mechanic to be. Additionally, you might rule that the slippery area also counts as difficult terrain.

Melee attacks made against𒅌 a prone creature are rolled at advantage. As a result, slipping and losing the rest of your movement nearby a handful of enemies can easily result in the end of a character's life.

Slipping on a narrow crossing such as a bridge may also result in a character falling off the edge of the platform. If you want to be forgiving, you can give a character who slips in one of these spaces an ꦯAcrobatics check or additional Dexterity saving throw to catch ꦜthe ledge before plummeting off the side.

Persistent Damage

An adventurer with a lantern moves through a cave filled with gaseous mushrooms
Swamp by Piotr Dura

Yet another way to use weather in combat is to make it deal damage to characters subjected to it. Acid rain, hail, falling meteors, and more are all possible weather conditions that might ⛦damage creatures standing in them.

You can make this damage nearly unavoidable by subjecting an entire battlefield to it, providing the party an opportunity to cast a spell or perform an action that might provide them cover from the reoccurring damage.ꦿ This is a g🦂reat way to reduce a party's hit point total before a climactic encounter.

The damage these types of weather deal should only be unavoidable if it deals a relatively small amount . Otherwise, allow characters to make a Constitution saving throw or other relevant ability check to avoid🦂 the damage or reduce it by half.

Alternatively, you can construct a battlefield that already has areas of cover from the damaging weather. Fill these areas with enemies who can forcibly move other creatures out of the cover and into the damaging weather, an⛎d you'☂ve got a spicy encounter brewing.

Monsters with high Strength can use the Shove action fairly reliably to move creatures where they wish. Alternatively, you could have them grapple and throw characters🌠 back into the damaging weather conditions. Give a monster proficiency in Athletics if you want🌜 them to truly excel at this strategy.

Environmental Disasters

A storm giant reaches with lightning from the waves towards adventurers on a boat
Hall of Storm Giants (Variant) by Alex Stone

Finally, you can use weather to have an environmental disaster like a hurricane, fire tornado, flood, volcanic eruption, meteor shower, or earthquake be visited upon the party. These types of weather effects bring the utmost extremes to a combat encounter and should be used sparingly.

That being said, they are perfect for a climactic boss encounter at the end of a campaign arc or one shot. An environmental disaster in a combat encounter might challenge characters with some of or all of the previously mentioned weather effects simultaneously.

Alternatively, the disaster could move around the battlefield like an invulnerable enemy causing anyone caught in its wake to make a deadly ability check or saving throw. Rolling a d4 or d8 to decide the cardinal direction the disasters moves in is the safest and fꦗairest way to decide its movement🅷.

That being said, you could also introduce some method to the disaster's madness. The disaster may have a specific movement pattern that discerning players can identify and use to their advantage. Whatever method you choose, the saving throw this disaster requires should be brutal and even creatures who save against it should suffer some kind of harmful effect.

Weather conditions are often overlooked in D&D, but they can offer a ton of interesting parameters to the encounters we build. Beyond that, changing weather makꦯes your game world feel bo🎃th alive and lived in. After all, strangers do like to default to talking about the weather, don't they?

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Dungeons & Dragons: 10 Tips For Dungeon Masters To Ba♓lance Encounters

As a DM, you probably want your encounters to be challenging but not impossible. Here are some tips to ensure they're🉐 balanced.