How is Combat Objective?
The Straight Dope
In Monster-fighting games like D&D there exists a “problem” around a core part of the game, namely combat. More often than not, people playing the game find themselves in this exact scenario or one like it: The fight has turned into a slog. The combat is on its 5th round and the PCs have spent most of that time chasing down one particular enemy that just won’t go down. The fight has lost all tension, the PCs aren’t in any real danger of dying but also aren’t in a position to end the fight quickly. A player turns to their neighbour and asks: “Why are we doing this again?”
If this is you, then one solution to your problem is Combat Objectives, most recently found in MCDM’s Draw Steel. The thing is, Combat Objectives are not a magic bullet, and need to be deployed in a smart and responsible way. Ok that last part is optional, but you should at least be smart about it.
Every ttrpg that has combat uses some form of combat objective. This is because combat is usually done by sentient beings in the violent pursuit of some kind of goal. If there is combat in your games, then you most likely have stumbled across this particular phenomenon: a lot of encounters boil down to some variation of “Kill all monsters”, which will get boring for at least someone at the table over time. A game shouldn’t be boring, so when you inevitably ask around for advice on how to make combat interesting, you’ll invariably land on someone who will suggest helpfully: “Why don’t you try giving your combats objectives other than Kill all Enemies?”
Whoever told you this means well. They want to help. But if they don’t follow up with some version of “and here’s how you do it” then they have done you a disservice, because what they are asking you to do is design an entirely different type of encounter than what 90% of the advice out there is telling you to design.
Before I start going down another rabbit hole, however, let me get something off my chest.
Why is Combat Objective?
There is a notably vocal subsection of people playing the Original Monster-Fighting Game (OMFG), as well as games following the OSR tradition, that tends to use the same stick to encourage the players to come up with alternate objectives: Lethality. A lot of gabble surrounding OSR games is usually some variation of : combat is quick and deadly, not like that other game (We don’t talk about her). This is largely a reaction to the increased survivability of characters post 3e in the OMFG as the culture of play moved away from the survival horror implications of dungeoncrawling. It is also a massive culture shift if you come from those editions expecting your character to be able to tank more than a single hit from a goblin. Lethality then becomes a stick with which designers and GMs can use to bring players into the correct behavior for playing more cautiously and inventively.
Don’t get me wrong, lethality is one hell of a stick. It has the distinct advantage of being simple and effective. PCs generally don’t want to die, and will get very creative to avoid this state of affairs. This fits well with the general ethos of the OSR, which is to encourage players to come up with solutions to whatever problems the GM throws at them, with the GM encouraged to concoct ever more twisted horrors dressed up as problem projectiles they can throw at their leisure.
What is fundamentally true to making encounters more deadly is that it often forces players to give up on brute forcing their way through the encounter and come up with an alternative win condition, and despite what the propaganda has been telling you: TTRPG players want to win. The problem with Lethality is that it’s a stick, and sometimes people break sticks. Let me explain…
It is very easy to use the Lethality Stick™ for a given party of PCs no matter what system you use. Plonk a sufficient amount of kobolds, goblins, skeletons, what have you, and you can kill off most PCs. This is, however, not a good tool if you want to do anything else except beat back the players by putting their PCs in mortal danger. If the players, for any reason, no longer care about their character, then the Lethality Stick™ loses its power. Even worse, too many encounters that only use the Stick can lead to an arms race just as surely as min/maxing will. At that point, encounter design is purely systematic and we’re just doing variations of Kill All Enemies again. It’s a matter of whose math is better. That may sound like someone’s idea of fun, but it’s not mine.
Lethality is a way to incentivize creative solutions, especially if your system of choice does not allow for a lot of vertical character progression (aka you get better at hitting stuff and tanking damage as you level up), but it relies on a single overarching motivation for both players and their characters: Survive. If your players are smart, they will come up with ways to mitigate the ordinary dangers of the dungeon or the adventure, and if your system is of the power-fantasy variety (see later editions of D&D, Pathfinder, and Draw Steel) then their characters will be more likely to survive whatever dangers you throw at them.
Regardless of what system you use, if it has rules for combat it expects you to get into fights. If the only outcome of victory is "I get to fight another day" the game can get boring very fast as combat becomes this necessary evil you need to accomplish in order to keep playing. Fear of death or character loss is a negative motivator. It only incentivizes behavior that avoids the negative outcome and not behavior that seeks out new opportunities. In some games, like most dungeoncrawlers, this balancing act between the curiosity needed to explore the dungeon but also the caution that allows you to keep exploring the dungeon is part and parcel of the game. The problem then becomes : how do I challenge the players in ways other than by threatening their characters with death and dismemberment? This is why we need combat objectives.
What is Combat Objective?
Any combat is an encounter, with a beginning, middle, and end. Designing an encounter, even on the fly, requires that we think about those things with some intentionality. By my reckoning, encounter design is done on two levels:
System
Narrative
Systematic encounter design is concerned mostly with math: the balance of hit points and damage numbers, the size of a battlefield and the number of enemies. Systematic design is what is meant by most of the advice you’ll find around “encounter-building” in GM guides, youtube videos, or your buddy Alex at the game store. “Balance” tends to be an important buzzword in these conversations, specifically whether or not it’s important to “balance encounters”.
Narrative encounter design is largely left up to the individual, or if it is mentioned, it’s usually to oppose it to systematic design. This kind of design is more interested in how a given combat encounter fits in the narrative of the broader adventure or campaign, and worries about things like stakes and drama. A lot of people online think these two types of encounter design are antithetical. In my opinion, you need both to make a successful combat encounter, and combat objectives must contend with both to be effective.
An encounter that emerges from the narrative is more like a tense situation that erupts into a fist fight. You can usually see it coming if you pay attention, but it's chaos once the first punch is thrown. A combat encounter that cleaves to systematic design is less of a brawl and more like a duel, or an assault. Both sides know why the other is there and the stakes are clear. Each side wins by accomplishing their objective. That is what is important.
A combat objective puts a definite end to the encounter, which is why Kill all Enemies is usually the path of least resistance for most player groups and why ill-supported combat objectives fail. If it’s easier to kill all enemies, that’s what the players will do. Systems that tend towards heroic fantasy, such as D&D after 2nd Edition, Pathfinder, Daggerheart, Draw Steel, are particularly prone to this because most characters are designed to deal a lot of damage and take a lot of damage. This drags on combat encounters, which is bad news if all you’re doing is trading blows with the monster for 5 rounds.
If the PCs can get past the Necromancer and her skeleton minions to reach the lever, then the acid stops flooding the room with the party’s favourite kobold. In this case the Combat Objective is “Save the Kobold”. Reaching the lever is a possible solution, diving into the acid to rescue the kobold at a PC’s own risk is another. If, however, the quickest way to save the Kobold is to Kill the Necromancer, then we’ve failed to design an encounter with an alternative Combat Objective. We’ve just made Kill All Enemies with extra steps.
The major obstacle in making a Combat Objective relevant is by forgetting that players in general, want the butter and the money for the butter. In other words, they want to win with the least amount of risk possible. Fortunately, this is an easy problem to solve: make Kill All Enemies the more risky option. This is where the Lethality Stick™ is useful. If the trade off for Killing All Enemies is that the PCs suffer damage and possibly die, then in some games that is enough to deter a frontal assault. But if the players don’t care about PC death, then the Lethality Stick is no longer enough to motivate them. You need other tools.
Lethality is the salt of encounter design. It’s good, and most encounters need some lethality like most dishes need some salt. However, if all you bring to your combats is a bunch of enemies that can hit hard, then it’s like using salt as the only seasoning in all of your dishes. You need variety. You need Spice. That’s what a combat objective is.
Who is Combat Objective?
We’ve established that Combat Objectives are meant to provide variety to the kinds of Combat Encounters you can design for a game. We’ve also previously established that Combat Objectives cater to both Systematic and Narrative Design. This is possible because Objectives are things you can only accomplish by engaging with the system, but whose success or failure serves the narrative. Whether your narrative is emerging or not, combat serves as an inflexion point in the story that is being written by the PCs noble and fell deeds. This is another reason why Lethal Encounters™ can’t be the only solution to boring combats. Ending the narrative early is sometimes not what is required by the moment. Sometimes what is required is a challenge, a puzzle that the players must solve by thinking about what their characters are going to do. It all boils down to the fundamental question: What do you do?
Unlike most puzzles and riddles you find for D&D and other such games, a combat encounter is not solved just because the players know the solution. Finding the solution is the easy part. Executing it should be the challenge. As such, whenever there is an alternative combat objective, it should be clear to the players what it is. This should be made clear in no uncertain terms, if the GM needs to spell it out to the players, then that’s what they do. If the GM feels the characters don’t have the knowledge necessary to understand what the combat objective is, then that is a kind of failure state. The players failed to gather enough information, and now they have to face a more difficult encounter. If encounters are problems with no set solution, Combat Objectives are then the conditions of the test.
One such condition is Knowledge of Stakes. If the players know what's at stake, they can more easily identify what is and isn't a major objective. If the players realize that Lovable Kobold NPC is held in the bowels of the villain's stronghold, they might choose a different approach than "Bust down the door, loot the room" even if they could do that.
Another condition is the Enemies themselves. PCs are not the only ones who want to do things. During a combat, the combat objective can be something the enemies want to accomplish and it’s up to the players to not let them win. This works well with Boss Fights or when the Players come into a situation without all the information, in which case it serves as a focus for their improvised plan. Stumble onto the Necromancer trying to turn the Kobold NPC into goo? Now you have a problem, so what are you going to do?
Yet another condition is the location in which combat takes place. Running to save Lovable Kobold NPC may not be desirable or even possible if they're suspended on a chain above a vat of acid, so the objective changes according to the terrain. Which brings me to my next point.
Where is Combat Objective?
If I had my druthers, every GM and adventure designer would write a 10-page dissertation about their favourite battlemap and how it changes the nature of combat by its very shape. Altering the shape of the battlefield is an excellent way to make a combat encounter interesting, not least of which because it is one of the conditions of the test. If the PCs must cross a maze of catwalks to fight the Necromancer and simply walk 10 feet to pull the lever and save the kobold, it’s no surprise which options they’ll take.
Depending on the rule system you’re using, the actual details of the map that’ll be useful will change, but in general differences in height, walls and other forms of cover will always be useful. If there’s something about the room that the PCs can mess with to change the terrain― and therefore the conditions of the test― then that should be obvious to the players.
Of course, Crossing the Map can be an Objective in and of itself, complicated with changes in terrain, a moving wall of Bad Stuff putting the pressure on the players, but the larger point is that choosing the terrain determines what kind of objective you are going to set for the encounter. If the PCs must Stop the Ritual, then you need to answer the question: “How is the terrain going to make their lives difficult?” Maybe the ritual is being set across several points on the map that the heroes must reach while evading the brunt of the enemy forces. Maybe the ritual requires someone to hop between planes to cross impossible distances. All of these are problems that Kill All Enemies can’t solve, or can’t solve easily.
When is Combat Objective?
If the shape of the battlefield is one of the conditions of the test, then Time is yet another. If the PCs have all the time in the world to save the Kobold, then there is time to Kill All Enemies. If the Kobold will be drenched in acid and die in 3 rounds, then all of a sudden Killing All Enemies ceases to be a priority right quick.Any party can fight for 5 rounds, but completing the objective in 3 rounds or less is another matter. This can be explicit in the encounter design or gated behind another condition― such as until the enemies blast through a door― but the result is the same. Even the Lethality Stick is a kind of time pressure: how many rounds can you last before you need to retreat?
Setting a time limit to your combat is also a great way to avoid a slog. Hard to have a 6-round combat that goes one for 3 hours if there is a 3-round timer. There may be a time when you don’t need to apply time pressure to an encounter, just as there may be a time where a plain arena is what you need, or just as the enemies don’t need a complex goal to accomplish. These are all conditions of the test, and as long as the easiest solution to the test is not Kill All Enemies, then you will have no problem setting alternative combat objectives.
So How is Combat Objective?
Combat Objectives are a framing device for your combat encounters, no matter if they're improvised or set-piece, no matter if you're using 5e (though I will ask you sincerely in my best Werner Herzog: Why?) or OSE or Mörk Borg or Draw Steel, if your game care about combat then it benefits from combat objectives. What those objectives are depend on the narrative situation and the mechanical considerations of your table, so I shan't go over the various types here (though that may be another post.)
When you think about combat in your games (and you should think about it), just keep in mind the reasons for the violence, so that you don't look back at the session in horrific boredom and tell yourself: "man what a slog."