One of my greatest hang ups with 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons (and D&D generally, although it is more or less a problem in different editions of the game) is the length of combat encounters. Combat in 5e can sometimes take up an entire session (which I sometimes want!), but almost always, it takes up more time than I'd like. I'm always looking for prep procedures which reduce the frequency of combat and play procedures which reduce its length, so my players and I can spend more game time with exploration and social interaction.
I should probably clarify that the vast majority of my prep procedures (such as stocking wilderness hexes and dungeon rooms) use dice rolls to randomize results. I find this to be more fun and exciting as a DM, as it increases the likelihood that the content I prepare will contain elements I don't expect, or which I wouldn't normally include. D&D campaigns also tend to be long (my last one was three years), and I can't imagine not getting burned out by just deciding exactly what the player characters encounter all the time. Obviously, if a DM is confident in their ability to persistently and intentionally come up with interesting and varied encounter ideas, they can simply decide what frequency of combat encounters they want in their game, and be done with it.
That being said, reducing the frequency of combat encounters when prepping randomized content can be done in a variety of ways - namely by using reaction rolls and varying monster and nonplayer character motivations (resulting in a higher frequency of monsters and NPCs that either ignore the player characters unless engaged with or that want to get something from the player characters other than a fight), and by varying encounter distances (allowing possibly hostile monsters and NPCs to be encountered at greater distances and thus potentially be evaded).
To illustrate how these procedures and tools can impact an average D&D session, I'll use a recent session of my 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game as an example (it's not 5e, but I use procedures and tools from AD&D 2e in my 5e games, so it's still a helpful demonstration). In that session the PCs had a long trek through the wilderness and had seven random encounters.
Using a combination of reaction rolls, variable monster and NPC motivations, and variable encounter distances, I was able to reduce the frequency of combat encounters in the session. Of the seven encounters, only one resulted in combat, and that was because the players chose to instigate a fight, rather than the monster. Even so, that encounter was informed by my use of reaction rolls and motivations, and ended up being a shorter encounter as a result.
Reaction Rolls and Motivation
In my post on social interaction, I discussed reaction rolls and their near-total absence from D&D 5e. To put it briefly, reaction rolls are a great way to generate encounters which tend towards outcomes other than combat, such as monsters and NPCs that want nothing to do with the party, want something from them other than a fight, or are simply friendly or helpful.
Despite the lack of official support for reaction rolls in 5e, I highly recommend implementing them to any DM who wants to spend less game time in combat. For best results, reaction rolls should be combined with the DM's clever attribution of monster motivations.
The range of monster and NPC motivations is nearly limitless (for intelligent creatures, it as limitless as the motivations that humans have in the real world - in a fantasy setting, it is even more limitless, if that makes sense). There's no great way to generate motivations randomly - no single table exists which captures the full spectrum of possibilities, as far as I'm aware.
A given monster's motivations can be determined by reading the monster's description and combining it with the reaction roll and contextual details like the environment in which they're encountered, the history of the place, what other locations, monsters, and NPCs are nearby, and what the monster or NPC's relationship to those things is. This is truly dependent on the DM's imagination.
For help determining motivations, 5e's DMG has a section on creating nonplayer characters (Chapter 4, page 88), which includes tables for ideals, bonds, flaws, and secrets (pages 90-91), as well as villainous motivations (page 94). I also occasionally assign a humanoid or humanoid-ish NPC or monster a player background and use the tables in the background's description to determine these things. For example, a knowledge-hungry mind flayer might use the sage background, a zealous celestial might be treated as an acolyte, and a militant fire giant king might be treated as a soldier.
Tasha's Cauldron of Everything also has a table of monsters' desires (page 148), organized by monster type, which can sometimes be helpful, although the table entries are very limited, with just four entries per monster type.
Keith Ammann, of The Monsters Know What They're Doing, also has a great post on What Monsters Want, which is similarly organized by monster type, and can be used to determine the general motivations of a type of monster when the specific monster's description does not provide such information.
When I roll a hostile encounter with a monster, for example, that indicates only that the monster or NPC has decided that attacking the party is the best way to achieve its goal, whatever that may be. It might be that their goal is to kill all the PCs, to kill just one of them, to force them to surrender, or to drive them away from a location.
For example, a group of skeletons might simply hate the living and wish to kill them all. They might also only want to kill the party's cleric or paladin. They might have orders from their master to subdue any intruders in the master's lair. Or, they might just want to drive intruders away from their sacred crypt.
In my aforementioned AD&D session, the one combat encounter was with a giant toad whose reaction roll was actually friendly. I decided that the toad had come to associate humans with food, and was looking for a free meal from the party. That is, it didn't want to fight, so as soon as it was attacked, it fled. A combat encounter occurred in spite of the toad's reaction roll and motivation, but the encounter was shortened because I had these additional elements in mind.
Other encounters were with indifferent creatures, whose motivation was to avoid engaging with the party entirely. They may have had other motivations, like simply surviving, or searching for less well-armed prey, but these motivations weren't relevant to play, so they didn't come up.
Other encounters were friendly - the mother brown bear who came to the party's camp in search of food, or the wereboar foresters who wanted to share the party's campfire. These were opportunities for quick thinking and cautious play on the players' part, and for social interaction and information gathering, respectively.
The forest people, who had an unfriendly reaction, were motivated to determine the party's own motivations (because of their alignment, Neutral Evil, they had another, secret motivation which will likely come up in future sessions). They were carefully negotiated with and went on their way.
Of the seven encounters, only one was with a creature whose reaction roll was hostile, which is where another element - variable encounter distance - came into play to avoid a time-consuming combat encounter.
Encounter Distance
I use dice to determine encounter distance - that is, how far apart the party and the monsters are when they first become aware of one another.
5e didn't have any published rules for determining encounter distance until the publication of the Dungeon Master Screen: Wilderness Kit in 2020. The kit includes the following table on the DM screen:
The table includes both encounter distance based on terrain (which I take to mean the distance at which the two sides first spot each other) as well as audible distance (the distance at which the two sides first hear each other). This table is less comprehensive than similar tables found in past editions of the game, so I merged it with the Encounter Distance table in the 2e DMG (Table 58, page 139) and ended up with the table below:
When determining encounter distance, I usually roll both sight-based and hearing-based distances and take the greater of the two (i.e., I determine whether the two sides spot each other first or hear each other first, which is when the encounter begins).
Generating variable encounter distances this way can also reduce the frequency of combat encounters. Referring again to my recent AD&D 2e play report, the one hostile encounter I rolled was with a will o'wisp (which would have almost certainly resulted in a TPK if, for example, the wisp appeared 30 to 60 feet away and simply started attacking).
Because the encounter occurred in the mountains, and I rolled to determine the encounter's distance, the wisp ended up being hundreds of feet from the party. Based on this information (and the will o'wisp's motivation, which was to lure members of the party away from camp to their death), I determined that the wisp would attack only if the party came within its reach, which they did not (despite its efforts to lure them to it).
Later, the party encountered a hill giant. The hill giant ended up being indifferent, but if it had been hostile, this would have been another likely TPK scenario. Again, the encounter was in the mountains, hundreds of feet away. If the encounter had turned bad, the party would have had a very good chance to escape - the giant's movement speed is equal to the party's, so a chase would have ensued, with very little opportunity for the giant to close ground, meaning it would have eventually given up.
I'd say that at the very least, the tools I use to reduce encounter frequency are working. So what about combat length?
Reducing the length of combat encounters can also be done in several ways, by varying encounter difficulty and the amount of encounter "engineering" (additional elements like variable terrain, verticality, different monster types, area effects, traps, and the like, all of which can slow a combat down), using common sense to determine when an encounter's "dramatic question" has been answered, and using morale rules. Sometimes simply asking the players if they're ready for combat to be over is okay, too.
Combat Difficulty
In prep for my 5e games, I use a simple d10 table to determine if an encounter should be easy, medium, hard, or deadly:
d10 Encounter Difficulty
1-2 Easy
3-6 Medium
7-9 Hard
10 Deadly
This creates a nice distribution of difficulty, with easy and medium combat encounters being straight forward and resolved fairly quickly, hard encounters being slightly more taxing and having one or two additional elements like terrain or area effects, and deadly encounters being "set piece" encounters, usually with legendary monsters, lair actions, minions, variable terrain, verticality, area effects, traps, and the like - the kind of encounters I want to take up a large chunk of a session.
Hit Point Bloat
I find that the biggest offender with regards to lengthy combats in 5e is hit point bloat. In modern D&D, player characters gain a hit die at every level from 1 to 20, plus their Constitution modifier, and sometimes additional hit points from their race, class, feats, etc. The size of a monster's hit dice is determined by the monster's size category. They have a seemingly arbitrary number of hit dice, and they gain a Constitution bonus for every hit die they have.
These factors can combine to lead to PCs with upwards of 300 hit points by the end of the game, and monsters with even more. A particularly loathsome recent development in monster design is the "Mythic" monster, which is a "boss" monster that immediately regains all of its HP after being reduced to 0, at which point the PCs have to fight it all over again, albeit with a few new abilities - fun!
It used to be that PCs stopped gaining hit dice at a certain level, instead gaining a set amount of hit points at each level thereafter. It used to be that monsters all had a d8 hit die, and they didn't gain bonus hit points from Constitution (because they didn't have a Constitution score), although some monsters added or subtracted hit points on top of their hit dice to represent their toughness or fragility, respectively. This made combat in older editions feel quick and lethal once wounds were dealt, especially at high levels, when PC hit point scaling changes.
There's not a great way to address hit point bloat in 5e without simply reducing monster hit points, which might have several other mathematical implications which I don't want to analyze, so I'm reticent to tamper with the numbers or discuss it here.
Instead, I'll say that it behooves the DM to learn to recognize when an encounter is "basically over" - a monster with one hit point is basically dead, and a group of monsters which is likely to be killed before their turn comes around again is basically defeated. If the encounter is likely to end without the party using or losing additional resources like hit points, spell slots, abilities which are regained on a short or long rest, consumable items, or magic item charges, then the "dramatic question" of the encounter is probably answered, and combat can be concluded. Even shortening an encounter by just one round can save roughly 20 minutes at some tables.
Morale
Another way to mitigate hit point bloat - which is more concrete and in which I'm more confident - is to use morale.
In older editions of D&D, every monster had a morale score, which the DM could roll against when appropriate to determine if monsters fled or surrendered. I started using morale in my 5e games years ago, and it has consistently resulted in much shorter combat encounters.
An optional rule for morale in 5e uses a DC 10 Wisdom saving throw to determine if a monster flees combat or not (DMG, page 273). I find this unsatisfying, as it leads to monsters with particularly high Wisdom saving throw bonuses being basically immune to morale failure. A powerful wizard, dragon, giant, or the like may never flee or surrender, which might be satisfying for some DMs, but I personally like the possibility of all creatures having some degree of self-preservation.
Even the most arrogant wizard might teleport away to recover from a battle and seek vengeance on the PCs. An ancient dragon must choose between the indignities of abandoning its lair to adventurers or being slain by them. Extraplanar creatures, who might reform on their home plane, may not want to experience the pain of "death" and the inconvenience of finding a way to return to the mortal plane.
Undead, who traditionally don't make morale checks in older editions of D&D, may on the brink of destruction remember some element of their past lives, and seek to cling to what "life" they now have left. Constructs are a bit harder to justify - when they fail a morale check, I usually treat it as if their magical programming has gone haywire, and they begin acting in irrational or random ways. The DM can certainly rule that certain monster types are exempt from the morale mechanics if they wish.
To introduce more complexity, instead of using a flat DC 10 Wisdom saving throw, I set the DC at 10 to start, and use a variety of modifiers to increase or decrease the DC depending on the situation. As combat unfolds, I track the monsters' morale DC alongside their hit points. When certain prerequisites are met, I check for morale failures, and combat ends when all monsters have been killed or subdued, or have surrendered or fled.
The pursuit that sometimes occurs after a morale failure can also drag down the game. I often use quick, common sense rulings to resolve these situations. If monsters flee, I ask the players if they wish to pursue. If it's a foregone conclusion that the PCs will catch the monsters, and the monsters think it's likely that the PCs will spare them, I'll have them surrender, and we'll move on to the social interaction part of the game. If the players want to run them down and kill them, I say, "Okay, you do that," and we move on. The monster's morale is broken and it's not fighting back anymore, so combat is over - no need to roll to hit or for damage.
If it's in doubt as to whether or not the PCs can catch the monsters (the monsters are faster or have a unique means of escape like burrowing, climbing, flying, swimming, squeezing through cracks, etc., or the monsters flee in the direction of more monsters, traps, etc.), then the dramatic question of the encounter has changed, and we continue to play out the scenario as a chase. The context has changed, so I view this as an exciting development in the action which is distinct from the combat scenario.
It can at first be more time-consuming for the DM to track morale in this way, but once one gets used to it, it's amazing how much more quickly combats can end. In another recent session of my AD&D 2e game, the party battled a group of mercenaries at the entrance to a ruined tower. It took a few rounds for the tide of battle to turn in the PCs' favor, but once the mercenaries had a few casualties, their morale broke quickly and consistently, and the combat ended just a few rounds later, which likely saved us a half hour or so of time that would have been spent resolving several more combat rounds otherwise.
Of course, this morale system isn't applied to PCs, as players control their characters' actions absolutely (unless charmed, dominated, compelled, possessed, etc.). That being said, I did have one player who asked for my morale rules and used them to determine their PC's actions in combat. The rest of the players did not appreciate this, but I'm always happy to let my players use dice to dictate their characters' actions if they want.
A summary of my morale rules for 5e, which includes when to check for morale and the various DC modifiers, can be found here. The modifiers are mostly lifted from AD&D 2e, with a few changes that I felt fit with 5e.
It's worth pointing out that using a Wisdom saving throw for morale is a bit weird - if a "wise" monster sees that the battle has turned against them and successfully tests wisdom, wouldn't they exercise that wisdom to make a tactical retreat? I'm personally fine with this bit of dissonance - since most effects which cause fear in 5e are resisted using a Wisdom save, I don't see any problem with using Wisdom to overcome non-magical fear as well. Wisdom is a weird attribute - I find it best not to think about it too much.
A simpler method also exists, which is to use morale ratings outlined in past editions to determine a monster's morale. AD&D 2e provides the following guidelines for morale ratings:
2-4 UnreliableIf the monster existed in 2e (from what I can tell, 2e is the only edition which assigned specific morale values to specific monsters), the monster's morale rating from that edition can be used. If not, the DM can assign an appropriate morale rating based on their own judgment. Alternatively, in 5e, the monster's Wisdom score could simply be treated as its morale score.
The point here is for the DM to use morale - the exact method isn't strictly important.
A Combat Game
Some people say that because D&D (and 5e in particular) has more codified rules for combat than anything else, that D&D is a combat game. Its structured rules make it seem easier to run. Its eats up time at the table, meaning that a DM can usually prepare a combat encounter, and nothing else, and have enough content for a session or most of a session. Because people think D&D is a combat game, many tables mostly run combat encounters. Because tables mostly run combat encounters, combat gets more rules. As combat gets more rules, it takes longer to resolve, and people believe even more strongly that D&D is a combat game.
I strongly disagree, and find time spent on exploration and social interaction to be just as valuable as combat (albeit with additional structures in place to make those elements of the game more satisfying - again, referring to past editions can help with this, since 5e is lacking in noncombat procedures).
Sometimes I'm happy to run a session which is entirely combat, and it's natural for sessions like that to occur somewhat regularly over the course of a campaign. But even small, inconsequential combat encounters can often occupy a disproportionate amount of game time compared to the other modes of play, which is the issue I'm trying to resolve.
The methods I've outlined above have helped me ease the burden of combat in my games, allowing more time to be spent on other aspects of the game, and ultimately, allowing more stuff (and more interesting stuff!) to happen in my sessions.
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