Better Dungeon Master Tactics!

"There's lots of different schools of thought on this. I tend to think the purpose of the GM is to add friction and challenge and obstacle, but not really to aim for fatality. Because if that's the point, it's trivially easy; I have infinite dragons!" I love this take, I'm showing it to my group immediately :D

Level 12 Encounter Tip: Just banish the demon. In BG3, if successful, the demon would be removed temporarily so you can focus on the other stuff. In TTRPG, if successful, so long as the caster doesn't lose concentration- the spawner is made a COMPLETE noncombatant, and would never return so long as you aren't in the Abyss.

One thing DnD4E did well was try to teach GM's tactics through the use of common video game terms that were analogous to leaders, tank, DPS (ranged/melee), nukers, buffs/debuffers, healers, etc... Once you start doing that and begin planning encounter groups with a mix of monster types rather than say copy/paste monsters, the depth of many ttrpgs opens up greatly just from the mechanics angle alone.

I actually did this once with a Gnoll warband generated through Volo's Guide to Monsters. Since it was supposed to be something where the village was doomed, i decided to tell everyone to make a quick 5th level character and it would give them a sense of the oncoming danger as these characters... Which were heroes in their own right... Were attacked by a vicious warband, fighting desperately to drive off the gnolls and save as many people as they could before their actual level 1 heroes could return to their hometown. The only hero that managed to survive was the 5th level fighter after he lost his arm to a Maw Demon that was traveling with the pack. The Gnoll Hunters with barbed arrows slowed people down, the dual-dagger wielding berzerkers slaughtered, the regular gnolls felt endless and the Flind was terrifying. It was an awesome way to start the campaign.

"i have infinite dragons" got a chuckle out of me. I am really excited by the fact that my current play group geniuniely thinks i am trying to kill them every session. Lets me know i am doing it right.

I love the enemy archetypes you laid out here. They feel like they are incredably useful, especially if you think of them how the creature is used in the battle and not a universal rule. A direwolf could be a 'brute' in one fight, but a 'cavalry' in another. As players get more and more tools and defence what was an 'artillery' unit might be treated as a 'ranged' and so on.

I know this is a minor thing, but the style of drawing the units on the paper as though the view is close to isometric is really cool!

Oh, the Act 2 Moonrise encounter was FUN. I absolutely WRECKED them by plopping a Wall of Fire at the base of the stairs and staying just out of artillery range up the stairs. A smarter AI would have avoided walking through the flames into the narrow hallway to get me.

I deployed a small summon army for that third act fight, met their chaff with my own across the entire battlefield while I punched up the right flank with the characters. I even remembered to throw my beholder bottle I kept forgetting about into their rear to cause havoc. Incredibly enjoyable encounter.

I thoroughly loved this episode, so inventive and creative without getting bogged down and crunchy! Also fun tip: 35:39 if you need to increase the size of your play area but don't have the physical space to do so, consider using 10ft squares on your battle grid instead of 5ft. For outdoor encounters (or if you're really jammed for space), 20ft squares can also be used! Anyway I'm just gonna watch the whole thing again. Cheers Kyle!

This is exactly what BG3 inspired me to. That, and giving my players enough environmental hazards - either to fall for themselves, or use to their advantage

tbh, I am no dnd player, don't have any experience on this. I just let your videos play in the background while i draw maps and such. they are such an inspiration and your good-naturedness is very soothing. Thank you!

Yessss, I love seeing some attention to tactics. So much mapping advice is focused on how to make the map pretty. Back when I was really into video game mapping, there were all kinds of tutorials about map flow, risk vs reward, chokepoints, and things like that, which are hardly ever talked about in D&D pages. I hope to see more like this!

I like the longer videos. A lot of your videos feel very condensed, like you have more to say. It's good to hear you really explore a topic.

I liked using misdirection. I sometimes hid the "elite" boss dude/dudette into one of the other units, or hid them under stealth. I didn't make them impossible to defeat, just super hard to find. If they dressed similar to the "artillery" for the mage types and the infantry or ranged for the warrior types, sometimes I had one of each working together and did away with a brute sort.

This was a fantastic video that showcased how to run tactics unbelievably well, your drawings with the commentary is so engaging and easy to follow. Its amazing how memorable these fights are just from the pictures, a real credit to BG3's design and how tactical encounters create engagement.

I really love this walk-through of encounter design because it comes from a valuable angle that is often left unexplored. 4ED was severely under appreciated by the community as a whole, and there is so much there that really does work well for the game we actually play. It may have come off as video-gamey but that's because of the intense natural language of the rules in the previous edition contrasted it so hard. I think that 4ED was a masterclass in technical writing, and user focused design, even if there were some changes that I could live happier without.

Now all we need is a copy of The Monsters Know What They’re Doing, and the party will go running for the hills

Everything you draw in this video seems so simple, but is so well placed in perspective. It is effortlessly impressive.

I always love your videos. So well put together! And they're always helpful, good job!