Tips on Describing Combat in D&D

You fall to one knee. The large orc in front of you grips his battle ax firmly in his hands and lets out a mocking grunt. Blood drips down the blade and onto the ground. Your blood.

You look around at your companions. They are all lying on the ground bloody and unconscious. Julian might be dead. Things could not look worse. 

“Puny wizard. Drinking your blood will be a great pleasure.” The orc says through his tusked maw.

You slowly raise yourself to your feet and point at the orc with a shaking finger. “Blood for blood. This death was brought to pass by your actions feral one.” The orc begins to laugh. Then he charges you. You reach inside your tunic and pull out a simple wand of cherry wood. You point it at the orc and whisper, “Infiern”. Immediately a brilliant ball of fire is launched from the wands’ tip expanding to engulfing the entire orc. Unfortunately, you are also a bit to close to the fire and find yourself flung off your feet as the ball of flames explodes on impact with the goblinoid.

You open your eyes to see everything on fire, even you, but you can’t seem to move.

What would you like to do?

Welcome back to How to be a Better DM. I’m your host Justin Lewis and together, you and I will learn how to craft better stories as we DM sessions of Dungeons and Dragons 5e.

As always, I’m very grateful that you’ve allowed me to dig into the hobby for 8 months now and we don’t plan on stopping. You guys have been stellar in showing us what you like and what you don’t like and we will do everything we can to gratify your desires.

If there’s one thing that a lot of people struggle with, it’s describing combat. Honestly, it can be hard for any DM to make round after round after round of combat interesting. There’s a spectrum. It goes from very boring combat to perhaps too graphic and violent. So how do you describe D&D combat in the best way? This is how.

Highlights

D&D is not a movie. As much as we treat it like a movie, even going to the point of using Screen Wipes as happens in tabletop games like Star Wars, it’s not a movie. In movies, you can show every single moment of action, because in reality it only takes a couple seconds. When you use words to describe every single action in combat it takes much longer. That’s because two things can happen simultaneously in real life but you can only say one word at a time.

So with your combat, describe the highlights. Briefly describe the effect of an attack that does damage. Don’t go deep into, “You swing and miss and they swing and miss and back and forth and finally someone scores a hit.” That’s too much. You can even just give the damage and save the juicy descriptions for large amounts of damage or the end.

Realistic combat

If you’re fighting someone who is proficient with a weapon and you don’t kill them in the first hit, then that means that most of your hits do not sever limbs or slash deep gouges. Sometimes you need to be realistic in the way that you describe things. Just because you do damage mechanically doesn’t mean that you have to necessarily do damage in your narrative. Say a barbarian does 12 points of slashing damage with their battle ax. You could describe that as the ax cutting deep into the enemy’s armor, slowly deteriorating its integrity, allowing for an opening that becomes pivotal when a crucial opportunity presents itself. You don’t have to be lopping off people’s arms with every swing.

Describe the Bigger Baddies

Often in D&D, your villains will have minions. If in the same combat encounter you have a multitude of minions, then don’t waste too much extra breath on the mini baddies when you can describe the big baddies in much better detail. You don’t have to explain that the skeleton chopped when you can spend much more time describing what the Lich did. No one cares about the skeletons (for the most part). 

Follow the Flow of Combat

Combat is a story just like any other part of D&D. It has crescendos and decrescendos. The more combat seems to be difficult, the more you should indulge in describing the combat to enhance the tension. If a player is sustaining many serious wounds, then you should describe that. If the characters are decimating foes left and right, you don’t need to go into too much detail.

Narrate evenly for everyone

Though it might be more fun to describe how the wizard pulls out his wand of fireball and unleashes hell than it is to say that the rogue takes a shot on their crossbow, you should look for ways to spice it up evenly between both players.  Give everyone a chance to feel awesome.

Learn specific verbs, adverbs and adjectives

Verbs are what someone does, adverbs is how they do it and adjectives describe the effect on the subject of their verb. Here’s a small table with some words every DM should be able to use

Verb

Adverb

Adjective

slash

noiselessly

bloody

smash

quickly

bruised

slice

loudly

cold

parry

painfully

tired

stab

wearily

exhausted

cut

strongly

shaking

bludgeon

confidently

sweaty

char

weakly

tousled

blacken

deathly

disheveled

impale

hopefully

grim

It’s not a full list of words to use but it should get your brain thinking.

The Simple Formula

It’s ok to use a one sentence formula as well. Try this

You [adverb] [verb] your [enemy] with your [adjective] [weapon].

This could look like:

You weakly char your orcish foe with your fiery Wand of Fireballs.

Simple.

Now that’s not an exhaustive course on describing D&D combat. I don’t have an english degree by the way, but that should get you far enough to be able to help you players feel more immersed and really make a big difference in your narration.

Make sure to stick around after to hear some announcements and the show’s sponsors, but until next time, let’s roll initiative.