How can I improve combat so my players don't always use the strategy of collectively focusing fire on one enemy at a time until it's dead?

Question

I'm DMing a 5e campaign with a group of four players. We're all experienced in RPG in general but not specifically in 5e.

Players are Level-4 Wizard, Fighter, Rogue and Druid, Circle of the Moon.

My players have come to the conclusion that, given the mechanics of the game, it is much more effective to focus all the fire power on a creature at a time and avoid spreading damage. Their logic is it really doesn't matter if a creature has 1 or 80 HP left, as long as it has over 0 HP it has full capacity to do damage. In effect, creatures are binary: they are either alive and therefore have full capacity to act, or dead, in which case they don't.

Unfortunately I agree with this assessment but I feel it makes the game less fun, for both me and them. (The comment has actually come up from a player so definitively they enjoy it less.) Not because I'm looking for super realistic combat but because it limits the combat strategy to "drop them one at a time".

As such, they tend to not distribute their efforts or engage separately but, instead, swarm a single enemy, concentrate all the attacks on it and then move to the next. This feels to me like the more effective tactic but also the least "fun" and role-playing way of doing combat.

Is my players interpretation wrong or am I handling the combat in the wrong way? What am I missing?

Answer 1

"Focused Fire" is a legitimate technique.

But there are many ways to deal with it.

If your Combats are small skirmishes, with all participants within reach of each other then the PCs all piling on to one foe at a time will work. And this sounds like the "less fun" problem you are having

Some of the techniques I have used are:

• Use the same tactic against the PCs! All the foes focus on one PC! (This can make the PCs think about other Actions, such as Trip, or ways to slow down the assault)
• Put a Sniper behind cover.
• Outflank the Tanks and go for the 'squishy' (usually the Wizard)
• Use Terrain: Forests with large trees will make it difficult for everyone to focus on one foe. Dungeons with narrow corridors limit how many PCs can attack.
• Have Foes use other Actions apart from Attack. An enemy Spell Caster may be Concentrating on a Spell. A PC may not be able to kill them in one blow, but forcing them to make a Concentration Save is worthwhile. As above, have the Foes Trip PCs, cause non-lethal, but Inconvenient, Conditions.

Answer 2

As long as the fight is solely about killing the enemy before they kill the PCs, focussing is a strong tactic. So look for ways to make it about something other than just attrition.

For example, one that I ran a while back involved PCs (plus a few helpful NPCs under their command) helping to retake a dwarvish fortress that had been overrun by traitors. The PCs' job was to infiltrate the gatehouse (hiding in carts full of mushrooms) and raise the gate so that the loyalists' main force could enter.

This meant that as soon as they jumped out of the mushroom carts, they had four objectives to juggle:

• Mop up the guards inside the gatehouse
• Secure entry point A, barricade it, and fight off enemy attempts to break through
• Ditto for entry point B
• Crew the winches to raise the gates as quickly as possible, because it's not possible to hold those entry points forever.

Plus an optional objective, rescuing loyalist prisoners. (I hadn't actually expected them to do that, but in hindsight it made perfect sense, especially since it solved the problem of finding extra bodies to work the winches.)

To succeed, they had to give attention to at least three of those simultaneously - they didn't have time to mop up all the guards in the gatehouse before securing the entrances, and if they'd focussed on just one entry point the enemies would have come through the other.

As Black Spike mentioned, terrain can prevent PCs from focussing on a single opponent. Another big one is differing PC capabilities: if only some of the party have silver weapons, maybe they should take on the lycanthropes while the rest of the party fight off their pets. Ranged/melee and magic/non-magic are other obvious points of difference.

footnote: I'm Australian, "focussed"/"focussing" is the usual spelling in Australian English. I already have to fight my browser on this, be assured that if I use the Australian spelling it's what I intended :-)

Answer 3

D&D is not a videogame

Monsters don't exist only to die, monsters aren't punching bags, monsters aren't a handful of lines of AI. You, the DM, are responsible for making these monsters behave in the way you see fit. Strategy is only meaningful when there are multiple valid choices.

A monster at low hp is less effective than one at full hp.

To a monster hp is more than just a number. It is their morale, their courage, their lifeblood. If you take away half of a monster's hp, you have shaken their resolve and scarred their body. The way they act, the way the DM controls them, should fundamentally change.

I'm sure you've seen in movies a scene where a tough guy gets wounded and he gets angry. You've also seen someone wounded and even a drop of blood turns them into a blubbering mess. How will your monsters react to hp loss? Does it drive them to anger, do they flee after 1 damage? How do their friends, family, comrades, clan take it? What stories do they tell at the monster tavern after the fight?

What do your monsters feel when attacked? What do they want? What don't they want?

Let's slow down and think about an example for a minute. Your party of 4, Wizard, Rogue, Fighter, Druid, happen upon a band of goblins. Immediately the party sets to work, all attacking 1 particular goblin.

• What do the monsters feel? Fear, anger.
• What do they want? To survive.
• What don't they want? For themselves or their comrades to die.

So how should the goblins react? Firstly, the one being targeted will probably flee. They will try and get out of line of sight, act defensively, stop the pain and prevent imminent death.

What will the others do? Act to defend their goblin friend? Block line of sight, cast defensive magic, distract the party, physically prevent the adventurers from pursuing. Will they go on the offense? Will they target the weak wizard, will they flee or regroup?

This fight may play out as follows:

1. The two forces meet, and the party immediately focus fire 1 goblin.
2. That goblin flees, hides behind a box
3. The rest of the goblins jump in front of them, some of the goblin rogues flank the wizard, the ranged goblins target the rogue. One goblin begins to flee to alert others.
4. The party is now forced to react piecemeal. They can't communicate smoothly in combat. The wizard wants to defend themselves, the rogue disengages to avoid damage. Will the fighter pursue the fleeing goblin? Who will the Druid support?

The party now has options. Their enemy has reacted and taken away easy choices. Force them to act fast, always change up their priorities and thwart their plans.

Whatever the party chooses, the goblins won't make it easy for them. Once they have taken some wounds, the goblins retreat, they won't risk their lives for nothing. However, they will hold a grudge for free. In the future these goblins could harass the party at night, or from afar, preventing them from resting and healing.

Answer 4

I don't play D&D so I'm not sure if these suggestions can be applied, but even if they can't perhaps they can shed light on alternate tactics:

• Attach negative effects or enemy buffs that are applied upon enemy death, encouraging the players to spread the damage and eliminate them as close to each other as possible along the timeline.

• Treat the enemies as a constant obstacle TO an objective that must be destroyed - e.g. a wall of zombies guarding a crystal that revives them shortly after death, creating situations where the players are unexpectedly surrounded by zombies they already thought dealt with and advanced over. The objective being to destroy the crystal, either with damage or special item interaction.

• Give certain enemies a 'heal on death' effect dependant on a shared life pool, e.g. you have 5 skeletal mages, your players focus fire on one and it revives with 80% of it's health every time it dies until they 'vanquish' another skeletal mage, and so on until zero when each mage has been 'killed' once already.

Sometimes it's not that the players are focusing their fire, but that the fight isn't interesting itself. You can make a focus fire strategy interesting by making it important to focus fire on the correct target, or suffer the consequences.

Answer 5

The players can coordinate this easily, because they're sitting across the table from each other in relative comfort, and they can take their time deciding what to do.

But the actual characters don't have that luxury.

Rule that to coordinate fire once the fight has begun, one of the player characters must declare the next target, so that everyone knows who to target.

No other player can act on this until the next round of combat.

If the opposing monsters are animal intelligence or lower, the players will achieve their desired outcome and the monsters will not adjust their strategy.

If the opposing forces are intelligent enough to have speech, then on the next round (after the first round of concentrated fire) every surviving enemy will see the PC who gave the command as the party leader and they will concentrate their fire onto him.

Answer 6

In addition to the great answers already here, I'd like to add my two cents.

If the enemy uses AOE spells/attacks then everyone ganging up on him may not be a good strategy since all 4 of them (depending on the PC's attack range and the NPC's AOE range) would get hit at the same time.

Answer 7

In ranged attacks, this is totally valid and good tactics.

In melee though, you and they are missing a key factor, which is that if they focus on one opponent then they aren't defending against any others. All starting at one flank is good tactics for them because they can nail one or two whilst the others can't reach them. But as the other opponents pile in, they need to start defending themselves.

It's been a while since I played, but my memory is that there are rules for attacks on an enemy which cannot defend itself, for instance if it's unconscious or asleep. The PCs are putting themselves in that position. Their opponents get whatever relevant bonuses to hit and bonuses to damage. Edit: Refreshing my memory via Google, the correct word is "incapacitated", which applies to sleeping or unconscious opponents, and following the rules for "surprise". Check your rulebook for that, and for any extra features depending on who's doing the attacking.

Note that historically this was exactly how soldiers in full plate worked, trusting their armour to take the hits. Your fighter might be armoured up and able to do this. The rest of the party, probably not so much without magical artifacts.

Answer 8

How would the party feel if their weakest member was constantly targeted and eventually picked off?
They'd be protective, annoyed and pissed off!

So work that into the dynamics of your enemy groups as well.

You could have all remaining enemies in the group Rage (similar to the Barbarian player class) when one of their own is killed or ganged up on.

Alternatively you could come up with some houserules that grant attacks of opportunity or advantage against players that are all bunched around a single enemy (from the other enemies).

Having wounded enemies fall back to cover (as other answers have also already mentioned) is also an excellent idea to make the fight feel more interesting and force spreading out the field.

I wouldn't introduce anything that penalises the players for fighting efficiently, just keep tweaking the systems until the most efficient way to fight is a fun way.