The Battle Royale in D&D
Pointers for structuring and running an engaging Battle Royale in Dungeons & Dragons 5e.
Suffering Breeds Innovation
I finished my costume and war paint, then logged into Zoom ready to BE Boblin the Goblin — my 10th level Arcane Archer Fighter. After two weeks of planning with the other members of my squad I was ready for a memorable night of shenanigans playing Dungeons & Dragons in the form of a 3v3 Battle Royale.
We had a variety of players — the Dungeon Master (DM) had played since the 3.5e days, some of us had played for a couple years, and one brand-spanking-new player who had joined us for the last two sessions of our regular campaign. Three rounds in, the excitement was gone and everyone on our squad was either not able to play or straight up not having a good time. Our newest player — with less than a month of play — only got to take one turn before getting Banished for the remainder of the session (high Spell Save DC + Portent). Our Barbarian got stuck in a Hold Person spell against a 21 Spell Save DC and had to watch as other the team did 350+ damage to her over the next few rounds with the aid of ~20 summoned Minotaurs. Three people got to play, three people got to watch.
A Battle Royale can be a fun way to change things up for your group of D&D players — instead of an extended, complex campaign against an overwhelming evil your players get to experience a self-contained, violent battle to the death with those that they typically consider friends. However, it’s difficult as a DM to structure and run one of these sessions — there are so many things that can be overlooked and result in the one-sided ROLFstomp described above. Most of what exists on the internets are very specific recommendations that I’m assuming players learned the hard way (i.e. don’t let them play druids, ban the sleep spell, etc.). However, as new sourcebooks are added players find new ways to leverage older items and spells, it becomes very difficult to structure the session with the mentality of ‘just exclude things on this list’. This motivated my group and I to approach the problem from a more fundamental perspective that will allow DMs to modify every aspect of the game according to 3 specific principles which will ensure a fun and engaging Battle Royale (for everybody!).
There is a TL;DR of pointers at the bottom of the article, in case you’re here for some quick tips.
Building a Better Battle Royale
The principles that follow and their discussion are guided by the tenet:
All decisions on player characters, items, abilities, and mechanics should be made with one thing in mind: How will this impact the engagement of my players?
That’s what matters the most — will your players stay engaged? Rules as written (RAW) have their place, but RAW were made for players vs. world, not necessarily players vs. players. When RAW clashes with player engagement, adjust.
Player Engagement
To get a better understanding of how to think about player engagement I turned to Engagement Theory, which focuses on how to structure engaged learning for remote teaching applications.
“By engaged learning, we mean that all student activities involve active cognitive processes such as creating, problem-solving, reasoning, decision-making, and evaluation.” — Kearsley and Shneiderman, 1998
Engaged players should be actively contributing, creatively adapting to the conditions on the battlefield, and making impactful decisions. Though I won’t be using the Relate-Create-Donate principles from Engagement Theory, I have used them as inspiration to create the following principles that DMs can use to guide the decisions that they make when creating a Battle Royale.
Principles
- Participate — Players should be actively participating in the majority of rounds played.
- Validate — All players should be valid: no item, ability, or character should fundamentally invalidate another player.
- Regulate — Prepare to balance challenging scenarios vs. hopeless scenarios. Challenges can increase engagement but hopeless situations will severely reduce engagement
Participate
Active participation is the most important component of player engagement. Rolling dice and taking whatever damage is done to them is technically participation — but not active. Characters need to be problem solving and making meaningful impacts to be actively participating.
The largest obstacle to this will come in the form of crowd control (CC) abilities and items. The obvious examples here are Banishment, Hold Person, and Polymorph, but could also come in the form of physical items like nets or shackles. Players could even get creative and build a Strength based character that grapples other players the entire time or a caster that uses Stone Shape to entomb smaller players. Being on the receiving end of this prevents a player from being able to actively participate and the longer/more often it occurs, the more their engagement will drop.
Ultimately it’s up to you as the DM to decide how you can ensure active participation, but since it’s hard to anticipate all of the creative ways players might try to do this, an exclusion list isn’t necessarily the best option. As a DM, you should collaborate with the players as they are building their characters to modify their toolkit to reduce barriers to active participation. Guidelines could look like the following:
Players should not be involuntarily removed from the game for more than n consecutive rounds. They also should not be involuntarily removed from the game for more than x% of every y rounds.
With 5 players, it’s likely taking close to 10–15 minutes to complete an entire round of combat. If a player is out for two rounds due to a CC ability or item, that’s 20–30 minutes without active participation. It’s a good idea to choose your n, x, and y variables so that players spend a majority of their turns being active. To do this, spells can be modified; Banishment can go from a 5th level spell that lasts 10 rounds to a 2nd level spell that lasts 2 rounds. If a player spends 2 rounds in an effect such as Banishment, they cannot be targeted by a similar ability/item for 3 more rounds. This doesn’t exclude spells and abilities like Banishment, but makes the characters more carefully weigh taking and using such a spell and reduces the impact on active participation.
Conversely, players should not be able to voluntarily remove themselves for a majority of rounds either. Abilities such as Invisibility or Darkness can be frustrating for players who are actively participating if it allows a player to choose not to participate until later in the session when they gain a significant advantage. Druids that shift into Earth Elementals and burrow underground to hide can have the same effect. The same structure as above could be followed, and adjustments to Invisibility conditions can be made that allows players to find them on Perception checks, having invisible characters make Stealth checks, or travel as though it’s difficult terrain.
Validate
A player finding out that they have been invalidated by another player will likely cause immediate disengagement. This one is tied closely with the upcoming Regulate principle as it will probably make them feel like the scenario is hopeless.
This situation is a bit more subtle than the previous issues with Participate as it can come in a number of forms. The ability for casters or archers to fly will invalidate melee based characters (combined with Mobile Feat won’t even allow of Attack of Opportunity), weapons that prevent healing can invalidate characters such as Clerics or Paladins, and combinations of class abilities and items can result in characters high AC, Spell Save DCs and Saving Throws; a paladin with a shield, Cloak of Displacement (disadvantage on attack rolls against them) and Mantle of Spell Resistance (advantage on Saving Throws against spells) could nearly invalidate all opponents.
To handle this you will probably need to remove a few capabilities such as flying (honestly that’s best because combat in 3 dimensions is more complex to track), but more importantly you should also enforce that player characters have some kind of weakness along the dimensions of AC, Spell Save DC, or Saving Throws —nearly invincible characters invalidate everyone else. Don’t be afraid to modify your rules as they build their characters and you see the creative tricks your players come up with.
Regulate
Regulating the balance between challenging and hopeless is really the core challenge for all DMs. Challenging will encourage players to get creative — increasing engagement, but hopeless will cause them to lose motivation and just passively accept their fate.
Identify some of the scenarios that your players could find themselves in which seem hopeless and then create contingency plans. This is where a lot of creativity from the DM can create unique and memorable experiences for the players. If the format is every person for themselves, what will you do if 4 players all choose to gang up on the 1 remaining player? Will you allow for that one player to dig deep down into themselves, finding a determination that adds to their AC and attack rolls for every player that attacks them that round beyond two? Will you have a not-so-benevolent overseer of the combat offer up items that can help them (recall the floating packages to specific combatants in The Hunger Games)? If you’re using a team format and one team clearly has an absurd advantage, what would happen if team compositions were suddenly switched and players found themselves paired up with new players — perhaps due to a development that causes them to suddenly change their perspective on who is and is not hostile?
Overview
The idea of leveraging the Participate-Validate-Regulate principles when building your Battle Royale is to shift the mindset from one of hoping that you’ve exhaustively excluded every trick or exploit that your players could come up with (spoiler — you won’t) to one where you continually making adjustments to abilities, items, builds, and environments based on key principles that will ensure player engagement.
There will still be unforeseen considerations — i.e. players can override allotted ability score points with potions and items, consumables can give resistance to all damage — or a number of other things that I wouldn’t even be able to come up with. On top of that, as new sourcebooks and materials are released more exploits can be found. But don’t worry — sticking to these principles should guide you as all of those changes present themselves.
Good luck, and may the odds be ever in your favor.
TL;DR
- Every decision you make about adjusting rules, abilities, items, and mechanics should all be in the pursuit of increased player engagement — this could mean bending RAW a bit.
- Players should not be involuntarily removed from the game for more than n consecutive rounds. They also should not be involuntarily removed from the game for more than x% of every y rounds. I would recommend making sure that n never exceeds 2, and that x% is around~30%. You don’t need to identify and ban all spells that remove players from gameplay, but build a mechanic or modify such spells so that your engagement ratio holds true .This should hold true for players who voluntarily remove themselves from combat as well through things like Invisibility.
- Don’t let any player be invalidated by other players — i.e. melee characters are invalidated by flying characters, weapons that prevent healing invalidate clerics, etc. Enforce that player characters have some kind of weakness along the dimensions of AC, Spell Save DC, or Saving Throws. Nearly invincible characters invalidate everyone else.
- Challenges increase engagement — but hopeless situations destroy it. Identify some of the scenarios your players could find themselves in which seem hopeless and then create contingency plans. This is a great opportunity to create unique and memorable twists!
- Don’t hesitate to modify RAW to remove barriers to engagement. Making the Concentration check DC equal to damage done can help prevent excessive incapacitation. Homebrewed items that reduce damage or boost AC when x% of a character’s HP has been done in a single round can ensure that players don’t gang up to quickly remove someone from play (who then has to sit and watch the majority of the session).
References
- Kearsley, Greg, and Ben Shneiderman. “Engagement Theory: A Framework for Technology-Based Teaching and Learning.” Educational Technology, vol. 38, no. 5, 1998, pp. 20–23. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44428478. Accessed 3 Jan. 2021.
- All the players in my D&D group. Y’all the real MVPs.
