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I don’t know about you, but sometimes fights in tabletop roleplaying games feel like a drag to me. Sure you can punch up the action narratively, but sometimes it ends up with two sides standing next to each other until the dice decide who wins. Yay.

Now I’ve mostly been playing EZD6 so the turns go around very quickly, but if you’re playing some other games where you can end up waiting several minutes for your turn and your only option is “I hit him with my sword”, it gets old fairly quickly.

Luckily, I have been doing Science! Or rather, I have been playing a lot of Baldur’s Gate 3 and taking notes about fight scene design and what I can take back to the table pretty sure it’s the same thing. I came up with five points and one bonus tip which maybe isn’t 100% fight scene related but will come in handy anyway.

I will try to avoid spoilers because experiencing the game yourself is great fun; most of the examples I’m using are from Act 1, although I did need to pull in some examples from Act 2 and Act 3. I’ll warn you before they come up though.

What NOT to copy

Before we dig into the meat, there is a point I need to make clear. This is a video game so it can afford to go a bit harder on the player than you can in a tabletop game. If the party is wiped out in Baldur’s gate 3, you can just hit reload and try again, as long as you’re not playing in Honour mode. Obviously, that doesn’t translate well to the tabletop, so don’t try to transplant things directly from the game without tuning them a little. Your players won’t make it. And with that, let’s get started.

1. No random encounters

There are no random encounters in Baldur’s Gate 3. Every fight scene happens for a reason; in the beginning of the game they teach the player about how the game works, then they’re there to further the plot, or teach the player more about the environment they are in.

Now, I’m not telling you not to use random encounter tables. If you enjoy using those, go for it, but take some time to think about why something is there. For example, early in the game, you run into a sealed crypt and find these skeletons; it could have been rolled up as a random encounter, but the designers took it a bit beyond that and gave them robes to flavour them up as scribes. It sets the tone better than finding a bunch of generic skeletons standing around waiting to attack you on sight, and that is already a step to making things more interesting. Now to keep it interesting, we need a suitable environment.

2. Make the terrain interesting

Very few of the fights in this game happen in a flat expanse. There are almost always changes in elevation, pools of water or lava, corners and nooks. Even where you’re fighting in a built environment, there are usually piles of things or furniture. These aren’t just obstacles – they can be pathways between different sections of the environment, cover, or even improvised weapons.

This is great for several reasons. First of all, it gives sneakier characters places to hide and move around undetected, so you have more strategic options. It can also create less obvious paths to move around, which can give an advantage – say for example climbing over some rocks or jumping across a pit to flank your enemies. And of course, shoving your enemies into pools of lava is always good fun.

One thing I liked about this game is destroyable terrain, like the platforms near the goblin guard post. The goblin lookout can stand there and shoot arrows at your party, but you can also break it down to make them drop. This not only makes for good action, but it can also be used to alter the encounter map during play. And by the way, if you play with miniatures, here’s a link to my video about building miniature walkways and platforms like this.

All these things turn a fight scene into more of a puzzle; once you’ve set up an environment which can be used to gain an advantage, fights start to rely less on dice and feeling more like a puzzle.

3. Encourage movement

Now while a good encounter map will already encourage players to manoeuvre more, a little extra incentive helps. In Baldur’s Gate 3 the player is constantly pushed to move. At the most basic level, nearly every enemy you fight can throw things at you. This is important because your squishy wizards can’t just hide all the way in the back, someone can still throw a rock at them. At the same time, your fighters need to figure a way to get to grips with the enemy.

The skeleton fight we talked about earlier is a good example of this, as they can cast silence and fog to block out areas of the map so you can’t just sit there and shoot them or cast spells at them. Your ranged characters will need to find positions outside the blocked areas, while your close combat characters need to figure out a way to reach the enemy through a combination of running and jumping.

As I was revisiting this write up for the blog, it also struck me how the skeletons in this scene throw frost attacks at the players. This isn’t just thematically appropriate, but it also reduces their ability to move by a small amount. Now I’m wondering if it’s not an intentional choice to use reverse psychology on the players to make them want to move more.

Another great way of making players move is to throw in an alarm – there are several in the goblin infested temple in Act 1. This is clearly telegraphed initially – the little guy shouts out before he runs for the drum, so the players know that stopping that particular goblin is now a priority. In later encounters the goblins just run for the alarms – hopefully the players will already have realized what those drums are for!

This has the added bonus of helping players pay attention if they were zoning out when it’s not their turn; the situation can change quite dramatically! It also leans into the idea of making fight scenes more puzzle like, but if you want to lean into it a little harder…

4. Create additional victory conditions

There are some fights in this game you can’t win just by beating down all your opponents. The game teaches you this very early on when you run into this fight between a devil and a mind flayer. Your objective is to get to the controls of the ship at the end of the room, and if you get stuck in this fight, you will lose; you don’t really have the resources at this point to finish it in time unless you really cheese the game.

Now obviously this isn’t something you want to do all the time. Running past an encounter isn’t terribly satisfying. However, the idea of having an objective other than beating the crap out of everything is quite intriguing.

Here’s an example from Act 1. This little boy gets hypnotized by a harpy’s song and your job is to stop them from eating him. You can interrupt the singing and let him break free, but since another harpy can pick up the song he can end up yoyo-ing backwards and forwards, so you might need someone to keep shoving him back or picking him up and running him back.

Now obviously you could focus on beating up the harpies and not worry about the kid – you don’t really lose anything if they get him. However, this addition turns what would otherwise be a rather average scene into a pretty memorable one.

But you obviously can’t have a bunch of harpies everywhere in your games. Or maybe you’re running The Four Horsemen, my historical dark fantasy game where there are no harpies. Well, think about the restaurant scene in Indiana Jones and the temple of doom where they’re trying to grab hold of a vial of antidote and a diamond which are being knocked around while a fight is raging. Same idea, you have a moving objective which your players need to capture and hold on to until the fight ends.

This works great with the next point, but since I will be bringing up some stuff from acts two and three, you might want to skip to the chapter after that if you still haven’t played and don’t want spoilers. In the meantime, let’s all look at my little owlbear buddy.

5. Use timers

There’s a great example in act 2 where you have to defend a portal for a few turns. Shadow creatures will try to destroy the portal in this time, and you have to stop them. One great thing about this kind of timer is that you can throw bigger stuff at your players than they would usually be able to handle, because they only need to hold it off for a given time. Once the portal closes here, any shadows left over will disappear. Of course there are also stakes; if you let the shadows destroy the portal, you lose one of your companions permanently and you’re locked out of resolving a particular storyline.

Now remember what I told you earlier about being able to reload your game. If you’re playing this and mess up, you can reload, arm and prepare yourself better, and come back. You can’t do that at the table, so drop in some hints beforehand or let the players have a flat out planning session. The latter works well for you too, because it lets you know how heavily you can push them.

Another example is the Iron Throne, an underwater prison in Act 3. This is one of my favourite parts of the game, purely for its design. There are a bunch of parts here which work beautifully together.

First off, it is a very small area, just a handful of rooms and corridors. That in itself isn’t terribly interesting. Your objective here is to rescue some hostages; there are only two that are critical to different plotlines, but there are a whole lot more you can rescue if you are feeling heroic. Blocking your way are some fish people, but here’s the kicker; you only have five turns to get in, free the prisoners and get out. At the end of the five turns, the prison collapses and anyone still inside, dies.

You can’t get stuck in a fight with the fish people or you will run out of time, but you can’t ignore them because they will attack the fleeing hostages. Now the game does fudge things a little to help you; one of the key hostages starts out right next to the escape ladder so she can get to safety in turn one, while if you did some stuff earlier you get some help to rescue the other one. You don’t really get anything extra by rescuing anyone else, except that badassitude is its own reward. In theory you could literally not rescue anyone at all and still complete those two plots, but the experience will be different.

Now while this could translate to the tabletop, you’d absolutely need to drop some information beforehand – like how the place is rigged to explode, there are shark people in the area, the bulkheads will seal if you start a fire inside, and so on. Dropping it on your players as it is will not work as well because they only get to experience it once. On the other hand, it could make for a great side plot as they steal the plans to the place, go over the schematics, and go Ocean’s eleven on it.

Bonus: It’s all in the mind

One last thing I wanted to raise before I wrap up here is possibly one of the best depictions of illusion I’ve seen in a game, that translates beautifully to the table, and it happens in Act 1. A hag has captured a woman, and you want to rescue her. Starting out, check out the lair – it’s a ring shaped around a pit, with roots and stuff around so you need to plan your movement.

Second, this fight gives you two things to think about right away – the hag creates multiple images of herself, and she sets fire to the cage the prisoner is in. The copies pop as soon as you hit them, but you have to deal with them AND put out the fire before the prisoner falls into the pit.

Next, the hag teleports the prisoner out and duplicates her shape, so you have to figure out which one is which or you could end up killing the prisoner instead. You could have the players figure it out via a dice roll obviously, but that isn’t as satisfying as letting them look for clues. For example, in this case the real prisoner was soaked because I’d just dunked a whole lot of water on her to put out the fire, while her duplicate was dry. I don’t think I’d point it out, but this is a good way to reward players who ask questions.

Conclusion

I’ve been rambling for a while so to recap, these are the five main points I want to take from Baldur’s Gate 3 into my tabletop games to improve the fight scenes:

1. Give every fight a purpose
2. Make interesting environments
3. Make the players move
4. Throw in the occasional side objective
5. Use timers

If I had to summarize that into one point, I’d say it’s to turn fight scenes into puzzle like experiences. Of course it’s always fun to roll dice and if your players are happy with that, stick with it; but it’s nice to have something in your back pocket to spice things up. Still, let me know what you think. Did this spark any ideas? Let me know in the comments!