Drizzt Do’Urden’s Guide to Combat is a supplement by Darrin Scot, giving lots of valuable advice on how to run combat encounters.

Disclaimer: We were provided with a free digital copy of this product.

It’s a bit of an older title, released back in 2019, but all the content in it is very much still relevant. New people start this hobby all the time, and this is a source of some very practical and useful advice. It doesn’t have stablocks or homebrew rules, but rather a collection of discussions around how to handle combat in D&D.

It’s split into 6 chapters, each focusing on a particular aspect, and it uses Drizzt Do’Urden as a sort of expository character, with him giving you directions and advice throughout the text. First of all, the introduction asks the most vital question: When do you run combat, and perhaps more importantly, when do you not run combat? Even though it is a core of the system’s design – and often takes up the most time in a session – combat isn’t mandatory (shocking, I know – even though it’s fun). Combat should have a purpose; move the story forward and provide dramatic moments, even if you’re playing a pure dungeon crawl/tactical style of game and the dramatic moment is “we ran out of resources, what’s our plan?”.

The subsequent two chapters are directed at the DM and the players in that order; and they get into more practical aspects of what to do when the battle actually starts. For the DMs, they handle topics like adjudicating player intent and solving rules disputes, as well as how to handle your DMing style properly; of course, something that I agree completely with and have repeatedly stated myself, is that the most important thing is communication and making sure everyone is on the same wavelength about what they expect from the game, be it a high lethality combat gauntlet or a more roleplay-focused campaign. Both are good, as long as everyone knows ahead of time which one they’re going to be involved in. The players get pretty much the same treatment, but for their side of the table.

Chapter 3 focuses a bit more on the actual mechanics of D&D; encounters and CR, initiative, and so on. Specifically, it also talks about balance vs fun, as well as “cheating” – something I admit I do liberally as a DM, both for and against the players, if I consider that an encounter isn’t being as enjoyable or dramatic as I want. Then, we have a discussion of grid-based combat vs Theatre of the Mind; both are fine options with their ups and downs, but it’s important that you know what these are before you pick one. Chapter 5, the biggest one, is all about Narrative, how to incorporate roleplaying in combat, how to describe what’s going on with flavour and not let it devolve into “You hit. The enemy hits. You take 5 damage.”. Finally, Chapter 6 includes some additional ideas on how to run encounters by giving enemies certain roles and tactics they use, as well as how to make the battlefield itself more dynamic and interesting.

Overall, Drizzt Do’Urden’s Guide to Combat is an extremely useful supplement. Particularly for new DMs, it’s an exceptional packet of advice and ideas that will really help them avoid certain pitfalls of combat, but experienced DMs can also find it useful, letting them reexamine some of the ways they run combat. And of course, everything you read can just as easily be applied in other TTRPG systems!

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