[RPG] How to end combat quickly when the outcome is inevitable

combatdnd-5egm-techniquesresource-consumption

I'm DMing for a party of 6. In our next session, I'm planning on running four combat encounters. With such a large group, I've found that it usually takes an hour or two to get through a single battle. So I'm potentially looking at an 8-hour session!

However, I've also noticed that once my players have taken out most of the enemies in an encounter, the outcome of the battle is set in stone. The players will win, it's just a matter of time. Even so, it can take 10-20 minutes and multiple rounds around the table to finish lopping off those last few hit points. Skipping these rounds and saying the enemies are just dead doesn't quite work because the players will probably lose a few more hit points and spell slots/ability uses before the end of combat. I want to balance my dungeons on the attrition between consecutive fights.

How can I speed up these last few rounds of an encounter without letting my players keep all of the HP and spell slots they would have used had we played them out in full?

(I'm looking for answers other than making the enemies retreat. I can do that in a lot of situations, but I'd like other options as well. And sometimes, enemies will want to fight to the death no matter what.)

Best Answer

Estimate it

One rule that a lot of DMs forget is that not every single combat encounter—or more specifically, every single moment within combat—needs to be handled in the Combat-Initiative Abstraction. A group of level 5 characters facing off against a single CR 1/4 goblin doesn't need to open with Initiative, and similarly, if a group of characters are up against any encounter whose difficulty is trivial to surmount (or they've whittled an encounter down to this point), you shouldn't feel compelled to mechanically iterate through each moment of that combat. Just use a single d20 roll (maybe a contested ability check?) to determine how many hit points are used up.

Surrender!

It depends on what kinds of creatures the players are up against, but most NPC creatures possess a modicum of intelligence and sense of self-preservation. If they see that the fight has clearly gone south for them, it's reasonable for them to surrender or run away, eliding what would otherwise be the grueling remainder of the fight.

Like in the example above: instead of narrating that the level five characters mercilessly brutalize the goblin, maybe the goblin just immediately surrenders without putting up a fight—or hopefully the players didn't intend ill will towards the goblin in the first place!

There's direct precedent in some adventure modules for this as well. For example, in the Lost Mine of Phandelver adventure, the very first encounter in the module suggests this course of actions for the goblins the PCs encounter:

Four goblins are hiding in the woods, two on each side of the road. They wait until someone approaches the bodies and then attack.

This will likely be the first of many combat encounters in the adventure. Here are the steps you should follow to run it effectively:

  • [...]

  • When three goblins are defeated, the last goblin attempts to flee, heading for the goblin trail.

Goblin Ambush, Lost Mines of Phandelver, D&D 5th Edition Starter Set

Having said that...

I do need to slightly challenge the premise of this question. It's one thing if you're only expecting players to lose a few more hit points to a lucky hit by their enemies, but if you're expecting players to still use up spell slots, that implies pretty strongly that the outcome of the fight is very much not set in stone. Even at high levels, a spellcaster would probably prefer to use their cantrips if they don't expect to need their spell slots.

So while the above advice is, in my opinion, a pretty good rule to follow, it should be tempered with the advice that if the players can be expected to expend expensive resources as part of their effort to end the conflict, it's probably too early to call it.