How to Speed Up D&D Combat: 5 Tips
Five tips that make D&D combat faster: a visible turn order, players ready before their turn, rolling everything at once, faster monsters, and better fights.
Quill & Tankard
I recently ran a tournament of three fights that lasted four sessions and took 10 hours of play. Combat felt way too slow, and I'm not the only one. Here are five tips that make combat faster, and make it feel faster. If you'd rather watch, there's a video version of these tips.
Every tip works with good old pen and paper too.
How do you speed up D&D combat?
Make every turn start faster, and give the fight a reason to end. The first three tips speed up your players, the fourth speeds up you, and the fifth fixes fights that drag because they're boring:
Call out the turn order and make it visible.
Get players ready before their turn, with a timer as the backstop.
Roll attack and damage at the same time.
Run your side of the screen faster.
Make the fight not boring.
You don't have to do all five next session. Pick one or two and see what changes.
How do you make the turn order easy to follow?
Call out three names every turn, and put the order where everyone can see it. This costs nothing, and you can start doing it at your next session.
I borrow three terms from baseball. Every turn, say who's up, who's on deck, and who's in the hole. Up is the player acting now. On deck is next. In the hole is the one after that.
You don't have to do this yourself. Make one player the caller. They track the order and call out who's next, which is one less job for you while you're running six goblins.
The second half is making the order visible. The cheap way is to fold paper tents, write a name on each, and hang them over your DM screen in turn order. The players see the order, and you see it from your side. You can also write each character's AC, save DC, and passive perception on its tent, if you want to reveal those. Then nobody has to ask whether an attack roll actually hits.
I do the same thing on a TV at the table, with the initiative display in Quill & Tankard. Full disclosure: I built Quill & Tankard, the free app I use to run combat. It shows the table the turn order, whose turn it is, who's up next, conditions, who's concentrating, and who's down. It never shows HP or anything else the players shouldn't see. Nobody asks whose turn it is or whether the monster is still paralyzed, and players can plan their turn while they wait. See the initiative tracker.
Paper, a whiteboard, or an app all work. Knowing the turn order for sure is what cuts the time.
How do players get ready before their turn?
They plan during other people's turns, so they never start from zero. The slowest part of combat is right after you tell a player it's their turn, and they start thinking about what to do for the first time.
Knowing their character well is the player's job: their spells, abilities, and feats. As the DM, you can still ask for it, and make it easier:
A default action. Each player picks the move they make when nothing better comes to mind: Fire Bolt, Eldritch Blast, or attack the nearest enemy. It doesn't have to be the best move. It has to be a good move they can make right now.
A cheat sheet. One line per spell or ability, especially for complicated characters. For example: "Fireball: 20 ft radius, Dex save for half, 8d6 fire."
If your table still drags, bring out a timer. Here's how to make it fair:
Rule | Detail |
|---|---|
What the timer covers | Deciding what to do. Rolling and math take as long as they need |
How long | 30 seconds to 2 minutes per turn |
When it runs out | The character takes the Dodge action. They froze in the chaos of combat |
They still do something. They just lose a strategic big play that they otherwise would've planned. Talk to your table first, and get everybody to agree before you try it because this is a controversial one.
Should players roll attack and damage at the same time?
Yes. Ask your players to throw the d20 and the damage dice in one roll. If the d20 misses, they ignore the damage. If it hits, the damage is already on the table.
That's one roll instead of two, for every player, every turn. It's a small saving, but it adds up. Color-matched dice help: a red d20 with red damage dice, a blue d20 with blue damage dice, so everybody knows which damage goes with which attack.
You can do the same behind your DM screen. If four goblins attack, roll four d20s and their damage dice at once, a different color for each goblin. That's four attacks in one roll.
How can the DM run monsters faster?
Decide as much as you can before the fight, so you don't think during it. The first three tips speed up your players. This one is for you.
Group your monsters. If you have six goblins, don't give them six turns. Roll initiative once, and put all six on one turn. They all move, they all attack, and their turn is over. Roll their attacks together, like in the last tip.
Give simple monsters one rule. Goblins hit the nearest enemy. The zombie hits whatever hit it last. When their turn comes, you follow the rule and skip the thinking. Save your thinking for the boss and the complicated NPCs.
Cut each stat block to one card. Before the session, keep only what you'll use: the attacks, the big moves, and the HP. Then you don't scan a full page mid-fight. I also write one or two lines of tactics, so I don't have to work out a strategy mid-fight.
In Quill & Tankard, a monster added from the compendium starts with a short copy of its stat block, and I add the tactics line on top. Hover over its card in the combat tracker and the whole card shows. See the combat tracker page for more.
Keep the rules at hand. When a condition or a spell comes up mid-fight, don't flip through a book. Press Ctrl+K, or ⌘K on a Mac, to search the Quill & Tankard compendium. It holds the creatures, spells, and conditions of the free System Reference Document 5.2.1 (SRD), and opens over the fight. Click a condition tag, such as Paralyzed, to read what it does.
Tell your players the monster's AC. This one is optional. Say it right away, or wait until they've rolled a few times and mostly worked it out. Either way, they can call their own hits: "17 beats 15, 6 fire damage." There's no back and forth about whether a 17 hits on every attack.
Quill & Tankard does this too. A monster's AC shows on the initiative display after it loses HP three times. You can reveal it earlier yourself, or turn the reveal off.
How do you keep a fight from getting boring?
Make every hit matter, and end the fight once it's decided. The first four tips fix slow turns. This one fixes boring fights, so players stay off their phones and plan.
Use glass cannons. Monsters with low HP and high damage. Take an ogre, cut its HP in half, and raise its damage. Every hit it lands is scary, and the fight ends before anyone gets bored. Use it sometimes or always, whatever works for your table.
End the fight once it's decided. If the boss is down and two goblins are left with 3 HP each, don't make your players spend three more rounds finishing them. Have the goblins run, drop their weapons and beg, or skip the dice and narrate it. A goblin who surrenders is also someone your players can question.
Give the fight a goal. Rescue the hostage before the bandits drag them off. Stop the cultist before the ritual finishes. Now your players have something to do besides "I attack again", and when they reach the goal, the fight is over.
Keep narration short and punchy. Give each hit one vivid line: "Your axe splits the shield." A miss can be shorter. Save the big descriptions for kills and critical hits.
How do you know if combat got faster?
Time your rounds. Quill & Tankard's combat log notes how long each round took, so you can compare one session with the next.
Pick one tip for your next session
To recap: call out the turn order, get your players ready before their turn, roll everything at once, run your side of the screen faster, and give the fight a reason to matter. Pick one or two for your next session and see what changes. If you want the turn order on a TV, open the combat tracker. I also have a walkthrough of one fight in the tracker.