Here’s something that’s been true at my table since 1980. D&D combat is the moment everyone looks forward to, and it’s also the moment most likely to go completely sideways. It’s not because the dice are cruel, though they can be. It’s because nobody’s quite sure whose job it is to make the fight actually good.
The short answer is: it’s everybody’s job.
Players and DMs alike make combat worse without realizing it, and players and DMs alike can make it fun, too.
This article covers both sides of that.
What Players Do to Kill the Energy
Let’s start with players, because that’s the half of the table that usually gets a pass on this.
When it’s not your turn in combat, what are you doing? If you’re honest about it, the answer for a lot of players is: checking your phone, talking to the person next to you, or staring at your character sheet trying to remember how much damage Magic Missile does. And then your turn arrives and you need thirty seconds to get reoriented to the situation before you can even start deciding what to do.
That’s the first thing players do that makes combat drag. It’s not malicious and many people are quick to say that’s the DM’s fault. But for a lot of players, it’s become a bit of a habit. Combat should be a shared experience unfolding in real time, not a sequence of individual turns you wait through until yours comes up. Pay attention to what everyone else is doing. Watch how the monster reacts. Think about what you’re going to do before your turn arrives. The table moves faster and the fight feels more alive when every player is engaged in all of it, not just their own action or movement.
The second thing players do to drain the energy out of combat is treat it as a solo performance. You pick the most optimal action for your character in isolation, execute it, and hand the turn back to the DM. It’s essentially acting like a solo star without concern for what else is going on around the table, or how your character’s actions impact the party’s goals.
D&D combat was designed to be a group sport. When players coordinate, it’s not just effective, it’s a lot more fun. When the rogue asks the paladin to shove the hobgoblin captain prone so she can use her sneak attack, that’s a cool moment. When the wizard counterspells the enemy caster right as the fighter was about to eat a fireball, that’s another cool moment. Those kind of things don’t happen by accident. They happen because players are paying attention to each other and thinking beyond their own turn.
The third thing, and I see this even with experienced players, is decision paralysis. It’s your turn. Everyone’s looking at you. You have seventeen possible actions and you start audibly weighing each one while the rest of the group sits there. A few rounds of this and the energy in the room starts to feel like a staff meeting.
You don’t have to make the perfect tactical decision on every turn. But you do have to make a decision. A bold, imperfect action keeps the game moving. A cautious, thoroughly deliberated action that takes three minutes is worse than anything the monster could do to the party.
What Players Do to Make Combat Memorable
Now for the other side.
The players who make combat memorable in a good way are doing one thing above all else: they’re focused. Not just on their turn. During the whole fight. They’re watching, reacting, narrating, sometimes even saying things like “I lean over to the cleric and whisper, we need to end this fast” right in the middle of someone else’s turn. That kind of attention to what’s going on is contagious. It lifts the whole table, and for the DM as well.
The other thing great players do is make their actions feel like something that matters. When your barbarian attacks, you don’t have to say “I attack.” You can say “I go straight for the one in the back, the one who’s been hanging out casting spells, because I want them to know they’re not safe back there.” That takes five extra seconds and it turns a mechanical action into a dramatic moment. The DM notices and so do the other players.
Good players also read the room, meaning the in-game place where the fight is taking place. If there’s a river behind the enemy, they think about how that can be used tactically. If the ceiling is low, a barbarian might wonder whether that’s useful or the caster might consider if that impacts their spell choice. The DM built that environment for a reason. Players who engage with it are essentially co-writing the encounter instead of just passively operating within it.
And when things go wrong, which they definitely do from time to time, the players who make combat memorable are the ones who commit to making it fun no matter what happens. Let’s say your bard failed their saving throw and ran away from the party in fear. You can groan about the dice, or you can play it fully and have the bard come sprinting back two rounds later with something to say about what they saw while they were panicking. One of those is memorable. The other one is just a bad roll.
What DMs Do to Kill the Energy
Okay DMs, it’s your turn.
The most common thing I see DMs do that deflates combat is run monsters like they’re spreadsheets. The orc has these hit points and this attack bonus and it swings until it hits zero. That’s not a fight. That’s a math problem. Players can feel the difference between a monster that’s trying to kill them and a monster that’s just occupying a square until its hit points reach zero.
Monsters should behave like creatures with some kind of instinct or intelligence, depending on what they are. A wolf pack works together to isolate prey. A hobgoblin captain maneuvers their troops for tactical advantage. A cornered kobold fights differently than one with an escape route. When the monster does something tactically clever, or when it reacts to being outmaneuvered, suddenly the players feel like they’re in a real fight instead of a mechanical one.
The second DM problem is fights that go on too long. If an encounter has opponents with too many hit points, you can have a perfectly well-played fight that still feels like a slog by the end. Players are hitting things that won’t die and the energy starts bleeding out whether or not anyone is doing anything wrong. Three well-designed dangerous enemies are almost always more interesting than six mediocre ones. At some point, quantity stops being a challenge and starts being a chore.
The third thing DMs do is forget that the environment is part of the encounter. A flat grid with some rocks placed around it is technically a location. But it’s not a very interesting fight scene. What’s the terrain doing? What’s on fire? What’s unstable? What can be knocked over, climbed, pushed into, or used as cover in a way that changes the action? If your players never look at the map and think “wait, could I use that,” you might be designing neutral spaces instead of interesting ones.
What DMs Do to Make Combat Memorable
Here’s how DMs can make the combat more engaging.
Give the fight stakes that exist outside of the pool of hit points. Not every combat needs to have the fate of the world attached to it, but every combat should have something on the line that the players can feel. Maybe the villain they’ve been chasing is about to get away while their minions buy time. Maybe the fight is happening in a building that’s collapsing and the question isn’t just whether they win but whether they win fast enough. When players have a reason to care beyond survival, they play differently and become more interested in not just the outcome, but how that outcome takes place.
The other thing great DMs do is let the fight breathe. What I mean by that is: the monster talks. It taunts. It makes a decision that reveals something about what it wants or fears. When the enemy orc commander tells their troops to fall back and regroup rather than fighting to the last, your players just learned something. That fight became a part of the story, not just a stat. One unexpected thing a monster does is often worth more than anything written in its stat block.
Know When to End It
And here’s a piece of advice that took me a while to realize. You’re allowed to end a fight before it’s technically over. If the players have clearly won and the last two goblins are fleeing into the trees, you don’t have to run those goblins to zero hit points. Just call it. Describe the goblins scattering, give the players the satisfaction of the moment, and move forward. Unnecessary rounds of mop-up are where momentum goes to die.
The Collaboration
Here’s what ties all of this together.
Great D&D combat is not something that happens to the players. It’s not a set piece the DM engineers and the players perform in. It’s a collaboration, and it only works when everyone at the table is pulling in the same direction.
The DM preps, sure, but they do it by populating it with creatures that feel real, in a place that matters and in a way that makes sense, not just some rectangular room with nothing else in it. The players engage with what’s in front of them and actually care about the outcome. They coordinate their actions and use the combat as a way to bring their characters to life. When both the players and the DM are doing their part, combat stops being nothing more than a source of experience points and becomes a key component of the story you’re building together.
I’ve run combats at my table that players are still talking about years later. None of them were memorable because of a rules interaction or a particularly elegant dungeon design. They were memorable because everyone was in it together.
