As a DM, how can I keep martial characters relevant in non-combat encounters?

Question

There's a lot of discussion around how/ whether casters outpace martial classes in combat, but in my game I've actually noticed the gap more in investigation, social, and stealth encounters. Some bullet points to support this:

• Investigation, Perception, Insight, History, Knowledge, Religion, and Arcana are all Int or Wisdom based skills. Monks may be good at the wisdom skills, but aside from that no martial class has any reason to invest in these skills. The same applies to Cha-based skills. I try to let players roll others skills as knowledge skills in the proper context (rolling Athletics to tell if someone is bluffing about his combat ability, for example) but mental stats are still overrepresented.

• Most class abilities (for all classes, but especially martial classes) only come into play in combat. Those that don't ( like tongue of the sun and moon) are highly situational. However, there are many spells that offer massive benefits outside of combat. Martial classes only have access to class abilities and feats, not spells, limiting their specific non-combat utility.

An example from my game: My 6th-level party wanted to rescue some captive children from a hobgoblin camp. The Wizard cast Feign Death on herself so the party could exchange her corpse for some captives. The Cleric used Pass Without Trace, Blessing of the Trickster, and Disguise Self to get herself and the Open Hand Monk inside the camp. This left the Battle master Fighter with 9 Charisma to negotiate the exchange of the Wizard's body. Thus the Monk and the Fighter contributed significantly less to the success of the plan, and the Fighter was actively doing something she wasn't good at.

Now, my players are all having fun, and they're pretty good about trying to pass the spotlight around. But I can't help but wonder if there's a way to either:

• Allow the Fighter and Monk to use their unique abilities more actively in non-combat encounters (like maybe there are skill or ability uses I'm missing?)

• Better design non-combat encounters to offer clear roles for these characters to excel in

• Encourage my players to make different plans that rely less on casters and more on the martial party members.

If you've encountered similar issues in your games, how have you addressed them? I'd prefer solutions that don't involve encouraging the martials to pursue a certain build, since I think they're already playing the characters they want to play. Giving them magic items is on the table, but not ideal.

Answer 1

Make non combat encounters rely on combat rolls.

This is my normal method to make visiting combat monsters interesting. Players have mostly enjoyed it. When a combat character arrives to meet other characters I have them admire the combat character's weapon, want to duel them, challenge them to a contest of a weapon, or challenge them to some great feat of strength.

I normally make it so that their combat abilities grant them increased presence in negotiations. For example, the hobgoblins might be very impressed with how the fighter killed a giant in the previous adventure, and an arrogant young master who is a level 1 power monster wants to duel them. They'll give them some of what they want if they do it, and more if the fighter can use their combat abilities to sway them.

Don't require charisma unless the fighter asks for something beyond normal negotiation.

A lot of DMs require charisma based rolls whenever something social happens. This tends to punish non charisma people. I personally only require them when someone pushes beyond normal negotiation.

For example, suppose the hobgoblins offer them 2 children for the practice duel. If the fighter promises to channel the spirit of the giant and give a really impressive showing (using action surge to look badass), that might get them more without any rolls. They only need to roll if they ask for more children without offering more rewards.

For monks, leverage their ability to fight unarmed a lot.

Most people need weapons to be useful in a fight. For infiltration and stealth, monks are great as they don't need weapons.

The cleric used disguise self, so presumably other hobgoblins saw them and thought they were hobgoblins?

What about their weapons? If someone chances upon them and harasses them, perhaps to extract some easy coin from these newcomers they can't really draw their clearly not hobgoblin made weapons and use them, or people will spot them. They'll need to go unarmed, or not draw weapons. The monk can handle this hobgoblin harassing them and prevent their disguise from being broken.

Include physical situations in non combat roleplays.

I often include athletics or other things in non combat scenarios. For example, suppose there is a wall around the hobgoblin camp. The monk can get them over easily with athletics. The wizard is likely weak, and would fail to climb it. The hobgoblins might close their door to the fighter, and only someone strong can shove it open.

This lets them use their abilities in such scenarios to get an advantage.

Answer 2

Are you good at everything you're asked to do?

Anyone can contribute to the success of the plan. Some people will have the education and background to succeed more often than others.

Every character (player) will attack a goal in a different way; some better than others. The bard may try sweet talking, while the barbarian bluffs their way through.

At work, I occasionally have to give presentations. Am I good at public speaking? No, but it's part of of the position I'm in. So I have to find a way to play to my strengths. So I make the presentation interactive (I talk less, they talk more), lighthearted (comedy can cover up a number of issues), and graphical (sometimes it's easier to explain with a picture). Your party is in the same boat. Sometimes, the only person for the job is the "wrong" person.

In a campaign I played, I was a Lizardfolk Cleric with a 10 Charisma. But because he was the only one that spoke Draconic, I was made the ambassador to barter a deal with an ancient dragon (he refused to speak in the Common tongue as it was beneath him). This was made even more awkward as my character always talked in third-person.

Was he good at talking? Nope. Was he good with trade? Nope. He wasn't even good at telling good from evil. If he missed three attacks in a row then his lizard brain figured his deity didn't want him hurting that person so obviously they weren't bad.

It made for a great number of encounters!

If everyone is having fun, where is the problem?

Now, my players are all having fun, and they're pretty good about trying to pass the spotlight around.

Sounds like you have a great group of people that solved the problem for you.

No one is great at everything, but everyone is great at something

There will be times people are good, and sometimes someone else can/should take over. But if there comes a time where they don't/can't, there are ways to bring people forward by introducing aspects unique to a character.

• Bring in an NPC from the character's past.
  • Anyone can talk to them, but by having a history, it creates a bond that might be more important than a proficiency.
• Create a situation where the skill of a certain character is required.
  • Maybe in order to gain favor with a tribe, someone needs to pass physical trials. Someone with a high Athletics proficiency perhaps?

Let the players play the game how they want to play it

They made the plan; let them sink or swim with it. Maybe the Fighter is seen as a fellow warrior to the Hobgoblins and will have a better reaction than a puny Monk or Wizard. Or a Cleric that believes in a false god.

Only your group can decide.

Answer 3

Social Encounters

The characters can be much more than their attributes and abilities. If you focus on character backgrounds and personality You can put different characters in spotlight. For example followers of competing deity may start suspicious if not outright hostile to the party cleric but neutral to the fighter who may have it easier to talk to them despite lower charisma.

Some characters may not even want to talk to commoners, others be suspicious of those of noble birth. The character background may give them contacts among sailors or craftsmen or academics or some other group important for specific scenario. Going further personal contacts, allies and rivals may put specific character in the front of given social interaction.

Stealth Encounters

First, everybody who is not specifically good at stealth is bad at stealth, even with invisibility spell one still make noise when moving around.

Second, a group of characters is even worse at stealth than least stealthy character in the group.

Third, total cover makes you not visible (physically impossible to see) regardless of skills or equipment and it would take superb perception to hear immobile character at a distance.

So a stealth encounter would be either solo affair of specialized character, or quickly turn into another kind of encounter - fighting, fast talking, running away.

Exploration Encounters

I prefer to run them with players interacting with environment through their characters rather than rolling. I give them everything that they characters can reprieve and specific interactions may reveal more. It is because the roll is either meaningless because you allow repeat it until it succeed or you risk locking out parts of prepared scenario or even progress altogether behind failed roll.

Investigation Encounters

They are mic of interaction and exploration encounters. So I would have one character best person to interrogate the Butler, another one to interrogate the Lady of the House, and would run the examination of crime scene mostly without rolls.

Answer 4

Mix it up

Variant: Skills with Different Abilities

Normally, your proficiency in a skill applies only to a specific kind of ability check. Proficiency in Athletics, for example, usually applies to Strength checks. In some situations, though, your proficiency might reasonably apply to a different kind of check. In such cases, the GM might ask for a check using an unusual combination of ability and skill, or you might ask your GM if you can apply a proficiency to a different check. For example, if you have to swim from an offshore island to the mainland, your GM might call for a Constitution check to see if you have the stamina to make it that far. In this case, your GM might allow you to apply your proficiency in Athletics and ask for a Constitution (Athletics) check. So if you're proficient in Athletics, you apply your proficiency bonus to the Constitution check just as you would normally do for a Strength (Athletics) check. Similarly, when your half-­‐‑orc barbarian uses a display of raw strength to intimidate an enemy, your GM might ask for a Strength (Intimidation) check, even though Intimidation is normally associated with Charisma.

Directly from the PHB.

Maybe your Fighter's negotiating technique doesn't involve being nice, friendly, personable. Maybe it involves glaring, scowling, flexing (Strength bonus). Maybe it involves reading the other person's reactions and realizing what they are hoping for and afraid of (Wisdom bonus).

The point being, you can let the players use a different ability score for the skill check, if they can provide a good reason for it. It might not be as good as having the actual skill proficiency, but it can help.

Let them fail

Not everyone is good at everything. And not everything the players try needs to be successful. Sometimes the most fun and the best story may come from failing. The fighter may try to negotiate, and fail. Instead of breaking off negotiations, the hobgoblins demand the fighter's sword instead. The fighter has to decide to give their weapon up, or not get the wizard's 'corpse' back. Either way, that leads to a new scene; trying to get the fighter's sword back, or the wizard gets found out, and the hobs are upset that they were tricked/betrayed.

Answer 5

In my games it is common for martial abilities, especially Athletics and Stealth, to see a lot of use in non-combat encounters.

In the encounter you described, perhaps the monk might have used Stealth to sneak in to the camp, or the fighter might have used Athletics to climb over a wall. If your encounter design would have allowed this, then perhaps your martial characters are simply not as good at thinking of ways to use their skills, and they might benefit from a brief reminder. If your encounter design would not have allowed this, you might try to design future encounters in ways that will allow opportunities for these things.

Sometimes, when a DM wants to allow a DEX-based character more flexibility, I've seen DMs accept Acrobatics checks in place of Athletics checks for climbing and jumping. Likewise, there's an optional rule to allow Intimidate to use STR instead of CHA. I don't necessarily endorse this but it's something you could consider if you wanted to give your martial characters more opportunities to use their skills.

Answer 6

This seems like something you should have worked out in session zero.

If you need your players' characters to be relevant in all types of encounters, discussing that with the players and helping them build the characters with that in mind would have removed the need for this question.

There are players who are uncomfortable with social interaction in games, and prefer the tactical hack-and-slash they are familiar with from video games. There are similarly players who feel uncomfortable with the intricacies of stealth missions. Without a shared vision, forcing the players to actively participate in either can cause friction.

House-rule character creation

If your group accepts the premise of everyone participating in every type of activity, but some players still feel that building their characters to also be decent at investigative and social situations to be limiting their main focus, give them more resources.

For instance, give all characters two extra skill proficiencies, one for investigation and one for social interaction, and ask the players to each pick a different skill, so they will each be able to cover different aspects of encounters.

You may also want to ensure higher "worst case" for Ability Scores, to ensure they don't end up with that crippling 8 Charisma for social encounters.

If you want the characters to be better generalists, give them the resources for it

Respect players' choices

If you had a session zero where you discussed that you wanted to run non-combat encounters, and some of your players still opted out of that when building their characters, let the players' choices limit their characters' options and utility.

They have made a choice, as is the role of players. Now your role as Dungeon Master is to give them the consequences thereof.

Answer 7

If you had an entire party that built characters that couldn't fight, how would they deal with combat encounters? They wouldn't, or you'd have to scale back combat until it was easy enough for them to fight effectively.

I'd say it was the same for non combat encounters. If they are focused on combat, they should probably be a hot mess outside of combat, screwing up encounters and annoying NPCs.

The problem is optimizing your character. If you build an optimized awesome fighting character, the only thing you are really doing is making the game harder for the other players and the DM. What I mean by this is that the DM will scale the difficulty of encounters to match the party, problems only occur when one character is significantly better than the others so that in order to hurt the Awesome Character, an enemy has to be built that would one-hit anyone else.

The same is true of social encounters. If one character is fantastic and the others are lousy, the encounters are harder to build and more likely to be disasters.

If you want a system that treats social encounters with the same import as martial encounters, I'd expect a few one-hit "Failures" if there is a significant imbalance in social ability.

Also note that failing a social encounter should not be a dead-end route. You should have alternate ways to move forward (They may not be as rewarding or straight-forward).

Answer 8

1. All characters have a lot of use for Perception and for Wis saves. Both are highly relevant to combat. If your players aren't aware of it, you might find ways to casually bring it up outside of game.

2. The difference between a 14 in a stat and a 10 is only 10% on a d20. Most of the time, people can't even tell if it made a difference in the results. Having a +4 from being trained in a stat is a much bigger deal. Create situations where a player is the best choice despite a lower mod - because of their background, or the languages they speak, or snobbery by the local NPCs, or whatever. There's a decent chance your characters have skills that aren't perfectly aligned with what they have high stats in.

3. There are a lot of martial classes/subclasses (maybe most)that give the character something outside of combat they're good at. If you know what that is, you can take advantage. Also some, like the Battle Master, have an option for it, but the player may or may not take that option. If they don't, you could have a deity grant it or a grizzled veteran teach it. That would feel pretty organic to the character.

4. Magic items can allow anyone to do just about anything. Obviously, you need to be careful not to step on anyone's toes with it, but spellcasters are often relieved to be able to save spell slots. And you can find/create items that do unique and interesting things.