Sometimes, it can be hard to roleplay your excellent combat skills when you’re just in the back shooting something at people every six in-game seconds.Dungeons & Dragonsgives players many opportunities to fight at a distance, from projectiles such as arrows, bolts, darts, or even bullets to magical blasts that can hit one or multiple targets or even cause other conditions on them, such as paralyzing them or putting them to sleep.
However, how will you roleplay that properly? Saying only ‘I attack’ every time can feel dull, and some ranged attacks feel too fatal to narrate when you know the enemy won’t die just yet. So, let’s talk about some ways you can roleplay your strikes.
5You Don’t Need To Hurt Them
Hit Points Can Be Interpreted In Different Ways
One of the hardest things about narrating shooting someone is that it’s hard to make a shot not feel deadly. It may come as a shock, but an arrow to the head tends to be fatal, you know.
Even if you hit the target in a non-vital area, this could cause consequences you don’t want to narrate as they don’t apply, such as shooting someone in the leg and affecting their movement or making them trip (if your attack does something like that,like a maneuver,then go for it, though).
you’re able to narrate what part of their body you want to hit and get confirmation on whether you succeeded or not from the Dungeon Master. Then, even if you just hit armor during the roleplay aspect, you know you cause ‘damage,’ even if it’s in the form of tiring your opponent out.
That way, you don’t need to roleplay a weird and obviously deadly shot on the chest or something with the enemy surviving it or force yourself to only roleplay minor scratches from almost hitting the target over and over.
4Consider The Creature
Some Monsters Can Take ‘Deadly’ Hits
This idea will feel contradictory to the previous one, but luckily for us, you’re not just fighting against normal people who die from a single shot. We also have giant beasts, undead, Devils, and Demons, among many others.
When facing a creature with inhuman resistance, you can roleplay your strikes without having to overthink details. You can shoot a zombie in the chest or in the head multiple times, and they can still ‘survive.’ The same applies to a big Dragon, for example, who can take a multitude of arrows before they start feeling bothered by them.
The same applies to magic strikes, as you can roleplay a Fire Bolt without necessarily burning the target alive — you have to wait for the DM to give you the clear for a kill narration, after all. The DM can even roleplay back with how much the creature is being affected, which works as a fun way of revealing if the enemy has resistance or even immunity from the damage by how bothered they were by your strike.
3Consider Your Dice Rolls
Roleplay According To Numbers
You can create a far better scenario by knowing all the variables, so getting the numbers first will help a lot. You’ll know beforehand whether you hit the enemy and how much damage was caused, so you can do things accordingly.
The same works particularly well with spells, where you can see if you hit them or if they passed or failed your spell’sSaving Throw,and the DM can roleplay their partial or total escape from your spell. Going back to the Fire Bolt example, you can roleplay small scorches if you rolled poorly on damage or big burns on their skin from high-damage rolls.
If you’re the DM, the same applies for spells that don’t cause damage but have conditions that will work depending on the enemy’s rolls. Roleplaying a successful and a failed Hold Person is a bit different after all, so you can give full description freedom to the player on success or take over on a failure to tell how the baddie avoided it — but you still let the player do the whole spell activation part.
2Elaborate Your Spellcasting
Whatever Fits Your Character And The Spell
If your attacks consist of spellcasting, flavoring them can come in many different ways. you may use something from your class, such as a Wizard opening their spellbook and saying some Latin word, or a Bard playing a specific riff on their instrument for the spell, or something that relates to how your character operates, like a Lolth Cleric using spider summons for the Spirit Guardians, for example.
To ensure your character will remain consistent, you just need to note what movement triggers each spell, or at least spells that work similarly in case you have a lot of them, and you can check the spell components to see if you need to say something (verbal component), move your arms around (somatic component), or whether you need items or your spellcasting focus to cast it (material component).
Since the same spell can be done in many different ways, you have a lot of room to flavor them. A simple Wizard casting Magic Missile can do it from their bare hands, rotating their staff around, or even something sillier such as holding their staff like a machine gun,among other options.
1Elaborate Your Shots
Poses, Glances, And Style
If your attacks rely on a long-range weapon, you’ll need to get a bit more creative. Still, since your attacks don’t depend on how you directly interact with enemies, you still have some ways you can play around it.
For instance, your character can hold their bow sideways or use an object to steady their aim with a gun. Or they can just do a silly little spin or pose before shooting their ranged weapon — your roleplay doesn’t need to be serious if it fits your character, after all.
Once again, you can also take inspiration from whatever class you’re going for, with a Fighter being a bit more straightforward and no-nonsense (unless, again, your character is comical) or a Rogue using multiple covers in the environment to prepare their attack, mixing the hide bonus action and their attack all into one description.
You don’t need to roleplay every single attack with extreme detail. Not only will that be tiring, but it will also remove what makes them special in the first place.
We encourage using these tricks in more defining moments of the game rather than attacks that barely hurt the enemy.
