Quote:
Originally Posted by Actana View Post
Encounter design, huh?

I do hope you enjoy reading, because there's going to be a lot of that in store for this post. There's a series of articles that I highly recommend to everyone about encounter design and what exactly makes a great encounter. Some are fairly long. Others even longer. But they all come highly recommended, and at least personally they've changed the way I've viewed encounters and building them.

They all come from the same person: The Angry GM. Maybe you've heard of him, maybe not. But here's a list of a few articles he's written about combat encounters, and I really can't recommend them enough:
Four Things You’ve Never Heard of That Make Encounters Not Suck
How to Build Awesome Encounters!
Three Shocking Things You Won’t Believe About D&D Combat
The Angry Guide to Combats (Part 1): Picking Your Enemies
The Angry Guide to Combats (Part 2): Battlefields and BattleFEELS
The Angry Guide to Combats (Part 3): Let’s Make Some Fights Already!

He's got a lot of other insightful articles on a variety of stuff, but since the topic is combat encounters I figured I'd limit the links to articles about that. Not that there's any lack of reading right there.

Edit: I also realize very well that the articles I linked to aren't specifically about the particular situation in the OP. They're far more general in nature, but are very well worth just for the potential applications the advice has, many of which apply to the situation.
I read through these articles Actana and they are very interesting. I ran an in-person game over the weekend and we completely did away with initiative; which was suggested in one of the articles.
Combat was incredibly more dynamic and interesting. It was so much better than everyone rolling and then having to keep track of the combat order.
It was so great in fact, that I won't be using initiative again with that group. And one of my players, who DMs a different game for our group has decided to get rid of initiative.

While changing up initiative works is not quite on topic of what Gwado is looking for, those articles can make the game itself more interesting and engaging.