A system-neutral guide to building combat objectives that make your fights feel like story events instead of tactical speed bumps.

There's a particular feeling every GM knows. You've set up a fight, the dice are flying, and somewhere around round four you realize: nobody at this table particularly cares who wins. Your players are doing math. Your monsters are doing math back. Somebody will eventually hit zero and the scene will end, and then everyone will move on to the part of the session they were actually there for.

The problem isn't your encounter balance. It isn't your monster selection. It isn't even your map.

The problem is that your encounter doesn't have an objective. Not a real one.

The Wrong Question

Most GMs sit down and think: which monsters am I using, what's my combat budget, how many of each, is it balanced according to the encounter difficulty rules? They do the work. They ran the numbers. And then the fight falls flat after round two, and they can't quite understand why, because they did the same thing last week and it worked out great.

Something happened naturally in that first session that didn't happen in the second. Something the GM needs to understand so that all their encounters land, not just the lucky ones.

Some GMs also add in a step: why are these creatures fighting? But in the rush of prep, or fatigue, or just a shallow familiarity with their own NPCs and monsters, even that falls flat. It seemed like a reasonable question. It just wasn't deep enough.

"They're bandits. They want money." Okay; roll initiative.

"They're orcs. They hate this region." Sure; roll initiative.

"They're cultists. They're evil." Classic; roll initiative.

What you end up with is two sides with vague, hostile intent trading damage until the math resolves. The fight is the fight. There's nothing underneath it.

The more useful question, the one that changes everything, is this:

Why does this conflict matter?

Because Combat is not a goal. Combat is an obstacle. It's what happens when two groups with incompatible goals try to influence the same situation at the same time and utterly fail, or don't care to try, to find other means of compromise.

Once you start thinking that way, something shifts. You stop inventing "combat objectives" as an afterthought and start asking yourself, during prep or during a session, what everybody wants, and letting the fight grow naturally out of that collision.

The Goblin Experiment

Here's a simple test. Two versions of the same encounter:

Version A: Six goblins attack the party.

Why? Unknown. What do they want? Apparently murder. How does it end? When everyone on one side hits zero. Old-school systems had random morale rolls. This was a quick and dirty method that added uncertainty and simulated something through randomness. But we don't want vague randomness. We want intentional design and understanding of our world and the NPCs in it.

Version B: Six goblins are dragging stolen food carts toward their starving tribe.

Suddenly you have:

• A reason the goblins are here at all

• Something the party might actually want to recover

• A way the fight can end that isn't "everyone dies"

• A possible moment where the goblins throw down their weapons and beg for negotiation

• A moral dimension that makes the players think

When I first started trying to improve my combats, I read articles about 'Combat Outs'. It was a wonderful article, but it didn't lead to a true understanding of what I was trying to pin down. Maybe it did for you and that's wonderful; it grooved into your brain, but for me, there was a missing piece of comprehension that saw me inventing arbitrary combat outs that felt heavy-handed and more like deus ex machina than organic to the NPCs and monsters I was running.

All of that served to make most combats feel like a mini-game we warped to that took us out of the story, and more importantly took my mind-space, busy juggling countless things and attention of 4-5 players, out of the emergent story and into a highly abstracted mechanical space that was supposed to provide challenge and drama. Sometimes it did, but I succeeded in spite of myself in those moments.

So what happened in example B above? The goblins didn't get smarter or tougher. Nothing mechanical changed. What changed is that there's a subject the conflict is about, the food, and the combat is the obstacle standing between both parties and what they want.

Remove the food carts from Version B and the conflict still exists. The goblins might still try to steal. The village might still go hungry. Because the food was the subject and the motivation was they're hungry, and they're willing to risk their lives to obtain/steal food. The fight was only one possible way that situation could resolve.

That's your diagnostic test: if you removed the combat entirely, would the conflict still exist?

If the answer is no, if combat and conflict are the same thing, you probably don't have a real objective yet.

Imagine you just ruled that the situation was under the watchful eye of a deity and combat simply couldn't happen. The conflict still exists: the goblins are going to steal food, and the party is motivated (by gold, care for the npcs etc.) to stop that. They might instead choose to negotiate or play diplomat between two parties, or buy food for the goblins if the GM roleplays them in a certain way that invites empathy.

Building a Conflict Grammar

Once you accept that combat is the obstacle and not the goal, you need a way to quickly articulate what the goal actually is without philosophically drilling down to the core of the cosmos. We can bring in some shorthand sentence structures to help get you immediately into the right headspace and refine it.

Every conflict, when you strip it to the bone, has the same structure:

Actor → Verb → Subject

Two sides, each trying to do something to the same thing.

Orcs → Destroy → Signal Tower <> PCs → Protect → Signal Tower

Cultists → Complete → Ritual <> Heroes → Stop → Ritual

Bandits → Steal → Supplies <> Guards → Protect → Supplies

Notice what's happening here. The subject is always shared. That's the thing both sides care about, the contested point that gives the encounter its meaning. The verbs differ, and that difference is where the conflict lives.

When an encounter feels pointless, it's almost always because there's no meaningful shared subject that you or your players have identified that is contested by all sides. Each side just wants to destroy the other. The combatants are the subject, the conflict is self-referential, and that tends to produce exactly the kind of fight nobody remembers the next week, or the GM feels like they have to end early because it's dragging. And often that leads to some very heavy-handed, quick ends that feel forced rather than organic.

The Six Verbs That Cover Almost Everything

When you look at what people actually do in conflicts, the specific actions collapse into a surprisingly small set of categories. Feel free to add any I may have missed, but I suspect that once discussed most additions would actually be revealed to fall into one of these.

Acquire: gain possession of or access. Steal, capture, recover, claim, retrieve.

Control: maintain authority over something. Hold, defend, occupy, guard, protect.

Destroy: remove something from play. Kill, burn, break, sabotage, corrupt.

Deny: prevent the other side from succeeding. Stop, block, interrupt, delay, disrupt.

Deliver: move something somewhere. Escort, transport, smuggle, bring, return.

Transform: change the state of something. Activate, complete, heal, purify, corrupt, repair.

That's it. Most TTRPG conflicts, from a tavern brawl to a siege, fit somewhere in that list.

The verbs matter because they tell you what desired end state each side is trying to create; not their method, not their tactic, but the outcome they're pushing toward. This distinction is important: a party trying to deliver a relic to a temple might fight, sneak, bribe, or bargain their way through. The verb, deliver, stays constant regardless of the method. The conflict objective doesn't change because the approach does.

A Word About Subjects: Drill Until It Stays Still

The subjects of conflict are the kinds of things you'd expect: a person, a place, an organization, an object, a piece of information, an event, or a time pressure.

But here's a useful test: keep asking "Why does this matter?" and see what survives.

A good subject holds up. The ritual is still the ritual whether you ask once or five times. The bridge is still the bridge. The king is still the king. More importantly, they still matter and don't reveal something deeper that matters in this moment when that question is asked.

Some things you might first reach for won't survive the test, and those are the ones worth examining. The obvious ones that are the whole point of this article are: kill or defeat the wizard or bad guy. Clichéd subjects aside, those verbs are almost never good to start off with. I dare say never ever. Because they are the means to which you're accomplishing your real goal, not the goal itself. And a good combat, like a good novel, can only be as good as the foundation it is formed on. Here are a couple of others that might surprise you:

"Freedom" as a conflict subject is usually a placeholder.

Take a group of prisoners who want freedom. Fine. But freedom to do what? Rejoin the rebellion. Warn the king. Escape execution and get evidence to the magistrate. When you drill down, freedom dissolves into a more specific objective underneath, and that more specific thing is almost always more interesting to build around than the abstract condition.

The same is true of survival, safety, and escape. They often feel like objectives because they're urgent and emotionally real. But ask "survive in order to accomplish what?" and something more specific usually surfaces.

"Escape" Is Almost Never a Real Objective

This one's worth its own section because it shows up constantly in GM notes.

Escape the tomb. Escape the prison. Escape the collapsing dungeon.

Every one of these is a placeholder. Not because escape isn't high stakes, but because it's pointing at the time pressure and the obstacle, not the actual goal.

"Escape the collapsing dungeon" might really be: deliver the relic to the surface before the tomb comes down around you.

"Escape the prison" is really: Rejoin the rebellion; warn the king; deliver the evidence.

"Escape the pursuing army" might be: protect the refugees until they reach the fortress.

The escape is the method. The tomb collapse is the clock. The objective, the thing that should live in your notes as the real goal, is whatever comes after you ask: escape in order to accomplish what?

And the final problem with Escape X... is it's just a passive thing. The party is reacting to something, and the opposition is often devoid of a goal itself. Escape the crumbling tomb? well that sounds like a cool scene, but without the why and a deeper delve, it's just a series of dice checks that don't resonate with the emergent story you and your players are forging. It has tension, sure, but it doesn't have meaning.

I'm not saying it's not useful, but it is a tension tool and an obstacle/method, not the goal itself.

Same with "explore the dungeon." That's a note to yourself that says: there is content here; figure out what these characters actually want from it or what you intend to actually entice them with. Once you ask the question, the real objectives come out. Recover the relic. Find the cult's ritual site? Heck, even that one can be drilled down too. Learn the wizard's true name. Rescue the captive. "Explore" was just stream-of-consciousness placeholder text.

And "defeat the orcs"? Ask it one more time: defeat them in order to accomplish what? Control the valley. Destroy the signal they're sending. Protect the village. Deliver the ambassador safely through their territory. The orcs are an obstacle to one of those things, not the objective themselves.

Whenever you write one of these words, treat it as a flag. It's your own notes telling you: dig deeper here.

The Formula

Once you've identified the verb and subject for each side, everything else slots in around them.

[Side] wants to [VERB] [SUBJECT] because [MOTIVATION] before [Time Pressure]. If they fail, they lose [STAKES]. They're willing to risk ...

Write it twice, once for each side. If you can do that in under a minute, you have enough to run the encounter.

The orc example:

The orcs want to destroy the signal tower because they need to maintain control of the valley. If they fail, they lose their strategic advantage.

The PCs want to control the signal tower because they need reinforcements to arrive. If they fail, they lose their chance to reclaim the valley.

From those two sentences, you already know the win conditions, the lose conditions, the time pressure, and the thing the fight is physically about: the tower. Everything flows from the tower.

A Note on Risk (And Why It Lives in a Different Place)

You might notice the formula above has a risk clause, and it's worth explaining because "risk" is genuinely useful. It just belongs somewhere else.

Risk, what a side is willing to sacrifice to achieve the objective, doesn't change what a conflict is about or even what will be lost if they fail. It changes how that conflict behaves moment to moment.

Orcs willing to lose half their number to burn the tower will fight very differently from orcs willing to lose three soldiers before retreating. Same objective. Completely different encounter texture.

More importantly: risk is the mechanism that determines when a fight stops being a fight. When enemies hit their casualty threshold, they might break and run; combat becomes a chase. When they realize they're beaten, they might throw down weapons; combat becomes social. When the clock runs out, the objective changes state, and you have a consequence to resolve.

Risk lives in the behavior layer, not the objective layer. For your player characters, you can't predict it anyway; they'll surprise you. But for your NPCs and monsters, writing down their risk tolerance, even as a simple note: these orcs will fight to the last to complete this mission or these mercenaries break at 40% casualties, gives your opposition a coherent logic that players can read and respond to.

Structure determines what the fight is. Risk determines how long they stay in it, how intense and difficult it might play out, and what comes next when they don't. It's the threshold by which the combat could become another encounter type.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

The logline comparison in the intro isn't accidental. Novelists are told: if you can't summarize your story in one sentence, you don't know what your story is yet. The logline isn't a marketing tool; it's a clarity test. When it's solid, everything downstream gets easier to write.

The conflict formula works the same way. When your two-sentence objective statement is solid, the encounter design that flows from it is more coherent, more improvable at the table, and easier to make meaningful. You know what a partial victory looks like. You know what the players are actually protecting. You know why the monsters aren't just walking into sword range to die. It is in the process of fleshing out this simple statement that you come to a greater understanding of your own story, scene, and participants, which helps you react more meaningfully and consistently at the table.

It doesn't guarantee a great encounter. But it gets you out of the trap of "two sides doing math until someone's math runs out", and that trap is where most forgettable or slog fights are born.

The Cheat Sheet

Tear this out. Stick it in your GM binder. Use it for prep and improv.

Core Conflict Formula

[The Party] wants to [VERB] [Shared SUBJECT] because [MOTIVATION]. If they fail, they lose [STAKES].

[Side B] wants to [VERB] [Shared SUBJECT] because [MOTIVATION]. If they fail, they lose [STAKES]. They're willing to Risk...

Write both sides. If you can, you're ready to run.

Universal Conflict Verbs

Verbs represent desired end states, not methods.

Universal Conflict Subjects

The shared point that both sides are contesting. Hold up under repeated "Why does this matter?" questioning.

Placeholder Objectives: Drill Deeper

If your notes say any of these, ask: "in order to accomplish what?"

Motivation, Stakes & Risk

Risk tolerance (NPC only) determines when combat shifts modes: fight → retreat, fight → surrender, fight → chase.

The 30-Second Test

Can you encapsulate your encounter in those two sentences? If yes, select some appropriate monsters (you probably already have) and run the encounter.

If you're stuck, the subject/verb is probably a mental placeholder begging you to dive deeper. Keep asking: "In order to accomplish what?"

The fight is not about defeating the enemy. The fight is what happens when two groups with incompatible goals try to influence the same situation at the same time. Find the collision point, and the rest flows from that initial design.