Hunting Monsters in D&D
I am obsessed with games that force me to hunt stuff down. Mystery games where I have to look for clues? Yes, I liked LA Noire. Action games where I follow a trail to find a monster? I’ve already written an article about my experience playing Monster Hunter. If I had the time I know I’d even get into the Witcher games more than a couple of hours!
However, it wasn’t until our 600 twitch follower celebration stream that the inspiration for this article appeared. That stream was my first experience with Phasmophobia. For those not in the know, you play a ghost hunter trying to identify the ghost of a haunted house so the proper specialists can come along and get rid of the ghost.
The journal in the game allows you to record clues that you’ve found in the house. Once you find all three clues you can finally narrow down which ghost it is. Guess correctly and you earn some money for your work. However, it’s a race against the clock or more specifically the ghost’s mood. At a certain point, the ghost will undergo “the hunt” where it tries to kill one of the players.
It is a fantastic experience playing this game and my designer brain went into overdrive after putting the game down (also so I could breathe after all the screaming). It brought up one important question that I’d never try to piece together. How do you make hunting an entertaining experience and how can I bring that to tabletop games?
Know What You Are Hunting
Almost every November 15th you can find me in a small cabin in the woods with a big gun hunting for meat, specifically of the venison kind. I do this instead of running around chasing deer because I know enough about the white-tailed deer in the area. I know that a deer trail goes right through the property and I’ve seen enough of them to know a bit about their behavior. To hunt them I have to understand the animal.
As a DM you have to know what the monster is that the players are hunting. For example, you have a warehouse near the edge of town that was recently ransacked. Your players have been hired to figure out the culprit. You ask the players to first make a Wisdom (Perception) check. Beforehand you have chosen a number of clues for the players to find and have given them a DC for this check. You can also give a few clues for free from the quest giver, but be careful you don’t give the answer.
Once they have found the clues they then need to identify from where those clues came from. Let’s say several of the boxes were destroyed and their contents are eaten or spread about. Do not prompt the players to do anything with the clues. Allow them to ask about specific details of the clue. If they want to check any leftover food for teeth marks, you could have them roll an Intelligence (Nature) check to see if they can identify the teeth marks.
The vagueness of the clues and the DC of finding the clues determines how challenging you want the investigation to be. By making the clues not directly give answers, will make the players look for more. For example, finding claw marks on a door gives you some details but not enough. You can reduce the possibilities to creatures with claws, but not much more. For our example, the teeth marks could just show that the thieves had pointed teeth. It reduces it further to creatures that have pointed teeth, guess that rules out human thieves.
Failing Forward
With the roll of dice, you run the risk of the players failing at key checks. In this case you need to have a back-up. Maybe there is a library in town and you need to do more research. These back-up options need to be something that will guarantee additional information even if it doesn’t solve the answer.
For our example, let’s say the players head to a nearby library and look through as many nature books as they can to narrow down their clues. They might find that in that area, there are goblins and kobolds that have been seen in the area. However, it might not specify that it's one or the other.
You can also introduce NPCs who might be able to give further information. Maybe a local monster hunter can better give hints on what it is, or a local guard was ambushed and has more information on what was found. Maybe they heard the thieves talking but couldn’t understand. Maybe they have the blade that was used against them in the ambush, narrowing it down to goblins. These additional clues are things that you as the DM can simply give the players with no additional rolls.
The World Keeps Moving
Nothing exists in a vacuum. Because of this, you will need to keep track of what the hunted creature is doing while the players are tracking them down. For the goblins, they may be ambushing a caravan near the town. Not only does this give pressure on the players to finish the hunt quicker or more people might get hurt.
Not only does this give pressure, but it can supply even more clues as to what they are hunting. If the players get to the sight of the ambushed caravan and find black feathered arrows, they may know for certain that it's a goblin. Or if your players are really struggling, just having an NPC from a random event straight up say what it was (if the NPC knows what it was).
You can also have the players experience this random event. Maybe they are in the caravan that gets attacked and see the goblins attacking. If the players didn’t know they were goblins, then it gives the group a ton more evidence for what the creature is. You should always have the hunted creature remain active or it will slow down the pace of the game (like real hunting)
The Final Showdown
After all of the evidence is gathered and the party knows what the creature(s) are then all that’s needed is to hunt it down and destroy it. If the party doesn’t have access to further information on the creature, you just set up a bigger challenge. Whenever players make rolls to see what they know, never give the players nothing. My favorite answers to poor rolls are usually a reiteration of what they already know, but some players need this reminder if the hunt has gone on for months out of the game.
Each creature will have its own tactics for hunting it down. In deer hunting, the best technique is to wait for a deer to cross through the area. You can crow food plots to make the area more attractive to deer or lay bait (though at the time of writing this it's not legal to do this in Michigan). Earlier I mentioned that a deer trail went through the area we hunt. We discovered it by finding prints of deer and checking them over several years. We know where they are and what they like.
Weather can also play a big role in hunting. For deer hunting, the worse the weather is the night before we go out hunting usually the better the hunting is. White-tailed deer are always moving and looking for food, but when the weather is terrible (like a blizzard) they will hunker down to preserve energy in a period of time that predators are more active. The next day they will be hungry and go looking for food. It’s why I always hope for snow in November.
Not all creatures roam like the white-tailed deer. For our goblin problem, this can be a manner of finding their lair. Maybe your players ask around town if they heard rumors of where goblins may have been, or you find a trail from the destroyed caravan leading off into the forest that you can follow. The use of the Wisdom (Survival) skill is a great tool for this.
Finally, they will need to prepare for the fight. In Monster Hunter, each monster has its own sets of resistance and weakness. Before going out on the hunt, it’s advised to bring along a weapon that will do the most damage. The wizard in the party can prepare some fire spells for scaring the goblins, making them easier to kill. Some creatures might require the party to get special oils or items to beat them, creating a potential side quest all on its own.
Now that they have located the creature and have done all the preparation they can do to fight the creature, all that is left is to deal with the creature however the party sees fit. This can be fighting them or negotiating. The end of this hunt will be satisfactory because of the hard work the players put into the hunt and the dopamine hit of solving a puzzle.
The hunt is the culmination of the “three pillars” of D&D. There are the social interactions with NPCs, there is the exploration of searching for clues and following trails, and there is the combat of the final encounter (or from random encounters). The only homework you really need to do beforehand is learning about the monsters. For D&D I highly recommend you check out Mr Rhexx as he does some really deep dives into popular monsters.
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