What are more fun ways to say "I hurt you"? It gets boring to say "The goblin hits you with his club", I’m thinking adjectives like Slash, Rip, Gash, Slit, Lacerate, Hack, Tear, Smash, Stab, Thrust, Poke, Wreck, Bash, Break, Pound, Mutilate, Maim, Cut, Chop, Cleave, Impale, Crack, Pierce, Pulp, Skewer. Please add to the list of helpful descriptions of brutality
https://imgur.io/RxpiRKh
This is a good template to give you ideas.
None of those are adjectives, they’re all verbs, words denoting action. You thinking of synonyms, different words with the same meaning. Also, no, I will not apologize for being this pedantic.
More helpfully, metaphors and similes can be nice sometimes, thing like describing the the sound of getting clubbed in the head like the deafening crack of a thunderstorm.
To add to what he said, i would recommend reading some of Robert E Howard Conan's stories.
Conan didn't just jump and cut a man, he lept towards them and in a single pantherish strike, cleaved the opponents arm off.
Adding some flair to normal actions is what made sword and sorcery so energetic
Only works if your combats are brief though, any 5e combat with 20 rounds will run out of energy on the 3rd round and will become a snoozefest soon enough
>Only works if your combats are brief though
eh, it's still good for particularly dramatic moments like characters going down or new enemies getting introduced or such
definitely a bad idea to go hard on describing every single attack though
This is what I came here to post. Nobody wrote action like Robert E. Howard. I'd suggest reading The Phoenix in the Sword because it's one of the shorter stories and the meat of it is a huge fight scene with Conan fending off a bunch of assassins and splitting their skulls left and right.
Terrible bargain bin pulp fiction author advice, describe things as they are, not as they are "like".
My bad b. I think I just thought of them as adjectives because they sort of help to describe and visualize what’s happening to characters for me
Describe it mechanically
"The club impacts in the lower ribs".
"The arrow penetrates about two inches into the left shoulder"
You need to step beyond what they're doing and start describing the scene. Something like
>From out of a hole in the wall, a goblin squirms out and rushes at you with a club. He aims for your shins and hits you for 4 damage.
What makes a fight interesting to describe is not the moment of impact, but all the moments leading up to and what happens after the moment of impact.
I generally describe it like this.
>the creature stabs you in your shoulder, it passes your armor and hurts like hell as your shoulder starts yo bleed heavily
use onomatopoeia
"The goblin THWACKS you in the head"
"The talons sink in with a sickening squelch"
"with a FFFT an arrow sprouts from your chest"
yo fo shizzle yous got made like a schnitzel
Depends on tone and amount of time you have to spend on description, but generally I like to describe how the enemy is actually attacking more so than how hurt you are by it.
But since you asked...
> The goblin raises his shield as if scared but his other hand is swinging a club right into your knee. It feels like your whole body is a stubbed toe.
> The wolf tears into your leg like it's a chicken wing. You can feel your tendon tensing and your muscles tearing - you don't think you can take another hit like that.
Humour can always be good if things are getting boring.
> The goblin, jumping from the tree, raises his club and sends you to horny jail. You are stunned and you spend the next round reconsidering your ways
U S E
A
T H E S A U R U S ,
N I G G E R
But what if I’m scared of dinosaurs?
Why are you playing games where goblins are attacking for more than say, 2 rounds? Either they should be dead or the players in that time.
I like to go autistic psuedomedical OP.
The swords bite is dulled by your crude helm,but the impact coupled with the deformation of the helm crushes your occipital lobe and leaves a half inch puncture in brow. This bleeds profuesly although you are presently too consussed to notice.
Light Head wound, bleeding plus stunned forD3rounds
We play Inquistor so we are all autustic lol
That sounds pretty good
What do you run?
I feel like narrating each hit in something like pathfinder will elongate the battle even more
Tread carefully the path of the purple prose.