As a GM I’d like to feel like I fully understand how to utilize my monsters tactically, but over the past couple months as I’ve been running the beginner box and now leading into Abomination Vaults, I feel as though I’m very often just making three strikes with an enemy or moving and striking twice unless the enemy has a very specific action in its statblock which is obviously better. Like a dragon is obviously supposed to use its breath weapon, but then I ran goblin warriors last night and I couldn’t even figure out how to use their scurry reaction beneficially.
I don’t know of any resources, but what I do is using skill actions. Athletics, Deception and Intimidation are what you’ll be mainly looking for because Athletics has a lot of fun stuff on it, Intimidation is Demoralize and Deception is Feint.
But never attack thrice, moving away is better even for meele and unintelligent monsters. If you look into animal fights videos you’ll see that, unless they’re grappling, they always do the back down-charge!!-back down-charge!! cycle as well. Even lions hunting larger prey do that.
