Puzzle Battles
D&D is a great game, but one of the most often mentioned criticisms I've heard in my limited experience is that combat can feel long and boring. My solution, that makes the combat in my games fun and engaging, is to make all of my encounters, or almost all of them, into puzzle battles. These are battles that have items on the battlefield that can be interacted with in order to affect or change the battle area. This forces both NPCs and PCs to move around the battlefield in order to activate those items in order to gain an advantage on the other team. There are countless ways to make a battle like this, but here is a simple template that will get you started making your own puzzle battles.
The Parts: Macguffin, Switches, Traps, Platforms
Macguffin
That's right, even a fight can have a Macguffin. This can be a hot-potato style item that the players are trying to recover or keep away from the enemies. Setting up an encounter as a game of keep-away immediatly changes the dynamic of the entire fight. Setting this up can be as simple as an item that when used does damage to all enemies. Players and NPCs can use grapple checks to grab the item, throw the item to other players, etc. Or perhaps the macguffin grants advantage to the person or team holding it. Or maybe you need the macguffin to activate a switch or effect somewhere in the room.
Switches and Traps
A 'switch' is anything in the room that is activated by a party member at a specific location on the battlefield or when a specific requirment is met and changes something about the battle. Traps would be considered switches in this context, but only if they change something elsewhere on the battlefield. So a tripwire that hurts the person that trips it, isn't a switch. But a pressure plate that causes the walls of the room to move around is. Switches should idealy deactivate themselves after use, causing players to have to move to a different location, to prevent players from remaining at one switch and activating it over and over. An easy dungeon design is a series of small chambers in a room during a battle where there are multiple levers. Whenever a lever is pulls a door between chambers opens or closes rearanging the room layout. This can change a boring battle into a complex one, and can be reused without feeling stale or overused.
Platforms
Platforms are anything that changes the layout of the battlefield. Doors that open or close, walls that move, the floor moving, ladders or chutes. Putting a battle in a clockwork tower with moving gears is an encounter that I am currently working on.
Force fields that block off parts of the area, vines that allow you to swing accross a chasm, rope bridges suspended by flying magic drones. Platforms are the primary way to run something like an encounter between two pirate ships on the ocean after one ship grapples the other. Each ship is a platform that move around each other as the battle progresses. This can dynamically change the player and npc positioning every round, leading to more interesting battle situations. Platforms can provide partial cover, make things obscured, or make difficult terrain.
Putting it all together:
Each player and NPC's turn is going to consist of 3 parts, their Action, Bonus Action, and Movement. Their action can include multiple attacks, so remember to decide if switches are activated with attacks, like Link shooting crystals in BoTW, or if the switches require and entire Action. Remember, the goal is to make it so that whenever a switch is thrown, the platforms or switches change in such a way that it is beneficial for the person to move to another location afterwards. Remember that a platform can be something as simple as a portion of the room becoming difficult terrain.
The main goal is to give your players things that they can do with their actions and bonus actions every turn to gain some type of advantage or progression in the battle. Then the goal is make sure that doing those actions and bonus actions requires at least 10ft of movement between each other. Remember that placing switches 35ft apart is significantly different than 30ft apart, because most PCs have 30ft base movement speed. I like to have my switches 40ft apart, because it seems to be the least repetitive incriment in practice.
Flavor
When building a puzzle battle, I find that it is best to develop the mechanics first and then flavor the descriptions to fit the scenery at the end. This is why I use the general terms of Macguffin, Switch, and Platform. After I've created the battle mechanics, then I decide what they are. I can also re-use puzzle battles over and over by simply reskinning the mechanics to look competely different, and moving the loctions of some switches and platforms. The players are unlikely to notice the similarity so long as the battles aren't one after another.
Example:
I recently ran a battle like this against 3 level 3 PCs.
Macguffin: A gold chalise that when poured out into a coffin in the center, caused an aoe to hurt the party.
7 switches that NCPs could use to cause an aoe to hurt party members who are poisoned where the macguffin can be refilled.
15 cultists.
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