GMW Academy: Designing Encounters 2

The encounter is the atomic unit of story telling. We know what a story is; it’s a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. But what is an encounter? The 5e DMG says, “Encounters are the individual scenes in the larger story of your adventure.” The story is the most important thing and it has to be planned first, but eventually stories become a series of encounters. This is true of every campaign ever written or played and is the functional definition for our narrative approach.

An encounter has a mechanical definition, and this is important as well. An encounter is a discrete event that takes place at the current time and within the area the players occupy, sense, and affect with the items and abilities they have. In simpler terms, an encounter asks the question, “what can the players do right here, right now?”

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In this article, I will describe designing proper encounters. Designing good, compelling, and useful encounters is a technical task. Creativity and imagination are great, but a technical, story-first approach always makes the best encounters.

Let’s get to it.

Encounters Deliver Story Beats

If you’ve been reading this series of articles, you know that I believe in a story-first approach to writing adventures. We use the same approach when designing encounters. The very first question to ask is:

“How does the story need this encounter?”

This question is posed in a very particular way. “Need” is a critical word here, because it is the story that must “need” the encounter. Every encounter must be required by the story; no encounter should be unnecessary. GMs often waste time with superfluous encounters that are just busy work, and I’ll talk about this later.

The question “how does the story need this encounter?” also forces us to make sure we design encounters to fit our story, and not write the story to fit the encounters. Everyone has a great idea for an encounter they’d like to run, but we can’t build a story around a single encounter. We know the framework of our story, so all of our encounters must fit that framework.

To divide our narrative into individual encounters, we use story beats. A story beat is a single plot element that the players need. For example, if your story starts in one town, and the climax is in another town, then motivating the players to travel to the second town is a story beat. I showed how to break a story into its beats in the article Designing a 3-Act Session.

You had one job, encounter!

Now, let’s get more technical. Each story beat needs one encounter. More importantly, each encounter should hit exactly one story beat. Again, each encounter should hit exactly one story beat.

This is called the “Single Responsibility Principle,” and it is critical when designing encounters. Each encounter has exactly one job, hitting one story beat. When designing an encounter, start with “what does the story need this encounter to do?” Answering that question, we define this encounter’s job.

An encounter can perform one of four jobs:

• Acquisition – An encounter where your goal is to give the players information, key items, or some other element needed later in the story. This is the most common type of encounter, and it includes a variety of scenes. Maybe the players defeat a terrible ogre to gain the magic sword. Maybe the players are in a high-stakes negotiation to gain a lead on their investigation. Maybe the players are mingling among nobility at a gala in order to gain favor with a monarch. All of these are acquisition encounters.
• Drain – An encounter where you present a challenge the players must overcome in order to continue. This is the second most common type of encounter, and it has a mechanical function. These are roadblocks; challenges in which the party pays a resource toll to continue the story. A common example is door guards who bar entrance to a place the players need to be. If you’re crawling through a dungeon, most of the rooms will be this kind of encounter.
• Tone – An encounter which you use to establish or maintain the setting. A common pitfall with tone encounters is overusing them. It’s usually best to have just one which immediately follows a dramatic transition, such as entering a new area or players realizing that their circumstances have changed. For example, in chapter two of Curse of Strahd, the players may encounter “… a skeletal warhorse and rider, both clad in ruined chainmail. The skeletal rider holds up a rusted lantern that sheds no light.”
• Reward – An encounter where you give a benefit not required for the story. These encounters acknowledge that we are players having fun with a game. Sometimes, we need to have a little fun or blow off some steam, so getting into an inconsequential bar fight might be a good way to spend an hour. Another use of these encounters is to give your players some item which is not integral to the story, such as a +1 sword or a bag of holding. Use these sparingly, because they are the “busy work” I mentioned.

So, when designing an encounter, figure out what story beat needs to be here, then categorize it as one of the jobs above. These are steps one and two.

Step three is style.

“When you can balance a tack hammer on your head, you can head off your foes with a balanced attack.”

– The Sphinx, Mystery Men

The best adventures feature balanced play. “Balanced play” means the challenges require different game elements. Some need heavy role playing, some feature assembling clues or teasing apart puzzles, and others feature toe-to-toe brawls with deadly foes. These are the three elements of play, also called the “three pillars” of play:

• Combat – The players are engaging in round-by-round mechanical fights. This is the most rules-intensive part of the game.
• Social – The players are engaging with NPCs or among themselves. This is the least rules-intensive part of the game.
• Exploration – The players are engaging with the game’s environment, usually in a physical way.

Generally, an encounter will feature just one of these three categories, but an encounter’s elements can to change. A faux pas at a dinner party might result in a fight with an offended noble. The social encounter became a combat encounter.

In some encounters the players can choose among the elements, with none being preferable. An example is getting past guards at a door. The players may opt to fight their way in (Combat), they may send their bard to sweet talk the guards (Social), or they may send their rogue to climb in a window and open a back door (Exploration).

When we write our adventures, we need to balance our encounters among the elements. There’s no rule on how many of which element to use and when, but an equal number of each is a safe bet. Some adventures or parties may favor one over the others, and that’s fine as long as it doesn’t harm the story.

An encounter should be preceded and followed by encounters of different elements. This gives the session texture by separating the rules-intensive play with other elements of the game. Your players will probably lose interest and patience if your adventure features four combat encounters followed by four exploration encounters.

After you choose an element for the encounter, add the game mechanics. Are the players fighting? Figure out which monster statblocks you need. Will they be mingling among the crowd of a seedy bar? Figure out what conversations will get them the information they need (and which will get them punched). Are they navigating a dense jungle? Decide which skills are useful and the DC of the checks. This is the tidying-up stage where you get ready to run the encounter.

Now let’s get into some advanced encounter design concepts.

Encounters are not optional! (Except when they are.)

Encounters must be built to advance the story by delivering story beats. An encounter which doesn’t is usually a waste of time (the occasional Reward encounter is an exception). Because every encounter you build is important for the story, your players must play each of them for the story to make sense.

But players don’t always do what you expect, so how do you ensure your players hit all the story beats? You must plan a bypass or a force for every encounter. A bypass is a way to deliver the same story beat without playing through the encounter. A force is a way to deliver the encounter when the players don’t engage it.

Encounters are often cut out of sessions to save time, or the players won’t or can’t engage the planned encounter. This is when you use a bypass. To do this, we plan to deliver the important story element of the encounter some other way, such as exposition. For example, if the characters need to interrogate an NPC for key information but need to bypass the encounter, a city guard can say, “Oh, we interrogated him, and this is what he told us.”

Some encounters are at a particular place or deliver necessary tone, and a bypass won’t work. In these cases, we use a force to ensure the players work through the encounter by compelling them with game elements. Do this by providing a lopsided choice, having NPCs intervene, endangering the players, and so on. It can be difficult to make this seem natural, so it requires planning and flexibility.

Say you need your players to go to a certain place, but they’re reluctant to do so. One way to get the players there is relentless pursuit by foes they can’t defeat. If they know the place you want them to be is their best bet, they’ll go there. Or, if the next beat of a story is a face-to-face meet with an NPC and the players are going in the wrong direction, the NPC can run into the players in the street, or maybe send underlings to fetch them.

“I never did mind about the little things.”

– Amanda, Point of No Return

Encounters are a small element in a large campaign. In fact, they’re the smallest element. But they’re vitally important to your campaign’s progress and flow, and must fit its structure. Encounters allow you to divide a huge campaign into easy pieces, but they must be designed well and used properly. Think of them as the individual bricks in a large building: If they’re poorly made or badly laid, the building is going to tumble.

As always, I encourage you to send your questions, comments, and hate mail to our GMW Academy mail box: academy@legendarypants.net

Stanford

Stanford is co-owner and lead designer.