Image by www.freeimages.com / Felix atsoram

Long-time readers of Campaign Mastery will know that it was co-founded with Johnn Four of Roleplaying Tips fame.

The most recent posting by Johnn (I’d provide a link but I think it’s probably too soon for there to be one) dealt with creating encounters on the fly, or improv encounters.

While it contained a lot of solid advice, I was immediately struck by a few differences between his approach and my own that I thought worth describing.

The Need

My first step is always to ask why I need an improv encounter in the first place. The answer is usually obvious, but mentally putting my finger on it helps define the solutions to grittier questions still to come.

Possible Needs include Pacing, Handicapping the PCs, Assisting the PCs, Steering the plot, Responding to plot drift, and Stalling.

• Pacing – if the game is heading into a major encounter which we won’t have time to resolve before the end of play for the day, but there’s a significant amount of game time left, it’s better to throw an unrelated minor encounter into the mix than to finish early or compromise the intensity of the main encounter.
• Pacing two – sometimes, there’s a need to fill a significant amount of in-game time with something. If I know that’s going to be the case in advance, I’ll build something into the adventure, but sometimes it’s down to how the players have chosen to have their characters react to the stimuli I’ve put in front of them, and I’ll need something to plug the gap.
• Handicapping the PCs – Players are sometimes too clever for the GM’s own good, cutting through the layers of fog that were supposed to keep them entertained to advance directly to “go”. Sometimes, that doesn’t make any big-picture difference, and they can be rewarded for their insights, but sometimes it was the layers of fog that were supposed to be significant – if the whole adventure was to serve as a soft entrance for an NPC whose significance would become apparent later in the campaign, for example. When that happens, you need to insert some fresh circumstances that will permit the “missing” building blocks to become relevant.
• Handicapping the PCs two – and sometimes the PCs are simply more effective in lead-up encounters than you expected them to be, and you need to throw a spanner into the works to avoid an anticlimax. You can either boost the effectiveness of the NPC concerned (sacrificing consistency for the sake of game-play) or you can use a side-encounter to make things temporarily more difficult.
• Assisting the PCs – when the players misinterpret the clues and hair off down a rabbit hole that puts the ‘big picture’ at risk, you sometimes need to parachute some clarification into the campaign before it’s too late. But such things should never be handed out on a silver platter, or they won’t be valued; so make them earn what you desperately want to give them.
• Assisting the PCs two – sometimes, though, you can underestimate the effectiveness of the enemy, a problem revealed in the lead-up encounters. This is the other side of the coin to “handicapping the PCs two”, and you are faced with the same two choices – providing some unexpected (and strictly temporary) assistance or being inconsistent.
• Steering the plot – sometimes the players don’t need to misinterpret the clues to go off on a tangent. When a flaw in their logic threatens to end in frustration and/or disaster for the campaign, corrective action needs to be taken (the rest of the time, let them learn the hard way, you ain’t their mama!)
• Responding to plot drift – some GMs have trouble sticking to a plot as it’s been written. Sometimes, especially in a commercially-available adventure, there’s a hole in the plot you can drive a Mack truck through – but patching it nudges the adventure to one side and the whole thing threatens to collapse like a house of cards. When that happens, it’s time to throw a new mastermind into the mix who can be revealed to have been providing misinformation left, right, and center, permitting the GM to snatch coherence from the jaws of anarchy. Another form of plot drift occurs when the players are stumped or simply not engaged; one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to change what you’ve planned in an attempt to capture their attention or supply increased drama; instead, use the plot the players don’t care about as background to something else that is made more dramatic or difficult as a result, and some of the attention gained by this side-plot will rub off on the plotline the players aren’t engaged with.
• Stalling – the least respectable of all the motives, but realistically, it happens that the GM simply needs more time to get the next “serious” part of the adventure ready. When that happens, you have three choices: run something half-baked, call off the day’s play, or Stall with a self-contained little plotline or encounter.

The Metaplot

Johnn’s first step is to determine what he describes as the GM’s Agenda, a notion that he credits to Dungeon World.

“I ask myself, what do I want to accomplish with this encounter? What’s my gameplay goal here?”

I consider this no less important than he does, but by making this my second question, I avoid excessive meta-gaming and plot trains. I am steered by the identified Need in the direction that I need the encounter to go at a metagame level.

But, having done most of the heavy lifting in terms of conceptualizing the encounter already, I find that I can spare the time and creative energy to be a bit more adroit in considering this question.

Most GMs in this situation use the encounter as a lever to move the players/PCs directly in the direction the GM wants them to move. This risks robbing the players of their free wills and direct control over their characters, producing the plot trains referred to a moment ago. I prefer to remove the directness by a step or two. One step means that the expected response to the encounter by the players will move them in the direction I want, but it is a change by their choice and not something forced down their throats. Two steps means that the expected response will trigger some NPC to move in a particular direction in reaction, and the counter-reaction from the PCs is in the desired direction.

The farther removed from direct cause-and-effect, the more scope there is for the players to make their own choices, or to feel that the choices they are forced by circumstances to make are their own. In effect, the direction that the GM wants the adventure to move in becomes a natural response to the in-game circumstances and not something that the GM is imposing.

The Entwinings

Having identified what the improv encounter is to achieve at a metaplot level, it’s time to contemplate exactly how this meta-function is to be achieved. What is the Being to be encountered (choosing my terminology to be as broadly-inclusive as possible) supposed to do? How will they translate the abstract ambition of the encounter into an in-game reality?

There are four aspects of the question that need to be contemplated, and the end result should be a checklist of attributes that the encounter needs to posses, either in terms of its capabilities, in terms of its actions, in terms of the responses that the PCs can be expected to make in reaction to those actions, and/or in terms of the changed context of everything else that’s going on in the adventure as a result of the presence and involvement of the encounter. These are: the encounter as an agent of metaplot; the encounter as a rudder; the big picture impact; and the small-picture impact. Between them, this set of specifications provides a blueprint for the encounter.

• The Encounter as an agent of metaplot – this generally means that the encounter is to be a stimulus of some kind. This consideration translates the known fact of what the metagame impact is required to be into a defined stimulus that will – at least in theory – achieve that effect.
• The Encounter as a rudder – this generally means that the encounter is to furnish information or corrective logic or an alteration in prioritization to the PCs. This generally is achieved by utilizing the current circumstances that the players (PCs) have incorrectly processed to achieve something that the PCs don’t want or don’t like. In the process of preventing or undoing that “something”, the Players and PCs will obtain the information that the GM wants them to have.
• Big-Picture Impact – some encounters can’t be confined in their impact to the scope of a single adventure. This is especially the case when the encounter furnishes either the PCs or their enemies with additional resources. Big-Picture impacts come in two varieties – desirable and undesirable. The encounter has to be defined in terms of achieving the desirable and avoiding the undesired.
• Small-Picture Impact – more often than not, though, big-picture impacts won’t be a significant problem. Instead, the issue will be with small-picture impacts – essentially, the encounter makes unplanned and ad-hoc changes to the current adventure, and you need to pay special attention to the ramifications that result. More than once, I’ve solved an immediate problem with an ad-hoc encounter that completely derailed the adventure, which needed to be reworked completely as a result – something that’s a LOT harder to do if part of the adventure has already been played.

The Agent

Once you’ve defined the parameters that the encounter needs to tick off from your checklist, and have a fair idea of how to control the inevitable side effects, it’s time to start hunting
around for someone or something that will meet the requirements. There are ten sources to contemplate, and I try to be fairly strict about considering them in sequence – and, of course, I stop as soon as I find an encounter choice that fits the circumstances. Johnn’s article identifies just four of these sources, and lists them in a very different sequence – with the same principle of stopping as soon as you have a “match” to your requirements. The ten are, in sequence, “From The Now”, “From The Past”, “From the Future”, “Targets Of Opportunity”, “PC Agendas”, “An Old Favorite”, “Encounter Reserves”, “A New One-Off”, “A New Recurring Element”, and “Random Generators”.

1. From the Now

Johnn gives the impression that his first resort is to mine the existing adventure for the encounter needed. It’s the first place that I look, but I am super-critical of any possible choices, because this is one of the most likely sources that will trip you up. The whole adventure can collapse if you discover (too late) that you have killed off an essential piece of the plot puzzle in an ad-hoc encounter. The benefits that Johnn articulates as deriving from choosing an encounter source from the game pieces already floating around the current adventure are all valid, but the price can be too darned high for my money.

2. From The Past

Johnn covers this source under the heading “Sandbox Encounters”, but I cast a wider net. Any NPC who has appeared in the past of the campaign and who doesn’t have a predefined role in the bigger picture of the campaign is fair game, in my book. The farther removed their last encounter was from the “now”, the more scope there is for updating their circumstances and capabilities to erase any red flags and tick any boxes that the character, as previously encountered, doesn’t match. What’s more, even dead characters can be an advantage; having the spirit of an enemy defeated by the PCs in the past return with an updated playbook, with a limited window before they are forced back to the grave, either in pursuit of revenge or in pursuit of some hair-brained quest to make their return more permanent, inherently limits the long-term damage that the campaign can experience from the encounter.

3. From The Future

If there’s no-one who has already appeared that fits the bill, I look at the characters I have planned to appear in the future – can any of them make an early appearance, even heavily-disguised? The answer is usually no, not without putting future plans at risk, but even the occasional “yes” pays big dividends in the long run in internal cohesiveness.

4. Targets Of Opportunity

I always have a list of past encounters that didn’t go as planned, or didn’t get used because the PCs zigged instead of zagging. Stripping them of their contextual links to the adventures they were supposed to be part of and reinventing them as standalone drop-ins is always desirable, but not always possible. A lot of them represent subplot threads that consequently didn’t manifest in the campaign, and those tend to be the easiest to adapt to standalone purposes. The need for a drop-in encounter can sometimes be viewed as an opportunity, in other words!

5. PC Agendas

When one or more of the PCs tell me they want to work on achieving something – whether that’s getting a magic item enchanted, buying a puppy, buttering up a politician, or acquiring a specific skill – I always devise a simple plot arc that achieves the result, or at least shows the PC working on achieving it, justifying marking the goal as achieved. Sometimes these need antagonists, sometimes they don’t need them but can support one (even one coming out of nowhere), and sometimes they aren’t important enough to justify any serious complications.

In the first case, It is possible to employ the antagonist as the encounter; in the second, it’s possible to add an antagonist to serve as the encounter. In the third case, you simply have to shrug your shoulders and move on. However, with N PCs, each of whom have personal goals, plus at least one team goal, the odds are good that at least one will fall into one of the first two categories.

What is less common is for such a potential encounter to satisfy the checklist of requirements, so it’s ultimately uncommon but not impossible for this to serve as the source for a drop-in encounter.

What is far more common is that the process of considering and rejecting the use of a potential encounter from this source for this specific purpose helps inspire ideas for the PC agendas and better define the plot mini-arcs in question, making them both more substantial and better defined when they do appear, so this option is rarely wasted effort.

6. Encounter Reserves

Johnn describes this idea as “Back Pocket Encounters”:

“Another trick I have involves creating 2-5 drag & drop encounters and keeping them in reserve. These encounters have minimal dependencies so I can drop them into most emergency situations. I often use these for stalling, but I try to integrate plot and GM Agenda as much as possible on-the-fly. I try to have a couple combat encounters and a couple roleplay encounters ready before each session. And I review these encounters every few sessions to account for character progression and relevance.

This is usually how I handle “wandering monster” encounters in D&D. If you come up with a list of half-a-dozen or so drop-in encounters, and a wandering monster is indicated, simply take the next one off the top of the list.

Sometimes, when it seems relevant, I will tag these as “Night Only” or “Day Only” or “In Furbash Only” or whatever, skipping over them if that defined requirement isn’t met. But for the most part, I try to make these as generally-valid as possible.

But I take these a step further than Johnn in that this approach permits interaction between these isolated drop-in encounters that connect them into a slightly larger narrative – a subplot that can, in fact, spread over multiple adventures, providing trans-adventure continuity that really ramps up the sense of cohesion within the campaign.

In addition to reviewing them periodically, I specifically review and replenish the list as part of my pre-adventure game prep.

For example, I might come up with the following:

1. An old hobgoblin, gasping for breath, half-insane from fear, stumbles into the PCs camp, gasps “The Terrax… all is lost….” and then dies. Three young Hobgoblins show up and attack the corpse to make sure it’s dead. If the PCs engage them, it will be discovered that they have twice the CON, +10 STR and DEX, and twice the HD that they should have (and attack bonuses & HP to match). They will commit suicide rather than permit themselves to be captured.
2. A lightning strike ignites a fire that threatens the PCs.
3. The PCs discover the mutilated body of a brass dragon.
4. One of the PCs will spot a gleam inside the hollow of a dead tree (or similar hiding place). Examining it more closely will reveal it to be a cache of stolen loot. Amongst items of minimal value is a fancy silver case with the legend “Terrax Enhanmus” on the lid. The lock of the case has been brutally forced, and the contents are missing.
5. A wild boar crosses the party’s path. It has a festering wound in its hindquarters from a poor-quality arrow.
6. The night sky will be filled with strange lights that you can see even through closed eyes, without explanation, and with no indication of where the display originates.
7. The PCs will encounter a hunting party of five “Enhanced” Hobgoblins (refer above). Three of them, The Hunters, will be riding Bugbears as mounts; the other two will be mounted on [undetermined, but something with a faster ground movement than Bugbears]. The latter sweep ahead of the Hunters on each flank and make noise to attract the attention of enemies. Those enemies will either flee the scouts, straight into the trap of the waiting Hunters, or they will pursue the Scouts and be led by them back to the trap. If a Hobgoblin rider is killed, the “mount” will come to its senses (remembering nothing) and either switch sides or flee; until then, they are willing servants.
8. The PCs come to a village from which all the children have been stolen by a Hobgoblin Raiding Party. The PCs can track the raiders back to their lair, where they see a strange altar and a totemic representation (a pole? or something else?) which incorporates a silver charm which exudes strong necromantic magic and darkest evil. There is a cage containing the children. Bloodstains on the altar reveals their intended fate. Thirty Enhanced Hobgoblins and forty Un-enhanced Hobgoblins are worshiping the “Terrax” while their “mounts” watch impassively. Another cage contains “wild” mounts. If the Terrax is destroyed, the Hobgoblins will lose all enhancement and their “mounts” will come to their senses. If the PCs watch until nightfall and moon-rise, they will see one of the children sacrificed, witness one of the Un-enhanced Hobgoblins become Enhanced and a “wild mount” become docile. The priests conducting the ceremony will be exhausted afterwards and need to rest for an hour before they can do it again.

It doesn’t matter how long a gap there is between one episode of this plotline and the next; they are not isolated but compartmentalized. Of course, it would be trivial to enlarge upon it – where did the “Terrax” come from, and are there more than one of them? How did the Hobgoblins work out how to use it? Is this a means of raising a small elite army for some grander plan? Or a distraction? Or a trial run?

7. An Old Favorite

Every GM has some old favorite
encounters they can dust off. Sometimes these are campaign-specific, with a magic that can never be recaptured; sometimes, they are a gift that just keeps on giving. More to the point, some of these will also be “old favorites” of the players. Dusting one off is always an option worth considering for a drop-in encounter. I have just three words to add – to some, they will speak volumes, to others they will be near-meaningless: “Red Gurdy Pickens“.

8. A New One-off

If I reach this point, I have conducted a comprehensive review of every NPC or antagonistic creature planned for the campaign (past, present, and future) and found nothing that ticks all the boxes. That means that it’s time to think about constructing something new, which will then add to the list of possibilities for future encounters. My first preference is to create a new one-off because that limits the campaign damage that can result, but some ideas are too good to be condemned to this fate.

9. A New Recurring Element

Which brings me to the notion of a new recurring element that I can pull out of a drawer whenever I need it. These are more problematic simply because the potential is for them to make an appearance in future even if they aren’t strictly necessary; if I can mitigate this problem through some character mechanism, I will create a recurring campaign element without further hesitation. But the idea needs to be good enough to sustain multiple appearances, and there needs to be such a mitigating mechanism before this is acceptable, adding to the list of requirements. If both are not accommodated then, no matter how good the character might be to play, I need a way to write them out – permanently if necessary.

10. Random Generators

I never use Random Generators except to give myself an idea when I’m completely at a loss for one. If I get this far through the list, I will use a random generator to construct such an idea and then pay particularly close attention to the reasons why the results are unsuitable if they are, better equipping me to start over. It very rarely happens – once in 30-odd years, in fact – but this is my last-resort.

In

With the who sorted, and what they are to do, both at an in-game and at a metagame level, there are only a couple of specific decisions that need attention. The first is “In” – i.e. how you are to bring the NPC “in” to the campaign. Closely related to this question are the sub-considerations of “Where” and “When” this introduction will take place.

Out

Once the “In” is known, it’s time to think about the “Out”, i.e. the resolution of the drop-in encounter.

Middle

Connecting the “In” to the “Out” is, quite obviously, the Middle. This is how the encounter is to be conducted to bring about the desired “Out”, which is why I consider that, first.

Legacy

Finally, I spare a thought for any legacy that might be left from the encounter. The best drop-ins will have a legacy, their status as ad-hoc drop-ins notwithstanding. A lot of the effort that I go to in this process is designed to ensure that such legacies are as beneficial to the campaign as I can manage.

Drop-in encounters are more than a filler; they are a tool and a resource, and should be taken as seriously as any other game element. Prepping some in advance is a great way of avoiding the need to do so at the game table while everyone is waiting. When you need one, take a break for a minute or five to consider your options, that’s only reasonable; but at the end of that time, you should be ready to proceed. Do it properly, and the players need never know the ugly truth of your need for an unplanned drop-in.