Four Ways of Encounter Thinking

Image byfrom Pixabay, brightened by Mike
The adventurers are moving over rugged grasslands punctuated here and there by the leaves of a wild melon. One of the PCs has been gathering these as they traveled to add a touch of flavor to the goat’s meat purchased in the last town, which has the flavor and consistency of stringy bark, in his opinion.
Although there are many plateaus and undulations in this region, the party has been careful to stay well clear of these and away from any potential danger of ambush.
The GM rolls the dice; the indicate that a random encounter is about to take place.
There are two common ways of thinking about what that encounter will comprise.
Way The First
Consider the terrain and landscape and pick an encounter that takes advantage of it to make the encounter more difficult / interesting.
EG: Goblins have used an illusion to conceal a natural bowl and the PCs are now surrounded by goblin archers with altitude on their side. The grasslands will waver as though in heat haze for a moment and then the sides of the bowl – and the archers, 30′ high on its rim – will stand revealed.
Problem: Why wasn’t the illusion detected / penetrated? This won’t be a problem if there’s no-one in the party resistant to such, but any Elf in the party raises a problem (at least in editions through 3.x – I’m not sure about 4e and 5e). Is there some limitation to the usual Elvish ability to see through illusions that the rules don’t mention? Or to racial abilities in general? Can clerical magic, for example, inhibit such abilities with an appropriate spell? Or Arcane Magic? Or is there something about this particular location?
The chosen solution to this problem will add considerably to the distinctiveness of the campaign. For balance, the opposite should also be true – there should be spells or locations that imbue specific races with additional racial abilities that they don’t have elsewhere. Suddenly, geopolitics in this world takes on a whole new significance and flavor!
Way The Second
Think about how the environment can be transformed to add spice to an encounter of a type that the PCs were not expecting.
EG: The PC picking melons sets foot on a piece of terrain that isn’t there, a hole hidden beneath the grasses. He falls 10′ (not enough to seriously harm most PCs) and is immediately attacked by a hungry spider with its mate to his rear. The spiders think that he’s probably going to have the flavor and consistency of stringy bark, but beggars can’t be choosers….
Meanwhile, the other PCs have noticed that the PC has vanished, but none of them saw where he went. They can hear him, though – BOY, can they hear him!
Way The Third
What is the story? Can it spawn an encounter? If not, do you have another little mini-story that can materialize unexpectedly?
EG 1: The PCs are on a quest to recover a legendary treasure. It’s of low monetary value and has no magical qualities but has high sentimental and patriotic significance. It has long been thought lost, but the memoir of its last guardian has just been discovered and provides a strong hint as to the location of the treasure. Whoever recovers it will be lionized and gain entree into the upper echelons of society, opening many doors to many opportunities.
No doubt some of the logical implications will be part of the main adventure. But this is a time to think through the logic again for anything you may have missed. The two most obvious implications are rivals on the quest and enemies who don’t want to see the item recovered. The main plotline will reveal (eventually) that the memoir is a fake and the treasure isn’t there, it’s a deception by a political rival looking to undermine popular support for the King. But the PCs are expected to discover a new clue to the real location of the treasure that will enable them to recover it and expose the plotting of the political rival.
Are there any other enemies of the Kingdom that might add their two cents’ worth? Are there any other adventuring bands who might also be on their way to recover the treasure? How might they have gotten ahead of the PCs?
To me that suggests an encounter: A rival band of adventurers have also been tipped off by a friend in the Kingdom’s circle of advisors. They have burned a one-shot teleport spell they recovered in the form of a magic item to get ahead of the PCs – which means that they were the first to encounter a band of Half-Giant Orcs who have been recruited by another neighboring Nation, one with which the PCs Kingdom is supposedly on good terms, but which fears that the Kingdom is growing too dominant in their relations. The Half-Giant Orcs are being well-paid to interfere in anyone’s attempt to recover the treasure. The neighbor knew about the treasure because they have a highly-placed spy in the Royal Court.
This not only adds nuance and richness to the politics of the Kingdom, it adds a new layer to the adventure, and throws in fair warning to the players that the GM is thinking outside the racial ‘box’ of the official rules. It also places a bit more treasure in the path of the PCs, compensating for the fact that the main reward of the adventure is not of significant monetary worth. In fact, it ticks an awful lot of boxes for the GM – so many that he really should have this as a pre-planned encounter en route.
Well, if that’s a pre-planned encounter that’s supposed to happen somewhere else, and there are no boxes that the GM can think of that they haven’t ticked already, perhaps a mini-story that just happens to intersect with the PCs path en route?
EG 2: A shepherd has been having trouble with a Harpy stealing his lambs of late. Many more have gone missing than can be accounted for in dietary needs alone. He doesn’t know what’s going on, but wants it stopped. As the PCs top a rise, they see (in the distance) the harpy carrying off another lamb as the shepherd tries to keep the rest of the flock together and his dogs attempt to attack the thief. The shepherd tells them (when they reach his location) that this is the 13th lamb stolen in 6 days. A single lamb should sustain a Harpy Nest for a week, he doesn’t understand it.
What he doesn’t know is that the Harpy is a Necromancer who intends to use the lambs’ blood in an evil ritual tomorrow night to enhance her powers, enabling her to raise and merge many Undead into a larger, more resilient and more dangerous form, a sort of Undead Flesh Golem.
The difference between this and a straightforward encounter is that the narrative behind the encounter is more important than the encounter itself, at least initially – the PCs see something in the distance, too far away for them to do anything about it, and then meet the farmer, who presents the plot hook. What’s more, by delaying the party, this eliminates the need for the pre-scripted rivals encounter to expend a teleport to get ahead of the PCs, which means that it can be set aside for use with a second band of rivals should another random encounter be indicated.
Of course, it might be that the story needs have all been catered for – that certainly seems to be the case at this point in my example! That brings me to…
The Zeroth Solution
The dice indicate an encounter, but there are times when the planned pacing is already chock-full, and adding another encounter into the mix will only get in the way. With every random encounter, the GM should always think about whether that encounter will help or hinder the pacing and unfolding of the plot, or if it will be too distracting. The less frequently you get to play, the more important such considerations become – there’s a lot more room to maneuver if you play weekly than if you get together bi-monthly, for example.
When there’s no room for an encounter right now, I invoke the “zeroth solution.” That’s an encounter that’s a time bomb – it won’t manifest until the time is right. If I can’t think of one that I haven’t used recently, then I’ll make it a plot development in a character’s background – they will return from the current adventure to find that things are not the same as when they left. Sometimes, these will be a change for the better, more often they will be for the worse. A third version of this encounter is a noteworthy location.
Let’s have an example of all three sub-varieties
EG 1: A pack of blink hounds stumbles across the PCs trail and begins stalking them. They will hunt the PCs for no more than three days, and will not follow the PCs into a dwelling or dungeon, though they will linger around the entrance in case their prey comes back out. They are looking for one of the members of the ‘herd’ to become separated from the rest, or for the herd to let their defenses down, eg a watchman who falls asleep.
EG 2: A PCs sister weds an unscrupulous character against the wishes of her family. What she hasn’t told them is that this is the price of his not turning over evidence of some past deed on the part of her father which, though legal, looks off-color, and would do his reputation serious harm. When the PC returns, the family will add this mess to his stack of things to do that require his immediate attention. Since that stack will now require him to be in three places at once, the only way he can make it all happen is by offloading some of his responsibilities to the other PCs. This encounter indicates that the Saga Of The Noble Scepter (or whatever it’s being called) will be followed by an unplanned change-of-pace adventure – one that wasn’t even on the horizon a moment ago.
EG 3: The PCs come upon a hill, one side of which seems to have been scooped away by some vast hand. A spring at the top of the hill cascades down the rocky side in a musical tinkle, landing on the side of a small pool, surrounded by shading trees. This place seems unnaturally peaceful; somehow, you can tell that this is the one place in all the world where there has never been an act of violence of any sort. On one of the tree-limbs, a sparrow and a hawk stand side-by-side, regarding you with unconcerned eyes. A rabbit pokes its head of a hole nearby to examine you with nothing more than curiosity while a fox emerges from the undergrowth to drink from the pool. This would be the perfect place for the PCs to camp and rejuvenate their spirits.
Every hour spent in this place adds a year to the lifespan of each PC, to a maximum of +25 years and does d3 healing. Once a character is fully healed, each hour adds +1 HP up to the maximum possible from the character’s hit dice. These extra HP will fade at the rate of 1 per hour once the characters leave the vicinity.
Any act of violence will be the equivalent of leaving the location, and will destroy the natural magic of this wonder of creation.
The place is also a trap for the unwary – every hour adds +1 to the difficulty of a WILL saving throw (or equivalent) to leave, it’s so comfortable and peaceful. If any party member fails, they will refuse to leave yet, for what seems like a good reason (to them, at least), and will resist any attempts to force them. Note that coming to blows will qualify as an “act of violence”. Even if a party member succeeds in one given check, that gives them no particular benefits at the next such check. Either the PCs split up, leaving some of the party at the pool, or they end the “magic,” or each party member has to succeed at the same time in order to leave.
Note that such rolls are not made every hour – they are only made when the time comes to leave according to the PCs established routines or other decision made by them.
A lot of narrative- and story-oriented GMs look upon random encounters as an inconvenience. The best will view them as an opportunity to flesh out a part of their game world or explore some aspect of it that hasn’t come to light. The very best will see it as a means of further world-building because they already have external forces lined up that will propel the PCs toward adventures that put all the established unique aspects of the game world on display.
Outside Fantasy
Game systems can be divided up into two main categories – those with random encounters and those without.
In the first category, we have virtually all Fantasy RPGs from D&D through to Tunnels & Trolls and Rolemaster. I’ve never seen a Fantasy game that didn’t have some ‘wandering monster in the wilderness’ mechanism. The same has to be said of every game system that is based upon a Fantasy-genre system – that’s D&D-esque game systems like Star Frontiers, Boot Hill, and Gamma World, and Pathfinder variants (only one so far, Starfinder).
Perhaps in an effort to distance themselves from the TSR/D&D model, random encounters are absent from almost every other game system, at least in terms of embedding them within the game mechanics. That doesn’t mean that casual encounters don’t and won’t take place, but these are more related to the logical potentials of each location and whether or not such encounters will add to or detract from the adventure at hand. If a superhero in Champions performs an act of public derring-do, nearby members of the press and fan-club members and members of the public in general will be attracted to the location. If the act is not so public, potential encounters are the people who could logically be at the location in question, from security guards to office staff working late.
Just because there is no die-rolling mechanism for invoking such encounters doesn’t mean that they won’t take place; it just gives the GM more control over their occurrence while placing more of the responsibility on his shoulders. In every other way, everything stated above still applies, including the four approaches.
Choices
With so many options, a systematic approach to choosing between them becomes critical.
I tend to adopt the following sequence under most circumstances:
- The Third Way
- The Zeroth Solution
- The First Way
- The Second Way
You could summarize this as “Story, Delayed-Bang/Background, Environment, Creative Capacity”. if nothing comes to mind in a given category, or is contraindicated, I’ll move on to the next category. Once the first three are exhausted, it indicates that no encounter is possible under the current circumstances, so if you really want/need an encounter, the only solution is to change those circumstances in some way.
A Fifth Answer?
In my superhero campaign, at the moment, I’m actually employing what could be considered a fifth approach, or at least approaching one.
I’ve created a list of possible encounters – little more than a placeholder – and whenever nothing interesting has been happening for a while in my adventure planning, I’ll spice things up by picking an item off the list that seems to match up with the local environment.
I can’t go into too much detail as we’re months away from actually playing through these, but they all fit under the “Third Way / Zeroth Solution” umbrellas so far (and the clock won’t even start on those months until the current Lockdown conditions come to an end – which quite possibly means a 2022 start).
Parting Wisdom
How you think about encounters pervades the atmosphere of your RPGs. Some approaches are better than others; the best choices will rarely happen by accident. All too often, one approach becomes habitual, even if it is no longer the best answer; take a moment to review how YOU handle random encounters, and your games will be the better for it.
I should end this article by pointing the reader to another of my articles on the subject – actually, a series of articles:
- Creating ecology-based random encounters: The Philosophy of meanderings
- Creating ecology-based random encounters: This Eats That
- Creating ecology-based random encounters: Encounters with meaning
And always remember, the object is to create fun at the game table for everyone!
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