Last week, I defined an encounter as a moment when the players face an obstacle to their objective.

It is important to know the basic structure of an encounter but that doesn’t tell us what makes a good encounter.

What is a “good” encounter?

The wizard is out of spells. The cleric is out of spells. The fighters are down to a few hit points. Nobody has any healing potions left. The party is cut off from escape by an ogre mage, who is casting a spell this round. If the spell goes off, it’s a total wipe for the party.

The thief, however, is intact and still invisible. He has carefully maneuvered behind the ogre mage, his magic short sword poised for a back stab. The party has done a lot of damage to the monster. The thief goes before the ogre mage. The DM says the monster only has two hit points left. All eyes are on the D20 roll.

It succeeds! The thief strikes the killing blow and the party is saved.

The room erupts into cheering and high fives!

That response from the players tells us that this was a good encounter.

A monster shows up while the party was searching for secret doors in an otherwise empty room. All the referee had from the wondering monster table was a stat block. Yet, it produced an engaging encounter.

Why might that be?

It’s baked into the game

Dungeons & Dragons in all editions, has the fundamental structure and elements that I’m going to tell you about built into the game.

Most game masters don’t care why or how it works, they just want the rules and the tools to use them. If you follow the basic recommendations and procedures in the core rule books, you’ll get a satisfactory experience out of the game, most of the time.

If you want to do better than that, then an understanding of what is going on and why is helpful.

A “good” encounter produces the feeling we want the players to feel.

The reason we keep coming back to this game is that playing D&D makes us feel things we like to feel.

“Fun” is a word we often use to describe the feelings we have when we play the game. This is a stew of feelings and experiences. This is not a single emotion. It’s ups. It’s downs. It’s everything in between.

A “good” encounter is one that produces emotions that players don’t get to have in their normal lives.

Most of us don’t have a lot of adventure in our lives. Adventure means risk. Few people want to explore dank caverns, climb towering rock walls, hunt dangerous animals with a spear, cross an ocean in a wood boat, or join a mercenary army.

We want to feel the excitement of a dangerous situation and exhilaration of victory; we just want to do that a safe distance from actual danger.

If D&D didn’t provide at least a little exhilaration and vicarious living, it would have remained the hobby of conflict simulation for military history buffs.

You can create a mathematically optimized encounter that scales precisely to the current level of the party in line with the intent and spirit of the game’s rules. If it doesn’t make the players lean in, get sweaty palms, groan, laugh, or shout then it’s not much of an encounter.

I want to make sure that the result of an encounter is an emotional response from the players.

If I’m playing Call of Cthulu I want the feeling of being a tiny speck of dust in an uncaring universe.

If I’m playing Aces & Eights I want to feel like a cowboy who makes his way with grit and determination.

If I’m playing classic Dungeons & Dragons I want to feel like a brave hero overcoming monsters and villains.

To produce those feelings, I break down the encounter into it’s component parts and assemble them in a way that is most likely to produce the experience I want.

The Objective

In my ogre mage wandering monster example, the characters had a very engaging objective.

Their survival.

Not every encounter has to have life and death stakes but there needs to be something the players want.

There are two broad categories of objective; gain and loss prevention.

The PCs are trying to gain experience points, treasure, magic, information, a McGuffin to return to a patron. Or they are trying to prevent their own deaths, avoid losing treasure, magic, or other valuable resource.

The importance of what is to be gained or lost effects how big of a response you’ll get from the player.

No one gets excited about 100 copper pieces. Enough treasure to level up will get a player’s attention.

Avoiding loss of something the players already have (their character, their character’s treasure, the character’s allies) is the most emotionally engaging form of objective.

Players will fight tooth and nail to avoid loss.

If the objective is a huge pile of gold but the obstacle is Tiamat, they’ll be nervous and think twice about that fight. Players will be incensed about Tiamat attacking the fortress where they keep their stuff and cost them a million gold pieces to build.

The emotional punch is amplified if the potential loss is something that the player has come to identify with their character.

If the character has a unique item that the player associates with their character, the player will be attached to that item. This is so even if the item doesn’t have that much value in gold pieces or as an adventuring tool.

If the players have established their characters as the great heroes and protectors of a town, a threat to the town is not merely a threat to the town. I’m threatening the player’s sense of who their character is and what the character means to the player.

Loss of identity cuts deep. Players will be very motivated to prevent it from happening.

The Obstacle

The obstacle determines how much tension the encounter produces.

That’s why the ogre mage encounter is good despite being very simple. An ogre mage is a serious threat.

Obstacles in combat encounters are obvious. The monster or the adversary is the obstacle.

Wilderness and dungeons have traps, puzzles, and environmental obstacles. Those are also obvious obstacles.

Social encounters are harder. Assuming that the player’s goal is important to them, then the difficulty of the obstacle needs to match the value of the objective.

If the goal is to get the king to ally with them in their fight against the invading barbarian hordes then the king’s objections must be difficult to overcome. The players should have to work hard to convince the king that helping them is worth the cost and risks.

If the objective of a social encounter is to see the apothecary for that rash the wizard picked up while carousing, then figuring out how they can convince the assistant to let them in shouldn’t require moving heaven and earth. A small bribe or promise of a favor should be sufficient. The encounter won’t be that intense but it might cause some laughs.

Costs of failure

For an encounter to be engaging, the players must have some idea of what they are going to gain or lose. What they might lose is especially important. Perfect knowledge isn’t necessary. It might be they know something bad is going to happen but not what it will be exactly.

The cost of failure is obvious in a combat encounter or a dangerous environmental encounter like a rickety bridge over a deep chasm. A social encounter also needs a cost that players don’t want to pay.

If the situation the players are in is desperate, the social encounter to convince the king to help them will be more intense.

Uncertainty

Uncertainty is useful for increasing the intensity of an encounter.

The players see a charred corpse in a passage in front of them. Something scorched that guy.

The party has an implicit objective; get to where they are going without being killed. I have presented evidence that there is an obstacle. They can choose to go a different route or try this passage. They have some uncertainty about what the precise nature of the obstacle is, where it is at, and how to overcome it. That creates suspense.

They’ll have to gather more information, try to avoid the obstacle by going a different route, or decide the adventure’s objective is not worth the danger and retreat.

Players need enough information to make good decisions but I can turn up the suspense by telling them there is danger but not giving them all the information right away.

Tuning the objective, obstacle, costs and degree of uncertainty

Old school Dungeons & Dragons can produce curiosity, wonder, excitement, fellowship, suspense and many other feelings.

When I select the specific objectives, the environment where the encounter happens, the monsters or traps they’ll face; I think about what these elements will communicate to the players.

A goblin in a ragged jester’s suit might be funny.

A goblin in a jester’s suit eating the jester’s warm liver might produce a different effect.

A gibbering mouther is a different experience altogether.

I like to decide what I want the experience to be like and then decide what the encounter’s contents will be based on the feelings I want to generate.

Context and genre expectation

An encounter is set within the context of the adventure. If it doesn’t fit the themes and motifs of the setting, the expectations of the genre, the established style of the campaign or adventure then it’s going to be confusing, irritating, or just silly.

Finding a cache of canned soup and an Elvis poster in the lair of an evil high priest because the chimney is a magic portal that leads to Eastern Michigan University in the year 1979 works in a light hearted one shot. It won’t work at all if we’re playing Game of Thrones.

Encounters that break expectation or tone of the campaign can be funny but they can also create dissonance.

Summing up

A good encounter produces emotions beyond the basic enjoyment of moving pieces around on a board and mastering the mechanisms of a game. A good encounter produces the kinds of emotion you feel when watching a great movie or reading an exciting book. The way a game does that is different but the emotional experience is very similar.

An encounter comporting with the rules of the game will not necessarily be a good encounter.

I can stimulate the particular feeling I want by employing…

• An objective that advances the players toward their ultimate goals or prevents a setback.
• An obstacle that provides enough challenge to require attention and caution.
• A cost for failure that players are aware of.
• Enough uncertainty to make them uneasy without being unfair.
• Fits within the context of the genre, setting, and adventure.

I don’t want every encounter to be an intense life or death situation but I do want to keep the players’ attention. I do that by making sure each encounter has something in it that they want (or want to avoid) and a problem that they have to overcome to get it.

I get the emotion I want by deciding what I want the specific experience of the encounter to be and then tuning it to produce that emotion.

I am trying to produce a specific emotional response from players. I’m not always going to get the precise response I’m going for. I can get close.

Even if I don’t hit it right on target, the impact will be far more substantial if I put thought into what I want the players to feel and what goals and challenges will be most likely to produce that.