The Importance of Encounters

Encounters put the G in RPG.

They can be some of the most exciting moments in a game, the times when everything hangs in the balance and outcomes are uncertain. Without them, are we even playing a game at all? or just sitting around pretending to be elves? The tension lifts when the stakes are high and fate plays its beautiful, cruel role … or roll. (0h, shoot me!)

During encounters, the game mechanics are used to adjudicate success and failure so it could be easy to leave these dramatic moments in the hands of ‘the rules and rolls’. But no rule enforces or applies itself and each GM has a pivotal part to play. How a GM thinks about and presents an encounter to the players makes a huge difference to the choices players feel empowered to make, their sense of agency and how real the game world appears.

Here we take a look at:

1. What is an encounter and how does it differ from other ‘scenes’ in a TTRPG,
2. What is ‘resistance’ in encounters and why its useful for a DM to identify it,
3. How to use your game rules to guide you to easy and fun DMing, AND
4. How to simply bring it all together to create a living, believable and murder-hobo free world.

What is an Encounter?

An ‘Encounter’ is any scene of the a roleplaying game that provides the players and their characters with resistance or a challenge. Sometimes the term is used to mean a fight scene but it could be a torrential river the party decide to cross or convincing a reluctant NPC to provide information.

Encounters are not Fights

I advise against thinking in terms of an encounter being ‘a combat’. Combat is a way of resolving an encounter, not an encounter itself.

Imagine the party seek access to an ancient mine and a group of bandits are camping in the entrance. The bandits not allowing the characters to wander through their camp is the encounter, fighting is just one way of resolving that. The party might try to bribe the bandits, sneak past them, poison their supplies, lure them away … whatever.

Allowing the party to choose how to solve their problems is a crucial aspect of player agency; their ability to make meaningful choices in the game. Player agency is huge topic in its own right and I’m not going to explore it in detail here. It suffices to say that ‘Agency’ exists on many levels. But down at the nuts and bolts level of an encounter, player agency should rarely be interfered with.

All you have to do is identify the resistance and react fairly and consistently however the players seek to overcome it. If you lock this in your mind, you have all the makings of a great DM. It’s that easy.

What is the Resistance?

The bandits aren’t, the torrential river isn’t and the reluctant NPC isn’t. The question is ‘Why won’t the bandits let the party through their camp?’ and that’s for you as the DM to decide. If you have the answer to that then you can run the encounter easily no matter what the party decide to do.

Perhaps the bandits don’t want their hideout to be revealed and have no reason to trust the party, they could have been paid to guard the entrance to the mine or maybe they are raiders and in sore need of a pay-day. Each of these scenarios affects how the bandits would react to the presence of the player-characters.

If the bandits are guarding the mine and spot the characters then they might hide and set up an ambush in case the adventurers come too close. If the bandits are in need of a mark then they may charge if the party doesn’t look too strong (if you were a medieval-fantasy robber, would you pick a hefty warrior with a longsword and chainmail as a target?) The party might be able to buy off raiders, but not guards. The raiders would be more likely to retreat from a strong fight-back than guards protecting their home.

When the party reach a river, they have a decision; try to cross it, look for another route or choose a new destination. If, and only if, they decide to cross it does the scene become an ‘encounter’ with the resistance being the width and strength of the river.

If an NPC won’t tell the party what they want to know, then the party have a decision; seek different information, find the information elsewhere or convince the NPC to tell them. If they try to convince the NPC to spill the beans then the resistance becomes the NPC’s reason for objecting to telling them and/or their lack of sufficient incentive to override that objection. e.g. “I’d get in trouble with my superiors if I told you” or “Whilst I have no reason not to tell you, this knowledge is valuable and you look like you have money”.

If you know the NPC’s objection you can run a compelling and realistic encounter; the party can either try to persuade the NPC that their objection isn’t a big deal or provide the NPC with an incentive to tell them anyway (a bribe or avoiding a knife in the guts, usually I find).

Staying focused on the resistance can make your world seem real. As you look at any relevant stats and environmental factors for your encounter, keep in mind the source of resistance and your games will come to life.

Goblin Ambush

As a running example, I’ll take a look at the first encounter of the very first adventure published for D&D 5e, ‘Goblin Ambush’ from the Lost Mines of Phandelver starter set. (A genuinely great adventure.)

In this encounter, as the players guard a wagon, they spot two dead horses further up the trail, feathered with arrows. Four goblins are hiding in the woods, two on either side of the road. The adventure text tells us that the goblins wait until someone approaches the bodies and then attack.

So that’s it then? The resistance is the goblins are going to attack?
No. As Dungeon Master you need to decide why they are going to attack. The adventure tells us that their hideout is about five miles away and they’ve clearly set up an ambush. They don’t know who the character’s are and have no reason to expect them personally so it doesn’t feel like an organised hit or assassination. Okay, so it looks like this is a robbery. Their home is too far away for them to be defending it and the goblins have put themselves right here in ambush for a reason.

This tells us what is at stake for them. Not their lives or home, just a payday. There is a clear place of safety to flee too. As soon as this ambush goes sour, these goblins might run for it. In fact, the adventure does go on to say the when three goblins are defeated the last attempts to flee, but we’ll come back to that.

What Rules Might You Need?

We can look up the goblin stat block entry and think about how we’re going to run them. There’s no right answer to this; they’re your goblins and you don’t have to make them behave like Gary Gygax’s or Ed Greenwood’s goblins. The only thing you have to do is make some decision about them so your head space is free at the table to focus upon your players.

So let’s take a look at the D&D goblin stat block as an example; a few goblins, that should be a nice warm up, right? If you need to, you might look up the combat section in the core rules and check you’re happy with how that works.

If you’re new to this, don’t worry if this block doesn’t mean all that much. What does this block tell us about how to use them? I’m going to go into a bit of detail here and you won’t need to conduct as full an analysis as this. I’m doing it here as an example which requires more explanation. All you need to do it think about it.

The goblins six core stats are listed in nice big font but they’re not the most important ones to us. We are interested in its AC (armor class), HP (Hit Points) and it’s to hit and damage rolls as well as any special rules.

The goblins have a special rule, ‘Nimble Escape’. Maybe this needs us to look up what Hide and Disengage mean but since we’ve read the ‘Playing the Game’ mechanics we have an idea. I’m not going to discuss Hiding and Stealth in detail here because it would get a bit off point. What matters is you won’t have your nose in a book trying to figure it out when your players are sat at the table.

‘Nimble Escape’ makes the goblins canny foes. A goblin can shoot its bow, move into some cover and take the Hide Action. In the next round, the beleaguered PCs might not know where the goblins are whilst the goblins gain Advantage to their shots for being hidden. If the party get close to the goblins, the little blighters can Disengage to escape! Tricksy.

But perhaps most important is what this tells us about goblins; they run away. They might slip off to a better position, regroup at a later ambush point or just flat out flee. The rule keys into our mindset how goblins behave and we as DMs can lean into that to make our goblins feel like goblins instead of just being a stat block of hit point and modifiers.

Bringing it Together

So I’ve identified (or chosen) the ‘resistance’ as being “the goblins want to rob travellers”. I’ve also checked out the goblin stat block and noticed these guys have a special rule to help them escape and considered that’s an important part of what makes them feel like goblins instead of just being little, scrappy snipers.

Had I not thought about this I’d probably have just viewed this encounter as a ‘combat with goblins’. But now, thinking of the goblins wanting an easy pay day and being willing to run away I can run the encounter with more richness and realism.

In fact, I’ve run this adventure at least four times for different groups. All of those groups have spotted the arrows in the horses and concluded an ambush was possible. Many of them have asked about the style of the arrows and, after making some ability checks, have realised this is goblin work. So what have they done then?

None of them have just wandered into the ambush. Not once have I just called ‘roll initiative’ without the players trying something else first. Some have snuck through the bushes to investigate, some have issued a challenge, others have targeted dead horses with firebolt spells (go figure …). But nothing in the book gives me any information on how to resolve this in anyway except a combat.

If a tall, muscular person with a massive axe bellowed a challenge, a chainmail armoured priest unshouldered a mace and shield as a robed person sent a bolt of fire into the corpses of the horses and a lithe figure slipped into the bushes, how would the goblins feel? Four of them, four of us, but these guys aren’t farmers or merchants. They’re clearly warriors and mages. Are the goblins going to treat that as irrelevant? Are they confident now? This is not an easy score for them and their rules tell me they have a tendency to flee.

The adventure text does say that when three goblins are dead, the fourth will flee and this one way the players can find a trail that takes them to another important adventure location. That is part of my ‘Adventure Prep’ more than encounter prep, but I know that part of the purpose of this encounter is to give the players a lead to the goblin trail.

So now, I’m ready to react and let the goblins flee if the party do something to scare them off. How I adjudicate this would be up to me on the night. There’s no way to prepare for everything and anything the party might do – that’s not really the point. All I have to do is understand my goblins;

• What my goblins are thinking and what they want, i.e. the resistance AND
• What is the purpose of my goblins in the adventure as a whole.

Murder Hobos

You may have heard of this term. It’s used in RPG communities to refer to player-characters who solve every problem with combat or violence. A lot of GM’s complain about their party killing their way through the adventure with no thought for other options but the truth is that very often, they’ve done it to themselves. If the party tried something creative to overcome the resistance in this encounter, and the DM shut it down, then the party will slowly start to learn that creative problem solving doesn’t work.

e.g. The party make a great show of strength to scare off the goblins. But because the adventure text says there’s going to be fight here, the DM doesn’t allow it to work, perhaps subconciously the DM has set their mind against such possibilities. The DM probably wouldn’t actually say ‘no’ but may be inclined to set the Difficulty Class too high, or to call for repeated checks when one success should’ve been enough. Eventually, the ambush is triggered and the fight ensues. Everyone has fun.

But it was the fight that was fun. During the fight the players made meaningful decisions and were in control of the game state by choosing how to win the battle; where to position, what resources to expend, etc. It was exciting; every decision they made had a clear effect and they felt like bad ass warriors. When they tried to intimidate the goblins it was less fun. They came up with a plan but it didn’t work and it wasn’t obvious why not. There was no victory, no sense of progress to the part where they tried to scare off the goblins. They didn’t feel like a force to reckoned with. All in all, the encounter was loads of fun but the fight was the good bit and in hindsight, the earlier plan seems to have been a waste of time.

Over the course of an adventure or campaign, if moments like this are frequent the party learn to rely on combat. Combat works and combat is fun. The DM plans “combat encounters” and other, non-combat scenarios but the party usually resort to violence.

The party don’t know which encounters are designed as inevitable combats and which ones are more open. All they know is that often, a creative solution is doomed to fail but if it has stats we can kill it. By identifying the resistance in each encounter, the DM can run a more rounded game and lay a fertile ground for creative roleplaying.

But the Fight Was Fun …

Exactly. That’s why you don’t need to stress over any of this. The most important thing is to get in there and just run a game. Being aware of this will make you a better GM as you gain experience but don’t fret over it. Just run your game!

The Purpose of the Goblins

I said I’d come back to this. Part of the purpose of the goblins is to give the players a lead to the trail and a way to find their hideout. But perhaps even more important is to give the players a chance to have a fight. When starting a new game, with a new group of adventurers, a good fight is a great way to cement them into a party. It gets everyone past any stilted sections where maybe they aren’t sure of how this works and after a good ruck, everyone relaxes a bit.

I’m not contradicting myself though. In my opinion, the players’ agency is way more important than enforcing a high tension moment. Any reasonable plan by the party should have a fair chance of working. Neither would I wish to have all four goblins flee and thus make a later section at the hideout more difficult for the players due to their success. That just doesn’t seem fair. It feels appropriate to me to have some goblins be intimidated, they squabble and give up their positions and one runs away, spoiling their ambush. That would allow the players to feel like they had a ‘win’ and give them a serious advantage, which they’ll need. Four goblins are no push over for a level 1 party.

The players are probably spoiling for a fight themselves. They’ve arrived on game night with their character sheet and dice and there had better be something use them on! We’d be foolish not to prepare for combat …

Thanks for reading! Because we can all level up!

* P.S. The premise of ‘Predator’ makes for an excellent short adventure! I’d run it level 3-4 and use an adapted mezzoloth in the starring role [2014 D&D Monster Manual page 313]. I’d swap the mezzoloth’s Darkness spell for Invisibility, give it a Firebolt spell as a level 5 spell caster (2d10 damage) and proficiency in Stealth. I might write this up …