In many tabletop roleplaying games there are explicit rules for designing encounters in the effort to provide challenges appropriate for the level of the player characters. These encounter design rules typically define difficulty as chance of survival, but I don’t like to run games where the primary challenge set to my players is to simply survive. I want games to have Drama! And often death is the least dramatic option. Here’s how I’ve been thinking about designing encounters with Drama as the focus instead of Survival. Since I’m primarily running 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons I will use that as the basis, but if you’re playing any simpler system this should be even easier to implement.
In Dramatic Encounter Building we have four categories that loosely map over the 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons encounter building categories detailed in the core rules.
Low Drama – Imparting the flavor of the location and allowing the players to showcase their characters through combat.
Medium Drama – Foreshadowing Threats relevant to the location.
High Drama – Putting the things the PCs care about at risk. Homes, loved ones, held beliefs, etc.
Extreme Drama – Putting the lives of the player characters themselves on the line.
Each category can and should contain elements of the lower ones. For instance every encounter should impart some of the flavor of the location. The battle against the Ancient Red Wyrm in its volcanic lair should probably contain some features such as exploding rocks and rivers of lava, right? And the battle against the Bandit Captain who is working for a powerful Shadow Priest should contain hints and flavor of their unholy influence.
- Death in Encounter Building for Drama
- Dying in anything but an Extreme Drama encounter knocks the PC unconscious. Not to say that there aren’t consequences for falling in battle. If a single party member falls its often an opportunity for one of the other play characters to display their courage by protecting or healing them. If an entire party falls then they can be captured. This heightens drama, which is exactly what we want! Or perhaps they are left to die only to survive barely and need to time to heal wounds both physical and emotional. A brush with death is often more dramatic than death itself.
- The LazyDM Encounter Benchmark1
- Because we are eliminating player death from any encounter outside of Extreme Drama, we are far less concerned with balance. Using the LazyDM Encounter Benchmark we simple choose the kind and number of opponents that make sense for the fiction, and then apply this simple formula to gauge how much course correction we may need in any given encounter.
- An encounter may be deadly if the sum total of monster challenge ratings is greater than one quarter of the sum total of character levels, or half the sum total of character levels if the characters are above 4th level.
- Steering Encounters for Drama
- There are knobs we can turn as GMs during encounters. Adversary HP, damage, attacks are some of the mechanical ones. Morale, Intelligence, and Goals are the some of the narrative ones. A key component of drama is pacing. Our goal is to achieve the drama of the encounter, and then move on to preserve pacing. We will turn as many of these knobs as required to fulfill those goals.
- If an encounter is dragging on longer than seems fun for the table then the opponents can simply surrender, or flee as makes sense within the fiction. Or they could be felled by the next blow they receive. Just choose the option which seems more dramatic in the moment.
- If an encounter is going by too quickly then pad the HP of the foes until the dramatic goal of the encounter has been met. Sometimes that might mean just getting to a description of something faster. Such as revealing the strange magic employed by cultists that will key the players in on the kinds of challenges they will face against the Cult Leader. Sometimes it might mean making a particular opponent hit harder or have more HP than they do in their stat block. If the point of an encounter was to put the village herbalist in danger because a player character is their sibling, then increase the drama by making the threat against them even more dangerous. Double the Ancient Wyrm’s HP if you meant this foe to be one worthy of ending a campaign with and the characters are laying it to waste too quickly.
- Thinking of Adventures using Dramatic Encounter Building
- We aren’t thinking of anything like “the adventuring day” or trying to worry about wearing down the PCs resources here. That stuff has no bearing on narrative drama.
- Instead we want our adventures to have satisfying arc of dramatic tension. To do this each encounter should ascend on the ladder. If we start with a Medium Drama encounter generally don’t follow it up with a Low Drama encounter. There are no hard rules, however.
- We could build an Adventuring Location with one of each encounter. That’s simple and a good place to start. I’d think of this a lot like music. When you’re learning feel it might be best to stick to a format, but once you have a more intuitive command of the rhythm and beats of drama then you can subvert the structure in surprising and exciting ways.
Songs of Sibylline 