What Makes an Encounter Interesting?

This site was born out of our desire to make each encounter the players interact with fun, exciting, and engaging. We have all had or run this encounter:

"I swing my sword at the troll, 18 to hit"
"You hit, roll damage"
"15 points"
"You make the troll angry. He swings his claws at you. You take 10 Damage"
"I swing my sword at the troll"

This encounter sucks. It is bland, it's not fun to run, it's not fun to experience.  It is the tabletop RPG equivalent of grinding. It is the random encounter in most turn based RPGs where you hit X until you are out of combat, but because your playing a tabletop game it takes 30 minutes instead of 2. This site is dedicated to the idea that it is possible to make all encounters interesting, using game elements, story elements, and mechanics.

So what makes an encounter interesting? In our years of running tabletop RPGs, this has been a key question in improving our encounters and our games in general.  While how to balance encounters and how to make them feel right in each game can be different, there are some principles that we have come to the conclusion are essential considerations in making any encounter good. However, in order to address what makes an encounter good it makes sense to first address what an encounter is within a roleplaying game and then start thinking about what makes them interesting.

So what is an encounter? An encounter is a smaller unit of the story structure within an RPG. The biggest story structure is usually the campaign, which is the entirety of sessions played with a set of characters over many adventures. It's the whole story. A campaign is normally divided into one or more adventures, which are stories within the campaign. They have a beginning, middle, and end, which adds in some way to a bigger story of the campaign. Within each adventure you have some number of encounters. As may be evident here at Tabletop RPG Encounters, we are only going to address encounters. This is for two reasons: The first is there already a whole lot of very smart people creating well written and interesting sites and/or youtube videos (look at the instructional page to see some of our favorites) that do a great job of explaining campaign, adventure, and general RPG design. The second is because you don't need to create adventures or campaign arcs for every session. But every session needs encounters, usually multiple encounters, and sometimes encounters you didn't plan for.

Within an adventure an encounter is when two or more parties, usually including the player characters, have conflicting goals.  Essentially an encounter occurs because two or more different sides want different things which results in a single conflict.  Easy enough right? So for example a group of bandits finds a caravan.  The bandits want the goods and money that are being carried by the caravan, while the caravan does not want to give them the supplies. We have the grounds for an encounter.

We also often categorize encounters in a few different ways, which we will refer to as modes, which are based on the way RPGs have traditionally been designed. We have the social encounter, which normally involves convincing others of something, a combat encounter, in which there is fighting, and a "skill challenge" encounter, in which the PCs are trying to accomplish some task like climbing a mountain or sneaking through the woods. This can be a useful categorization because each of these modes of encounters feels different to the players and generally different characters are good at these different types of encounters. That being said modes are not static or singular, encounters can and often do shift between modes or include more than one mode simultaneously. You can have a discussion that goes sour and turns into combat or your players might intimidate NPCs into stopping combat.

While this is how we create an encounter, it doesn't necessarily make it interesting. Currently our cat would like to play, but we want to finish this post. That has goals and the potential for different modes. While right now it is in a social mode, if the cat continues to not get what he wants it may take the combat mode. For some reason though, we doubt any of you are jumping to add this encounter into your game (if you include this encounter in your game please, please tell us about it). The question here is why is that a dull encounter? What actually makes the encounter interesting?  Well in our opinion there are two sides to what makes an encounter interesting.  There are the story elements that make the encounter interesting and there are the game elements (to be clear we do not mean mechanical elements, those are coming later) that make it interesting. They are equally useful in creating compelling encounters and in fact can be and should be complimentary.

On the one hand you have the story elements.  The story elements of an interesting encounter are stakes and tension. Stakes are what will be lost if the party loses at the encounter.  Often we leave the stakes at the party dies, game over or the evil overlord wins.  Which can get boring after a while. The next thing to consider is tension. Tension is the feeling of needing to complete the encounter. You can most certainly create tension by raising the stakes. You can also raise tension by creating mechanics that build the tension as the encounter goes on. One example is the "elevator" encounter.  The cord snaps, you are in free fall, you have three rounds before you hit the ground. While that is quite extreme, you can bet it sets a sense of urgency in the players. 

The second set of ideas to consider are the game elements of an encounter.  While shared story telling is certainly an important part of a RPG, it is a role playing game. Exploiting the game parts of an RPG can give you a lot of mileage towards making your encounters interesting. This means that characters need to have choices with impact. Having meaningful options will generally engage your players more deeply. While many games give you a plethora of spells, attacks, and or abilities you should also think of how what the players choose will affect how the encounter goes and the outcome of the encounter. When considering choices consider are there more "correct" choices? Is the duke more susceptible to intimidation than persuasion? Will there be consequences for intimidating the duke even though we initially get what we want? Is there higher ground on the combat field? If the players utilize higher ground does that mean they will have to spend less resources in the fight?

Now the thing about choice is that while tension, impact, and stakes all relate back to the story, choice can include what is in the story but can go beyond that. You can expand choice in a variety of ways, including creating different environments, creating different hazards, creating different paths, using several different NPCs/Monsters and creating multiple objectives to name just a few things. This is really a place you can go wild.

Finally we need to talk a bit about mechanics.  Mechanics are the rules that support your game. Notice that we intentionally are separating mechanics and game elements. You could make mechanical elements that support the story without actually making it into a game. Think about something like Rory's Story Cubes™. That has mechanics that support creating a story, but not many elements that you would traditionally associate with a game. On the other end of the spectrum you have boardgames which have a lot of mechanics that support playing a game, but not usually many that support creating. The mechanics you add or use should support both the story elements and the game elements. Don't take this to mean you need a rule for each element, but it does mean all of your rules should be supporting the other elements. You may have noticed that some of the examples have "rules" that are benefiting other elements. In the "elevator" encounter there is a timer until you hit the ground. This is just one example of how the mechanics can support the other elements.

So thus far we have discussed the following elements of encounters.

• Goals: What the NPCs want and what the PCs want. In order to have an encounter these need to be in conflict somehow.

• Mode: What "type" of encounter is occurring. Generally speaking it can be social, skill based, combat, or some combination of the three.

• Stakes: What is lost if the party loses this encounter? Why does it matter what their doing?

• Tension: What is making your players feel like they need to complete this encounter? Do your players feel the need to complete it quickly? Why?

• Choice with impact: What choices do the players have access to? What meaningful actions can they take in order to impact the encounter? How can the choices made by the players affect the outcome of the encounter or story?

• Mechanics: What mechanics are you using or not using in order to support the other elements of the encounter?

It should be quite obvious that many of these elements are very interdependent. Stakes absolutely work towards creating tension within an encounter, and what each characters goals are help to create the stakes.  One way to think about these elements as parts of audio EQ (equalization, we are music nerds as well). You can reduce or boost one portion of your EQ (often treble, mid, and high). It will affect the overall sound and often affect the bands right next to it. If you reduce the treble your going to take some of the mid with it. So even though some of our elements are not separable it is important to think about them individually and much like an EQ there are many different ways you can set each of these elements which all will give you a different feel for your encounters. In further articles we will be focusing on each of the different elements and how we can use them to create different feelings for different encounters.

To wrap up this is by no means meant to be a definitive answer or the perfect guild lines to creating the best encounter. This is our foray into the conversation about encounters and we expect this topic to be revisited, revised, and reworked. Elements might be changed, added, or taken away depending on the conversations we have and how our own learning goes. Our intention for creating this website is not only for us to share what we know about encounters but also to learn more about creating encounters. Do you have favorite resources for learning about encounter building? Favorite encounters? Comments, feedback or ideas about what we wrote? Please share below.

Also remember if you have encounters you want to share on this site go to our share page for guild lines and email you encounters to tabletoprpgencounters@gmail.com.