Tabletop RPG encounter/challenge design tips for beginners:
Tabletop RPGs are, in general, a collaborative affair. Unless youâre explicitly designing a challenge for a solo or one-player-one-GM game, you should have a clear idea of how the whole group can get in on the action. One of the most common newbie blunders is setting forth challenges or encounters that really only have a forum for one actor at a time, leaving the rest of the group stuck twiddling their thumbs. Itâs good when players find unconventional ways to contribute to overcoming challenges, but they should never be required to think outside the box in order to participate at all!
This is a big part of the reason that â for better or for worse â combat encounters are such a popular choice, and also why purely social challenges are concomitantly rare: diplomacy is easily dominated by a single speaker, but multiple people can generally participate in a fight. However, this can also go the other way for specific groups; if you have a single heavily optimised combat monster in a party of generalists, and you spec out a fight based on what would be a reasonable challenge for that character without paying sufficient mind to how people who arenât so good at hitting things can contribute, youâve got an encounter where only one player can usefully participate on your hands.
(This is, of course, much easier when youâre designing encounters for a specific, known group, because you already know which skill-sets your challenges need to be amenable to; otherwise, you need to have a very clear idea of what the gameâs most common player character archetypes bring to the table, and ensure that at least most of them are accommodated.)
Thereâs a common impulse to try to set up challenges as elegant puzzle-boxes with exactly one âcorrectâ solution per encounter. This is a mistake for three major reasons:
Having a right answer in your head almost unavoidably means youâre going to end up emotionally committed to it, which is going to bias you against alternative solutions. Thatâs a problem, because the playersâ many brains working in concert are definitely going to come up with angles that never would have occurred to you, and the last thing you want is to predispose yourself to shooting those ideas down simply because you didnât think of them first.
When you start with the means rather than the ends, itâs easy to lose sight of why the player characters are getting involved. Every encounter should have a prize, whether itâs obtaining a good thing or preventing a bad thing. It doesnât matter how elegant your challenge design is when the most sensible solution from the player charactersâ perspective is simply to walk away because they have nothing to gain! Let the encounterâs solutions emerge from its goals, not vice versa.
Even if you know exactly what tools will be available to the players (i.e., because youâre designing the encounter for a specific group), you can never count on the availability of those tools: spells or equipment might be used up before the encounter is reached, characters can die or become otherwise indisposed, and players might not show up. If your plans for the session become entirely impossible because a player called in sick, youâre over-relying on one specific solution.
As point two suggests, your starting point is to establish a clear picture of what the group is trying to achieve and how one might go about it, and evaluate prospective solutions in terms of those goals. If you must pre-plan (and sometimes youâll have to), a good guideline is to think of at least three totally different ways of achieving each goal. Not only does this make it more likely that youâll be able to adapt at least one of them for whatever your players come up with, but it also mentally primes you to accept multiple solutions in the first place. This is another one where designing for a known group helps, because you can ask: âOkay, how could [character A] achieve a positive outcome here, if it came down to them? How would [character B] do it?â, and so forth.
(And yes, for combat encounters, this means you need to come up with at least two plausible victory conditions for each fight that donât involve beating the baddies until all their hit points fall out. Making the bad guys fall down is a means, not an end; focus on what the players are actually meant to achieve!)
This is a more subtle one, because at first glance it seems to fly in the face of common received wisdom about tabletop RPG worldbuilding. In brief, the idea is that your setting shouldnât exist as a reaction to the player characters; stuff should happen while theyâre not around, NPCs should want things that donât involve the player characters, and so forth. Thatâs all true â but the flip side of the coin is that individual encounters absolutely do exist as reactions to the player characters: the only reason that specific sequence of events is going down is because they showed up.
Reconciling those priorities is a two-step process:
First, ask: âHow would this have played out if the player characters had never showed up?â
Then, ask: âHow is the fact that they did show up fucking things up for everyone involved?â
The first point establishes the setting independently from the player characters, and also helps to get a clear picture of why the player characters should get involved â after all, how things would play out without them might be bad! The second establishes the encounter itself as a reaction to their presence.
However, now we have a second problem: the encounter needs to be a reaction to the player characters, but you canât plan ahead of time for every course of action the players might take, and even if you could, it would probably violate the flexibility guideline, above. So whatâs the answer?
For encounters involving NPCs, the hammer-and-nail framework is often fruitful. You know the saying that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail? Give each NPC a nail, something theyâll always try to achieve, even if itâs a bad idea under the circumstances; and a hammer, a method of achieving it theyâll always try first, even if itâs not a reasonable tool for the job. Good nails might include âto sell thingsâ, âto assert my authorityâ, âto keep secretsâ, or even just âto be left aloneâ. Good hammers include âwith threats and violenceâ, âwith bribes and flatteryâ, âwith lies, when the truth would serve betterâ, or âby chucking fireballs at itâ.
Keep it simple and to the point â a hammer or nail that takes more than ten words to express is overthinking it. The resulting combinations might feel a little cartoony in context, and you can definitely play it that way, but people using inappropriate means to achieve unreasonable goals is a. something that happens all the time in real life, and b. rich fodder for encounter building.
Challenges that donât involve NPCs can often benefit from the same approach by lightly anthropomorphising them; the mysterious forest isnât really a person who wants to eat intruders (nail) by misrepresenting itself as a friend (hammer), but you can usually play it as though it was. Just play it close to your chest; sometimes itâs okay to have in-character acknowledgement that thereâs some malevolent goblin setting a series of carefully curated obstacles in the partyâs path, but that scenario is a sometimes food â itâs generally best not to lean on the fourth wall quite that hard!
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