Elegant Encounter Design
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ncounters are the motor of your storytelling. The way they are structured contributes the most to your table top experience.
I've compiled a collection of design principles for encounters using my business consultancy skillset. It's been refeshing to deploy those practices to role playing domain and I feel it has given me a new angle to the subject in general.
Key highlights and learning include:
- Using goal and obstacle chaining to create structured narrative
- Pitting protagonist and antagonist against each other in a structed manner
- Modelling hazards and aides as part of obstacle design
- Testing various encounter types (social¸ combat¸ exploration) against different obstacles
- Mixing encounter types together
- Creating epic encounters that have multiple interconnected sub-encounters working in parallel
- Using locations and NPCs as obstacles¸ aides and hazards
- Countering hazards and using them to create an opening
- Creating a ladder of obstacles towards a goal with fallback
- Shared goal race conditions
- Diversions and secret goals
- Encounter type conflict resolution
- Dealing with conflicting goals and related decisions
- Using conditional goals
- Evaluating what is at stake
The explanations are brief and have an aura of business consultancy injected to them while being 100% true to RPG domain. Take them as inpirations to further develop your encounter design thinking.
Note: the content has been created with PowerPoint and printed in pdf-format. It has been a concious choice to keep the copy in concise format.
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