Giving Your Encounters Character
Jak Charles
Intro
There are a lot of articles giving advice on how to balance encounters for satisfying combat: how to avoid killing your party, while still giving them a challenge, or how many fights per rest they should get, and how to challenge specific classes.
This article will cover none of that. I won’t talk about a single combat mechanic from any ttrpg system - because you don’t need it to make memorable encounters your players will love.
Let’s play a game together where we take a really crap encounter, something you might find in any number of officially published adventures for any tabletop system, and jazz it up until it’s so good your players will talk about it all week.
Image: Wizards of the Coast
The worst encounter you’ll ever play:
“You enter a room. It’s, uh, 20 feet by 30 feet and there are three bandits standing there. There’s also a troll in the corner. What do you do?”
You’ll fight the bandits and kill the troll. It’s not that hard, just meant to drain some magic from the spellcasters and some health from the frontline fighters before the next room. You forget it as soon as you leave it.
The best thing you could possibly do, given this room, is to give it some personality. It doesn’t matter if a fight is much too easy if the players enjoy doing the fighting! Let’s come up with a super quick reason the bandits are in the room, and see where it takes us:
The better version:
“You enter a room, it’s, uh, 20 feet by 30 feet. In the middle is a table covered with cards and coins: it looks like 3 bandits are conning a troll out of its hard-stolen money by cheating at poker. As soon as you enter they draw their weapons.”
Now if we fight, there’s a table to kick over, loot to grab, and a potential social situation to exploit: the party bard might decide to step forward and say they’re there to join the game.
If a fight does break out, the party might be able to convince the troll to turn on the bandits if they can prove the bandits were cheating. They don’t have to, because it’s not a tough encounter, but it’d be fun to see their enemies turn on each other and have a reason to interact with the creatures they’re battling.
If the party quickly wipes the enemies out, you can keep telling their story by describing what they find: every bandit had cards hidden up their sleeves, and the troll was down to its last penny. Maybe give a particularly perceptive player a device they can hide up their sleeve that can deliver playing cards into their hand at the flick of a hidden switch: not particularly game-breaking or useful in combat, but could lead to some fun roleplay down the line, and will remind them of that one time they interrupted a game of cards.
That’s it. Not every encounter has to be a masterpiece of storytelling, just... unique. I’ll give you an example I use all the time that my players love: the Haunted Magic School.
The Haunted Magic School
“While exploring the ruins of the burned-down magic school, you enter a large hall. Several ghosts rise up out of the floor! Roll initiative”
Let’s play this game again: who are the ghosts, and what are they doing here?
Maybe this used to be an exam hall, and all the students and exam supervisors died when the place burned down. Maybe they’re still stuck doing the exam for eternity.
Maybe they’ll shush the players when they attack and insist on exam conditions! Maybe they’ll hand out grades to each player for how well their character fights?
“While exploring the ruins of the burned-down magic school, you enter a large hall. Scorched and ruined desks covered with burnt parchment litter the area. At the end of the hall, several ghosts rise up out of the floor, wearing tall, pointy wizard hats and carrying clipboards. They shush you as you enter and vow to give you all automatic fails for breaking exam conditions. Roll initiative!”
During the fight, they’ll hand out ghostly grades to the players who do well. Critical hit? A+! Critical miss? F. I have the ghosts pin the ethereal grades onto the character’s chests as they fight, so everyone can see how well they’re doing. Now, it doesn’t matter how well the encounter is ‘balanced’, it’s a fun competition to impress the ghosts, get a good grade, and do better than your friends until the exam hall is cleared.
Where can I find inspiration?
Practice some free association! This is an improv technique where you just say the first things that come to mind and run with them. Sometimes it causes a mess (which is, at worst, memorable) and other times it’ll craft a surprisingly layered situation for your players to explore.
The ogre is a ballerina! The dragon collects butterflies! The wizard has a very specific conditioner he uses in his luscious beard! The barkeep has been cursed to only speak in rhyme and he hates it!
Often the flavour text in whichever Bestiary or Monster Manual you’re using for your game will give you all kinds of platforms to jump off from and expand upon. All Beholders are insane, but none of them are insane in precisely the same way: that’s up to you to invent.
Conclusion: the most important bit
Roleplaying your enemies in combat will encourage and inspire your players to do it too, leading to more interesting and exciting fights for everyone. All you have to do for each encounter is ask yourself why your enemies are there, and how they feel about your heroes busting down the door.
Make your enemies silly, or charming, or pretentious, or cowardly, for no reason other than that they’re people too and your heroes might have arrived while they’re in the middle of something else.
If there’s on thing to take away from this article, it’s this: roleplay should never stop during combat.
This piece comes from one of our talented storytellers Mock. You watch one of Mock’s adventure head to his Youtube series Nine Hell Heist. Published with permission of Mock.
If you would like Mock to run your very own private adventure you can book him over on his profile here.