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Telling Tales: What Is an Encounter?

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A lot of the DMing I’ve been doing lately has been part of the D&D Encounters program. Traditionally, these mini-adventures have consisted of one fight each week, with ancillary roleplay surrounding the centerpiece combat. Lately, though, Wizards of the Coast has been mixing up their style; instead of focusing on a single fight for the week, they’ve allotted time for more character interaction and exploration of the game world. As a narrativist, I’m a big fan of this move. After all, while every fight may be an encounter, not every encounter has to be a fight.

Let’s break down what an “encounter” actually is. From a storytelling perspective, an encounter is a conflict, a meeting of two forces or entities with distinct goals. Combat certainly falls into this category: the orcs want to kill the heroes, while the heroes plan to survive the day. But if you start to widen your definition of conflict, you can come up with an endless list of interesting, and even challenging, encounters which have no combat in them at all.

A classic type of non-combat encounter is the puzzle. From the riddle of the sphinx to the contest in Gollum’s cave, mental conflicts can be memorable and fun (especially if, as in those examples, the threat of being torn apart or eaten is waiting in the wings). Outsmarting an enemy is often just as satisfying as smashing his head in with a hammer. Traps can fall into this category too, if the DM places a puzzle of some sort that can disarm or bypass the threat. In that case, the conflict is mostly one-sided: the players want to progress forward, and their success is hindered by obstacles.

Both fighting and puzzles have been part of roleplaying since the early days. But there are more encounter ideas out there. An argument can be an encounter, even if no one ever touches the dice. That can be especially fun if two players are on opposite sides of the conflict; the DM can just sit back and watch the sparks fly. An encounter might be a chase or an escape, with the threat of combat or plain old destruction looming as a consequence of failure (or the reward for success). Heck, consider the first Iron Man movie. Tony Stark has to build his armor (in a cave! With a box of scraps!), while avoiding the appearance of anything suspicious. It’s a race against time with the constant threat of discovery, coupled with an intense test of skill. There’s no reason why you couldn’t run a similar scene for your players, with time itself as the opposition. If the price of failure is high enough and the tension pulled tight, you’ll have crafted a memorable encounter that will have your players dreading (and looking forward to) every roll of the skill die.

I’ll leave off once again with a tale from an actual game. This one was actually run using a homebrew RPG system that a friend has been tinkering with for months. A single player character was visiting elemental temples, collecting clues that might lead him to his estranged father. The Earth temple was full of the usual challenges: a test of strength, a test of endurance, a test of steadfast will. All of these challenges were designed to showcase the positive aspects of Earth. Then the hero found himself face to face with an enormous, immovable boulder that he could not pass. No force could break or move it. Any attempt to get around the obstruction met with failure.

At last, our aspirant sat down to think. In two real-life hours of intense thought, the player grappled with the problem. There were few die rolls of any kind. Eventually, the hero slowly came to realize another property of Earth: it was stubborn. But in that moment, he wasn’t thinking about the puzzle. Instead, his thoughts were consumed with the memory of a mistake he’d made, hurtful things he had said to a dear friend. His own stubbornness shamed him. In that moment of doubt, I asked the GM’s ultimate question: “What do you do?” Clarity came, and he stood, and headed for the exit, knowing that repairing his damaged friendship was more important than the temple.

And then the stone crumbled, for the only way to conquer one’s stubbornness was to give up.

This was a challenging encounter, even though there was no danger (except perhaps from starvation, if the hero was truly stubborn). Here we had a character with clear goals facing an insurmountable obstacle, and the only way to succeed was to have an actual epiphany. Epiphanies are difficult, and this player had to climb up to his the hard way, piece by piece. That internal struggle was just as dramatic as any contest of sword and skill. So the next time you’re stuck for an encounter, and your players seem bored of endless assassination attempts, try giving them a real challenge. Build an encounter to challenge their aspirations, their emotions, their most deeply-held beliefs. The memories from those battles will last a lifetime.


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