New Design, New ideas, Fresh start.

I'm going to kick start this blog again. My goal, 1 blog a week. What day of the week this will come will depend on my time. If I can post this durring work, my most productive time of the week, I think I can really get this thing going. (I know I'm unproductive at the work I should be doing, yet being productive at something in which I shouldn't be doing. Says alot about me.)

I've talked about game theory before and I may go back to that some time, but for now I'm just going to post some awesome encounters for 4th ed D&D. Since I'm been running and playing that mostly, thats what I'm going to talk about. If I start playing something else, I'll talk about that instead. Its my blog, I'll do what I want!

If your unfamiliar with the 4th edition of D&D (I'm talking about dungeons and dragons here) you should definitely check it out. You can start with their brand new spiffy Red box if you would like to try it out before really committing yourself or you can go ahead and get the rules compendium for full experience and game. If you have any questions about it you can leave a comment here and I'll tackle your question to the best of my ability. I may even make another blog about it if its a good question.

On to the topic at hand.

How to create a great encounter

The first thing that a DM should do when creating their encounter is to visualize the encounter. The DM should have an idea of the environment the encounter will be in already, whether its a dungeon or forest, city, town, lair, etc. From there they should also have the party's enemy or opponent in mind. If its a dragon's lair they should be fighting a dragon, if its an orc cave, some orcs, etc. Pretty basic stuff. The environment, though, could also narrow down the selection of type of enemy that the party could fight too. Maybe the orc's have trained an owl bear, or teamed up with an ogre. This is where some of the brainstorming starts.

A DM needs to think about the orc's and why they are there. Have they dug up to the surface from their dwellings from the deeper dark? Or have they captured a mining cave from the locals miners? Once you have figured out why they are there and why the players are in conflict with them the dm needs to figure out the 'what'. Which is one of the fun parts, IMO, of 4th edition DMing.

What is there? You have a general idea of what environment this encounter is taking place and you have an idea of who your party if facing so what else is there to do? Give the players something to interact with or something that will interact with them. Given the orc example, if they are in a cave or a mine, that would be a perfect place to put a rock slide or cave in. Perhaps the players could cause it to come down on the orcs or maybe the orcs planned it out to come down on intruders. Regardless, the DM will want to give the players the opportunity to spot the potential cave in and either thwart it or use it to their own means. This will make the encounter more interesting. It will ass an added element to the encounter besides, kill the orcs. When designing an encounter your goal should be to have 1-3 things that the players can interact with besides just the swords and punching bits.

You of course don't want to go the opposite direction either and create too many things happening. This makes it too hard to keep track of for you the DM and it creates too many choices for the players and probably confusion on what exactly is going on. My recommendation is never have more then 3 interactive bits in one encounter, besides, you don't want to use all your good ideas for encounter anyway. Spread them out among other encounters. Always remember that if your encounter gets too confusing your players aren't going to have as much fun and neither are you. If your stopping to explain that swinging, flaming platform for the third time, its probably too much. Which leads me to my last piece of advice for interactive encounters:

Keep it Simple. Don't make the interactive part of the encounter too hard to figure out or too random. Having random magic circles providing different magical effects is fine, just make sure that the players are able to figure out its trigger after, at most, the 3rd round. Don't make too many triggers either, limit those to just one or two.

Here is one of my examples of a simple interactive encounter bit that I used pretty successfully. Hope you like spiders:

Spider Encounter

The place is dark and mostly dry here. Moving through this area you can start to smell decay and death. (Moving anywhere in this area tips off the spiders they are here unless a Stealth check DC 21 is made). Fitted on one of the decaying bodies is a suit of Chain Mail along with 200 gp. The chain mail is a suit of Briartwine Armor.

Spider webbing

Hazard level 6

Spider webbing makes it difficult to move and creatures may get stuck. A spider webbing will take up an entire square usually from the floor to the ceiling and clinging to any object nearby. (like a wall)

Perception DC: 20 to notice the very fine webbing in low light or DC 12 with a bright light source.

Effect: Area is considered difficult terrain.

Effect: Fire/Acid damage may spread to other adjacent webbed squares on a roll of 5 or 6 (1d6)
Trigger: Whenever a creature moves more then 2 squares in effected terrain on their turn. (not including special movement)
Attack: +11 vs Fort; target is immobilized and suffers -2 penalty to defenses (save ends)

Counter effects:

• Any Fire or Acid effects will remove the webbing from the area (or target) but will deal +2d6 points of Fire/Acid damage to any creature in that square.
• Athletics check DC 25 to move through an area with out suffering any effects (including the attack).
• Acrobatics Check DC 16 to jump over a terrain square.