Step-by-Step Encounter Building

An encounter is a scene in which the heroes are faced with challenges or opposition. As soon as the players have made their heroes and are ready to see those heroes put into interesting situations, encounter building is the focus of your game! The step-by-step guidelines in this section are focused primarily on building combat encounters, where battle is a highly likely (and often eagerly expected) outcome.

It’s Not Science While we’d love to create an encounter-building formula that could predict the exact difficulty of any combat encounter, there are too many variables beyond the monsters you choose for your encounters that we can’t account for. The heroes your players create, the encounter maps you choose, the number of supernatural treasures the characters create or collect, lucky and unlucky dice rolls, each player’s tactical acumen, and a bad day at the office before game night can all contribute to an encounter going better or worse for the heroes as they play the game.

The guidelines in this section will help get you closer to the kind of encounter you desire, but it’ll take a bit of trial and error to figure out the best approach to encounter building for you and your group. For example, if the heroes in your game have a lot of damage-dealing area abilities, they’re going to have an easier time standing up to minions. If you have heroes who specialize in single-target abilities, they might be able to quickly destroy a solo.

Learn what makes a fun, challenging encounter for your group, and adjust these guidelines to fit your needs. And remember that reinforcements can always be on the way for any side who needs them if an encounter is too easy or too hard.

Step 1: Think

Building an encounter is almost like creating a character! Every encounter should have the following:

• A backstory or inciting incident.

• Cool monsters.

• A motivation for the participants to be there.

• Stakes, or consequences for failure, for all individuals involved.

• One or more opportunities for the heroes and villains to learn more about their opponents—or themselves!

• An interesting map that provokes the heroes to think about their moves as a team (see Choosing a Map later in this section).

Step 2: Choose Encounter Difficulty

After thinking about the components of your encounter, it’s time to determine how difficult an encounter you want to create. Encounters are rated by categories of difficulty, as follows.

Trivial Encounters

Trivial encounters are easier than easy. They present no challenge at all for the heroes, who are guaranteed to survive the battle with their Stamina mostly, if not entirely, untouched. Think 10th-level heroes taking on a small horde of typical kobolds. There’s no way the fight ends well for the kobolds. These encounters can be fun to occasionally throw into your game, but for many groups, the novelty disappears quickly; too many trivial encounters can feel like a waste of time.

Unless you determine otherwise, trivial encounters don’t earn the heroes any Victories.

Easy Encounters

Unless the heroes have already depleted most of their Stamina and Recoveries, easy encounters won’t threaten their lives. Easy encounters are great for adventures that want to give the characters a lot of battles between respites, or for when you want them to feel like superheroes while still overcoming a combat challenge that feels as though it’s within their pay grade.

An easy encounter is typically worth 1 Victory.

Standard Encounters

Standard encounters are the most common for many adventuring groups. These battles deplete some of the heroes’ Stamina and Recoveries, especially for melee-focused heroes. Although character death is uncommon in a standard encounter, it isn’t impossible, especially if a player makes a poor tactical choice or finds that the dice are against them.

A standard encounter is typically worth 1 Victory.

Hard Encounters

Hard encounters are typically climactic encounters with leaders and their loyal servants, or some other scenario that puts the heroes’ lives in real peril. Hard encounters are winnable, but the heroes need to play smart to survive.

A hard encounter is typically worth 2 Victories.

Extreme Encounters

Extreme encounters feature threats of a level that the heroes aren’t likely to survive if they try to fight to the bitter end. Such encounters rarely appear in most campaigns, though if the heroes are 8th level or higher, they can typically survive such encounters—or have a good chance of coming back to life afterward.

An extreme encounter is typically worth 2 or more Victories.

Step 3: Determine Encounter Strength

To determine how many creatures and other types of challenges you should have in an encounter, you need to figure out the heroes’ encounter strength (abbreviated ES). A party’s encounter strength is used as a benchmark for “buying” monsters for your encounter, as explained below.

To calculate a party’s ES, first determine each hero’s encounter strength. This starts at a baseline of 4, to which you add 2 for each level of the hero. For instance, a 3rd-level hero has an encounter strength of 10 (4 + 2 + 2 + 2). Then add the encounter strength of all heroes together, and that’s your encounter strength. This means a group of five 3rd-level heroes has an ES of 50.

Each retainer or other NPC fighting alongside the heroes counts as a hero when determining encounter strength. If a 3rd-level retainer or NPC fights alongside the heroes, they count as a 3rd-level hero.

Encounter Strength

Number of Heroes*

Hero Level 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

6 12 18 24 30 36 42 48 1st

8 16 24 32 40 48 56 64 2nd

10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 3rd

12 24 36 48 60 72 84 96 4th

14 28 42 56 70 84 98 112 5th

16 32 48 64 80 96 112 128 6th

18 36 54 72 90 108 126 144 7th

20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 8th

22 44 66 88 110 132 154 176 9th

24 48 72 96 120 144 168 192 10th

*Add one Hero for every 2 Victories the heroes have earned on average.

Factor in Victories

Victories make heroes more powerful on the way to their next level. For every 2 Victories the heroes have earned on average, increase the party’s encounter strength as if there were another hero in the party. For instance, if a party of 3rd-level heroes has 2 or 3 Victories each, increase the ES by 10. If they have 6 Victories each, increase the ES by 30. Be careful that the larger encounter strength doesn’t lead you to using more creatures than recommended in Number of Creatures below. It’s usually better to use higher-cost creatures in an encounter rather than add extra creatures when increasing encounter strength because of Victories.

Since you can rarely predict the exact order in which the heroes will face encounters during an adventure, it helps to keep a list of monsters with an EV cost worth roughly the encounter strength of two, four, and six Victories that make sense for the adventure you’re running. You can then easily drop or swap these creatures into an encounter on the fly.

Step 4: Determine Encounter Budget

Once you know the party’s encounter strength and have chosen your encounter difficulty, you can determine your encounter budget as follows:

• Trivial encounters have a budget that is anything less than the party’s ES minus the encounter strength of one hero.

• Easy encounters have a budget of anything less than the party’s ES but more than the budget for a trivial encounter.

• Standard encounters have a budget that is between the party’s ES and the party’s ES plus the encounter strength of one hero.

• Hard encounters have a budget greater than a standard encounter, but no more than the party’s ES plus the encounter strength of three heroes.

• Extreme encounters have a budget that is anything greater than hard.

How Many Fights Before a Respite? A group of heroes can generally handle from 4 to 6 Victories’ worth of combat encounters before needing to stop for a respite to refresh their Stamina and Recoveries. But as with encounter building, determining exactly how many encounters a party can run through before needing to rest and restore resources isn’t an exact science.

The luck of the dice, the number of treasures claimed, the composition of encounters, and the strengths of the heroes all factor into this math. And heroes might want to stop for a respite while they still have plenty of Recoveries because they have a downtime project they want to advance, or because they’re ready to turn their Victories into XP and gain a new level.

Even if we could account for all those factors, your game might have outlier experiences in which the party has to stop and rest a little earlier than you’d expected, or will push through long after you thought they’d stop. We think that’s a good thing. Part of the fun of roleplaying games is the fact that they’re unpredictable, with the dice and the decisions the heroes make both playing a big part in the story. When players push on because they have a lot of Victories, that’s the game working as intended.

Encounters Should Have Narrative Importance Combat encounters should hold narrative weight. Draw Steel isn’t a game of attrition, where a few trivial combat encounters can weaken the heroes or winnow down their resources to make the final, important, epic clash with the villain more of a struggle. A quick combat encounter with two bumbling guards at a gate is likely over in less than a round, and shouldn’t earn the heroes a Victory. It’s probably better handled with a test. These can be fun scenes to roleplay, but they aren’t going to make full use of your heroes’ features and should only occur sometimes. Most of the time when combat occurs, the stakes for the heroes and the story should be high!

Step 5: Spend Encounter Budget

You spend your encounter budget to “buy” hostile creatures to take part in your encounter. Each such creature costs a number of budget points equal to its encounter value (EV), as noted in the creature’s stat block. When choosing creatures, try to choose a variety of creature roles for a more dynamic combat experience.

Consider Creature Level

To ensure an encounter is challenging but not devastating for the players, you want to choose creatures whose level is no more than 2 greater than the heroes’ level. For instance, creatures of level 7 and below are appropriate challenges for a party of 5th-level heroes. If the heroes have 6 or more Victories, you can push the upper limit to within 3 levels of the heroes.

Solo creatures are an exception. A solo creature’s abilities dish out a lot of damage for their level, so restrict them to no more than 1 level above the heroes’ average level, unless you want the very real threat of a few heroic corpses lying on the battlefield in the aftermath.

Some creatures outside of these level ranges might fall into your EV budget, but such creatures have the potential to deal devastating damage before a hero gets to do anything about it. That means characters could die after relatively few attacks from such a creature, and that the potencies of the creature’s abilities might be nearly impossible to resist. None of that is likely to feel very heroic.

This comparison is the only indicator that level serves in encounter building. Everything else relies on the encounter value and organization mode of your monsters.

Minions Come in Groups of Four

Whenever you spend EV to buy minions for a combat encounter, you buy them four at a time. It’s recommended to buy at least two sets of minions for any given encounter, as they won’t be effective in smaller numbers.

The minions you buy can be arranged into squads of any size you need, up to a maximum of eight minions in a squad. With eight minions, you could make one squad of eight, two squads of four and four, a squad of three and a squad of five, or squads of three, three, and two. More minions in a squad leads to more effective minion turns, whereas more squads of minions are usually easier to track.

Number of Creatures

Too many creatures or too many different stat blocks in an encounter can create a big cognitive load for you, potentially turning an exciting combat into a slog.

In general, you don’t want more than eight creatures per hero at a time in any encounter. Additionally, if the encounter has more than three creatures per hero, at least half the creatures in that encounter should be minions.

When it comes to number of stat blocks, you typically don’t want to use more than six different kinds of stat blocks in an encounter, though you can probably manage more if you’re using a lot of simple minion stat blocks. Especially if you’re just starting out as a Director, keep the variety of your stat blocks limited until you’re confident in your ability to run a complex combat encounter.

Star of the Show

Sometimes a combat encounter features a creature who you want to stick around for more than a single combat round, so they can leave a lasting impression on the heroes. Such creatures are typically the named villains who the heroes face in the climax of an adventure or campaign.

If you want a creature to stick around in a combat encounter and become the star of the show, set up a hard encounter and choose a leader or solo creature with an EV that is at least one-third of the encounter budget.

Dynamic Terrain Objects

The final section of this book introduces and details dynamic terrain objects—thematic elements you can place in an encounter to challenge the heroes. You can spend your EV budget on dynamic terrain objects the same way you do on monsters. Adding one or two dynamic terrain objects to an encounter gives the heroes a challenge to overcome or resolve beyond simply exchanging blows with another creature. See Dynamic Terrain for more information.

Step 6: Build Initiative Groups

Once you have your encounter’s foes selected, you’ll put them together in initiative groups, with all creatures in the same initiative group acting on the same turn.

Though it’s not a hard and fast rule, as you build your initiative groups, try to keep the total EV of any group between the encounter strength of one to two heroes (see the Encounter Strength table at Step 3 above). Doing so helps to ensure that the foes in each encounter group can hold their own against any one hero in the party without overwhelming that character.

It’s okay to have one initiative group with a total EV of less than the recommendation above. It’s also okay for a group to be worth more than two heroes, as long as that group consists of a single creature or the heroes have racked up a lot of Victories.

How Many Initiative Groups?

In a battle without a solo creature, you want about as many initiative groups as the number of heroes, plus or minus one or two. This gives you a healthy range of groups to play with and makes your turns effective without being overwhelming for the heroes.