Encounters

An “encounter” is a meeting with
NPCs, animals, a trap, or anything else
the GM wishes. There are three kinds
of encounters: planned, improvised,
and random. Ideally, as you run the
game, your players should never know
which kind is which!
Planned Encounters
The GM works these out in
advance: when the adventurers come
to this place, they meet these people
(or animals, or whatever). All the
important encounters in your adven-
ture should be planned.
Be aware that few encounters go
exactly as planned! You should always
be ready to adapt to the characters’
actions. Suppose a planned encounter
involves the bouncer at the “Blue
Boar” – but the PCs don’t go near
there. You can drop a hint to send
them there, of course . . . but it might
be easier to change your plans and let
the innkeeper at their rooming house
serve the same purpose. The more
flexible you are, the more you can
avoid the appearance of manipulating
the players. And appearance is more
important than reality!
Improvised Encounters
The GM makes these up in order to
keep the adventure moving along
planned lines. The simplest “impro-
vised encounter” is the little old man
(looking a lot like the one you met at
the tavern) who appears in your path
and says, “Turn around! You’re going
the wrong way!” Such encounters can
provide extra clues, hints toward the
“right path,” etc.
Improvised encounters are often
necessary when the players do some-
thing really unusual. For example,
suppose you have the PCs encounter a
traveling duke who is beset by bandits.
The heroes drive off the bandits and
save the duke, who offers to pay them
generously to track down a family
treasure. The players accept, but con-
clude that the bandits were after the
treasure, too, and decide to hunt them
down to find out what they know.
Since you only intended the bandits as
a means to introduce the duke, you
could say, “You can’t find the bandits.
You must have scared them off.” Or
you could let the party find the bandits
and defeat them in a meaningless
battle. But it would be more fun to
improvise an interesting encounter.
If the heroes skillfully track, over-
whelm, and interrogate the bandits,
you could reward them with a clue.
Perhaps one of the bandits snatched
the duke’s heirloom cloak clasp, which
broke open when he tried to pry the
jewel from it – revealing a fragment of
an old map!
Random Encounters
The GM might wish to generate
some encounters at random. One
technique is to use a “random
encounter table”: a list of encounters
keyed to a roll of the dice. See Sample
Encounter Table (p. 503) for a simple
example. Some “adventures” consist
Fantasy adventures traditionally feature a variety of
traps. The novice designer can overdo this, with a
crossbow behind every door and a pit in every corridor.
If this doesn’t kill the whole party, it slows the game to
a crawl as they check everything in sight for traps – and
then check again, to make sure. But a few strategically
located traps can make an adventure more interesting.
All of the above remains true in other genres! A
criminal stronghold or millionaire’s mansion might
hold some unpleasant surprises in store for the unwary
intruder. Primitive natives encountered by explorers
might have some upsettingly sophisticated defenses.
Some common types of traps include poison nee-
dles, hidden crossbows (or guns, or lasers), hidden
giant crossbows (or cannon, or homing missiles), pits
(with spikes, snakes, or both), falling weights, rolling
boulders, sliding walls (or descending roofs), slippery
slides, poison gas, acid sprays, land mines, and many
more. Think of the last hundred adventure stories you
read!
Not all traps are deadly. The intent might be to crip-
ple, capture, annoy, embarrass, or just frighten the vic-
tims. A burglar alarm is nothing more than a trap that
only produces sound!
Traps, like rooms, should appear on the map key –
or a trap in a room can be part of the room’s descrip-
tion. For each trap, specify the following:
mainly of such tables, allowing play to
proceed for hours with no planning at
all! This is great for a quick game, but
not in the same league with a “real”
adventure.
Another method is to invent a char-
acter on the spot, rolling dice for any
important statistics.
If you don’t let random encounters
become a crutch, they can provide
variety and free you from planning
every single encounter. Don’t let the
players know that you are rolling a
totally random encounter, however. If
they realize an encounter is not “part
of the plot,” they will act differently.