Evolving Encounter Design

Almost took out two
players with this one.

A while back one of my friends asked if I could make a post about encounter design.  Riding high on a couple views here and there, I guaranteed that would be the next post though I wasn't entirely certain what exactly I would be describing.  Five posts and several months later, I'm finally getting around to it.  Trying to put together my planning method into a coherent design post, I've discovered something interesting.  I've been making some pretty awful encounters.

Now this doesn't mean that I think of myself as bad at DMing.  Indeed, this exercise will hopefully make me a better one.  Having had time recently to play on a regular basis has, of course, done some of the same.  What I intend to do (and what I will describe) is how I plan to change how I make encounters and my reasons behind that.

Crit-Failed Craft (Blogposts)

Apparently this is a thing!  Who knew?

My last post was way back in February and I'm rather embarrassed about that.  I'd like to pin it on the demon of not getting enough time to game, but I've actually had the chance to play pretty consistently since then and am on my way to a TableTopDay game with my old home crew.  My plan is to begin posting again in a more focused way as I've now got several things I'd really like to talk about.  For now though, I just want to make a quick recap of recent gaming to kind of center my thoughts.

The game I've been playing the most has been using Pathfinder rules with the game world of Ecletia that I've partially described.  It's been fantastically steampunk-y and quite a lot of fun so far.  I'm still working out a couple of kinks (such as deciding whether having a player Skype in is useful or distracting) and getting a good working schedule.  The main structure I've been using is a plot-line (which unfortunately has been a little railroady to start) which culminates each session in an interesting battle of some kind.  I'm really not sure how this hasn't been something that I've done from the beginning.  There's really no excuse for the Boss Encounter at the end not to have something cool or interesting to change the flow of combat.  The first session of Ecletia I put the battle on two airships careening down out of the sky which worked very well, but I think I dropped the ball on the second.  I simplified an element at the last minute to being just a boon for the players instead of the threat/boon I'd originally planned.

I'm now about to head over to a friend's to play a one shot of some kind.  We're looking to use the Wushu rules to keep things simple but haven't actually decided upon a genre to play in.  In all honesty, this plan came together approximately two hours ago total so not a whole has been discussed at all.  I'm realizing that although I spend quite a bit of time and effort planning plots and ideas for my ongoing campaign, I'm just about never totally ready if something unexpected comes up as a chance to play something.  It won't do any good for today, but I'm thinking it could be worthwhile to write up some interesting genre-generic plots that I think I can cover in a single session for times when I don't get the chance to plan things.

In any case, happy Easter and wishes of good gaming from Culture Loot!

The Relative Evil Scale

This guy didn't multiclass paladin.

During my undergraduate years I wrote for a detective radio drama that aired once a week with a brand new mystery.  When it started out things were pretty simple; bad guy shows up, detective figures him out, bad guy goes to jail.  As this started to slowly begin to feel stale the other writers and I played around with adding longer lasting characters and plot lines without a whole lot of concern for tone.  Then we realized that we had made a terrible mistake.  As the episodes went by our villains kept getting meaner and meaner as our main character started getting more and more humanitarian.  We can't have a sparkly clean hero!  This is a 1930's noir for crying out loud!

We sat down one day to discuss this weird change in tone and to try to figure out how to fix it.  What we came up with then is something I now do every time I am running a campaign.  It does an excellent job preventing alignment creep and can even be used to avoid stereotyping a specific class of character as being always good or always bad.  I have come to call it the Relative Evil Scale.