High-Stakes Encounters in Practice

Previously: Why is the Dragon Frightening?

I have six simple rules for high-stakes encounters and fights that create tension.

• Use established rules when possible. If a monster swallows PCs, start with a bite-and-swallow creatures in the Monster Manual as a template. If a special ability is similar to a spell, use the spell description rather than creating something from scratch. Homebrewing is sturdier when it’s applied judiciously.
• There’s a logic to the monster that can be unlocked. A tough monster is a puzzle. It should be possible to observe what makes it dangerous, what it wants, how it acts, and to introduce an appropriate strategy. The DM should reward PCs who intelligently engage in this way, particularly if they “risk” deviating from their tried-and-true combat loop to try something clever.
• The monster is not precious. Building upon the previous point, the DM should not try to “save” the monster or worry about a PC “ruining” an encounter. Monsters are cheap; players engaging with the fiction are precious. Weight accordingly.
• A bad choice is much better than no choice at all. A monster that incapacitates a PC is not much fun. A monster that gives a PC a choice between incapacitation and serious damage is more interesting. Players are much more engaged in tough fights if they get to make choices, even (especially?) choices between two terrible options.
• Escape is usually an option, but with consequences. Be ready to shift out of tactical, square-by-square maneuvering if the PCs turn from fighting to fleeing. Reward clever escape plans, and be clear about the costs of conventional ones. A roll of the dice is usually appropriate, but it should typically be made to measure the magnitude of the cost of escape, rather than a pass/fail on escape itself.
• Break reality, but don’t break the game. You can have monsters that subvert, invert, attack, or transform the way fights work in the game… as long as the players trust that the DM is adjudicating the situation fairly.

What does this look like in practice? The following are examples of monsters from our 5E game that wrapped up earlier this year. These monsters attacked things beyond HP, and brought their own strange logic and challenge to the encounters.

The Fiction Manifester. The mischievous intruder in the mystical library is attuned to books buried in an enormous pile in the center of the room. For example, one book makes him so nimble that he has a +10 to his AC, for a total of 28, making him supremely difficult to hit by conventional means. Another gives him immunity to most conditions. The books briefly flash with light similar to Faerie Fire when he draws upon their magic.

It’s possible, but difficult, to beat him through conventional attacks and spells. Finding and destroying the books will cut off his power, but will draw the ire of the library guardian golems. Reshelving the books in their proper places will break the magic without incurring the guardians’ wrath. 

The Time Manipulator. Commit an anachronistic crime, and a Timekeeper will hunt you down in 12 days, 12 hours, 12 minutes, and 12 seconds to punish you for your crime against chronality. Every time the Timekeeper hits, its target must save, or their initiative drops by 1d12, and the Timekeeper’s initiative increases by an equal amount. For every interval of 12 by which the Timekeeper’s initiative exceeds the initiative of the next-highest enemy initiative in the encounter, it gains an extra turn per round.

The Fate Eater. This fate-spinning spider can steal whole vistas of possibility, literally devouring possible timelines stretching out before a character. On a failed saving throw, a character must roll on a prompt table; the DM then gives them a choice of two (very broadly outlined) paths in their future. One is gone forever, and the spider heals some amount of damage in the process. 

The Wish Granter. This demon prince first uses Dark Gift, a signature ability that allows a saving throw; those that fail learn the Wish spell and gain a 9th-level spell slot that can only be used to cast Wish, with various caveats, principally that it cannot be used to replicate lower level spells, but must instead be a true “wish” in the classic sense. The wish also cannot harm the prince. The prince then uses the spell Command – upcast to hit as many PCs as failed the first save – with the command word “wish.” The wishes follow the normal logic of the spell, but with a greater emphasis on the monkey’s paw downsides.

Why is the Dragon Frightening?

In Dungeon World, the dragon is frightening because its hard moves can ruin the PCs, and there are limited ways to fight back against it.

In Troika, the dragon is frightening because it acts deliberately. Consider one of the most beautifully written explanations of a game rule that I have ever seen, which has informed a lot of my own monster and encounter design: 

“The goblins have few [initiative] Tokens because they are cowardly, not because they are slow; the dragon has many because it knows exactly what it wants, not because it is fast.”

In D&D 5E the dragon is frightening because… it has a mechanic that says “save or you’re frightened.” Which the PCs will ignore, because they cast Heroes Feast that morning. Oh good, I was afraid something exciting might happen.

OK, that’s a little harsh. I’ve run perfectly good dragon fights in 5E. The first dragon our 5E group encountered was novel just because it was A Dragon. The last dragon they fought pulled out every trick in the book: casting spells, unleashing a Prismatic Spray breath weapon on the PCs, and nuking the battlefield when bloodied. And they could only fight it to a draw.

But what I’ve found from big 5E fights is that they don’t succeed on DPS and big HP totals or immunities. Damage acts like a clock on the fight, to ensure it doesn’t go on forever. But the really tense fights came from monsters that threatened the PCs in unusual ways, and objectives that differed from race-to-zero slugfests.

To whit, we’ve had multiple tough fights where the group healer looks around afterward and asks “who is injured?” And the PCs realized that despite the tension in the fight, they took very little damage. Because the encounter was attacking something besides their HP total.

Next: High-Stakes Encounters in Practice

Stranger Than Fiction: Ascetics

It’s taken as a platitude that truth is stranger than fiction, but we have to remind ourselves constantly, lest our games be more ordinary than everyday life.

Consider the historical example of Simeon Stylites. Was the strangest holy man in your game as strange as this real-world one? Certainly players would not soon forget such an NPC encounter. I would guess that most games have too few strange religious outcasts, and very few have too many.

In the interest of moving money to the mouth zone, a random table.

Why is the fervent ascetic you encounter on your journey locally famous?

1. A repentant former soldier. They have worked thousands of swords and other weapons into a massive modern art sculpture. Will evangelically attempt to convince armed PCs to donate their weapons to the project. A little too interested in swords for it to be healthy (possibly a Gladio worshiper?) 
2. A wizened pilgrim from a far-off land. They attribute their longevity to fasting, prayer, rigorous calisthenics, and a diet of salt scorpions (only available locally!) Searching their modest yurt will reveal pigments, dyes, and tinctures they use to fake this elderly appearance; in reality they’re not a day over 30.
3. A hairless farmer who has forsaken the plow. They now dwell inside a huge, hollow brass statue near the forgotten lord’s road. The statue amplifies their voice, and they can often be heard singing, crying, or proselytizing in the early morning hours. Local tax sheriffs pay them a grudging tithe to keep them from quiet during winter’s thaws, when their vocalizations could trigger dangerous avalanches. 
4. An impoverished fisherman who has found their true calling. Their shrine holds thousands of small clay statues, which they lovingly care for, cleaning them and making tiny sacrifices to “feed” them. For a modest donation, they can dedicate one such statue to you, as a temporary receptacle for your soul, in case of your untimely death. It will be safe in their care until such time as your relatives can retrieve it and return you to your homeland for burial.
5. A flockless sheep herder who was just sick of “the politics.” They can read the future in sacrificial entrails, but their prognostications are uniformly negative. The superstitious local towns pay them to not use this reputed ability, in a kind of backwards protection racket. The local hetmen would like nothing more than to get rid of this annoyance, but they’re worried the seer will see it coming.
6. A fearless young runaway, ready to usher in a new age. By some combination of dumb luck and divine providence, they single-handedly killed six soldiers from the King-in-Repose’s Army, and now a dangerously hangry mob of pitchfork-shaperners has gathered around their hilltop altar, ready to march on the capital at their divine leader’s sign. 

The Bag of Threads

One of my players – interested in DMing their own game – asked me about how backstories factor into session planning, and how they connect to other events that occur in a game. My answer was substantive enough that I wanted to revisit it, rework it for clarity, and share here.

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I like to boil any backstory down to about one sentence. Then it goes into the bag of ideas that I pull from when I prep sessions. That same bag is where all the "loose ends" go after each session. NPCs, treasure, monsters, events, conflicts, debts, rivalries, complications, all sorts of one-sentence "loose ends" or "loose threads." For each thing the characters resolve, they leave multiple things unresolved; so this is a major source of ideas for preparation.

So for example, very early on, a character sold their shadow to a merchant. This went into the bag of ideas. At some point, selling the shadow was going to come up again, and probably complicate things for them. Either being shadowless would be an issue, or the shadow itself would appear in some compromising way. That idea gradually turned into "what if the merchant sells the shadow to a third party, and it's weaponized?"

But the great thing about those "loose threads" jostling around in the bag of ideas is that they get tangled together. So, what if the shadow thread was intertwined with another loose thread? What if "the character sold their shadow" gets tangled together with "the disappearance of that character’s sister was the inciting incident that led to their life of adventure"? 

So the party is attacked by a weaponized version of the sister’s shadow instead of the character’s shadow. Why is the sister’s shadow also detached? Because she sold hers too, of course. So that creates a parallel between the siblings. And provides a clue as to where she is, and what she's doing.

The characters eventually followed those clues to find the sister pragmatically working with a group of mindflayers. And those mindflayers provided a natural way to tangle together more loose threads. Different characters' stories were tangled together, and the mindflayers became a cluster of complications. So the sister is working with the mindflayers. Who are trying to bend the power of the paladin’s god to their own end. And they've also put a parasite in the rogue’s head. And so on.

And, of course, the players have to choose to pull on those threads. A lot of threads are dropped into games, and the players never grab them. And that's fine. They may go back in the bag, or I might discard them, if it seems like they're not really relevant anymore.

This is more art than science, but once you get used to it, it really makes session planning easier by centering it on the characters, their past actions, and the things they care about, as measured by what they focus on in the actual game.

Knave-ifying 5E Spells

D&D 5E advocates a rulings-not-rules philosophy, rejecting 3.5E’s and 4E’s attempts to capture as much of the game as possible in formal rules. 5E is better at sticking to this philosophy in some places than others. One of the weakest areas is the spell list in the Player’s Handbook.

The 5E spell list takes up a full quarter of the total page count of the Player’s Handbook. Some descriptions are admirably succinct. Jump is 14 words long. Others are beasts. Symbol takes up more than half a page on its own.

What if all the descriptions were like the former? More specifically, what if they followed the logic of Knave's spell descriptions? 

What does it mean, mechanically, for time to move 10 times faster, or gravity to triple? 5E would work these details out with a dozen paragraphs explaining saving throws, special conditions to end the effect, interactions with ability checks, and combat implications. Knave simply assumes that the DM could reasonably adjudicate the effect based on common sense and the shared logic of the game world. 

So could we do it? Can we Knave-ify 5E spells? Let's try the first dozen spells in alphabetical order.

For this exercise, we won’t cover level, school, casting time, range, components, duration. Note that Knave uses “nearby” for range and common sense measures like “the size of an apple.” We’ll assume that anything not outright stated would be adjudicated at the table. As with Knave, there is no effort to balance these, and they are treated as basically level-less, or having effects that scale with level (denoted by “L” below).

Acid Splash: Conjure a goblet’s worth of weak acid, dealing Ld6 damage to a creature or destroying a fragile object.

5E has an abundance of spells that deal damage and do little else. 5E’s system for upcasting spells keys to tier rather than directly to level, which has a balance logic, but isn’t intuitive or easy to condense to a formula. If it were up to me, cantrips would be out of the game entirely, but that’s an entire post of its own. 

Aid: Temporarily increase L friendly creatures maximum HP by 5.

Note that Aid temporarily raises maximum hit points, but is different from temporary hit points, and a character could benefit from both simultaneously. Have I mentioned that I do not enjoy explaining the moon logic of this game design to new players? This effect is not even particularly interesting, and would be on the shortlist of spells that I would consider cutting entirely for its non-diegetic “numbers go up” implementation.

Alarm: An audible or silent alarm (your choice) triggers when an unfamiliar creature enters a warded space no larger than a 10xL cube.

Alter Self: Adapt the physical means of locomotion, survival, or predation – such as wings, gills, or talons – of a beast or monster you have seen before.

The last part is an underrated trick. 5E occasionally uses this conceit – the druid’s Wild Shape ability is limited to “a beast that you have seen before.” If a player wants to Wild Shape into a particular animal, the DM can ask them to make the case for their past encounter with such a creature, or even briefly flash back to their pre-adventuring days. This also gives 5E players a strong incentive to go out into the world and see new and dangerous creatures. More 5E spells and abilities that do things like summon creatures or create illusions should be predicated on the caster’s direct observation and interaction with such things.

Animal Friendship: Target beast must make a Wisdom saving throw or be charmed.

Animal Messenger: Target tiny beast reliably delivers a short message to a recipient, within L days travel, based on a general description of the recipient.

Animal Shapes: Target creatures transform into beasts with CR no greater than L/4.

There may be a more elegant way to cap the size of the beasts involved. Considering that Animal Shapes is an 8th-level spell, I’m not sure why 5E is so stingy about the strength of the assumed form. Or why this spell doesn’t simply re-use the logic of the Polymorph spell.

CR is also annoying because it is mostly a DM-facing stat (essentially, a rule for encounter balance and experience calculation) -- but, rarely, character abilities key off of it. When I homebrew beasts in 5E, I have to reverse engineer a CR after the fact, because the druid will ask me if they can Wild Shape into the fantastic animal they just encountered.

D&D 5E’s various transformation spells all include extensive language about what happens to equipment, what effects or conditions would return the subject to their normal form, and so forth. If this can’t be left to DM discretion, 5E should just have a universal rule for how transformations work.

Animate Dead: Raise L-2 skeletons or zombies capable of obeying simple orders for as long as you exert conscious control over them.

Animate Objects: Imbue a collection of objects the size of a person or smaller with temporary life; use a swarm stat block for many tiny or small objects, or a bear stat block for one big object.

Antilife Shell: Living things may not enter the 10’ radius shimmering dome that surrounds you.

Antimagic Field: Magic is blocked or suppressed within this invisible 10’ radius sphere.

Antipathy/Sympathy: All nearby creatures of a type of your choice must make a Wisdom save or be attracted or repelled (your choice) in your presence.

Note that in 5E’s rules, antipathy applies the frightened condition, but sympathy does not apply the charmed condition. I cannot think of a reason why this would be. GAME DESIGN.

We could repeat this exercise for the rest of the alphabet, but as with so many hacks, you have to stop and ask yourself if it would not make more sense to just design from the ground up, rather than painstakingly fixing the things you don’t like about the existing system.