The Three 'E's of Encounters

Encounters

Ok, before you correct me, I know that you spell the word ‘Encounter’ with only two Es but that's not the point. When designing an encounter there are three angles you should consider to get the most out of the encounter, the Enemies, the Environment, and the Events. Thinking about these things is a great way to flesh out encounters beyond something as simple as ‘2d6 wolves’ which tends to end up a pretty stale encounter, especially the second time around.

Varying the types of enemies always creates a more interesting encounter

Enemy

When it comes to enemies the most interesting encounters often use multiple enemies together. It's important to consider what types enemies the players is in conflict with. That same wolf encounter becomes a lot more interesting if a Dire-wolf is thrown into the mix (or even better, Werewolf or Bargeist). A mix of tanking, supporting, ranged, and melee and whatever other roles are created for combat can really create interesting moments for players and show what is interesting about those enemies.

It's also important to consider the goal of these enemies. Are they mindless monsters that fight to the death? Are they worried about self preservation and are they gonna flee if they leader dies or the fight turns against them? Also how do these Enemies prioritize their actions? Do they try to kill all intruders or do they defensive and do they draw back when they are losing to try to hold out as long as they can? Enemies don’t stand around and wait, they guard, they sleep, they invade, they travel. A bunch of wolves and a Dire-wolf is probably hunting, and they will probably flee if their leader or enough wolves die. Injured wolves will probably try to stay out of the fight.

Where enemies are placed also is important to a good encounter. Are the enemies in a good position to show off their talents or are they in an area where their spears and bows are useless? The placement of enemies can also create opportunities for players to use their abilities to gain the upper hand or make it more difficult for them to sneak up and surprise. Our wolves probably don’t want to all be seen at once and probably will try to encircle whatever ‘prey’ they find so it can't get away. This of course leads us to consider the...

Not shown; the several hours hike to get here.

Environment

The environment where the encounter takes place is can turn a simple encounter to an entrancing one. Fighting a tough dude is just a tough fight but fighting a tough dude at the Preikestolen in Norway is a totally epic fight. Static environmental pieces help limit movement and create areas of advantage for players and enemies to try to control. Cover can limit the effectiveness of ranged weapons and create safer areas, difficult terrain can slow players and enemies leaving them vulnerable. The advantages and disadvantages of individual positions can keep players moving and tactics changing. Environments also can include interactable elements. They can be simple traps, to spillable liquids, to starting fires. Each of these represent choices the player or enemy can make to influence the environment. Other advantages in the environment can be weapons and items that players can, even doors that players can open, close, lock or barricade. Our 2d6 wolves and Dire-wolf encounter changes a lot when the wolves can travel and attack through a thorny hedgerow the players can't follow through, and a cart of rotten barrels the players can tip over for cover and concealment against the seemingly endless wolves come out of the woods.

Lightning strikes are maybe a little too cliche of a random event

Events

During an encounter, events can occur to to change the conditions of the fight. Maybe when the fight starts it begins to rain, the ground becoming muddier and harder to move through as players and enemies fight. Maybe lighting flashes and illuminates the darkness giving a brief indication of what hides in the darkness. Maybe the cave is collapsing, or it's not a cave at all. These events generally occur outside the fight and are outside of anyone’s control, events are things that just happen.

What events really can do is add another dynamic to a fight to break stalemates and add an unexpected element to strategies. Once a player thinks they have it figured out, the event can show them a twist. It can also help to change a fight that is slow battle of attrition, to one where the player has a chance or realizes they are in over their head. A lot of games have waves of enemies that help an encounter, especially with a boss, change from predictable slow win, to being ‘reset’ to something more interesting. Our dire wolf encounter might start as a storm brews and rain falls. Wolves might keep pouring out of the thorny hedgerow like like the endless rain until we manage to kill the Dire-wolf, the ground becoming a torn up, impassible mass of mud as we churn through it in combat.

Our Dire-wolf encounter is looking pretty snazzy, but is too snazzy?

Words of Warning

So we got a pretty awesome Dire-wolf encounter figured out. It's got a Dire-wolf leading some wolves and their coming at you from all along a hedge. There is a wagon to tip over to make a wall for you to put your back to. It starts to rain so the ground gets muddy as we fight making it hard to move as more and more wolves come out… it's pretty badass!

This is a great encounter, but did we go too far? Is this supposed to be the climax of an adventure or… are we just some bros traveling roads? The purpose of the Dire-wolf encounter was really to show how this model takes a simple, boring concept of 2d6 wolves and changes it into something spectacular. But if the purpose of this encounter is to makes a random encounter to spice up a trek, 2d6 wolves and a Dire-wolf would be enough. Maybe the hedgerow of endless wolves is a great way to show how dangerous the road is.  You can just take parts of the formula, you don't have to fully use and fully rely on it, as a matter of fact, it might be a little overwhelming for a player to constantly deal with all this epic-ness. You could go really overboard and have like 5 different enemies and tons of intractable and then a storm starts but then undead rise from the grave and there is an earthquake as you fight on the side of a volcano and also there are bees… My point is that there can be too much. Don't over do it (or maybe just overdo it once).

While this is a formula, you shouldn't over rely on it. Understand that choosing to just have one type of enemy is fine, but its still a choice. If the goal of your encounter is to introduce that enemy then by all means, just use one enemy. You can use a simple or boring environment if there are other things you want to show off. Not having an event can be just as tense as having one. Doing nothing with the Enemies, Environment, or Events in an encounter is still using them, it's just choosing them to be nothing. And that choice can be made to highlight or help reinforce the purpose of why the encounter was made in the first place.

Encounters can be conversations too!

Beyond Conflict as Combat

Often games show conflict as combat. But you can still use these same principals with other systems that model conflicts. Enemies might be individual npcs that must be debated or convinced, the Environment might be the setting and social situation the characters are in and Events might be things that happen during the conversation. There can be a lot more to this than just action movie fights. But action movies are cool so it's a great way to frame things right now.

*Wolves get a lot of bad publicity, and undeserving so. The origin of the 2d6 wolves encounter comes from a D&D module, the Curse of Strahd. It being a particularly boring random encounter, in an otherwise well regarded module. Wolves are actually an important part of our ecosystem and not a statistically significant threat to livestock. They also can not spontaneously generate from thorny hedgerows. In case, you know, you mistook this article as being scientifically accurate or something.

D&D Tools for (Digital) Game Designers

Caution:

These things are developed mostly by dungeon masters running tabletop rpgs. While game design and DMing are very similar activities, you can improvise and adapt in a physical medium in a way you can’t in a digital one. So these tools may not be immediately helpful without some adaptation; however they are rigorously used and they are helpful to many people. So, like all game design advice, you’ll be glad you got the half of it that is useful.

5x5 campaign method

https://critical-hits.com/blog/2011/03/04/the-5x5-method-compendium/

How do people even design campaigns anyway? With interweaving plots and multiple characters it can be hard to keep everything straight and related. The 5x5 is a systems that helps to keep things organized.

The method isn’t terribly complicated, it's basically a grid or a tree, each column represents a significant story threads or questlines and each row is how far they are into completion. Ideally the completion of one of cell in the grid will feed into or relate to other questlines (like a data tree). So instead of players working each questline to completion they jump between them as they progress. This is also a good way to keep things related and influencing each other (instead of just a hub with quests).

There is a lot of work an interest on this and most people modify it to their own end. When I’ve attempted to lay things out I tend to find things converge at the end into a single climactic event. Your mileage may vary, but it will get you going.

5 room dungeon

https://nerdsonearth.com/2017/12/5-room-dungeon/

https://www.roleplayingtips.com/rptn/rpt156-6-methods-making-dungeons-interesting/

For game designers this is basically a mix of ‘differences in kind’ with an ‘engagement curve’. I think it's a mistake to take this literally as a dungeon with 5 rooms, but I think it's better to look at it as a bunch of encounters every session/adventure should have.

As with all formulas, add things, repeat things, drop things. A 5 room dungeon is fine but be willing to change things up. It's already pretty great because most of these ‘rooms’ or encounters are either or type affairs (puzzle or roleplay encounter) kinda things. I think it's a really solid formula and definitely something game designers should be taking with them into their own games.

10 m/f names

The basic gist of this is to write down 10 male and 10 female names. If players ever want to figure out someones name or what’s going on with them; you can just pull one off the list and roll with it (sorry for the pun). But what this creates is the idea that this is a real and believable world, suddenly, everyone has a name and a tiny back-story. The world comes alive!

This is more abstract (and as a knee-jerk reaction, it's impossible) thing to in digital games. But I think it's one of those things where you never know who players might attach to and find important. If you can find a way to let your players elevate the importance or seek deeper interactions with *any* character they come across it will go a lot farther in creating a believable world.

7 sentence NPC

http://www.pandius.com/npcbuild.html

Originally from TSRs Dragon magazine, this is a simple framework for building NPCs. Now these are customized for a tabletop seeing but depending on the game your making things like “physical description” and “Distinguishing Features” might be handled by whatever system is used to generate character art. If you are trying to create a system where any player can interact with any NPC its a good place to start.

And if you do have to make NPCs for your team; well they should all get the 7 sentence treatment. The upside to this is that it compresses information to basically a paragraph anyone has time to read. Starting with a blank slate is hard, but getting those seven sentences out give you a place to go.

Secrets and Mysteries

http://slyflourish.com/sharing_secrets.html

http://slyflourish.com/facilitating_empowered_investigation.html

Secrets and details are great for world building and helping things come alive. Having a bank of little things players can learn is a great way to reward interactions of the players. Interaction is a core advantage that games have over other mediums. Having a list of secrets is a great way to reward players who like to dig into the world and read every little description.

When players need to investigate or uncover a crime, well we know that a significant number of players just won't get it. So even if they have all the secrets in front of them or the details seem to all point to one direction, sometimes you have to keep nudging. Basically, it's better to let players shoot the arrow and then paint the target around it. If players keep looking in the wrong spot, just put the clue in the next place they look.

Encounter Building

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DowI3p7L44

HA! I worked a youtube video into this! So even if you are too lazy to read, you can’t say this post wasn't useful!

I’m going to break this video down a little bit because Projared isn’t really articulating exactly what he is doing. But basically, each encounter has a variety of monsters and it has environmental components. I don't want to get too deep into encounter design (that should be its own post), but I do want to explain the very basics of what he does.

When it comes to monster variety, it doesn't have to be complicated. Even just varying the equipment (up-armoring a guy, or changing a weapons) can create a much more interesting scenario. The important thing to do is to avoid fighting ‘6 goblins’ because then the players just ‘attack the one that took the most damage’.

The other thing to do is to see what you can do to make the environment more interesting. An encounter without an environmental gimmick is like toast without butter. Its missing something. Now sometimes giving your enemies some high ground is basically just an advantage to them, but  you can use gimmicks to help players engage with the space. What's important to consider is that potentially both Players and Enemies could use these gimmicks too.

Conclusion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTD2RZz6mlo&list=PLlUk42GiU2guNzWBzxn7hs8MaV7ELLCP_&index=2

These 6 things are by no means comprehensive of everything you can take from d&d and every trick and tactic you can learn from. But this is a good example of the popular stuff, and a great batch of tools to take with you. If you think this was super useful, I would suggest taking a look at Matt Colville on youtube. He’s a videogame designer and Writer for Turtle Rock Studios as well as DM extraordinaire. So you can tumble down that rabbit hole if you want more.

Disclaimer:

I didn’t really vet anyone I’m linking to. I mostly pulled these explanations from google searches. So while I'm endorsing these ideas; I won't endorse anyone's character. I actually have never met any of these people.

Misere

Misere is a french word for poverty. But in games it typically is used in trick taking card games (like hearts) to mean the taking of no tricks. This is typically a reverse of what the players are ‘supposed’ to do as most games are scored by taking the most tricks. However the dynamic of ‘playing to lose’ is an interesting notion and an important perspective to consider in games. By examining a couple of points about misere, I think some important insights can be gained.

A boundary for balance

The simplest use of misere as a mechanic is to prevent a runaway winner. Simply put if a misere gambit is a possibility, the end of a match can become much more tense if someone has dominated the round. Often this becomes a situation where players need to force the losing player to take a trick, creating a point of power for a losing player. In some ways it kinda feels like a ‘gotcha’ mechanic, a rule used to trick players before they realized it was too late. Either way it becomes a player enforced ‘rubber-banding’  or balancing technique. Often these types of balancing mechanics that are despised for the lack of agency. But when its made an obvious rule, players control it and enforce it themselves and don't feel disempowered. Mario Kart is a great game, but much maligned for its rubber-banding. I suspect that if it had much more clear and much less arbitrary rules as to how power ups were distributed players would feel better about the mechanic. It would create the option to strategize around the mechanic instead of them being randomly thwarted by it.

Playing a game to lose

Misere is an important perspective to understand because of how arbitrary game rules can be. Is there really any difference to winning and losing a game if you had to play optimally to do so? Often in certain kinds of puzzle games, the answer is no. Playing bejeweled to get the lowest score can be just as difficult as trying to get the highest and can expose different types of play. Triple Town is just as fun if you try to play to invoke its loss condition as fast as you can (instead of trying to win). Also there is no need to involve yourself in microtransactions if you play this way.

This really exposes just how arbitrary points are in some games. If it creates the same sort of challenge to score high or low, why not include both as a way to score in the game? Using misere, games can create this ‘difference in kind’ while it helps players to better understand the mechanics of the games. This is a rather simple way of expanding the possibility space of what the game is and get more out of game mechanics.

Mark Brown of "Game Maker's Toolkit" explains RE4's adaptive difficulty

Changing how you play

The way in which misere changes how players play has some interesting results. One of the more famous examples is the Resident Evil 4 speedrun. RE4 (not shown) has adaptive difficulty, where the game gets easier if the player goes into encounters with less health. In this way speedrunners intentionally take damage to have easier encounters for faster play.

There are many other examples of players exploiting mechanics to change how games are played as well (save scumming, arbitrary restrictions, even just speedrunning itself). Using misere as another lens can help designers get the most and even add more to their games.


[the formatting seems to be a little off for some reason, I'm looking into it]

Coolest Daughter Ever Syndrome

I was playing Dishonored 2 during the holidays to catch up on what I missed and to honestly enjoy some of the great achievements in the first person perspective. However, what I find interesting is how Dishonored 2 (2016) treats it’s daughter protagonist. Since games like The Last of Us (2013) and Bioshock Infinite (2013), the daughter protagonist has become an uncommon but also welcome addition to games (especially if you are looking at review scores). But I think this points to a pattern developing in the genre because of their maturing and predominantly white male target audience.

A new  female protagonists following in her father's footsteps.

Father’s Gaze*

Critics like to talk about male gaze in big budget games, enough that I’m not going to go into it here. However, I will talk about the more subtle nuances that can come from it. Games with the perfect daughter don’t eliminate male gaze they just show a different male’s gaze. In the case for Dishonored 2 (and Bioshock Infinite and the Last of Us) the male gaze is from the view of the father.

The relationship between the father and daughter is idealized from the male perspective. For the most part, the relationship is one where the daughter idolizes the values of the father character, wanting to (and encouraged to be) a similar sort of bad-ass that the father character is. The daughter is the one who relates to the father character. What would be considered feminine characteristics (even basic biological characteristics) are not related to or even mentioned in the games. Even something as stereotypically feminine as wondering about ‘boys’ or thinking about ‘fashion’ or anything being considered ‘cute’ does not occur. It's almost as if the daughter character is a hyper tom-boy to the extent they are only female in superficial appearance.

Honestly, Zizek is probably a little too deep for this analysis.

FEAR

Older men and young girls really don't relate that well to each other, creating what could be considered an uncanny valley of understanding between the personas. The horror genre plays on this with the ‘creepy girl’ trope. One of the reasons why the F.E.A.R. (2005) antagonist, Alma Wade (scary girl in a red dress), works as a trope is because the male audience doesn’t relate to her. But moving deeper, players see her exhibiting lots of feminine traits. She wears a dress, she is a mother, even the theme of blood in the game could be considered a feminine connection (I'm reaching). Even in FEAR, Alma’s hug is lethal; the male player must shoot to repel her. The nurturing feminine touch is toxic to the masculine ideology and must be repelled by violence, the most masculine reaction ( I can hear Slavoj Zizek’s breathy slurps already).

It's really the name thing and the guitars that make it weird.

Girls will be Girls

Now games are not inundated with these ‘cool daughters’. This crop of games might just be a footnote or a stepping stone to more varied characters. It doesn’t even fully constitute a trope or pattern in games due to how few examples exist. What is really important is to be aware of this emerging pattern. It’s important to understand how games have shown the masculine and feminine traits; and to understand that the male gaze it not removed by just adding daughters. There are deep and subtle patterns being displayed in these games and there is a lot of possibility to show new and interesting characters.

Also, all the daughter characters’ names start with the letter ‘E’ and it's starting to freak me out.

*The father's gaze also represents a more mature and positive gaze. Male gaze is often vilified for its adolescent connotation. Father's gaze does remove or lessen  a lot of the most troubling aspects male gaze, such as the objectification of women, and women being acted upon instead of as independent actors. However, men are still implied to be the audience and violence is prevalent and their values are still upheld.