In Case You Missed It :: Designing Encounters (Patreon)

This is a copy of the lecture I gave this last Sunday, the second in a series on dungeon design for 5e. Lectures are free and open to everyone, happening every Sunday at 12pm CDT (18:00 GMT -6). Content+ patrons should check out this post too, which contains a link to worksheets for you to fill out to help you make your own dungeon.

The Core of Player Interaction

In order to talk about designing encounters for 5e, what we actually have to talk about are the fundamental forms of player interaction in games. They are, as the name suggests, fundamental to how your players will be interacting with your campaign on every level, not just your encounters.

• From here on out, for the sake of this discussion, “player” and “character” will be synonymous with each other. Normally I make a distinction between players and their characters, because that distinction is important, but the concepts we’re about to go over are abstracted to the point where the distinction between player and character is irrelevant.
• Furthermore, just to make sure we’re on the same page, we’re going to define encounter as “a short-term situation in which players/their characters are met with opposition that requires them to spend some of their limited resources in order to overcome it.” This most often takes the form of combat, but it doesn’t strictly have to be combat. A verbal confrontation in which someone spends a spell slot, drinks a potion, or invokes a feature with a limited number of uses can also count as an encounter.

There are three core types of player interaction: Player-to-Opponent, Opponent-to-Player, and Player-to-Ally. You actually probably know these terms already, they’re very popular terms in a lot of gaming communities, it’s just that they’re not called by their proper terms. Instead, gaming communities love to refer to these types of player interaction as DPS, Tank, and Support, respectively.

Player-to-Opponent, or DPS, is the interaction that occurs when a player does something to their opponent. 99% of the time, it’s attacking the opponent, and in 5e this holds true. If you are a DPS, if you like the Player-to-Opponent interaction the most, you’re probably going to pick a class that focuses on causing as much damage as possible.

Opponent-to-Player, or Tank, is the interaction that happens when the opponent does something to the player. If the opponent damages a player, the player’s ability to withstand that damage is referred to as the player’s ability to “tank” that damage. A player that likes to tank damage is a player that likes to have a lot of hit points and, if possible, a few abilities that allow them to force damage to come at them, rather than their allies.

Player-to-Ally, or Support, is the interaction that happens when a player does something to assist an ally of theirs. This is usually healing or allowing their ally to recover hit points, but there’s a lot that someone can do in order to play the role of a supporter in an encounter. They may have features or abilities that allow them to disorient the opponents, or buff their allies’ abilities, or reposition creatures in a fight. Even just being able to toss a really cool weapon over to the DPS player can be seen as an act of support. Modern games, 5e being no exception, have really embraced support options beyond just healing.

The Trinity Is Everywhere

Everywhere you look, in every single game you’ve played or even just watched someone else play, you can probably sit down and figure out what qualifies as DPS, Tank, and Support in that game, even if the game doesn’t have these strict roles.

Take football (soccer) for example.

• The forwards are the DPS, as their job is to “attack” the opponent’s goal by kicking the ball into it.
• The goalie is the tank, as their job is to always play defensively, even when their team has the ball and is on the offense. They are always thinking of how to stop the ball from getting into their team’s goal.
• The midfielders are the supports. They switch from offense to defense throughout the game, supporting whichever role needs them the most based on which team has control of the ball.

Using the Trinity to Build and Run Encounters

When you’re building encounters, you’re not just picking out monsters that match the narrative of the situations, or who have cool mechanics you want to use. Everything you put into your encounter, from monsters to mechanics to objects in the environment, all of these things are going to open or close avenues of player interaction.

Imagine, for instance, an encounter where your players are shooting out of arrow slits in a castle wall. In this case, there is no need for anyone to be a tank, because the defense provided by the castle wall is so high, a tank character just isn’t going to provide anything that isn’t already provided. If you made this encounter for a party that has one or more tank-type players, you need to think of something else for those tanks to do.

Games like D&D are designed around the core trinity of player interaction. Each class has a list of features that are unlocked as the player levels up, and these features will give the player interaction options. The barbarian is heavily focused on DPS interactions, and the paladin is heavily focused on tank interactions. Though these classes can seem very similar, they are fundamentally different classes because they provide fundamentally different interaction options to their players.

Your party’s composition, the characters they’re playing as and the form of interaction they favor, should be used to inform how you design all of your encounters for them.

It matters when you’re running your encounters, too, because the actions monsters take—the actions you decide that they’ll take—will contribute to the avenues of gameplay you open or close to your players.

In video games, you have stats for things like aggro and threat levels, and the AI of the game will move opponents in predictable ways, allowing players to execute their favored form of interaction. The tank can run up first and get enemies attacking them, the DPS can go to the highest level opponent and start stabbing them, and the support can stay behind the tank and focus on keeping the other two alive. The players can discuss and execute this plan because the video game is forced to act in a specific way, thanks to its programming.

A GM is not a machine, a GM is not a program. A GM is a human being. You have absolutely no obligation to play any monster in any specific way, and in fact, monsters that are using the same stat block can be played in completely different ways, if you really wanted to.

Even still, it’s really important that you understand the fundamental forms of player interaction and you let them happen when you’re running encounters. I especially advise this with regards to parties that have tanks, because tanks are the ones who are often shafted the most in the switch from video games to TTRPGs. One of the most common newbie GM mistakes I see made is that the GM thinks they’re being clever by having the monsters walk around the tank and attack the squishies anyway, but what they’re actually doing is denying that player their chosen form of interaction. Let the tank be a tank! Even though there isn’t a rule that says you have to have your monsters hard-focus the toughest looking character in the party, for your tank to feel satisfied with their chosen form of player interaction, you need to have your monsters attacking them.

An Encounter Template

Alright, we’ve covered the core forms of player interaction in any game: Player-to-Opponent, aka DPS; Opponent-to-Player, aka Tank; and Player-to-Ally, aka Support.

5e has done a lot for you already in terms of incorporating these forms of interaction into your campaign’s gameplay. Classes themselves tend to lean one way or another in terms of what interaction they prefer, and also, there’s a ton of different permutations to them. While some classes do very much favor one form of interaction, no class actually only does one form of interaction.

This means that, even if you have a party of five rage-happy barbarians, you still need to be thinking about all forms of interaction in your encounters.

To that end, I’ve put together a quick list of elements to incorporate into your encounters which will help you achieve multiple forms of player interaction. The elements are listed in order of how frequent they should be across all of the encounters in your campaign. Element 1 should be the most frequent element you use, element 2 should be less frequent than element 1, and element 3 should be the least common element you include. Structuring the frequency of elements in this way allows elements 2 and 3 to remain special, and not having all of your encounters using all of these elements reduces the workload on you, the GM.

If you include an element in an encounter, it’s highly recommended to include all other elements above it. For example, if you make an encounter that uses element 2, also try to find a way to incorporate element 1 into the encounter, too.

As always, game design is an art, not a science. This is a quick guide that will be good enough to get you started and will be good enough to make fun, engaging fights most of the time. Whenever I’m stuck and I’m not sure what to do for an encounter, I come back to this guide and I use it.

Element 1: The Mook Monster

This should be some kind of monster that is individually weak, but is present in large numbers, and thus is posing a threat to the party based on how many of them there are, not by how strong they are. This could be a group of goblins, or a bunch of awakened shrubs.

Group fights allow more styles of gameplay to shine, especially the tank style and DPS characters that focus on area-of-effect abilities, like the wizard that loves to cast fireball. It also helps players feel powerful and makes the tougher fights stand out in their memory, the ones that include element 2.

Element 2: The Elite Monster

This needs to be a monster that immediately conveys to the party that they are not going to go down easily. They might be the leader of a gang, a beefy troll, or a Huge dinosaur wreaking havoc. They should be a threat in their own right.

This kind of monster is typically what is thought of when someone says “boss monster,” and it puts pressure on players to coordinate. It also usually costs the players some kind of resource to take this monster down, especially when this monster is paired with element 1, which can force parties to have to really dig deep to survive the encounter.

Element 3: The Secondary Objective

This is not a monster. Instead, this is some kind of goal or obstacle that goes beyond the encounter, that engages the players on a level beyond simply having to defeat the bad guys. Some options include:

• A timer of some kind, such as the lead cultist needing to be defeated in 2 rounds or less, or they’ll finish their summoning ritual. Or maybe a bad guy is escaping, and if the party can’t finish the fight soon, they’ll be no way for them to catch up.
• A change in the environment, such as a blizzard blowing in that is reducing visibility with every passing round.
• A person or item that needs to be protected, such as a precious vase or an award-winning cow that’ll save the farm, if it can be kept from being slaughtered.

In Closing

The core forms of player interaction are at the heart of every game, from sports to video games to TTRPGs like D&D. But everything I’ve talked about here is literally just the surface. I could talk about encounters and encounter nuances every day for the next year, and I would still have not exhausted the subject.

Because hey, guess what? DPS, tank, and support are not the only types of interaction that exist! There’s also Player-to-Environment and its opposite, Environment-to-Player. These two types are really common in systemic games like Breath of the Wild, Prey, and Divinity: Original Sin 2 (the best TTRPG ever made). These forms of interaction are all about the player manipulating the environment to get what they want, and also about the environmental systems (like weather systems) altering a player’s plans as they change.

There’s also Player-to-Resources, which is when players have to perform risk assessment and manage the resources at their disposal, or manage resources as a means of achieving other forms of interaction. This is present in games like Minecraft, Starcraft, and of course, D&D.

Basically, this is a HUUUGE subject with almost endless discussion behind it. My hope is that, even if I couldn’t cover everything I wanted to, I’ve at least given you enough information to start thinking on the subject or doing additional research on your own.