Hi, my name is Matthew Mercer.
I'm a voice actor and the dungeon master for Geek and Sundry's Critical Role,
and welcome to my short video series for my tips on how to dungeon master
or game master your own role playing game.
So today, our first topic is going to be encounter building.
So when you're creating an encounter-- a combat encounter specifically--
for your party of adventurers or space marines or whatever else you're running,
you want to consider what kind of terrain or region is this going to have.
That's going to go ahead and help you guide what creatures are going to be there,
what type of challenges might be in that wake.
So consider: is it an icy tundra?
Is it a frozen mountaintop?
Is it a hot and muggy swampland?
Is it an underground cave network?
You know, there are actually in a lot of these resource books that you find for these RPGs,
they'll have listings of creatures and monsters and dangers by topography and by weather.
And that's a really cool way to see what indigenous creatures might live there.
That's a good resource to pull from if you're not having any real creative juices,
helping you decide on what to put in front of them.
Secondly, you want to consider how challenging you want the encounter or encounters to be.
Do you want it to be a really quick scuffle?
Do you want it to be a series of small battles
as they're fighting down a long hallway in a spaceship?
Do you want it to be just one giant, climactic, multi-leveled boss confrontation?
Once you've made that decision, that'll help you figure out how dangerous, how extensive,
and how powerful the villains may be for this encounter.
There's a lot of great resource manuals for every RPG system out there that have
breakdowns about what creatures are good for which player levels as far as power and
challenge and danger is concerned.
Like for instance, the Dungeon Master Guide and the Monster Manual have a challenge
rating system.
A creature of a certain challenge rating is a decent challenge for a group of four
players of that level.
And you can slide the scale from there.
And also the DMG, or the Dungeon Master Guide, has an experience threshold table in there
as well, that helps you build encounters just based
on the total experience points of
the creatures they're fighting.
So those are really cool resources if you're new
to the system and you're trying to figure out
how to balance that properly.
And over time, eventually you'll just get a
feel for it.
Experience helps you get a little more
comfortable with balancing the battle.
And you want to make sure you don't kill all your players way too quickly in the game,
either.
There's also a really good website called Kobold Fight Club for those who are running
Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition campaigns that helps them build an entire encounter
with the experience tables and stuff that helps you get an idea of what could
and could not be considered too powerful.
And don't forget: if you can't find a creature or a monster in these realms, or any sort of
villain that really suits your needs for the storyline or this particular battle,
you can create one.
Make one up.
Or take something that's there and customize it.
Alter it.
Make it more powerful, make it weaker.
You know, if you really want to run a game that has a bunch of kobolds as the main
villain, but all your players are level 10: go ahead and make yourself some more
powerful kobolds.
You can customize them all you want.
Everything in there is just a baseline suggestion
of what they think--or they created initially-- to be, but you can always scale them.
You can make them more powerful, you can add additional hit points.
Make them do
more damage per attack.
Increase some defenses, give it some hidden resistances
or vulnerabilities.
You can even create whole new abilities.
I customize creatures all the time
for my game.
I think it, one, makes it more interesting and more customized to the specific
encounter and world.
Secondly, for players who have been playing for a long time
and have pretty much memorized the Monster Manual, it keeps them on their toes,
because they'll be encountering monsters that they have yet to memorize everything
about.
Also make sure though, if you do use these creatures and you want them to have interesting
defenses and vulnerabilities and the like, make sure you highlight them or note them.
It's very easy in the rush of combat to forget some of these cool things.
So I always use
a highlighter and I highlight the various notes and elements of these creatures or
these combat scenarios that I want to make sure I remember and recall in the heat of
battle.
The next note I want to bring up is battlefields.
First and foremost, not every game needs a battlefield.
In fact, I kind of prefer RPGs
that don't have a battle map with miniatures.
It's a way to play.
I prefer to keep things
in my imagination.
But that's generally more wieldy with smaller groups, if you have three,
maybe four players.
Larger than that, it gets a little unwieldy.
And with me running
six to eight players, it's become very necessary for everyone to keep track of their spatial
awareness.
When you create a map, things to consider: creative terrain.
You know, think of where it's happening
but ways to make it different on occasion, too.
You can have straightforward battles
with just-- here's a an area where they fight.
Here's some hallways, here's some rooms.
And that's cool too.
But, you know, if you're in an urban setting, have furniture that they
can use to their advantage, whether it be for
height or for setting up blockades.
Also, consider what other challenges and confrontations they might have with
the terrain during the battle.
Is there a giant chasm they have to get across to actually
get to the villain while they're attacking them
from a distance?
Is there some sort of an
arcane field that's locked off a portion of the
battlefield, and they have to figure out some
sort of puzzle during the battle to lock it down?
Is the villain invulnerable to all damage until
they can find some sort of hidden aspect of their
soul locked within the nearby battlefield?
Or is there a bunch of innocents in there as well
that are in danger of being killed from the
collateral damage?
Find cool and unique ways to make it an interesting battle
outside of just a slugfest of HP being knocked away and whoever falls first.
Mind you, those can be fun too on occasion, but you want to make sure you keep
things interesting.
For those who want to create battlefields: what I use for my battlefields, because
this question has come up a few times: you can use easel pad paper, one inch
grid easel pad paper that you can find online.
And that's a really cool way to
just draw on that using markers and create your own battlefields that way.
There are great tutorials online, too, that show you how to make cool battles and
interesting looking terrain with just simple hatch mark shading and minor colors.
So, highly recommend that.
Also, when you're using intelligent creatures, especially monsters or individuals or
villains that are, you know, understanding of their own mortality, they may flee.
When they hit about half or a quarter hit points, they may want to get the heck
out of dodge.
So, don't be afraid to let your villains or your enemies do that on occasion.
One, it ups the stakes immediately in a battle, from just a slog fest to, "Oh crap, he's getting
away," and the dynamic shift to try and prevent them from doing so.
And secondly, if they do manage to get away, you may have a juicy villain who can
recur later on down the story with a need for vengeance.
Vengeance.
Another cool note: not all battles are meant to be won, either.
Sometimes you want to introduce a really powerful enemy, kind of as a foreshadowing
aspect.
A creature that they can in no way, shape, or form defeat, and they
are meant to flee from, so that they can build towards down the road.
Maybe coming back and finally killing it as a means of vengeance.
Just make sure you try and insinuate to the players that they shouldn't stick around
for the whole fight, or you might have a TPK on your hands.
So, be careful with
that one.
It's a fun tool, but, be careful.
No, seriously.
Be careful.
Plus it also leads into a cool story of like, "Man, remember that time we almost got
killed by that thing?
Whew!"
Not all fights are meant to end in bloodshed, as well.
So don't be afraid to let the players
diplomatically resolve an encounter.
Sometimes battles happen because of misunderstandings,
or misinformation, or the wrong thing was said
and it ticks somebody off.
That doesn't mean
they have to fight to the bitter end and murder whoever's in front of them.
You don't want the
whole murderhobo syndrome to be consistent.
Unless that's the campaign you're running.
In which case, fight on my murderhobos.
But, you know, let the players use their social skills to try and diffuse an encounter
before anyone gets killed.
I've had many games where halfway through a battle
someone's like, "Wait, they may have information we need."
Or, "Maybe we
were duped.
We have the wrong information."
And they decide to, you know, diplomatically
end it.
Doesn't always work, but it's nice to give them that option.
So, I hope this has been helpful in you running your own games, both GMs new
and old alike.
Feel free to go ahead and check more videos from this series on
geekandsundry.com, and thank you for watching.