Tabletop RPG encounter/challenge design tips for beginners:
Tabletop RPGs are, in general, a collaborative affair. Unless you’re explicitly designing a challenge for a solo or one-player-one-GM game, you should have a clear idea of how the whole group can get in on the action. One of the most common newbie blunders is setting forth challenges or encounters that really only have a forum for one actor at a time, leaving the rest of the group stuck twiddling their thumbs. It’s good when players find unconventional ways to contribute to overcoming challenges, but they should never be required to think outside the box in order to participate at all!
This is a big part of the reason that – for better or for worse – combat encounters are such a popular choice, and also why purely social challenges are concomitantly rare: diplomacy is easily dominated by a single speaker, but multiple people can generally participate in a fight. However, this can also go the other way for specific groups; if you have a single heavily optimised combat monster in a party of generalists, and you spec out a fight based on what would be a reasonable challenge for that character without paying sufficient mind to how people who aren’t so good at hitting things can contribute, you’ve got an encounter where only one player can usefully participate on your hands.
(This is, of course, much easier when you’re designing encounters for a specific, known group, because you already know which skill-sets your challenges need to be amenable to; otherwise, you need to have a very clear idea of what the game’s most common player character archetypes bring to the table, and ensure that at least most of them are accommodated.)
There’s a common impulse to try to set up challenges as elegant puzzle-boxes with exactly one “correct” solution per encounter. This is a mistake for three major reasons:
Having a right answer in your head almost unavoidably means you’re going to end up emotionally committed to it, which is going to bias you against alternative solutions. That’s a problem, because the players’ many brains working in concert are definitely going to come up with angles that never would have occurred to you, and the last thing you want is to predispose yourself to shooting those ideas down simply because you didn’t think of them first.
When you start with the means rather than the ends, it’s easy to lose sight of why the player characters are getting involved. Every encounter should have a prize, whether it’s obtaining a good thing or preventing a bad thing. It doesn’t matter how elegant your challenge design is when the most sensible solution from the player characters’ perspective is simply to walk away because they have nothing to gain! Let the encounter’s solutions emerge from its goals, not vice versa.
Even if you know exactly what tools will be available to the players (i.e., because you’re designing the encounter for a specific group), you can never count on the availability of those tools: spells or equipment might be used up before the encounter is reached, characters can die or become otherwise indisposed, and players might not show up. If your plans for the session become entirely impossible because a player called in sick, you’re over-relying on one specific solution.
As point two suggests, your starting point is to establish a clear picture of what the group is trying to achieve and how one might go about it, and evaluate prospective solutions in terms of those goals. If you must pre-plan (and sometimes you’ll have to), a good guideline is to think of at least three totally different ways of achieving each goal. Not only does this make it more likely that you’ll be able to adapt at least one of them for whatever your players come up with, but it also mentally primes you to accept multiple solutions in the first place. This is another one where designing for a known group helps, because you can ask: “Okay, how could [character A] achieve a positive outcome here, if it came down to them? How would [character B] do it?”, and so forth.
(And yes, for combat encounters, this means you need to come up with at least two plausible victory conditions for each fight that don’t involve beating the baddies until all their hit points fall out. Making the bad guys fall down is a means, not an end; focus on what the players are actually meant to achieve!)
This is a more subtle one, because at first glance it seems to fly in the face of common received wisdom about tabletop RPG worldbuilding. In brief, the idea is that your setting shouldn’t exist as a reaction to the player characters; stuff should happen while they’re not around, NPCs should want things that don’t involve the player characters, and so forth. That’s all true – but the flip side of the coin is that individual encounters absolutely do exist as reactions to the player characters: the only reason that specific sequence of events is going down is because they showed up.
Reconciling those priorities is a two-step process:
First, ask: “How would this have played out if the player characters had never showed up?“
Then, ask: “How is the fact that they did show up fucking things up for everyone involved?”
The first point establishes the setting independently from the player characters, and also helps to get a clear picture of why the player characters should get involved – after all, how things would play out without them might be bad! The second establishes the encounter itself as a reaction to their presence.
However, now we have a second problem: the encounter needs to be a reaction to the player characters, but you can’t plan ahead of time for every course of action the players might take, and even if you could, it would probably violate the flexibility guideline, above. So what’s the answer?
For encounters involving NPCs, the hammer-and-nail framework is often fruitful. You know the saying that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail? Give each NPC a nail, something they’ll always try to achieve, even if it’s a bad idea under the circumstances; and a hammer, a method of achieving it they’ll always try first, even if it’s not a reasonable tool for the job. Good nails might include “to sell things”, “to assert my authority“, “to keep secrets”, or even just “to be left alone“. Good hammers include “with threats and violence”, “with bribes and flattery”, “with lies, when the truth would serve better”, or “by chucking fireballs at it“.
Keep it simple and to the point – a hammer or nail that takes more than ten words to express is overthinking it. The resulting combinations might feel a little cartoony in context, and you can definitely play it that way, but people using inappropriate means to achieve unreasonable goals is a. something that happens all the time in real life, and b. rich fodder for encounter building.
Challenges that don’t involve NPCs can often benefit from the same approach by lightly anthropomorphising them; the mysterious forest isn’t really a person who wants to eat intruders (nail) by misrepresenting itself as a friend (hammer), but you can usually play it as though it was. Just play it close to your chest; sometimes it’s okay to have in-character acknowledgement that there’s some malevolent goblin setting a series of carefully curated obstacles in the party’s path, but that scenario is a sometimes food – it’s generally best not to lean on the fourth wall quite that hard!
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