Bring your best ideas to life, and bring unforgettable encounters to the table.
Everyone celebrates. For the last hour, they've been struggling against incredible odds, flipping between moments of triumph and dastardly setbacks. Finally, they've emerged, battered, shocked, surprised. The group collectively agreed that this session was wild. This is the scenario that we, as GM's, strive for.
These great moments are created on the foundation of well-designed encounters. But encounter prep is hard to get right every time. It's easy to forget something or miss the mark. We've done it in nearly every imaginable way. From those mistakes, and with the help of our patrons, we've created a system that streamlines great encounter prep. It's system agnostic. It has a broad definition of encounter. It's as thorough as possible while only including what is absolutely vital.
In this episode, we're going to explain our encounter-building system. Then we'll use it to create a satisfying final encounter for the adventure we have been creating this season, titled "Corruption in the Temple of Trials".
In The Extra-Dimensional Gateway, we look for inspiration for this encounter. Pulling on the pieces of media suggested as inspiration by patrons for the adventure in our episode "Session Zero to Story-Driven Dungeon Crawl", we hone in on some of their most powerful scenes. From Lord of the Rings we appreciate the tactical stages used in the Battle of Helms Deep, and the thrilling environment as the fellowship escapes from Moria. We then consider an amazing example of a social encounter from Stranger Things, where Eleven goes toe-to-toe with her mentor figure, Dr. Brenner.
In The Proving Grounds, we create our encounter. It is everything we wanted to capture, in a concise, useable package. It contains escalations so that tension stays sky-high, it has stakes beyond the life of each PC, it leaves space for plenty of heroics, and it lets us stay flexible and reactive to the player’s choices.
The Encounter Building System Blank
As always, huge thanks to the patrons who made this episode a reality:
Inigo the Brave, Adam F., Alex R., Steve A., Sigma, Kuraidoscope, Skyler E., PseuArt, Blackthorne, FirstLaw, PeakcockDreams, DM Thunderbum, Marley R, Timewarp, DangerousMarmalade, No Ma'am, Michelle T, Adlerious, Chris F, The Senate, Lucas D, Lyla G, The GM Tim, DM Natske, Heavyarms, Leprecan, and Will HP.