Encounter building: Part 1

Recently I've been thinking a lot about some of the challenges I face when creating encounters, especially combat encounters, for my pathfinder campaign, my party is reasonably powerful with nine players running level eight characters (plus one animal companion and an eidolon), and consequently they can easily deal with challenge rating 12 encounters as long as no individual opponent is more powerful than challenge rating 9 or so.  If individual opponents get too powerful player characters can start dying with very little warning.

My main issues are:

1. Running a fast paced and engaging combat with at least twelve entities in the initiative order.
2. Balancing the combats so they contain an element of risk that I can easily calibrate.

As I began to engage with the process of seriously thinking about these challenges I found myself deconstructing the notion of encounters to see if the root of my issues perhaps lies with some misunderstanding on my part of what an encounter should be. This led me to realise that game masters have quite a bit to think about before we start adding mechanics to encounters. Thus I suspect that there might be a lot of thinking to do before I can start getting close to grappling with my two key questions.

So what is an encounter?

In meta game terms it seems to be some instance, I'm going to call it a scene, that prompts a dialogue between the game master and the players as opposed to game master exposition. In less meta terms, an encounter occurs when the player characters interact with the game world and the outcome is uncertain. An encounter will not necessarily invoke the mechanics of the game although many times it will.

To illustrate, imagine a situation where the game master describes a marketplace including some history about the site and activities that routinely occur there - this is game master exposition. In addition if one or more party members were to visit a weapon smith in the marketplace and purchase some goods - this isn't an encounter as there is no uncertainty as to the outcome.

In contrast, if the players characters spoke to Stanislaw the Baker, a stall holder in the marketplace, who told them about how Sozakc the Bugbear was finally captured and executed right over there, 'you can still see the blood stains on the cobbles' and the cleric of the party then asked what happened to Sozakc's axe (the demon possessed one) - the players have engaged with the scene and learnt something about the game world that has furthered their quest, this is an encounter.

Note that no game mechanics were invoked in this example but they could have been if a player wanted to make a sense motive on Stanilaw's statement for instance.

Why then do we break up the narrative structure of role playing games into encounters?

If we think about other storytelling media we find that they also consist of a series of scenes following encounters between the story's protagonists and their environment. The main reason would seem to be that there are lots of things that happen between encounters that aren't necessarily very interesting or that contribute much to the story at hand. While it might be interesting to role play walking from the marketplace to the keep from time to time, but if nothing is going to happen that would distinguish this from any other walk between arbitrary locations there is not a lot of point to doing it every time.

Adopting a 'role play everything that happens' approach would also generate a ton of work for the game master, and without discrete scenes to work on where would you start?

What role do encounters serve?

Encounters are important elements for driving the story forward, and without the story there isn't much to motivate role play. A well thought out encounter creates conflict between the player characters and the world around them as well as potentially between player characters (maybe even between a player and their character?).

Encounters can also serve an important role in world building, the little details that go into encounters can create the illusion that the world the player characters inhabit is alive, and help to make the story meaningful to both the players and their characters.

When encounters engage the mechanics of the game system they create opportunities to roll dice and exploit the abilities of the player characters and even when they don't, they provide role playing opportunities.

Another aspect of encounters bringing game mechanics into play is reward.  Without encounters there is no treasure and no experience points, and these are what empower the characters to face more dangerous foes in the future.

This week I unpacked encounters to try and understand them better and help to answer the two questions if began the post with

1. How to run a fast paced and engaging combat with at least twelve entities in the initiative order.
2. How to balance the combats so they contain an element of risk that I can easily calibrate.

While I think I've gained some insight into encounters I don't have any answers to my questions but over the coming days I will continue to work towards them and hopefully by next post I will have a some satisfactory solutions. If you have any insights of your own feel free to leave them in the comments.