Friday, December 4, 2009

Close Encounters of the I made a bad joke

Today, I've been back to world building. As I said earlier, I've always been kind of fascinated with the Explorer.

So while exploring ways to interest and engage an explorer, both with cool cultures and exotic locales, I've been looking at designing encounters that would appeal to this kind of player as well. With that in mind, I'm going to take a look at a sample encounter I might build with an appeal to the explorer. To make it a little simpler, I'm going to focus more on exotic locale, rather than cool culture for this encounter.

One of the big keys seems to be in setting the scene. It's the chance to really convey where the players are, allowing me to differentiate between fallen ruins that act as difficult terrain, or thick gnarly vines which are difficult terrain, and so on, which is itself, difficult terrain. I know right?

But it's not enough to set one encounter apart from the others with a description of the environment. I've got to try and make encounters in the more "explorey" locations stand out from the others. One thing I am thinking of doing, is giving the terrain a bigger part in the scene. It is already an important part of any combat, what with difficult terrain slowing up monsters, and cover and concealment allowing lurkers to get around to shank more vulnerable PCs. But I think I can try and give it a little more active role, whether through traps/hazards or interesting terrain effects.

So, say I send the party deep into the Shadowfell. Possibly so deep they are in Shadow Shadow bo Badow, and they come through this twisting shadowy mist into a cavern. In this cavern there's a copse of exotic ghost mushrooms the size of trees that give off a faint bluish/white glow. They are slightly translucent, perhaps they have grown so large from eating the dead and decaying ghosts and specters and other haunted souls that roam the lands of the dead. All around them motes of dust and spores dance in their light.

So let's say I have a few stands of these giant mushrooms spread around the cavern. That's kinda cool in and of itself. Maybe if I gave the mushrooms some kind of importance to the story it might make them a little more interesting, maybe they need to harvest young mushrooms for a cure to a deadly disease, or something like that. I don't know, as I've said, I've never really done up encounters/locations like this before.

Now amidst these rare mushrooms, maybe there are ghosts that are trapped, slowly being digested by these giant fungi colonies. And to top it off, there are some monsters here they'll have to fight. Maybe they've been tracked here by their enemies, or maybe it's just a bunch of shadowy cavern monsters. Either way, there's a fight.

So when the fight breaks out, I could probably try and encourage the PCs to explore around the mushrooms, by hinting that say, the shadows around the mushrooms seem eerily thick, they provide concealment to adjacent creatures. Or maybe give players that fight in squares filled with floating mushroom spores a bonus to their attacks at the cost of a penalty to defense.

At some point, the half-digested ghosts might wake up, and either join the fray if the fight is going too easy, or perhaps they start thrashing about, which would give me the excuse I need to change the effects of the mushroom. Maybe this causes clouds of spores to move around, or a different kind of ghost spore to be emitted, which damages anyone caught in it, storing the life energy of creatures within the mushroom stalks. Maybe at this point, they could try and free a ghost from a mushroom, which would allow them to spend a healing surge, or regain a healing surge or something like that.

That seems kinda cool. I like the idea of the dynamics of the encounter changing over the course of the fight. It would encourage people to revisit the terrain. I guess the danger here is in not being clear about when things are changing, but if I can describe the shifting of spores or something, then I could prompt active perception or dungeoneering checks or something, to give players the opportunity to use their skills and feel like they were worth taking. Oooh, I could totally have freeing the ghosts be a skill challenge or something.

That's how I might engage the explorer in an exotic location. Tune in soon for cultural encounters of the third kind.

Dangit.

2 comments:

  1. I think one thing that could be important to creating the kind of encounter your talking about would be to change the pace of the fight.

    One reason that I see players not spending much time exploring during fights is that they dont feel that its a worthy investment of time.

    When the monsters are stabbing you in the face, most players arent willing to take the risk of wasting time on some random skillcheck that may or may not make a difference. Especially when stabbing the monster in the face has a definite and concrete effect.

    I think the key would be to somehow make understanding and mastering the environment more important than killing the monsters.

    Also, give the party small breathing spaces where they can take the time to figure things out.

    For example, in a recent game I was in, the party was in an encounter where skeletons would continuously spawn untill we broke a thingy. However, we just killed all of the skeletons to the point to where we could just kill them as they spawned, buying us infinite time. Thus the whole idea of "hold off the monsters while someone hacks the console" was completely lost. We just killed everything and then handwaved the skill part.

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  2. Oh wow that is fantastic advice. Thank you!

    Yeah, I could see doing something like have a monster or two show up before the "real encounter" and while they are stabbing it, they could notice the spores having certain effects, maybe they even notice the mushrooms trapping the ghost.

    I'm not sure exactly what I could do to make mastering the environment more important than killing the monsters. I could try and make the environment deadlier than the monsters, or at least give it some pretty drastic abilities, more along the lines of a high-powered hazard or something.

    Or I could try and make the monsters harder to kill without the benefit of the environment (maybe the environment is healing them or something) but that just means that the players might try harder to kill all the monsters and then figure out the rest.

    I see what you mean. It's definitely got to be worth the time it takes to give up an action or more to leverage the terrain.

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