Deliberate Practice of Random Encounters

Rolling up random encounters is noble, aspirational. Making them fun (especially when you roll them at the table, in the moment) is hard.

I have, for as long as I’ve participated in the TTRPG hobby, been fixated on and frustrated by the idea of Deliberately Practicing your GM skills. The capital letters there are on purpose - Deliberate Practice is different from practice. It’s a sort of framework for practicing, in which you aim for better results by improving your process of practice. It was coined by a Swedish psychologist, and popularized when he wrote a book about it. It’s a good read. Some people think it’s nonsense, but some people think lots of things.

I want to Deliberately Practice my GM skills. I want to be a better GM because I find value in it, because it fulfills me to improve at something I care about. So I need to find a framework for it that makes sense, and I think this one should work. Let’s find out. (I make no promises - at the end of writing this, I’m still publishing it, even if I decide it sounds like nonsense.)

You Should Be Rolling Encounters

If you read the title, you know this article is about rolling random encounters. For the 5e GMs out there, this probably confuses you - don’t you just roll the dice and tell the players “Two wolves show up on the road. Roll for initiative.” (I jest - kinda.) But nay, rolling encounters in old school games is usually more involved, more interesting, more dynamic, and more central to the gameplay loop than the terrible tables that show up in modules published by Dullards of the Coast.

It’s so central, in fact, that some of the better materials in the old school scene will give you tons of great tables, and encourage you to adapt other subsystems, to make your encounters come alive. I’m going to use Dolmenwood for this example, because I think it’s got fantastic stuff in this area. You roll for the type of encounter, the creature you are encountering, what their general mien is, and how they react to the players. When you realize how many different rolls there are involved here, the combinatorics astound - even before adding your personal interpretation of the results, there’s some stupid number of possibilities at play.

You should be doing this, in any system in which your players have encounters. (Maybe not story games, I don’t really know.) The randomness has an emergent quality that distinguishes your game from your neighbor’s Dolmenwood game. It allows the GM to experience that sense of wonder that the players get to experience. Rolling at the table can even contribute to the big V - verisimilitude. It’s more believable than “the book says you encounter a troll if you go down this road.” What if I didn’t go down it for 50 years? Why is the troll just waiting there for me?

That said, while this is an aspirational and noble goal, and it will improve your games if you commit to it, it’s also just hard. Encounter design is a whole big topic, and the scope of an encounter can range from a brief conversation to a campaign-shaking epic. And you only have ten minutes before the players at the table get tired of waiting and go play Baldur’s Gate 3 instead. We should probably do some practicing away from the table, so we’re ready when the moment comes.

Can You Practice This Deliberately?

Deliberate practice requires:

1. A Goal

2. Structure

3. Focus

4. Quantifiability (uh-oh)

5. Feedback

Let’s tackle these. The goal, first, is to improve your random encounters and make them more exciting and interesting at the table. Pretty straight forward stuff.

Structure is given to us in the form of your game’s systems and guidelines for generating encounters. Easy! We’re just gonna roll the dice in the order the game tells us to (and any extras we decide to add because we like hacking our own games.)

Focus is harder for some than others. I have ADHD, I forget my meds way more often than I take them, and I have two small children. But, it’s non-negotiable. You can’t improve at doing this live and in technicolor if you can’t do it in a zero stakes environment like your kitchen table.

Quantifiability is measuring the success or failure of your attempt. I know what you’re thinking - this is such a subjective endeavor, it’s impossible to quantify! I agree, but I have good news. You can objectively measure your results based on your own subjective rubric of quality! I’m going to share an example in this article of how to quantify your results based on one rubric, but you’re welcome to find or invent your own. So long as you’re consistent in what metrics you are applying, this will work just fine.

Feedback is something we’ll often get from our players. Did they have fun? Was it epic? Do they remember it? All of these are great forms of feedback, but you can also just share with a friend that you think is good at this stuff, and ask them what they think of your encounters. Discord communities are a great place for this - there are some really awesome ones out there full of smart, creative, kind people.

So it seems like we can practice this deliberately. Let’s talk about rubrics and give it a shot.

Objective (Subjective) Metrics of Funness

The challenging part of this process is finding a way by which to measure your output. If you’re running track, you’ve got the clock. If you’re playing chess, your rating will go up or down. But if you’re being creative? If you’re using imagination? Seems pretty subjective, and it is.

What you have to do is find an objective way to measure your preferences. There are a number of articles and book chapters outlining The Things Encounters Should Be. Here's one. Probably one of the best, in my personal opinion. The article walks you through a hypothetical encounter and how to set it up, tweak it, subvert it, and at the end of the day, make it way more interesting.

In summary, it’s a simple checklist, which makes it distinctly useful for judging other encounters by. One point for every list item you nail, half a point if you feel like you kinda got it, but could do better, and zero points if you forgot about it or couldn’t figure out how to sneak it into the fight. It really doesn’t have to be more complicated than that. I would recommend that you create or find your rubric, read it once or twice, and then try to apply the principles. Don’t keep the checklist next to you while you work - operate from memory, and grade yourself after. It’ll give you a good baseline score for how well you’re designing encounters spontaneously, and you’ll have a number to beat later on when you’ve done more work.

Go roll up some encounters! I’ll do one here, and show you the process.

Rubbering the Road

Here’s what I rolled up. I chose a day encounter, in the wilderness.

Type: Regional. Excellent, these are the most interesting to me.
Creature: Redslob (3). I rolled on the Mulchgrove table, since that’s where my players are. And then it’s 1d4 for the number, and I rolled the 3. Time to flip open my Monster Book.

Semi-sentient masses (8′ across) of noxious, bubbling, crimson ooze that lurk in branches, waiting to drop on victims. Have an avaricious tendency - sometimes collect gems. Here’s the stat block:

I can work with this. Semi-intelligent, neutral, level 4. Cautious and inquisitive, can speak. Lots of good stuff here. No lairs for these guys, so I don’t need to roll for that one. Now let’s see if either side is surprised.

I rolled a 1 and a 2, so both sides are surprised. Fantastic.

Encounter distance - how far away are they at the beginning of the encounter? I rolled a 4 on a d4, times 30’ for surprised distance, so 120 feet. This… feels less than useful to me, so I may ignore it. (Go ahead, cheat a little - I won’t tell anyone.)

Lastly, if the reaction of the creature is unclear, you can make a reaction roll. Based on the cautious, inquisitive behaviour, I think a reaction roll is called for. 2d6! I got a 2 and a 1. Low numbers are a grim portent for our players - that’s a hostile reaction.

What we need to do now is come up with something interesting that hits all the marks of our rubric. Since we haven’t discussed that yet, let’s list them out:

1. It happens to the players. It isn’t just something that the players see happening to something else. If it doesn’t immediately involve them, it won’t grab their attention.

2. It needs to be “toyetic”. I prefer the word interactive here. It needs something the players can play with, touch, change, experiment with.

3. Multiple solutions, or no solutions. Don’t pre-suppose how your players should behave.

4. The players should want something from the encounter. There’s so many ways to make the players want to be there, want to interact with it.

5. The encounter creature, or the situation - does it want something? Does it have a motivation? Everything alive has a desire - even if it’s just survival.

6. Does the encounter creature have the means to do something about their desire? How can the players get involved with that desire? Is the creature missing what it needs to succeed, and do the players have that?

7. Is there a consequence for simply ignoring the encounter?

With that in mind, I’m going to write this next section in a stream of consciousness style so you can see me thinking through the thoughts and the process.

Given that both the players and the Redslob were surprised, is that the players find literally step into the ooze. We need an interactive element in the environment. I’m drawn to low hanging branches, or some environmental threat like a pit or some other creature’s lair. Since this creature greedily covets valuables like gems, we should put some gems within reach of the players, and likely within the body of the Redslob itself. The players will have motivation to either escape and grab some goodies, or to fight and get all the gems. They also have the option to negotiate for their release by giving a gem or some gold to the Redslob - multiple solutions are definitely in play here.

The creature probably wants to get away, but perhaps it notices a valuable object on the player, or reacts in anger to being stepped on, giving it a reason to do something other than immediately flee. Then again, if it immediately fled and the players saw the glint of gemstones within it, this encounter becomes an interesting pursuit. (We could use pursuit mechanics, even.)

It’s not really an option to ignore the encounter - rolling that both sides were surprised simply demanded, to me, that the players step into the ooze. So it’s already happening. But if the party were somehow to try to ignore it or simply run away? They lose the loot, obviously, but also maybe they lost a valuable thing when they walked past a greedy, intelligent slime.

Finally, coming back around to the environment. This area of Dolmenwood is described as “dank lowland riddled with fungal forests, treacherous bogs, and twisted willow-woods”. Those bogs sound like an environmental threat, and the willows could be useful for players trying to pull themselves out of the ooze (or out of the bog itself.) If the players end up killing the ooze, or hacking off a part of it, they might find it has strange properties - it could become a useful tool for the players to use.

Feedback and Thinking Forward

Looking back at the rubric, I think this scores a solid 7/7. (Cause I have the list next to me, so it’s kinda cheating.) I’ve got all the things that I personally want in my encounters. Remember, your rubric is whatever you want it to be, so long as you can quantify it. Now when I want to practice my GM skills, I can roll up a few encounters - see how I compare to myself, and track my progress over time.

I have a feeling this works. I’ll post an article or two soon, writing up some more encounters and evaluating them. Maybe we’ll see an improvement, and hopefully I can translate these improvements to my table.