Encounter Design
Pathfinder Gamemastery Guide (Second Edition), page 46
Creating a compelling encounter goes beyond just following the guidelines for selecting monsters of a given level. Good encounters have a place in the story, compelling adversaries, interesting locations, and twists and turns to make them dynamic.
Encounters play a fundamental part in roleplaying games, but it can be tricky to know where to start when building them. This section covers ways to expand on the basics provided on page 489 of the Core Rulebook to make your encounters an exciting and integral part of the plot. Encounter design goes hand in hand with location, map, and adventure design. You might set an adventure in a swamp and populate it with swamp creatures and environmental features. Or you might have a dungeon denizen in mind, and structure a section of your dungeon to fit that creature.
When you’re starting out, straightforward encounters of low or moderate threat can let you get your bearings. Then, you can increase complexity as you get more confident and as the PCs collect more tools to use against their foes. The more encounters you build, the more comfortable you’ll get with your own personal style. You can always come back here to get more ideas or advice on executing a certain type of encounter.
In this section
- Variety Variety in encounters is essential to let players try new tactics and give different PCs chances to shine as they face foes with weak points they’re uniquely suited to exploiting.
- Encounter Locations Choose compelling settings for your encounters. When encounters take place in a building or lair, the most significant environmental features originate from the occupants, both past and present.
- Enemy Motivations Every encounter should happen for a reason. Consider a creature’s motivation to fight. Is it defending its lair? Robbing to enrich itself? Following sadistic impulses? Simply being paid to fight?
- Dynamic Encounters While you can certainly create enjoyable encounters by placing a group of opponents in a square room with little else, you have numerous tools to create encounters that are more interactive and dynamic.
- Social Encounters The setup for a social encounter tends to be less detailed. For the NPCs involved, you’ll just need statistics for their social skills, Perception, and Will.
- Treasure by Encounter The standard rules count treasure over the course of a level, rather than dividing it up by encounter. If you need to select treasure for a single encounter, such as in a sandbox game, you can use the table below.