Game design encounters and dungeons, Dungeon and Dragons (TTRPG)

About

Here I will show how I make encounters, create battle maps, analyse and learn from them. So that I can increase the players and my own enjoyment in the campaign. With that, I aim for a smooth play through to make sure that the combat does not take too long.

Map making tools

Making maps I used Photoshop, Gimp and Dungeondraft, I now mainly use the last one because it is specifically designed for making battle maps. I made use of free textures to make the battle maps, so I had all the freedom to assemble and design the battle map as much as I can.

How I create a normal encounter

I find inspiration and references for the location, inhabitants and the player capabilities. A good example of this would be the first encounter for the players. An abandoned mine in the mountains inhabited by kobolds. This encounter was to test what the players can do and with their character's abilities and promote teamwork.

I knew already what the characters are capable of, but that is still very different to how the players will use them. The kobold mine was a dungeon encounter that main focus was movement, the kobolds would rob the players and runaway through small holes and lure the players into traps. Normally a mine would make any flying unusable, but by adding crevasses this made sure that the players could still fly and use that to navigate the mine faster and easier.

Kobold dungeon

- Context: This will be the players first combat of the campaign, which means some won’t be that used to their character yet.

- Goal: To let the players test out their characters and encourage the power of teamwork and to show the dangers of these mountains.

- Location: Mountains, abandoned mine, small dungeon.

- Theme: Kobold robbery, movement, simple traps.

- Story: The party ventures on a mountain that is filled with big holes, showing signs of abandoned mines. In there kobolds live and occasionally rob people when they get the chance when they pass by. The player encounters some kobolds at the entrance of a mine and they promptly get robbed. An encounter and chase ensues and the party gets lured further into the mine where a lot of simple traps and kobolds reside attempting to further rob the party and attempt to fight them.

- Encounter and battle info: The kobolds are not that dangerous when you fight them one on one, any one of the players level can kill one of them in one turn or so. The mages can kill multiple if the enemies group up, but that might prove difficult because the kobolds use small nooks and cranny's to traverse the mine where the party can't easily go. The kobolds use that to their advantage to confuse the party, encouraging the plays to think outside of the box and to try out their abilities. The traps are non lethal, designed to slow down the players and encourage a non reckless and teamwork behavior throughout this dungeon.

- Outcome: One of the players that can fly, flew over the crevasse and followed one of the kobolds who robbed them. This made it so that they were alone and were overwhelmed by multiple kobolds and got downed. The rest of the party went through the dungeon together slowly learned their mechanics, teamwork and understanding the dungeon more.

- What can I learn from this: I learned that the main problem was the health points from the kobolds, making it difficult to kill them off in one go. Making sure that the amount of enemies is well distributed to make it more fun for everyone. I also think that the map itself might need more accessibility rather than just fly over the crevasse, for example a way to get over it by parkour which would require an ability check. This could make the party be more able to group more.

Combat tactics and what I learned:

- When creating encounters I would not focus on making the enemies on par with the players, there would be encounters that the players can easily defeat and some they had to avoid from. This is to make sure that some encounters don’t take a lot of time since on par combat would mean it will take a long time.

- I used a lot of lesser enemies that are easy to defeat against the party, but with a catch that there are many of them. Giving a clear danger of numbers and a clear focus whenever there would be stronger enemies among them.

- I experimented a lot with group enemies and I realized that it is a lot of fun, but to take in mind that if the players cannot target multiple enemies at the same time. The fight would become more difficult and take longer for no reason.

- In combat we had a lot of moments where the players couldn't kill a small monster in one go or with a big spell, they would always have a few health points left. I fixed this issue and the combat became more smooth by having the monsters die if they only would have a few health points left, and soon afterwards I calculated the players average damage and based off the health of the smaller monsters on. So that they could be one shot in one attack.