Everybody knows how an encounter starts: The goblins (or the SWAT team or the cyborg death squad) come through the door, snarl, and attack. Roll initiative!

Or the PCs are walking through the jungle when they suddenly see, or are ambushed by, the goblins (or the special ops team or the cyborg death squad). Roll initiative!

Or the PCs kick down the door, the goblins look up, snarl, and… Well, you get the idea.

All of these, however, are bang-bang encounters: The PCs see the bad guys (bang) and combat immediately begins (bang).

Nothing wrong with a good bang-bang interaction, of course, but this is just one way of initiating an encounter. If all of your encounters are bang-bang encounters, then you’re missing out on some fun options and your adventures will be unnecessarily one-dimensional. There can also be some tack-on effects in terms of game balance and scenario design that you may find surprising if you’ve only experienced bang-bang encounters.

STARTING OLD SCHOOL ENCOUNTERS

If we look back at the oldest editions of D&D, we’ll discover that they featured a procedural method for triggering encounters. The exact methods varied from one version of the game to another, but broadly speaking the procedure would look something like this:

1. Determine surprise. This could result in the monsters becoming aware of the PCs before the PCs become aware of the monsters; the PCs becoming aware of the monsters first; or both becoming aware of each other simultaneously.
2. Randomly determine the encounter distance. (For example, in a dungeon the encounter might start at 1d6 x 20 ft.) This could notably generate results farther than the current limits of the PCs’ line of sight, implying that the PCs would hear the monsters before seeing them (or vice versa).
3. Make a reaction check, which could result in monsters being, for example, Friendly, Neutral, Cautious, Threatening, Hostile, or Immediately Attacking. (The players, of course, would determine how their characters would react.)

You can see how a GM, by simply following procedures like these, would generate a huge variety in how their encounters would be initiated.

What may be less immediately obvious is the effect this has on actual gameplay:

• Spotting the goblin warg riders at a thousand feet creates a completely different combat dynamic than noticing those same warg riders when they’re only fifty feet away.
• Hearing a group of kobolds arguing on the far side of a door in the dungeon gives the PCs an opportunity to barricade the door, ambush them, sneak past them, eavesdrop for information, or any number of other options.
• Compared to an ogre who immediately attacks, a threatening ogre who says, “You don’t belong here! Get out and never come back!” offers the PCs a completely different range of potential responses, from drawing their weapons to attempting negotiations to accepting his offer and beating a hasty retreat.

And so forth.

The nifty thing to note here is that the GM doesn’t have to design all these different types of encounters. Instead, a simple, procedural variation in a handful of initial encounter conditions creates the opportunity for the players to approach each encounter in significantly different ways. Combined with different creatures, environments, and continuity, you end up with an essentially infinite variety of encounters with little or no effort.

This also has a direct impact on encounter balance.

For example, when discussing hexcrawl campaigns (or other sandbox structures where the encounters aren’t geared specifically to the PCs), I’m often asked what will happen if low-level PCs stumble into a section of the hexcrawl designed for higher-level characters or get a bad result on the random encounter tables. That’s surely just a TPK waiting to happen, right?

If you’re running exclusively bang-bang encounters, there’s a lot of truth to that, and counteracting that will require the GM to significantly limit the dynamic range of their encounter design (e.g., the world levels up with the PCs) and/or take on the responsibility of manually creating all kinds of signals warning the PCs away from dangerous areas.

But the procedural encounter methods also had the practical effects of creating ablative layers between the PCs and TPK. For example, imagine a party of 1^st-level PCs encountering a beholder. Actually getting into a lethal combat encounter with the beholder would mean:

1. Randomly generating the lethal encounter. (Which was statistically less likely.)
2. Not having the % Tracks check indicate that the PCs are encountering monster-sign instead of the monster itself. (A tracks result would, of course, procedurally warn the PCs that something big and dangerous is in the area.)
3. Failing to gain surprise. (Which would allow the PCs to silently withdraw.)
4. Generating an encounter distance close enough that the PCs couldn’t slip away.
5. The reaction check needs to generate a hostile response. (Or the PCs need to provoke a hostile response.)

As D&D stripped these various structures out of the default mode of play, however, the game gravitated towards a mode of play in which the encounter simply existing is functionally equivalent to a PC dying.

Note: The original 1974 edition of D&D also featured a fully functional mechanical structure for retreating from combat, so even when the ablative layers of the encounter system and/or the players’ commonsense failed and they found themselves in over their heads, the PCs would still have the opportunity to escape the imminent catastrophe. But that’s a topic for another time.

CREATING YOUR PHASES

Again, the point here isn’t that bang-bang encounters are bad. The point is that variety is good, and bang-bang encounters are just one option among many.

The point also isn’t that the procedural encounter-framing of old school D&D is the One True Way™ of gaming. That point is that encounters are, in fact, framed, just like any other scene in your game.

This means all the advice about scene-framing from The Art of Rulings applies to combat encounters, too:

• What is the agenda of the scene? (There are other options than “fight to the death,” even if you’re using the combat system.)
• What is the bang? (Bang-bang is, as we already know, only one option.)
• What are the elements of the scene? (These include both characters and location.)
• How does the scene end? (Are victory and defeat the only options? And, if not, what options have you been overlooking?)

What I will say is that playing around with old-school-style encounter framing procedures is, in my experience, a good way to experiment, push yourself out of ingrained habits, and begin exploring new alternatives. But these are, of course, random in nature and, ultimately, simulationist/gamist in nature. Which means that there are, once again, a lot of alternatives here. For example, you can frame dramatically or make deliberate creative choices in your encounter framing. And there are also completely different procedural methods you could explore.

Looking at the lessons that can be learned from old-school procedures, however, one that I find particularly useful is that the beginning of an encounter is inherently phased. (Even the choice to do a bang-bang encounter is, ultimately, a choice — conscious or otherwise — to collapse all of those phases into a single moment.) These phases include:

• Seeing monster-sign (they’re close!)
• Line of sight
• Encounter distance
• Surprise (aka, who’s aware of who? and when? and how?)
• NPC reaction/mood/morale

Think about how (and why) certain phases are skipped or become irrelevant in some encounters, but not others.

Do these phases need to occur in a specific sequence? What happens if you change the sequencing?

During what phases (or after which phases) are the PCs able to take action? Do their choices affect the sequence or phases or which phases occur? What about the NPC choices?

Are there other phases we haven’t identified here?

Rolling for initiative (or, more generally, moving into combat timing) is usually a key pivot point in a combat encounter. It’s a big, definitive bang. But it can be very empowering to remember that there are many encounters that could become combat encounters but don’t necessarily need to end up that way. (Monster reaction checks remind us of that procedurally.)

Similarly, even after initiative has been rolled, remember that scenes can have more than one bang! That might be:

• reinforcements (whether more bad guys or allies or neutral parties who could go either way)
• environmental changes (the lava is getting closer! the ceiling starts descending! poison gas fills the room!)
• retreat
• surrender
• negotiation and/or hostage-taking
• momentous death

The fact that most RPGs feature a highly structured system for resolving combat can be a very useful and powerful tool, but don’t let it become a trap. Remember that you control the framing of the scene and empower your players to shape the outcome of the scene in ways that transcend the combat mechanics.