In “The Joy of Extradimensional Spaces,” an adventure by Michael Polkinhorn in Candlekeep Mysteries, the PCs discover a portal to an extradimensional space, go through it, and become trapped on the other side.

This is a classic trope, and for good reason. Perhaps the most memorable and well-known version are the arches of mysterious mists and the green devil faces of The Tomb of Horrors, but I’ve run some variation of this gag countless times.

Often, of course, PCs will also encounter mystic portals and strange gateways of coruscating energy that aren’t one-way affairs. But they won’t necessarily know that. And even if they don’t suspect a trap, the unknown threshold beyond which they cannot see is quite likely to inspire endless amounts of paranoia.

So, either way, the day will likely come when you hear some variation of: “Okay, let’s send Kittisoth through first to check things out.” Or: “I stick my ten-foot-pole into the portal and pull it back out.”

First: Know your metaphysic.

What does happen when you stick something halfway into a magical portal and then pull it out?

A few variations:

• No problem. It’s just like a doorway in space, even if the field of energy blocks your line of sight. (Perhaps you might even be able to still hear what’s on the other side.)
• You can’t pull it out. Once an object has gone partially through the portal, the only movement allowed is forward through the portal. If you pull back, it will feel as if the object is “stuck.”
• That’s incredibly dangerous. You can pull back, but you’ll only pull back the portion that’s still on THIS side of the portal. (Make sure you walk through these portals with confidence.)
• That’s not possible because as soon as any discrete object or creature touches the surface of the portal, it instantly vanishes and reappears on the other side. It’s more of a “touch here to activate” effect than it is a literal gateway. (This one can get tricky: If I prod it with a pole, do I vanish? Can I tie a rope to something hundreds of feet away, toss one end of the rope in, and have the whole thing go through the portal? What if the object is bolted to the floor? Or is a huge tree and the room on the other side is only 10’ x 10’? But, conversely, if I touch it with my hand do I disappear while leaving my clothes behind? One way to simplify this is to create a “threshold” before the portal – a misty arch, a field of energy, a penumbral aura, the entire room that the portal is in – and only objects within that threshold vanish when the portal is touched. Your choice whether to have something straddling that threshold get severed at the threshold or if the whole object remains even when touching the portal. But I digress.)

You want to have a clear understanding of this, because the players will want to experiment with the portal to figure out how it works / whether or not it’s safe. They’re going to come up with all kinds of crazy testing schemes, and you’re going to want a clear conceptual framework for consistently ruling what the outcomes of those tests will be.

I’m of the opinion that this metaphysic should feel consistent with the portal’s behavior on the other side: If it’s a one-way portal, for example, then you shouldn’t be able to stick things through the portal and then pull them back. (In other words, you want to play fair and reward players who take the effort to engage deeply with the scenario.)

Second: Use a portal countdown.

When the PCs send a scout through the portal, don’t immediately describe what the scout sees. Instead, stay with the PCs that remained behind: Describe the scout going through the portal, disappearing, and then… what do you do?

Keep track of the number of rounds it takes for each of the other characters to go through. Then, once they’ve all done so, you can flip to the other side of the portal and accurately play out events on the other side.

So, for example, Kittisoth walks into the portal. The other PCs wait a couple of rounds and then Edana sticks her ten-foot-pole through. Unable to pull it out, she sighs and steps through on the next round. Everyone else then nervously follows on the fifth round.

Now cut to the other side of the portal: Kittisoth emerges into a goblin ambush! Roll initiative! On the third round of combat, Edana’s pole sticks out of the portal. On the fourth round, Edana walks out. On the fifth round, the other PCs join the fray!

Even if there are no immediately “interesting” consequences from using the portal countdown (e.g., the portal emerges into an empty room and Kittisoth just patiently waits for everyone to join her), the experience is still immersive and tantalizing in its paranoia: What is happening on the other side of the portal?

When there IS something interesting happening on the other side of the portal, the experience of seeing the other side of the timeline (e.g., Edana’s pole sticking out of the portal) is a ton of fun.

What if all the PCs don’t come through? That’s fine. Run a couple rounds of the portal countdown in “combat time,” but when it becomes clear that some or all of the remaining PCs aren’t going to follow Kittisoth blindly through the portal (“She was supposed to come back!”) simply ask them how long they’d wait, note that on the countdown, and then cut to the other side of the portal.

Should I have players leave the room? If you’d like. I’ve not generally found it to be necessary and, as I mentioned, I’ve found the audience stance of seeing the other side of the timeline to be fun. But I’ve also been given to understand that the experience of going into another room and waiting while your fellow players join you one by one can also be mysterious and fun. Play it by ear and get a feel for what works.

(If you’re splitting the players up anyway, you may also want to just go back and forth between the two rooms each round instead of using a portal countdown.)

What if it’s not a one-way portal? This technique works best with one-way portals because the events on one side of the portal are generally firewalled from the other side of the portal, but since the players don’t always know if the portal is one-way or not, it can also be effective to use the technique regardless. (If nothing else, it means you’re not tipping your hand when they do encounter a one-way portal.)

But what if, for example, Kittisoth simply walks back through the portal?

If that outcome is quite likely, of course, then you don’t want to use the portal countdown technique in the first place. Or use it in a modified form. For example, if Kittisoth’s intention is to walk through the portal and then immediately turn around and walk back and there’s nothing on the other side that would prevent that from happening, you can just run it normally. Or you might take Kittisoth into another room, describe what she sees, and get a sense of her intentions: If it looks like she’s going to explore a bit – or get cut off from the portal by the goblin ambush – then you can go back and run the portal countdown.

But if you are using a portal countdown and Kittisoth comes back “early” (i.e., before all of the declared actions on the countdown have played out), that’s just fine. You can simply retcon the rest of the countdown; those actions belong to an alternative version of reality, I guess.

(The portal countdown is basically an extended form of declaring an intention. It’s similar to combat systems in which everyone declares their actions at the beginning of the round before resolving them in initiative order: If someone declares that they’re going to run down an open passageway, but then the passageway gets blocked with a wall of stone before they can take their turn, they’re not going to just mindlessly grind their face into the wall like a computer game NPC with bad pathing. They just won’t take the action.)

What about other continuity issues? Keep in mind that premature portal returns aren’t the only contradiction of continuity you can run into. For example, those on the far side of the portal might use a telepathic ability to contact their comrades. Or Kittisoth might grab the end of Edana’s pole and yank her through the portal.

Again, that’s fine. Just end the countdown and begin resolving actions normally from that point. (Which might even include starting a new portal countdown depending on what’s happening.)

Similarly, you generally pause the countdown and begin resolving actions on the far side of the portal when everyone has either gone through or definitively decided NOT to go through. But actions on the near side of the portal can also trigger this decision earlier: For example, if it’s Edana who chooses to use a telepathic ability to contact Kittisoth (assuming that she can do so), you’ll need to pause the countdown and resolve Kittisoth’s side of the portal.

You’re running a scenario. The PCs have a fistful of leads telling them where they’re supposed to go next. (If you’re using node-based scenario design, they might have a fistful of clues pointing them towards multiple places they could choose to go next.) But instead of doing that, they head off in a completely different direction.

And there’s nothing there.

Maybe they’ve made a mistake. Maybe they’ve made a brilliant leap of deduction which turns out not to be so brilliant after all. Maybe they have good reason to look for more information in the local library or the newspaper morgue or the records of the local school district, but there’s nothing to be found there.

It’s a dead end.

And dead ends like this can be quite problematic because, once they have the bit in their teeth, players can be relentless: Convinced that there must be something there, they will try every angle they can think of to find the thing that doesn’t exist. In fact, I’ve seen any number of groups convince themselves that the fact they can’t find anything is proof that they must be on the right track!

Not only can this self-inflicted quagmire chew up huge quantities of time at the table to little effect, but once the players have invested all of this mental effort into unraveling an illusory puzzle, their ultimate “failure” can be a demoralizing blow to the entire session. The effort can also blot out the group’s collective memory of all the other leads they had before the wild goose chase began, completely derailing the scenario.

Fortunately, there are some simple techniques for quickly working past this challenge.

IS IT REALLY A DEAD END?

First things first: Is it really a dead end?

Just because they’re doing something you didn’t explicitly prep, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing there. In fact, the principle of permissive clue-finding means that you should actually assume that there is something to be found there.

So, start by checking yourself. Is it really a dead end, or is it just a path you didn’t know was there?

Maybe the players thought of some aspect of the scenario that you didn’t while you were prepping it. (That can be very exciting!) And even if something is a wild goose chase, there can be interesting things to be found there even if they don’t immediately tie into the scenario the PCs are currently engaged with.

(This is also why I’ll tend to give my players more rope in exploring these “dead ends” during campaigns than I will during one-shots: The consequences of doing something completely unexpected can develop in really interesting ways in the long-term play of the campaign, but don’t really have time to go anywhere in a one-shot, and are therefore usually better pruned. Also, if the scenario runs long because you had a really cool roleplaying interaction with Old Ma Ferguson that everyone enjoyed — even though she has nothing to do with the current scenario — it’s fine to hang out the To Be Continued shingle in a campaign and wrap things up in the next session, which is, once again, not an option in a one-shot.)

If it’s not really a dead end, then you should obviously roll with it and see where it takes you. If you don’t feel confident in your ability to improvise the unexpected curveball, that’s okay: Call for a ten minute break and spend the time throwing together some quick prep notes.

Although you don’t need to announce the reason for the break, it’s generally okay for the players to know that they’ve gone diving off the edge of your prep. Most players, in fact, love it. The fact you’re rolling with it shows that you creatively trust them, and they will return that trust. It also deepens the sense of the game world as a “real” place that the players are free to explore however they choose to, and that’s exciting.

FRAME PAST IT

But what if it really is a dead end? There’s nothing interesting where the PCs are heading and, therefore, nothing to be gained by playing through those events.

Well, if there’s nothing there, there’s nothing there.

At its root, this is a problem of pacing. And, therefore, we’re going to turn to The Art of Pacing for our solution. In short, you’re going to frame hard into abstract time, quickly sum up the nothing that they find, and then move on.

For example:

• “You spend the afternoon asking around the Docks for anyone who’s seen Jessica, but you can’t find anyone who saw her down here.”
• “You roll up on Jefferson Sienna, haul him down the precinct, and grill him for four hours. But you come up dry: He doesn’t know anything.”
• “You drive over to Mayfair to see if the library has the book you’re looking for, but their selection of occult books is pretty sparse.”

The most straightforward, all-purpose version of this is to simply tell the players, “You’re barking up the wrong tree. This isn’t the solution, there’s nothing to be found here, and the scenario is in a different direction.” But this direct approach is usually a bad idea: You know all that stuff I said about how much the players love knowing the game world exists beyond the boundaries of your prep and that they’re truly free to do anything and go anywhere? Well, this is basically the opposite of that. Even if you don’t strictly mean it that way, the players are going to interpret this as, “You can only go where you’re allowed to go.”

The distinction between “this isn’t the right way, try something else” and “you did it and didn’t find anything, now what?” might seem rather small. But in my experience the difference in actual play is very large.

(I suspect the difference is partly diegetic: One is a statement about the game world, the other is a directive from the GM to the players. But I think it’s also because the formulation of “you did it” still inherently values the players’ contribution: I didn’t tell you that you couldn’t do the thing you wanted to do; I was open to trying it, you did it, and it just didn’t pan out. It’s a fine line to walk, but an important one.)

The key here, once again, is to quickly sum up the totality of their intended course of action, rapidly resolve it, and then prompt them for the next action: “What do you do next?”

A good transition here can be, “What are you trying to do here?”

This pops the players out of action-by-action declarations and prompts them to sum up the totality of their intention. You then take their statement, rephrase it as a description of them doing exactly that, and then move on.

Player: Okay, I’m going to drive over to Mayfair.

GM: What are you planning to do?

Player: I want to check out the library there, see if they have a copy of My Name is Dirk A that hasn’t been stolen yet.

GM: Okay, you drive over to the Mayfair library to see if they have a copy of the book. But their selection of occult books is pretty sparse. It doesn’t look like they ever had a copy for circulation. It’s about 6 p.m. by the time you pull out. The sun’s getting low. Now what?

It’s a little like judo: You just take what they give you and redirect it straight back at them.

ADVANCED TECHNIQUES

Where appropriate, further empower the players’ intention by calling for an appropriate skill check: Streetwise to ask questions around the Docks. Detective to interrogate Jefferson Sienna. Library Use to scour the stacks at Mayfair Library.

The check can’t succeed, obviously, since you already know that there’s nothing to find here: Jessica wasn’t at the Docks. Jefferson Sienna isn’t involved in this. Mayfair Library doesn’t own the book.

Calling for the check, however, is part and parcel of allowing the player to truly pursue the action they want to pursue and resolving it truthfully within the context of the game world, while also letting the player know that this is what you’re doing.

If the group is currently split up, you can also “disguise” the simple judo of this interaction by cutting away once they’ve declared their intention and then cutting back for the resolution.

GM: Bruce, you find Jefferson Sienna smoking outside of his club. What are you planning to do here, exactly?

Player: I want to haul him down to the precinct and grill him about the missing diamonds.

GM: Great. Give me a Detective check. Tammy, what are you doing?

[run stuff with Tammy for a bit]

GM: Okay, Bruce, you spent the afternoon grilling Jefferson Sienna in Interrogation Room #1. What did you get on your Detective check?

Player: 18.

GM: Hmm. Okay. Unfortunately, you come up dry: He really doesn’t know anything. What are you doing after you cut him loose?

SCENES THAT DRIVE INTO A DEAD END

Sometimes it’s not the whole scene that’s a dead end (whether you planned it ahead of time or not): Jefferson Sienna wasn’t involved in the heist, but he’s heard word on the street that Joe O’Connell was the one fencing the diamonds. That’s an important clue!

… but then the PCs just keep asking questions. They’re convinced Sienna must know something else, or they’re just paranoid that they’ll miss some essential clue if they don’t squeeze blood from this stone. The scene has turned into a dead end.

Now what?

First, you can give yourself permission to just do a sharp cut: If the scene is over, the scene is over. Frame up the next scene and move on.

However, if the PCs are actively engaged with the scene and trying to accomplish something (even if it’s impossible because, for example, Sienna doesn’t actually know anything else), this can end up being very disruptive and feel very frustrating for the players.

You can soften the blow using some of the techniques we discussed above. (For example, you might cut to a different PC during a lull in the interrogation and then cut back to the PCs who were doing the interrogation while framing them into a new scene. You can also just ask, “What’s your goal here?” And when they say something like, “I want to make sure we know everything Sienna has to tell us,” you can judo straight off of that to wrap up the scene.) But we can also borrow a technique that Kenneth Hite uses for investigative games:

When the characters have gained all the information they’re going to get from a scene, hold up a sign that says “SCENE OVER” or “DONE” or something like that. The statement cues the players to let them know that there’s no reward to be gained by continuing to question the prisoner or ransack the apartment or whatever, while using a sign is less intrusive on the natural flow of the scene (so if there’s something they still want to accomplish of a non-investigative nature, the scene can continue without the GM unduly harshing the vibe).

You can adapt this pretty easily to other types of scenes, too. You’re basically signaling that the essential question the scene was framed around has, in fact, been answered, and you’re inviting the players to collaborate with you to quickly bring the scene to a satisfactory conclusion and wrap things up.

Then you can all drive out of the dead end together.

Possibly the single most important skill for a GM is pacing: Cool challenges, awesome drama, incredible roleplaying, stunning set pieces, breathtaking props. These are all great. But they can be rendered almost irrelevant if your sessions are bloated with boredom or choked with dead air. It won’t necessarily kill your game deader than a doornail, but the constant drag from poor pacing will make everything else a little harder and a little worse.

So a very large part of being a great GM is developing the tools and techniques to keep things moving and to keep the players engaged at the table. I’ve already written a whole series about the pacing of narrative elements, but effective pacing also includes the more practical elements of managing the moment-to-moment details of the conversation at the game table.

When it comes to mechanics, this often just boils down to resolving things swiftly and efficiently: Virtually any time that you’re interacting with the mechanics, the right answer is to move through the interaction as quickly as possible.

Note: This isn’t because we inherently don’t like mechanics or mechanical choices. It’s because the actual rote execution of the mechanic is usually not the interesting bit of the game and you want to get to the next interesting bit (which can just as easily be another mechanical choice as a cool character detail or dramatic dilemma). There are also MANY exceptions that prove this rule. For example, knowing when to build the stakes up around a specific, momentous die roll so that everyone at the table is holding their breath through every jittering bounce of the polyhedron can be a very effective technique.

A large part of this efficiency, of course, is simply knowing the rules. But it can also be techniques that let you essentially fake knowing the rules – like using a cheat sheet, prepping your scenario notes using a hierarchy of reference, or identifying the rules guru at the table who you can provide that mastery by proxy.

Of course, this can only take you so far. However, once you’ve more or less maximized your efficiency in mastering the rules, you can still push things farther still by multitasking – i.e., resolving multiple mechanical interactions wholly or in part simultaneously.

There are a number of ways that you can do this, but today we’ll focus on one of the easiest: Rolling multiple dice at the same time.

ATTACK + DAMAGE

Start by rolling your attack die and your damage die at the same time.

I’m not sure this really needs more explanation: Do it just a few times and you’ll quickly realize how much time you’re saving. Teach your players to do it, too! In a typical combat with fifteen combatants, your group will be making ninety attack rolls (or more!). If you’re saving just four seconds per roll, that adds up to 5 minutes per combat. Running three or four combats per session? That’s fifteen or twenty extra minutes of play!

This, obviously, assumes that you’re playing a game like D&D that has a randomized component to damage. But it broadly applies to any mechanic that uses two-step rolling: These mechanics rarely have a decision point between the two rolls, so there’s no reason not to make both rolls at the same time.

ROLLING MULTIPLE ATTACKS

On the GM side of the screen, you’ll often be making rolls for a whole gaggle of NPCs. Stop rolling them one at a time! If you’ve got five bad guys who are all attacking, scoop up five dice and roll all those attacks at the same time!

Often these bad guys are all using the same stat block and may even be attacking the same target, so it won’t really matter which die gets assigned to which bad guy. (You can almost think of a mob of eight goblins in melee as just being one mass that makes eight simultaneous attack rolls.)

But you can also use this technique with disparate stat blocks and/or bad guys attacking different targets. You just need to figure out how to assign the dice in front of you:

Color coding. Use dice with different colors and assign those colors to the different attacks. In my experience, this tends to work best when you can make long-term color assignments. (For example, when I make iterative attacks in 3^rd Edition I use red dice for the first attack, black dice for the second attack, and blue for the third.)

On the other hand, trying to remember that the ogre was blue, the goblin was red, the other goblin was purple, and… Wait was the ogre purple and the second goblin blue? … Yeah, it tends to bog down. There are workarounds for this (or maybe your memory is just better than mine), but you may want to use a different technique for assignments that vary from one encounter to the next.

Tip: One work-around that DOES work smoothly, though, is when you’re rolling for two groups of bad guys that are numerically distinct – five goblins and three ogres, for example. Roll five blue dice for goblins and three black dice for ogres and there’s really no confusion about which color goes with which group. This might also be “the five halflings attacking Alaris and the three halflings attacking Dupre.”

Read left to right. When you roll the dice, they’re generally going to scatter across the table. I tend to roll across the table in front of me (instead of in a straight line onto the table), so my dice tend to spread out left-to-right. I can then just “read” the dice left to right – assigning them to the bad guys on my list in the same order.

(You might find a top-to-bottom reading of the dice works better for you. Whatever works.)

Geometric reading. This is a similar technique, but rather than linearly assigning the dice, I’ll equate the cluster of the dice on the table to the grouping of the bad guys in the game world. A simple version of this is to take a left-to-right reading of the dice, as above, and then, similarly, look at the bad guys on the battlemap left-to-right from my point of view. But you might also look at the battlemap (or imagine the scene in your mind’s eye) and see that the bad guys are arranged in two ranks with three of them in the front rank, so you just grab the three dice closest to you for their attacks.

You can also flip this around and group according to target. So if the PCs are standing three abreast in a dungeon corridor, for example, the dice on the left will be those that target the PC on the left, and so forth.

The most important thing with these techniques is to not over-think it: Whatever method you’re using, quickly shift the dice for clarity (if at all) and then move immediately to resolution.

Note: Sometimes when I describe this technique, people will express concern about the possibility of cheating – e.g., assigning your best rolls to the bad guy with the most powerful attacks or whatever. Basically… don’t do that. If you want to cheat (and you shouldn’t), there are ways to do it with a lot less rigamarole.

If you’re concerned, hard-coded color coding avoids the issues entirely. In practice, it’s not really a problem: When I’m assigning the dice, I’m treating them as objects. It’s only after I quickly and definitively shift them to the appropriate stat blocks that I actually starting processing the numbers on the dice.

This technique of rolling fistfuls of dice is often only use to the GM, but there are systems where it may be useful to also teach it to your players. For example, the aforementioned iterative attacks of D&D 3^rd Edition: The groups where I can get the players to simultaneously roll all their color-coded attack dice and matching-colored damage dice at the same time sees combat resolve MUCH more quickly than in the groups where I can’t make that happen.

PRE-ROLLING

A final dice trick for speeding up resolution is to pre-roll the dice. For example, while the PC wizard is counting up his fireball damage you look ahead and see that the horde of goblins is going next: You know that regardless of the fireball, they’re going to attack the paladin. So you can scoop up those d20s, roll them, and have them ready to go once you’ve finished adjudicating the fireball.

There are two keys to pre-rolling:

• You have to be nigh certain that the circumstances of the battle aren’t going to change the character’s intended action.
• You have to be able to stick with the intended action even after seeing the roll and realizing it’s not going to work. (Some people find they just can’t resist the temptation to switch things up. That’s not a sin. Just be self-aware enough to avoid the problem by not using the technique.)

What’s really great is when you get a group of players who are mature enough and trusted enough that they can ALSO use this technique without any problems. I can’t express how amazing it can be to say, “Okay, David, what you are you doing?” and for David to immediately say, “I’m attacking the ogre, hitting him for 32 damage.” (In this case, David has also used an open difficulty number to good effect.)

And when you get a whole sequence of players doing the same thing – pre-rolling attacks, pre-rolling fireball damage, etc. — it can be like you’re playing a totally different game! You can just roar through the mechanical portion of combat, which then immediately opens up all kinds of space for the group to instead focus on the strategic choices, dramatic dilemmas, and narrative description of the conflict!

So grab those dice and get rolling!

In Numenera cyphers are one-use items scavenged from the ruined technology of an elder age. Often the utility of these items as perceived by the PCs will be only tangentially related to the item’s original function; the ultra-tech equivalent of ripping a laser out of a CD player and using to signal your squad mates. I’ve talked about cyphers at greater length in Numenera: Identifying Items, but the core concept is that they let the PCs do something cool once and then they’re cycled out for another cypher. Examples of cyphers include stuff like:

• A metallic nodule that can be attached to an item, allowing one to telekinetically manipulate it with a paired rubber glove.
• A disk-like device that shoots out paralyzing beams.
• A set of goggles that can be used to perceive out-of-phase creatures and objects.
• A metal amulet that surrounds the user in a field of absolute blackness.
• A cannister dispensing foam that transforms metal into a substance as brittle as glass.

Now that you know what a cypher is, here’s the tip:

To quickly create a memorable bad guy, roll on the random cypher table in Numenera and have the bad guy do that as “their thing.” When the fight’s done, the PCs will be able to scavenge the matching cypher from their corpse.

For example:

• A synthetic octopodal creature that telekinetically hurls large items at the PCs.
• A slender ungulate with “antlers” that are metallic discs emitting paralyzing beams.
• An invisible assassin droid that launches attacks from the out-of-phase interdimensional space where it lurks.

This technique works particularly well in Numenera because, as I discuss in Numenera: Fractal NPCs, creating NPCs in the Cypher System can be literally as easy as saying, “He’s level 3.” But then you can expand that to whatever level of detail you want (hence the “fractal” in “fractal NPCs”), which in this case would be adding the cypher-based ability.

However, you can achieve a similar effect in almost any system by simply grabbing an existing NPC stat block and slapping on the ability. (The only drawback is that scavenging may not be an assumed part of play in your game of choice, so you may lose that depth of experience unless you make a special effort to incorporate it.)

For example, if you wanted to make a tribe of orcs a little special, you might have them worship Glaubrau, Demon of the Nethershade. Take a standard orc stat block and then have them cloaked in absolute blackness. (The PCs can harvest their black blood to make an oily potion that imbues a similar effect.)

I’ve actually found myself using the Numenera cypher lists to achieve this effect across multiple systems, but there are often local equivalents. For example, random potion lists in D&D are somewhat more limited in their range of effect, but can work in a pinch. (If you’re running 5^th Edition, however, you might just cut to the chase by grabbing a copy of Arcana of the Ancients, which adapts a whole slew of cool stuff from Numenera for your D&D game, including some random cypher tables.)

Over the past couple decades, a design concept that has become fairly entrenched in D&D culture is that the PCs need to face X encounters of Y difficulty per day. The general idea being that the game is balanced (either intentionally or unintentionally) around their resources being chewed up across multiple encounters: If they face fewer encounters, there’s no challenge because (a) they will still have lots of resources left at the end of the day (thus suffering no risk) and/or (b) they burn up LOTS of resources per encounter (making those encounters too easy).

There is obviously a kernel of truth here, but there are also, frankly speaking, A LOT of problems with this design ideology. But that’s somewhat beyond the scope of this article. What I’m mostly interested in focusing on today is one specific element of game play that becomes a really problematic dilemma when combined with this design ideology:

Wilderness encounters.

See, the basic assumption is that the design of Dungeons & Dragons should be finetuned around X encounters of Y difficulty per day in which the value of X reflects the number of encounters in a typical dungeon. There are some problems with this idea that dungeons should be designed as a one day excursion, but laying that aside, this makes a lot of sense: The dungeon is the assumed primary mode of D&D play; therefore the game should be balanced around dungeon adventures.

But, of course, the density of encounters in a dungeon is inherently much higher than the density of encounters in a vast wilderness. Furthermore, even if you increased the density of wilderness encounters, the result would be to turn every wilderness journey into an interminable slog. If you assume that

X = a dungeon’s worth of encounters = one day’s worth of encounters

then a wilderness journey that took ten days would “logically” have ten times the number of encounters in a typical dungeon.

You don’t want to do that, so you make one wandering monster check per day in the wilderness: The players know that they’ll have at most one “dangerous” encounter per day, so they just nova all of their most powerful abilities and render the encounter pointlessly easy.

So what do you do?

Do you just strip wilderness encounters out of the game entirely? They’re pointless, right? But to delete an entire aspect of game play (and something that routinely crops up in the fantasy fiction that inspires D&D) feels unsatisfactory.

Perhaps you could artificially pack one particular day of wilderness travel with X encounters, turning that one day into a challenging gauntlet for the PCs. But that’s really hard to justify on a regular basis AND it still has a tendency to turn wilderness travel into a slog.

For awhile there was a vogue for trying to solve the problem mechanically, primarily by treating rest in the dungeon differently from rest in the wilderness. In other words, you just sort of mechanically treat one day in the dungeon as being mechanically equivalent to ten days (or whatever) in the wilderness. The massive dissociation of such mechanics, however, could obviously never be resolved.

Long story short, the dynamic which has generally emerged is for wilderness encounters to be REALLY TOUGH: Since the PCs can nova their most powerful abilities when facing them and there is no long-term depletion of party resources (including hit points), it follows that you need to really ramp up the difficulty of the encounter to provide a meaningful challenge.

In other words, dungeons are built on attrition while wilderness encounters are deadly one-offs.

There are several problems with this, however.

First, it creates a really weird dynamic: Instead of being seen as dangerous pits in the earth, dungeons are where you go to take a breather from all the terrible things wandering the world above. That doesn’t seem right, does it?

Second, the risk posed by these deadly one-off wilderness encounters is unsatisfying. In a properly designed dungeon, players can strategically mitigate risk (by scouting, retreating, gathering intel, etc.). This is usually not true of wilderness encounters due to them being placed either randomly (i.e., roll on a table) and/or arbitrarily (“on the way to Cairwoth, the PCs will encounter Y”).

(A robustly designed hexcrawl can mitigate this, but only to some extent.)

Finally, this methodology – like any “one true way” – results in a very flat design: Every wilderness encounter needs to push the PCs to their limits and thus every wilderness encounter ends up feeling the same.

So what’s the solution?

THE FALSE DILEMMA

The unexamined premise in these attrition vs. big deadly encounters vs. skip overland travel debates is often the idea that challenging combat is the only way to create interesting gameplay.

Partly this is the assumption that all random encounters have to be fights (and that’s a big assumption all by itself). But it’s also the assumption that if the players easily dispatch a group of foes that means nothing interesting has happened because the fight wasn’t challenging.

Neither of these assumptions is true.

Let’s back up for a second.

You’ll often hear people say that they don’t like running random encounters because they’re just distractions from the campaign.

Those people are doing random encounters wrong.

The “random” in “random encounter” refers to the fact that they’re procedurally generated. It doesn’t mean that they’re capricious or disconnected from their environment. I talk about this in greater detail in Breathing Life Into the Wandering Monster, but when you roll a random encounter you need to contextualize that content; you need to connect it to the environment.

And because the encounter is connected to the environment, it’s meaningful to the PCs: Creatures can be tracked. They can be questioned. They can be recruited. They can be deceived. The mere existence of the encounter may actually provide crucial information about what’s happening in the region.

Random encounters — particularly in exploration scenarios — are often more important as CLUES than they are as fisticuffs.

They can also be roleplaying opportunities, exposition, dramatic cruxes, and basically any other type of interesting scene you can have in a roleplaying game. As such, when you roll a random encounter, you should frame it the same you would any other scene: Understand the agenda. Create a strong bang. Fill the frame.

Once you recognize the false dilemma here, the problem basically just disappears. If the PCs have camped for the night and a group of orcs approaches and asks if they can share their campfire… do I even care what their challenge rating is?

If I roll up the same encounter and:

• The PCs subdue and enslave the orcs.
• The PCs rescue the slaves the orcs were transporting.
• The PCs discover the orcs were carrying ancient dwarven coins from the Greatfall Armories, raising the question of how they got them.
• The PCs follow the orcs’ tracks back to the Caverns of Thraka Doom.

Does it matter that the PCs steamrolled the orcs in combat?

I’m not saying that combat encounters should never be challenging. I’m just saying that mechanically challenging combat isn’t the be-all and end-all of what happens at a D&D table. And once you let go of the false need to make every encounter a mechanically challenging combat, I think you will find the result incredibly liberating in what it makes possible in your game.