Your Guide for Becoming an Encounter Mixologist
Too often, even in official books, a string of encounters are given that are boring, redundant, and feels more like ticking boxes than a fun and interesting encounter. The secret to running an exciting adventure is to mix up your encounters, and that includes more than just fighting to the death against some goblins who give your players the side-eye.
By mixing and matching encounters, monsters, traps, social clashes, and difficulty, you create an interesting and diverse set of encounters that keep players interested (instead of checking their phones while you deal with your fifth encounter with the same goblins as before).
5 Elements to Mix Together
There are 5 main things to consider when mixing your encounters: Monsters, Hazards, Non-Combat, Difficulty, and Complexity. By mixing and matching these elements, you create encounters that keep your players guessing and on their feet.
With that said, you don’t need to go out of your way to use every single one of these elements in every encounter. Sometimes a simple encounter with kobolds can be interesting, so long as it makes sense in the adventure and is used as a foil for an upcoming difficult and complex encounter against the red dragon.
Monsters
The easiest way to mix up your encounters is to mix up what your adventurers are fighting against. If they are fighting a lot of goblins, give the goblins new allies, utilize different types of goblins, or simply reflavor an existing stat block (like for a quaggoth) for a rare or strange type of goblin.
By giving different monsters for the party to face, it keeps them on their toes as to what they’re fighting, how difficult it is, and chances to use different abilities. If they only fight monsters immune to fire damage, it can be frustrating that they can’t use their favorite spell—fireball. By changing out what monsters they are facing, they get a chance to use a wider variety of spells and abilities that they may not be able to use.
That said, don’t be afraid to utilize the same stat blocks. An interesting encounter doesn’t come solely from a stat block (and, to be honest, 5e stat blocks can be incredibly boring by themselves). When players fight a monster, they learn tactics to fight that monster, but it only applies if they face the monster again. Don’t be afraid to use the same stat block as part of your monster mix, but be aware that using the same stat block over and over will lead to a boring and predictive fight.
Hazards / Traps
A simple way of making an encounter exciting is to throw a hazard (or trap) at that party. It doesn’t need to be uber-deadly (like a sphere of annihilation inside an aura of magical darkness), but it should be thematic for the location (like falling stalactites in a cave that fall in random areas when spells are cast).
These hazards can also be structured traps, like a blade trap on a door or spring-lock on a lock to a treasure chest. Think beyond a trap just existing, but how enemies might utilize pre-existing traps that they are aware of. If a wizard once created a trap that shoots lightning bolts in a specific area, it would be pretty simple for the monsters to learn that information and find ways of tricking the adventurers into the blast area or triggering the trap themselves.
These traps can take part in a fight or exist by themselves. Regardless of how you use them, be flexible in how they can be defeated with clever plans. Nothing is as frustrating as a GM has only a single way of defeating a hazard and it is only obvious to that GM.
Non-Combat
Not every encounter must be a fight to the death, or even a fight itself. Not everyone plays Role-Playing Games to go around and murder defenseless goblins, but rather to take on the role of a wizened wizard or elite fighter.
Give them chances to interact with creatures, especially those they have been fighting. Let them meet Bobo the Goblin who has been mistreated by the other goblins and hobgoblins and may be willing to betray the others for clever role-playing or monetary bribes.
And if you aren’t sure how to create these social interactions, the easiest way is to create two factions within the monsters that the party is facing. If the party is fighting a lot of gnolls, have a group approach the party peacefully and attempt to get the party on their side. Maybe they hate the other gnoll clan they are forced to work with and are willing to help the party, reward them with magic items for dealing with the other clan, or anything else.
And if your party doesn’t feel like socially interacting with the monsters, that’s completely fine too—but the important thing is that you are giving the players the decision on how they want to tackle these encounters instead of forcing them into yet another combat against gnolls, kobolds, goblins, or whatever flavor of monster mob they are fighting.
Difficulty
Another dial you can fine-tune is how difficult an encounter is. This doesn’t just mean making encounters as hard as possible because you think only hard and deadly encounters are fun. We are playing a game of pretending to be badass fighters, rogues, wizards, and monks because we want to act like badasses (not to act as if we are a troop of weaklings).
Give the party a super easy encounter so they get a chance to try new things, so they can experiment, and so they can have fun and feel badass. But also give them challenging encounters that force them to work together and test their knowledge of the monsters they are facing.
In my experience, a good mix of encounters is:
Easy - 1 to 2 encounters (one or two normal monsters, or a group of weak mobs)
Medium - 3 to 5 encounters (main bread-and-butter monsters)
Hard - 2 to 4 encounters (mini-bosses or hordes of weaker monsters)
Deadly - 1 encounter (typically the Boss)
And my ‘difficulty’ above is pretty loose and is going to be based on your party composition. If you have a bunch of power gamers, their “Deadly” is going to be a lot different than a bunch of noobs who don’t remember what a d4 looks like. Adjust your difficulty for the table, not for your individual preference. The goal is for EVERYONE at the table to have fun, not just a single player.
Complexities
The last element to play around with in an encounter is its complexity. This includes a variety of ideas into one, but the basic gist is that the complexity of the fight determines how long it’ll take the party to clear the encounter.
If you have a ton of monsters on different elevations, using a bunch of stat blocks, that is a complex encounter. If you just have a few kobolds on a flat plain charging forward with no tactics, that is not a complex encounter. Both are valid for an encounter, so long as each are utilized throughout an adventure.
You don’t want to constantly give your players complex and complicated fights that give them migraines (but in a good way), just like you don’t want boring rooms of monsters who just claw, claw, bite. You want to give the players a mixture of both to keep encounters fun and interesting.
Complex encounters will help players dig their teeth into the game system and provide depth to combats, while simple encounters give them chances to just roll dice and have fun with friends, without having to utilize their higher education degrees to win.
The simplest way of adding complexity to a fight is to think about elevation, where it makes sense to add difficult terrain, and provide cover for monsters and adventurers to hide and sneak behind.
Mix Up Your Encounters
When designing your encounters, remember that the ultimate goal is for the table (that includes you) to have fun. If an encounter is just frustrating, confusing to an extreme, or far too difficult—it won’t be fun. You want your table to be excited when an encounter starts, to lean forward in their chairs, to pay closer attention, and to be eagerly looking at their abilities or the space they are in for how they want to take on the encounter.
And don’t be worried about just letting your players move quickly through a dungeon. If they are entering a kobold cavern and they have demigod levels of power, you don’t need to worry about them encountering a single kobold. Simply let things move on to the next fun and interesting encounter and not sweat the small stuff.
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