DM Tips: Encounter Information

As you learned from Monday's (actually Tuesday) crafts i use the D&D tiles in every encounter. They are pretty generic and don't provide much information.

So today's tip is about encounter information. When building your encounter its important to list details about the encounter, is it day or is it night, what is the illumination like, is there difficult terrain in the encounter and where is it. Are there areas of concern, that could deal damage.

Every encounter you build should include the following
Illumination: Consider time of day, weather, and put in any negatives you need to apply to perception checks
Traps/Damage: Identify any areas that are traps or create damage. Example what if one square has a campfire.
Treasure: List any treasure that can be found in the encounter

This is where you can make your encounter unique and give your players additional challenges. Its a great way to increase the challenge of an encounter without affecting the monsters or XP. Check out the Dungeon Delve for great ideas on tweaking up your encounter.

So you have your encounter built, and your using tiles, how do you convey this information to the player?

Answer: Overhead projector sheets, cost about $12 for a pack of 20. Seems a bit pricey but when you use whiteboard markers you never realy need more.

Its hard to see in the picture to the left beacuse the material is so clear but thats the beauty of it, it allows you to mix well with your tiles, and still draw directly on the encounter. I highly recomend drawing walls, and if something in the encounter causes something to change, you can show it live, its even great for drawing in the wizards wall of fire.

One of the things i do in my encounters is orange squares, every encounter has 1.5 times the amount of orange squares than players. (5 players 7-8 squares) my players know that when the sceen starts (i will explain the diffrence between a sceen and a encounter next week) that they can chose where they want to be as long as its in a orange square.

It gives them some flexibility in the encounter that makes sence, brings back the old marching order question, and gives you control when setting up your encounter.

Sticky Tack, i used it monday and i am using it again today. This is a amazing tool for any DM. I use it to stick the tiles to the mat, and when creating multiple levels it helps to hold the blocks in place (muilty level encounter is going to be the topic in two weeks time) i've also used it to create a beholder (a zombie behodler).

In this case were going to create small peices of sticky tack and stick the film on the tiles. Five peices should work just fine, one in each corner and one in the middle.

Remember you can draw anything you want on the tiles, in this example here you can see i used it to draw an underground river. Sure its placed on top of a stair set, but it works, the rest of the area is a cave set tile system.

So this DM tip is half crafts and half tip, in either case i hope you enjoy it and find new ways to use the overhead projector sheets. I don't recommend cutting them up because it makes them harder to reuse, but having a bunch that are 8"x 8" will work out in your favor.

Until next time, keep your dice on the table.