Creating Escalating Encounters in Soloplay

...or how I combined a bunch of stuff I like

Some of you may know that I am very active in the discord of Nimble talking about ideas for the solorules. This has prompted me to look at a bunch of resources I own as well as blog posts of ideas I haven’t heard of.

One of the things I wanted to achieve, whether it is for Nimble or my own Soloplay, is create a system for exploring dungeons/wilderness that has a random element to it, can escalate the danger and requires little dice rolling.

I am not sure I achieved all of that, but today I want to talk about an idea to create escalating encounters.

First I want to talk about a few inspirations for this idea, because whether or not you like what I came up with, these resources are worth knowing and exploring:

Overloaded Encounter Die

This is probably the most well known and kind of obvious approach to generating encounters. Instead of rolling a d6 and have an encounter on a 1 or whatever number you prefer you create a d6 table that causes an encounter every time it is rolled.

Traditionally that looks something like this:

1. Encounter

2. Omen

3. Local Effect (Environment/hazard/Trap)

4. Fatigue/Exhaustion/Stress

5. Resource exhaustion

6. Light source exhaustion

This largely depends on your system and I did see some that also listed none as an encounter.

A variant of this I really like is from Dawnfist Games which you can find on this blog post

Essentially the GM takes a d6 everytime a player or group takes an action an adds it to their pool. If the pool reaches 6 you roll and count the number or 1&2 and get an effect.

The disadvantage to this approach is that you still have to roll on the appropriate tables to create the encounter. Especially in regards to monsters: Is this monster friendly, hostile, neutral. What is it doing etc.

Creating a Large Overloaded Encounter table

I got the idea from Joseph R. Lewis and Dungeon Age in this youtube video.

Essentially you create a d20 (or whatever size you like) table and roll on it at the appropriate time. The d20 table from the video looks something like this:

1. 2d6 raid wolves — hostile, attack

2. 1d6 cautious wolves on patrol, hunting

3. Two big wolves attacking a mangy wolf

4. Two wolves (mates) — asleep

5. Lost wolf puppy — tameable

6. One wounded wolf with an arrow (red fletching) — a clue

7. Dead wolf in a rusty bear trap

8. Two dead wolves in a pit trap

9. Multiple wolves howling from the east (Area 13)

10. Multiple wolf tracks heading west (Area 14)

11. Tufts of fur and a blood trail heading south (Area 15)

12. Bloody wolf’s head on a stake

13. Rotten branch falls from above — save or d6 damage

14. Step in a rusty bear trap — Wisdom check or 2d6 damage

15. Fall into a camouflaged pit trap — Wisdom check or 2d6 damage

16. Sudden rainfall — quenches fires and torches

17. Gust of wind — blows out torches and fires

18. Thick fog sets in — Wisdom check or lost for 1d6 hours

19. Dead hunter (wolf attack) — bow, arrows, daggers

20. Dead merchant (wolf attack) — fancy hat and 17 gold pieces

This list essentially covers encounters, omens, environmental effects and loot opportunities.

The way you would create this obviously depends on what you want out of your adventure and especiall in soloplay we would probably refer to something else as this is very specific. However I do find it useful considering some people like to play certain settings like Dolmenwood and could use this to prepare large lists in advance.

However, neither approach actually creates tension:

The Underclock

I have to say, this is probably one of my favorite mechanics I came across and can be thorougly read about in this blog post.

The way it essentially works is you start a clock at 20 and roll a d6 everytime a character takes an action, When it reaches below zero you triger an encounter. If it reaches exactly zero it resets to 3. When it reaches 3 it triggers an Omen.

Now this doesn’t sound that different from the method from Adventurous fI talked about earlier, but there is a second layer to it:

Whenever the group takes a rest, their HP and everything reset but the die steps up to a d8-d12-d20. You trade safety for higher chances of encounters creating player agency through choice. I find that is always good design.

On the flip side this means a lot of times there won’t be an encounter. This might be interesting in group play and OSR games where you interact with a GM but in Soloplay (at least me personally) I find this boring. It’s an empty room I have to create and think about filling with stuff.

So, let’s look at a different way to create escalating tension that some of you soloplayers might be familiar with already:

The Event Crafter

I have to admit that I didn’t quite get the usefulness of this tool until I asked on the Worldmillpress discort and Tane pointed me towards Mythic Magazine #44 which essentially was what I was looking for in the beginning. I did add a little to it so don’t feel like I was clickbaiting here.

The Event Crafter uses either a random list or structured list and you roll a d10 adding a number of Progress Points to the result. This essentially increases the chances of certain events being rolled later in the adventure. A list that I created based on the ideas for Nimble could look something like this:

1. Hostile monsters

2. Immersion

3. Hazard / trap

4. Nothing

5. Neutral monster patrol

6. Challenge

7. Immersion

8. Nothing

9. Hazard / trap

10. Friendly monster socializ.

11. Hostile monster resting

12. Hostile monsters clashing

13. Neutral monster patrol

14. Hazard / trap

15. Immersion

16. Hostile monsters ambush

17. Challenge

18. Hostile monster patrol

19. Hostile monster hunting

20. PP Reset

I didn’t crunch the numbers but simulated a few sessions and it would need some adjustment. the question is whether or not I want the entry “nothing” on there or let that be handled through locations. Alternatively later entries could include treasure or the aforementioned loot opportunities. Those could escalate as well adding progress points to your loot from mundane to common to rare and magic (I think this has been done in Mythic Magazine #62 the Event Crafter Collection).
One thing I did add, and this is the reason I talked so much about inspiration from other sources, is the Underclock mechanic.

Everytime the Players take a rest or the Progress Points reset the die steps up. You can start with a d4 or d6 and move to a d12 (d20 doesn’t quite work because of the reset).

There is one question though that still needs answering and that is probably system specific:

What Does Escalation Actually Mean?

I feel there are a couple of levers we can pull to increase the intensity.

• difficulty (number of enemies, strength)

• density (increasing the chance of encounters)

• situation (ambush, patrol, socializing, hostile vs neutral)

The option I chose here is situation and density trying to have the more encounters with a more difficult situation around numbers I expect to come up more often (again, looking at the simulation that didn’t quite work out yet). The thought process was that I can increase the difficulty the more often I roll encounter. First encounter minion, second encounter easy, third encounter medium etc. The reason is simply this: I can create different situations with a single dice roll and track difficulty seperately. Alternatively I have multiple instances of different encounter difficulties on here but it would leave me to roll on other tables to determine the situation. Both are valid and I haven’t playtested this a bunch.

What’s next?

I plan to playtest this table a bunch more while running Nimble or possibly Drawsteel. I also want to experiment with combining Ironsworn Delve mechanics with this as well as Tension Sparks.

Let me know what you think.

Daniel