Why do Dungeon Masters get so weird about encounters, randomness, and determinism. Whether you’re talking about Passive Perception, keyed encounters, quantum ogres, or wilderness encounter placement, most DMs just freak the hell out about knowing outcomes in advance or plotting encounters with anything other than precise geographical and temporal coordinates. Don’t worry, guys; you aren’t railroading just because you’re not running a full-on holodeck sim.

Y’all Mind if I Rant About Encounters Predestination?

Hold on to your butts. This one’s gonna get random.

This is one of my occasional, random, rambling rants. I don’t outline these, and I rarely even know what point I’m trying to make when I start writing. Usually, these are just me thinking through some crap and dragging you along for the stream-of-consciousness ride. Sometimes, they’re me responding to something someone said that pissed me off in a way that prevents the offender from fighting back. It’s the blogging equivalent of the cowardly bard screaming, “I’ll fix your ass; I’ll write a song!”

That said, my recent fixation with ranting about different aspects of encounter and adventure design that definitely need better rules, but which Game Masters also need to fix their broken-ass mindsets about, isn’t an accident. But don’t worry about that.

Anyway…

This rant is here because of another rant I posted weeks or months or whatever ago. I made a point that, when designing wilderness adventures, it’s hard to place encounters because there are no rooms to put encounters in. The character’s movements through the wilderness aren’t constrained by walls and doors, so the odds of the characters tripping over an owlbear at a specific set of geographical coordinates are infinitesimally small, especially given how close you have to be to something in the vast wilderness to even know it’s there.

Though, for actual, practical, game design purposes, none of that is actually true. But we’ll get to that some other time.

Thus, I noted that lots of Game Masters fall back on letting random tables populate the wilderness. Many of my readers even use this method which I invented a long time ago. It was called the Tension Pool, and it was designed to make the passage of time actually matter in roleplaying games and introduce random complications in a way wandering monster tables just couldn’t. Unfortunately, I explained certain parts of the system badly and focused too much on the mechanics and not on the complications, and I’ve since refined the whole thing so it’s a more accurate time-tracking tool that also helps better manage wilderness adventures and town downtime and shit like that. I promise a write-up is coming. I know lots of you are waiting for it.

Now I’ve been yelling at people for years that you can’t let randomness write your adventures. Tools like the Tension Pool and random encounter tables are good for adding a frisson of chaos to your party’s adventuring lives, but they can’t hold up the actual scenario design. Random encounters aren’t load-bearing game mechanics.

See, I want to do this whole thing about encounters and how I classify encounters when planning adventures. It’d be really useful if I were, say, writing a series on homebrew adventure and encounter design. But I keep running into this problem that most Game Masters have a very particular kind of brain damage. Game Masters are really screwed up in the head when it comes to determinism.

Except, really, this is about predetermination and Game Mastering omniscience. But don’t worry, I’m not going to get into philosophy or try to explain how you can have free will in a deterministic universe or in one ruled by an all-knowing God. This is all just about running pretend elf games. It always is.

Let me give you a simple example of what I’m talking about before I tie this into encounters.

I’m a huge fan of the Passive Perception mechanic in the latest edition of one of the world’s roleplaying games. I think the designers behind Dungeons & Dragons 5E solved a very long-running problem very elegantly with Passive Perception. But every time I write about Passive Perception, I’m reminded that a few Game Masters absolutely frigging hate it for really insane, irrational, stupid reasons.

If you somehow don’t know how this crap works, let me explain. Every character in D&D has a Passive Perception score. It’s just the result they would get on a Wisdom (Perception) check if they rolled a ten on the die. If there’s something concealed or camouflaged or disguised in visual range and a character is not actively searching for such a thing but is otherwise alert and aware of their surroundings, the Dungeon Master compares their Passive Perception score to the Difficulty Class that would be required to reveal the hidden detail to see if the character notices it.

So if Cabe normally adds +6 to Wisdom (Perception) skill checks, his Passive Perception is 16. If Cabe enters a cave and there’s an old key partially buried in the mud that I, the Game Master, have determined requires a DC 15 Wisdom (Perception) skill check to locate, Cabe will notice some sign of the key’s presence without having to hunt for it. He’ll see a shape in the mud or notice a metallic glint and say, “Huh. What’s that?”

You follow the same process for goblins lurking in ambush, pressure plates that trigger traps, or literally anything else that would be perceivable if not for being camouflaged, concealed, or hidden. Every such thing has just one DC to notice its presence by any possible means, active or passive. It’s a great mechanic for lots of reasons, and I’ve already won this argument many times, so don’t even bother fighting me on it.

But there’s this one bizarre-ass objection that Game Masters just keep citing. In fact, one of the most talented homebrew adventure writers I know has actually voiced it multiple times and has even admitted it’s batshit insane and complete nonsense. But he won’t get over it, even though it’s bad for him.

The objection is that, if you know the characters’ Passive Perception scores when designing an adventure, you know, a priori, whether the party’s most alert spotter is guaranteed to see the hidden thing without having to take any action. When I set that key to be hidden behind a DC 15 Wisdom (Perception) check, I know Cabe is going to see it the moment he enters the chamber.

Now, that is a factual statement. As a Game Master, because I know the numbers involved, I do know Cabe is going to see that key without even looking for it. But I also recognize that it doesn’t frigging matter whether I know the outcome or not. It changes nothing. It doesn’t ruin the purity of the gameplay because I can predict the outcome. What matters is that the players don’t know what’s going to happen until it happens, and what does happen follows from what they did and what choices they made. My knowledge of the outcome has no causal relation to the outcome. It’s just an accident of game mechanics and the fact that I can see the game’s Matrix code. That’s just part of being a Game Master.

Look, Cabe’s Passive Perception score is based on game mechanics and on choices his player, Chris, made when he created Cabe. When he set Cabe’s Wisdom score and chose a class and picked Proficiencies and decided what Proficiencies benefited from his Rogue Expertise and all that crap. Moreover, if the party is moving at a slow pace or Cabe drank a potion of alertitude, his Passive Perception might be modified by the time he gets to the cave.

Meanwhile, I set the Difficulty Class to find the hidden key based on the game’s mechanics and my own best judgment. It’s a small object, partially buried in the mud, but not deliberately hidden, and it’s made of reflective metal. Moderate difficulty seems right to me.

The two numbers are set independently. I did my thing to make the adventure, Chris did his thing to make Cabe, and it just so happens that, in this particular case, because this is one of those mechanics that eschews a random component for very good reasons, I can figure out in advance how this one particular action is going to play out. Knowing the outcome changes nothing.

Honestly, I use passive scores for everything. They’re a great tool that D&D doesn’t use nearly enough. Whenever a character’s senses or brain or whatever might just produce information without the need for an action, I use a passive score. I use Passive Perception and Passive Intuition and all sorts of passive knowledge-type shit to give people extra information about the stuff they recognize. It’s better for pacing, it’s better for game-feel, it rewards build decisions, and randomness here adds literally nothing.

See, I’m a Game Master. I’m not at the table to enjoy the play experience like the players are. I have a job to do. My job is to create a great gameplay and narrative experience. I know way more than the players do about everything happening in the game. I have to. I can predict a lot of outcomes with a very high degree of accuracy. Hell, I have to be able to predict what the players are going to do to write and run good games. To prep for a session, I need to guess what the players are going to do so I can make sure I have good game materials ready to run.

You know that game balance and challenge design depend heavily on predicting outcomes, right? When you build a challenge, you try to balance it so that, as long as the players use their skills and resources to overcome it, they’re likely to win. More than that, you’re trying to pinpoint a precise challenge sweet spot that lies between the Bluffs of Frustration and the Mire of Boredom. In the business, we call that the Flowstate Flood Plain. Or whatever.

Even when you leave open the possibility for the players to lose a challenge, you try to predict how they’ll lose so you can make sure the loss state is fair and earned and doesn’t completely ruin the entire experience, right?

Still on the subject of Passive Perception, because this dumb-ass argument just won’t frigging die ever, if you design a gameplay experience that is ruined because the players are guaranteed to find some hidden thing by their Passive Perception scores, and you know that in advance, you built a shitty gameplay experience. The quality of the experience should not hinge on the outcome of a single action. Especially an action that is barely gameplay to begin with. Passive Perception is just skipping something that isn’t even meaningful gameplay anyway. It’s not like searching a room is interesting gameplay. The player just says, “I search around,” you make them bounce a die, and the outcome is what it is. Hoody freaking hoo, what an engagement roller coaster that roleplaying gameplay moment is. Wouldn’t want to skip that shit.

Searching isn’t even a choice. Players will search everywhere if you let them. That’s why Passive Perception exists.

The gameplay doesn’t actually start until the players notice something and have to investigate.

Anyway…

Determinism. Predetermination. Game Masters are weird about this shit. They think if they know the outcomes — or if they can predict them — the gameplay isn’t real. I’ve had some Game Masters say they prefer randomness because they, themselves, like to be surprised. Well, dumbass, you chose the wrong seat at the table. You get on the other side of the screen and let me run the game because your brain isn’t wired for Game Mastering. Give me your screen and make a character. Don’t forget to tell me your Passive Perception score so I can write it down.

This brings me to the encounter thing. Game Masters are really weird about placing encounters. They really can’t handle the idea of an encounter not being marked at a particular location at a particular time. But they also sometimes stroke out when encounters exist at particular locations at particular times. I’ll get to that second point in a little while. But first, the whole non-punctual encounter thing.

I mentioned that I plan encounters for non-dungeon spaces, like, say, wildernesses, the same way I plan them for dungeons. You have to. That’s the only way this shit works. Encounters are the gameplay. They’re the challenges. And note, by the way, that I don’t just mean combat encounters here. Anything the players have to interact with or overcome is an encounter. Traps, hazards, social interactions, infiltrations, investigations, obstacles, and weird-ass shit to poke and prod are all just as much encounters as combats are. Anything you’d put in a dungeon room that would make the players stop and do something is an encounter.

Because they’re the moment-to-moment gameplay and because you want good gameplay experiences, you design encounters good. You design them with goals and outcomes and challenge elements, and you design them to demand just enough of the players so they earn their outcomes and have a good, fair time doing it. You can get that shit from a random table, but that’s down to luck and your ability to finesse it at the table. You’re always better off with a purpose-built, pre-designed encounter whenever you can get one.

Thus, when you make a wilderness adventure, you need to design encounters for it just like you’d design encounters in a dungeon. But because you don’t have walls and doors and hallways to funnel the players to the encounters, you have to place those encounters differently. You can’t just mark a dot on a map of a forest and say, “The owlbear fight is here.”

Instead, you base them on triggers or contingencies or events, or you place them just because you need them to happen when they do.

At dusk on their first day in orc territory, the players encounter this orc hunting party here…

But this smacks of predetermination again, doesn’t it? This is just a thing I have said, by fiat, is going to happen. It’s even worse if I say something like…

In the afternoon of the second day in the Venomfang Forest, wherever they are, the players come to the edge of the Giant Spider Clearing…

.At least you can justify a roaming party of orc hunters tripping over the party, but in that second case, I have this specific location, the Giant Spider Clearing, that just appears in the party’s path no matter what path they take. It doesn’t matter whether they’re traveling north, south, east, west, following the river, or wandering lost.

Have you ever put a monster in the first room of the dungeon? Have you ever put a guardian monster in a boss arena protecting the Macguffin that the players need to win? Well, good job, asshole, you’ve done the same thing I did. It just doesn’t feel that way because you can wrap yourself in the comfortable lie that all you did was create an objective reality for the players to navigate through and give them a goal. If a monster is in a room and the players enter the room, the encounter is a consequence of a real, fictional world.

But that’s a lie. It’s bullshit. You didn’t design an objective world. Designing an objective world is a crappy way to build an adventure. You put a boss fight in because that makes for a good narrative and gameplay experience. Adventures need a final challenge. They need a climax. You did that because you’re a Game Master.

Note, too, that encountering an encounter is just the start of the gameplay. It’s the equivalent of spotting the pressure plate. If the players don’t spot the pressure plate, all they can do is trip unwittingly over it and then make a Saving Throw to avoid some fire damage. If they do spot the pressure plate, they can investigate and try to determine how the trap works. They can avoid the pressure plate. They can try to set it off without getting hurt, so it’s safe now. They can feed the character with the best Dexterity Save Modifier a potion of fire resistance, give him a shove, and duck and cover.

It’s the same with the party reaching the giant spider clearing. If the party is alert and moving slowly and has good Passive Perception scores, maybe they recognize the danger and try to skirt around the clearing. Maybe the spiders notice and start following them through the forest. If the party misses the clues, then they get ambushed instead.

Honestly, I’d rather have a game in which the players do notice the pressure plates and do end up in Giant Spider Hollow than a game in which they don’t. Which is why I don’t let randomness write my adventures. My job is to provide a great gameplay and narrative experience. I need to put a proper mix of interesting challenges between the players and their goals, and then make them prove they’re bad enough dudes and dudettes to overcome them. That’s what a game is.

This brings up the whole Quantum Ogre thing. I don’t know if people still use that term, but let me explain it anyway. As a Game Master, sometimes you design an encounter or event that just never sees play, right? If you come up with a cool encounter with an ogre guarding a treasure in a hidden room, but the players never find the hidden room, the cool encounter never happens, and the work gets wasted.

Some Game Masters, then, got into the habit of shifting encounters around the map to make sure their work wasn’t wasted. The joke argument goes like this: there are two doors leading out of a room. Behind one is a cool encounter with an ogre. Behind the other is nothing very interesting at all. So, if the players pick the wrong door, the Game Master just moves the ogre. Hence, Quantum Ogre. Its position isn’t fixed; it’s wherever it’s observed to be.

I ain’t advocating for that, but that’s not because non-local encounters are terrible. The problem with Quantum Ogres is, first, that the motivation is tainted, but second, it’s just patching over a really shitty design. If you have a cool setpiece encounter, like a miniboss or whatever, why design a dungeon so that one path has the cool setpiece and the other is just a boring-ass hallway full of nothing? Why have two doors at all? Just have one. Or come up with two different cool things, one for each door.

But Giant Spider Grotto in Venomfang Forest isn’t really even a cool setpiece encounter. It’s just a well-designed forest encounter because you have to have encounters, and well-designed encounters are better than the alternative, and giant spiders live in Venomfang Forest. Which, by the way, is another reason not to use randomness. I mean, imagine if I set up Venomfang Forest as the really scary place filled with giant spiders and everyone in town was talking about it and the players stocked up on potions of antidote and someone bought a +1 spiderbane longsword but the random tables I used to provide the actual wilderness adventure never once served up giant spiders by pure, stupid luck.

Because, really, that’s what’s at the heart of all this crap. The gameplay isn’t about whether the players have encounters or what encounters the players have. The gameplay is about the choices the players make based on what actually happens. If the players hear tales about the giant spiders of Venomfang Forest and spend time and resources preparing to fight spiders, that’s gameplay. Likewise, the whole orc territory thing is only meaningful if the players can possibly recognize they’ve entered orc territory or miss the clues and get surprised by it, based on either the choices they made to prepare for the adventure or what they do in the adventure itself.

So maybe the alert players recognize the hallmarks of orc territory and decide to try to circumnavigate it. Or maybe they recognize they’re in something’s hunting ground, but they don’t know what it is. Or maybe they miss the clues and blunder on until they get ambushed by orcs and only then say, “Oh, that’s what all those blood-spattered animal skulls hanging on sinews from the trees were about.” Maybe they hired a guide in town who says, “Oh, this orc territory. We’d best be careful.” Or maybe they chose not to hire the guide. Or maybe the social interaction went bad and the guide refused to work for them. And even if the players have no choice but to cross the orc territory, if they recognize they’re in dangerous country, they still have the chance to consider their approach and take precautions. Just like the players on the edge of Giant Spider Grotto may think differently about how they approach the clearing if they spot the scattered bones in the dirt and the gossamer-thin strands of ensnaring silk all around them.

See what you miss when you twist yourself in stupid-ass knots about whether knowing outcomes in advance ruins the game or whether non-local encounters are terrible? The shit you’re worried about isn’t even the gameplay; it’s what starts the actual gameplay.

You can’t not see the Matrix code, and you shouldn’t try not to. You’re part of the code. You’re part of the system. You’re the woman in the red dress. Nothing you know about the game is real. It’s all just code until it happens to the characters, and, even then, only what’s real to the players is real. Nothing else is.

Let me give you a brain-breaking final example. If you can crowbar this into your cranium, you’re wired to be a Game Master. Otherwise, well… you can always let someone else have your screen.

People often complain that the idea of fixed encounters keyed to specific locations is too static. It’s ridiculous. It implies this world where orcs and owlbears and dragons, all of the appropriate level, just sit around in their rooms waiting for the heroes to appear. It also implies a world that levels up with the characters. Except it implies nothing of the sort. Because there is no objective reality when the players’ characters aren’t on screen.

That map of the dungeon? Those keyed encounters? The only reality they describe is the state the characters find the dungeon in when they arrive. The orcs in the guard post? The owlbear in that side cave? They haven’t been sitting there waiting for the characters to arrive. They just happen to be there at the moment the characters showed up. Whatever moment that is. The dragon being an appropriate level for the characters to fight? That’s not because the dragon has been leveling up as the characters adventure, and it’s not because there are no higher- or lower-level dragons in the world. That’s just the dragon that happens to be ravaging the countryside the characters are in.

Could there have been more guards on duty yesterday? Or fewer a couple of hours ago? Of course. Might the owlbear have been out hunting until ten minutes ago? Absolutely. Could that dragon have been any level challenge at all? Absolutely. But all of that is hypothesis contrary to fact. The truth is, right now, there are five orcs in the guard post, and the owlbear isn’t out hunting, and this dragon is a medium-hard challenge for the 8th-level characters. Your job as an adventure designer or as a Game Master is to make the world seem like it could be real, but it’s also to provide a great gameplay and narrative experience. Neither of those has anything to do with creating some kind of objectively real, simulated world.

So, if the players are only ever going to see the dungeon in one state, if they’re only going to experience it the way it is one time, why do anything more complicated than just stock it to provide the best narrative and gameplay experience at that one precise moment when they arrive?

Whatever moment that is.