Encounters vs Monsters (Patreon)

Hey folkses, Matt Colville here! James just sent out a new packet to our testers, and I thought this was a good time to talk about our current thinking on monsters. Specifically, how we represent their stats in combat.

To give you some context, here’s how Goblins are presented in the newest packet.

This is gonna look weird because it’s a landscape image and you’re viewing it in a portrait mode page but whatever. Notice, this is thirteen different Goblins! In Flee, Mortals! There are only 8 goblin stat blocks spread across six pages! PR is the goblin’s bonus to their Power Roll (also useful as a bonus to a skill check should they need to make one, if you think they’re proficient in that skill), FMR is Forced Move Resistance, which makes you harder to push around. OA is Opportunity Attacks which are also like basic attacks. Note that monsters don’t roll for these, it’s just flat damage. EV is Encounter Value because we also wanted to include (ideally) more straightforward rules for encounter building that eschewed things like “challenge rating” and fractional values. That part is still very speculative FYI.

Now, this isn’t the entire presentation, the rest of the page gives you the stats for the different weapons listed, Light Melee, Heavy Ranged, etc… And the test for all the different Special Traits, like so…

But all 13 goblin types, and their weapons, and their special abilities, all fit on one page. In the finished game there’ll be a page of Goblin Lore and art, but the thing we’re testing right now is: could this be how monsters’ stats are presented in the Monsters Book? We don’t know! Testing will help us figure it out. But let’s talk about why we think this might be a good idea in the first place, and how we got here.

The Encounter Sheet

This started with my frustration running monsters in d20 Fantasy. I do not consider it easy or fun. I mean, it’s fun to challenge my players! It’s fun to see the monsters Cool Shit happen. But compared to any other game, card games, board games, war games, running a bunch of monsters in d20 fantasy is sort of a pain in the ass! Isn’t that weird? Shouldn’t it be…fun? 

The players have their own UI for the game, called a Character Sheet. It lists all the canonical ways they can interact with the game: attacks, skills, attributes and they can use these to improvise any number of other interactions.

The Director on the other hand has…well, I don’t know what they have actually. They have a DM screen, but that screen does not know anything about the encounter they’re running. If you throw some Orcs with a Hell Hound and some Goblin allies at your players, your DM Screen isn’t gonna be a lot of use. It doesn’t know which or how many monsters you choose for your encounter.

So each director improvises their own presentation. Some directors run monsters straight out of the Monster Manual. I think this is pretty common when the encounter is against a single monster, or monsters that all share one stat block.

But once you have an encounter with a handful of different monsters, you’re faced with a minor dilemma. How do you get the stat blocks out of the Monster Manual so you can run these monsters at the table?

Typically what I do is, I use the Windows snip tool (windows key + shift + s) to snip an image of the stat block out of the monster book and into my session notes. Then I resize the image to create a kind of two-column presentation, like this:

Then I just print my notes out and run the encounter from my printed notes. This works, it’s fine.

Some people use or make monster cards. I’ve done both, bought and made my own and the thing is…it works up to a point. 

For one thing, monsters aren’t designed to fit on cards! The people who designed those monsters did not know they would someday end up on a card, so you end up with a single monster taking up more than one side of a card, sometimes two cards, and stat blocks with really tiny text!

Even IF you could easily fit an entire monster on a card, you’re still just running one monster at a time. Unless you’re a gecko, you can only look at one card at a time! The players have this great UI for the game, everything they need on one, or probably two, pages. But you’ve got these cards you have to shuffle back and forth. There’s no easy way to see all your monsters at once. Unless you’re only running one stat block.

The players are running one character with one interface, you are running several characters each with their OWN interface. Which is not, I submit, well-tailored for the task. 

So I started to wonder, like a YEAR ago, I was thinking “There has to be a better way.” It would be better if the director had an Encounter Sheet, that was their version of a player’s Character Sheet. “Here’s everything you need to run all these monsters.” I had no idea exactly what this would look like, but I was committed to figuring something out.

I brought this up after a playtest James ran where we fought a lot of Kobolds and he agreed. “Even just running Kobolds, it felt like a lot.” So it was time to figure out “can we make running an encounter easier than running a bunch of disparate monsters?”

Atomized Monsters

The first thing I knew I needed was simpler monsters. The principle being: the encounter is challenging. Single monsters do not need to be complex. Complexity arises OUT of the different monsters you choose to field. So an encounter can have a lot of moving parts, but unless you’re fielding a Boss Monster or a Solo, each individual monster doesn’t need to be at all complicated and should not be complicated.

James and I talked about this and he agreed. We both had our own idea what this would look like, so we decided to both build our own encounter sheets. Here’s what James’ looked like.

Notice, this is not James’ idea of an Encounter sheet, this is James imagining how the goblins would actually be presented in the Monster book. He was simulating the act of just photocopying the Goblin Stats page out of the Monsters book and using it to run an encounter on the fly, so to speak. So the encounter he ran did not have one of every monster on this sheet. No way. He only used a a few different statblocks.

Notice there is a sort of Generic Goblin stat block in the upper left corner. “This is true of all goblins unless otherwise noted.” So if you look at the Goblin Warrior for instance (middle column, bottom) you see they have “Speed” broken out. That means “This goblin’s stats are exactly the same as the Generic Goblin, except for their speed which is listed here.”

You will also see Horde Moves which we still like! This was something we came up with to answer the question; “should an All Goblins encounter be different from a mixed encounter with Some Goblins and like Some Orcs or whatever?”

Well we thought…yes! So you can have a mixed encounter, but the more goblins it has? The more cool things those goblins can do, the more “gobliny” the encounter is. If you have Some Goblins and Some Orcs? Well then you get one minor Goblin Horde ability and one minor Orc Horde ability, etc...

James ran an encounter with this actual sheet and instantly knew we were going in the right direction. It worked, and was easy. It was easy to run MANY goblins. It was easier to run many goblins this way, than it was to run fewer kobolds the old way! 

I was working on my own version and thought “It could be simpler…”

Better Roles

Atomized monsters, to me, meant “each monster [unless a boss or solo] basically does One Thing.” When it’s the director’s turn to activate a monster, they should be thinking “what do I need Team Monster to do right now?” And the different monsters in the encounter should give them options. Activating a single monster should [unless boss or solo] just be about Moving + Doing Their Thing.

I started by looking at the different roles we had. I thought “We can do better.”

In Flee Mortals monsters have “roles” that tell you broadly what they do in combat. But I think practically they’re more an aid in encounter design than they are when running the encounter. They are broadly defined, but I wanted to drill down and make them more specific, because I thought that would make them more useful in combat. I knew this would mean more roles, but that doesn’t bother me. More roles is not bad, as long as each role is clearly useful. Which I thought making them more specific would accomplish.

Here’s what I came up with. 

These are just notes, but they pointed in a certain direction. I broke out “Hexer” from Controller because I thought it would be useful to have a dedicated debuffer role. This also meant I was making “Controller” more specific. Same thing with Sniper and Artillery. I wanted to know that when I activate an artillery monster, their job is to just do a little damage to a lot of heroes. That’s it. So it’s good for them to go early in the encounter.

Whereas the Sniper I could design so that, if their target is at 25% stamina, and the Sniper gets a good hit, a tier 2 or better result, the Sniper will down the hero. Or at least, get them to 0 Stamina. 😀 So, it’s always good for a Sniper to act, but it’s especially good if they act later in the round, when the heroes are closer to 25% total stamina.

Harriers, I thought, were the “strike and retreat” melee enemy. Like Quinn in League of Legends. Their “job” is to lure the front line heroes out of position. Force them to “chase” the Harrier, thereby getting farther from their own team, especially their ranged allies in the back. 

Bullies were just a kind of Brute. Same as a Brute except the Brute makes it real hard for adjacent heroes to get away, the Bully does the opposite. They have some High Knockback ability, so if there’s a hero in some annoying position where you think “If only THIS character wasn’t HERE” you send in the Bully. They hit the PC and send them flying.

Now you may be thinking; “Wait, this makes each monster less versatile.” Yeah, well about that….

Initiative

One problem, which we did not recognize until after we had come up with this new method and were testing it, is that D20 Fantasy monsters have to be pretty versatile to be useful, because neither they nor the director have any control over when a monster acts! It’s literally random! A d20 roll (modified by a bonus, sure) tells each monster when they get to go. 

Since the dev team has no idea when a monster can or should act, they have to build monsters in such a way that they DON’T focus on doing one thing well. They have to be more generic.

But our game doesn’t work like that! With the exception of specific hero abilities, like a Tactician ability that lets the player decide which monster goes next, the Director has COMPLETE control over who acts next! I mean, among those monsters who haven’t acted yet this round, obviously.

So the whole IDEA of giving the director a broad array of tactical options, where each option “belongs” to a different monster is not only possible, it started to feel like a natural result of how initiative works. The director SHOULD be thinking “ok, it’s my turn, what do I want to do?” And the answer is based on which monsters haven’t acted yet, and which roles they included in their encounter.

Armed with all this, I built my own Encounter Sheet and ran a session just four days ago using this:

This is the actual Encounter Sheet I used. This is fourteen goblins across six stat blocks! These were pulled from a longer list of 10 different goblins I made for this exercise. Note that after I printed this out, but before the actual encounter, I went in and added ranges to the special abilities so it reads “Rain Arrows (10)”. 

Result? It was EASY. It was very, very easy to run this encounter. In fact, as you can see in my notes, it was easier for me to run this entire encounter than it was for some of the players to run their character. PCs have MANY options and there is always fun discussion about “ok it’s our turn, what should we do?” But especially compared to the players who were learning a new hero? Running this encounter was a breeze.

Now, there may be reasons why it was easy for me that would not translate to your table, chief among them: I designed these monsters. I knew what the Goblin Bully could do, because I invented the Goblin Bully. Ok, fair play. That’s what testing is for! 

But after the playtest, James and I were fizzing. He immediately wanted to revise the monsters in the packet using [his more robust version of] this system. He even invented a Goblin Grappler! 😀 And he managed to do so AND get a new packet to the testers in less than 48 hours. Does James SLEEP?!

Notice, there’s a lot of white space! I printed it in landscape because I thought I needed space to track stamina as it was whittled down. But as you can see, I didn’t need that much space! I could absolutely have fit all this on an 8.5” x 11” sheet in portrait mode.

Also the font is tiny, but it didn't need to be. And I had no problem reading it with my Old Eyeballs and no glasses. That’s why I printed it out. Even though we were playing over Owlbear Rodeo, I wanted to see if this would work in the most old school way possible, just pencil and paper.

You can see I made a note about how, in 4th Edition D&D, the #1 thing monsters did that made them nasty? Was damage. They had cool abilities! But those cool abilities were like a spice. A modifier to what they all already did; which was “a lot of damage.” I made that note just to remind myself: it’s ok if the monsters hit hard. They need to hit hard to light a fire under the player’s asses. 

I ran these monsters in squads. I did not activate a single monster on my turn, I activated a whole squad. And I designed the encounter on purpose so that, even though there were way more goblins than PCs, there were the same number of squads. So the initiative would work fluidly.

So, all the Harriers were in one squad. All the artillery in another. The Sniper and Hexer were each in their own squads, each with a Defender to protect them. And I hit upon the idea that Defenders need some way to be effective, even while they were stuck next to their squishy ranged buddy. So I gave them the Command ability and that worked SUPER well.

The one thing I really missed was Triggers. I had one (the Bodyguard ability) and that worked great, but there were many moments where, if these were Flee Mortals monsters? I would have gone “a-HAH!” and surprised the players mid-round with some cool reaction.

Well I didn’t want to overload this prototype with reactions. I wanted to test two things.

1: Many monsters. 14 goblins!!

2: Many goblin stat blocks. Six different kinds of goblins!

I figured keeping the number of Triggers close to zero would help? But given how easy this was, I could have added a couple of Triggers no problem. Just gotta see what the right number is. My gut says like…3.

We also think monsters need more, different defenses. Something like…Body, Mind, and Soul (though probably not those specifically? We’ll see.) So different Hero abilities can target different defenses. This helps heroes make more and better tactical decisions because the Elementalist can decide “hey I bet these goblins are idiots. Do I have a spell that targets their Mind defense?” That is fun, I love that shit. And I don’t think you need six stats for that, I think three is plenty.

But that’s is still conjectural, we’ve not prototyped that yet.

There’s more to test. What does a mixed encounter look like with different ancestries? An Ogre and some Trolls? Some Orcs and some Goblins and some Wargs? But these seem very solvable to me right now and frankly, if some encounters end up being TWO pages? No big deal. Most character sheets are 2 pages and people seem to manage that.

It’s all about where complexity comes from. Making complicated, fun, challenging encounters without overloading the director with a bunch of very complicated monsters. No, simple monsters, each with a different role, translating to a different ability, so it’s always easy to decide “what should I do now?” and then do it.

Leaving The Grid

Very simple monster stat blocks, like this, do present one problem for some directors. And that is “what happens when a monster leaves the grid?” Meaning, what happens if you encounter a monster outside combat?

Some people think “well, now I need to know everything about them! Their skills, stats, proficiencies, languages, alignment…everything!” Which is a big reason why modern d20 monster stat blocks work the way they do. They’re trying to encode all that into one stat block.

Well, we think we solved the “what happens if a goblin leaves the grid” question with Retainers. There’s 8 different Goblin stat blocks in Flee Mortals, but only one goblin retainer. Doesn’t matter if the goblin you recruited was a spinecleaver or an assassin, as soon as they leave the grid they become a retainer. And no one seems to mind this! In fact…I think they like it! Because it’s easy and straightforward.

So far, we’re excited, we think we’re on to something, but it’s still very early days. The testers are going to put this idea through its paces in a way we can’t internally, and we’ll see what happens. At the end of the day, we’ve got this monster book over here people seem to like. If we can’t make running monsters a better experience by focusing on the encounter, and not just presenting a bunch of monster cards, we can always just adapt Flee Mortals. That’s what we thought we were going to do! Then we got this crazy idea…

It’s Still An RPG

I want to point out, here at the end, that we don’t see our game as being any MORE about “fighting monsters” than the game you’re already playing. We just want it to be fun. Fun to run, fun to build encounters. So we’re taking this stuff really seriously.

But something happens when you do that. People start talking like making fighting monsters fun means that’s ALL there is to do in your game. I have no idea why this should be. You’re already fighting a lot of monsters! All the polls we’ve done, and our own experience across many different groups and many different decades, tells us the majority of groups like a session that’s 50% roleplay and 50% combat.

Given that sessions last HOURS, it just seems like common sense to us to say “is it fun? Can it BE fun? Can it be MORE fun than it already is?” And we think that means; make it easier, make running monsters, tracking abilities easier. Focus on the encounter, focus on letting the director decide “what do I want to do right now?” And give them many cool options to do it with.

That’s it folks! Long post I realize, but this is what you’re paying for. :D Next post is probably going to be from me, probably pretty soon, and probably about one of the new ancestries in the game.

Until then, peace! Out!