I’ve been writing a lot of random encounters lately. I thought it would be helpful to collate and consolidate the best advice for writing gameable encounters (akin to the classic dungeon checklist from Arnold K. of the Goblin Punch blog).

How to Use this Checklist

Unlike Arnold’s dungeon checklist, the best encounters will not hit every single one of these questions. But an encounter that hits none of them is likely to fall flat at the table. The worst encounters play out like vignettes where the referee reads aloud a little scene, and the players say “uh, okay” or “huh, weird” and just press on, ignoring the encounter completely. If you’re able to answer “yes” to at least a few questions below, your encounter is more likely to be something that either cannot be ignored or (even better) something the players would never dream of ignoring. Conveniently, this list hits the magic number of 7, so the advice is hopefully tight enough to keep in your head while you write encounters.

1. Is the encounter something that happens to the player-characters?

The game is about the player-characters. An encounter could be cool, interesting and flavorful, but if it is not something happening to the player-characters, the characters who the players have agency over, it is just window-dressing or a cut scene. So whatever is happening is immediately and easily improved by making it happen to those player characters.

For instance, consider an encounter where 1d6 goblins are shining some poor rube’s boots while one of them is surreptitiously robbing the fellow. Altruistic characters may feel inclined to jump in, but the encounter is improved if the goblins instead come up to the player-characters and offer to shine their shoes and, if they accept, pick their pockets.

2. Can the player-characters “play” with the encounter (i.e., is the encounter “toyetic”)?

The best encounters offer lots of avenues for interaction and experimentation. This is the encounter-scale version of “Something to Experiment With” on Arnold’s dungeon checklist. It is also the element of “how much [the encounter’s] elements allow interaction” in the schema of “sticky” encounters by Patrick at False Machine. The easiest analogy is making the encounter more like a child’s playset—something with elements the characters can interact with. These can come in many forms: ladders, rope swings, trap doors, greased floors, functional stove tops, round boulders begging to be pushed, things that can be opened or locked or launched, etc., etc. This is the element that is added with shenanigans in mind.

Using the earlier example of goblins offering to shine the characters’ shoes, what if one goblin is struggling to carry a large vat of (potentially flammable) shoe polish, another pushes an ergonomic, rolling office chair, another carries a block of cheese and has 50 feet of hemp rope on their back and a fourth goblin, whose clothes are covered in wet, red paint, carries a lit torch. Chances are that just describing what the goblins carry will ignite their imagination.

3. Are there multiple possible solutions or no solution at all?

Singular solutions to problems in TTRPGs are always a mistake. Not only does it fail to take advantage of the tactical infinity uniquely offered by the medium, it also runs the risk of turning into a game of “read the referee’s mind” or the “what have I got in my pocket” riddle, neither of which makes for a fun gaming experience. Riddles (without alternatives to the riddle) are the ur-example of this problem in action, but the most frequent offender is the Mandatory Combat Encounter. We all love a good tussle here and then, but combat encounters are best when there are clever ways to avoid them, be it talking your way out, bribing or feeding the enemy, tricking the enemy, running away, etc. But when the encounter consists of violent enemies, who want nothing except to fight to the death, you have yourself a boring, slog of an encounter. If you are into the OSR playstyle, with its emphasis on player creativity, this one seems pretty easy to avoid. Yet there are some very popular TTRPGs out there whose adventures often fail to clear even this bar.

The original goblin encounter already lacks any “solution,” so it passes this, the easiest of the criteria. But it wouldn’t if, for instance, it was simply “goblins attack and will stop at nothing until either you or they are dead.” How boring.

4. Do the player-characters want something from the encounter?

This is a carrot that draws the players into an encounter. Player-characters are greedy, little creatures, drawn inexorably to the slow accumulation of shiny objects. If there is something the player-characters can obviously gain by interacting with the encounter, they are more likely to dive in. This is also a good element in trap design; for instance, my favorite trap relies on the players diving head first into uncertain situations if you dangle a shiny enough carrot, and it has not failed yet.

Applying this to the shoe-goblins, just drape the little miscreants with treasure—give them gaudy necklaces, gleaming rings, fancy suits, and dangling pocket watches. This can turn the encounter into a classic archetype: the player-characters want to rob the monsters, and the monsters want to rob the player-characters.

5. Does the encounter have a motive?

This is the flip side of the above principle. The monster, or whatever else is encountered, should want something. They should not simply be waiting around for the players to come by and imbue their life with meaning. This is a pretty core point in the checklist because, if you can embed a motive into the encounter, you are more likely to make the encounter something players can interact with, manipulate and come up with multiple solutions. As John of the Retired Adventurer blog advises in his blog post on motive, means and opportunity, “[a] good [motive] should either be extremely concrete, or it should be a broad abstraction - stuff in the middle tends to [lack] the benefits of either.”

For example, goblins that want to pick the player-characters’ pockets is easy but sufficient, but it works just as well if the goblins want to form an autonomous goblin polity free from the oppressive yoke of humanocentric empires. The fun thing about the latter is, as John says, it can motivate lots of different actions from the goblins beyond just whether they’ll pick your pockets. This is especially helpful to know what kinds of things the goblins would go for if the player-characters decide to negotiate with them. Perhaps they can ally with the goblins in this dungeon if they agree to sneak the goblins into the human monarch’s bedchambers once they get back to town.

6. Does the encounter have a means to accomplish its motive?

The best situations have a fuse and a match. This item refers to the other two concepts from John’s aforementioned blog post: means and opportunity. John again: “[m]eans are the tools, skills, resources, allies, etc. that a character brings to bear on accomplishing their motive” and “[a]n opportunity is the moment or set of moments when the NPC uses their means to try to accomplish their motives.” A motive is helpful because it is a lever that players can pull on. Means and opportunity give the encounter more potentiality of outcomes. When the motive isn’t perfectly aligned with the encounter’s means or opportunity, it requires some intervention from the player-characters to bring them into alignment.

In the original shoe-shine goblin encounter, the goblins have a motive (to pick the player-characters’ pockets), some means (the skills to pull off a fake shoe-shine operation and to try picking their pockets). Here, the motive and means are aligned, but only the players can provide the opportunity to bring it all together by agreeing to have their shoes shined. But if the goblins also have the means of violence (e.g., weapons), then they may shift tactics if the players don’t give them that opportunity so they can still achieve their motive.

7. Is there a consequence to ignoring the encounter?

The encounter is meaningless if it matters neither how the player-characters interact with it nor whether they interact with it at all. This goes to a fairly deep-seated mantra of the OSR that games should be impactful (see, e.g., Arnold’s example of the orcs armed with feather dusters or Chris at the Bastionland blog’s doctrine that the player’s choices should have consequences). It is easier to embed impact into the encounter (that is to say, making it matter how the players choose to interact with it), but the best encounters are impactful even when the players choose to bypass it, whether they know the impact at that moment or not.

Returning to our now-beloved and dare I say iconic shoe-shine goblins, there isn’t much consequence to just avoiding their eye contact and pressing on (assuming the goblins don’t have the alternative means of attacking the players, per the change in #6). The player-characters don’t get their shoes-shined, don’t potentially get robbed, and don’t have to deal with whatever bullshit the goblins are peddling. But what if there is another area of the dungeon (or whether this hypothetical adventure is taking place) where there is a strong (but fashionable) ogre that denies entry to some area of the dungeon to anyone with scuffed shoes or broken shoe laces? Now there is a consequence to not getting the shoes shined, and the way that consequence manifests itself differs based on when the goblins are encountered. If the player-characters meet the ogre first, they are more likely to jump at the goblin’s offer (causing the encounter to now satisfy #4 above). If the player-characters meet the ogre after the goblins, the consequence of their earlier decision is now felt. They either have shined shoes and can go in, or they don’t and need to go back looking for those goblins or find some other solution to get past the ogre bouncer.

Encounter Checklist