When it hits the fan: Unplanned encounters

When your plan backfires and spirals out of control there's always a way to salvage it.  As part of an ongoing series I'm going to be addressing campaign issues and how I'd fix them.

Didn't expect that...

It's been a rough couple of weeks at the gaming table. Mostly because the table has been empty. Lisa broke her leg, John had to work overtime, and Mark couldn't make it because of something he called the “death plague.” When you last left your intrepid adventurers they had just met and were about to fight the avatar of greed who guards the ancient lost city of Deler'aq.

You look up at your eager players and begin combing through your notes. You're mentally preparing for the session, and with a mild heart attack, you find the avatar of greed's character sheet is missing. You remember all the cool things. How he can vomit small semi-precious gems, and the bonus he gets for attacking anyone who has an item made of gold. For the life of you, however, you can't remember any of the hard statistics.

That's ok. You can make a monster on the fly.

No matter how it comes about, sooner or later you're going to find yourself less prepared than you like. How it happens doesn't matter.  It could be like the scenario above, or maybe a player attacked a creature that was meant to be just a dressing or any number or scenarios.  You could call off the session, but you really like game mastering. Your friends like playing. To call off tonight's session would be a waste.

Once you get the hang of it, it's pretty easy to make a monster on the fly. The only thing you'll need is a piece of paper, something to write with, and a chart that's probably nestled away in a source book.

But wait, you said...

This sounds a lot like you're ignoring the rules.

I guess you could call it that. But I'll ask you, why do we have rules? Again, rules serve as a social contract between players and game masters so that the players understand how the world works. We're not upsetting that concept. The players still can interact with this creature in a meaningful way, and as far as they are concerned he's fully statted out. We are following the spirit of the rules. Maybe if we had the time it'd be better to fully stat him out, but that isn't an option right now. So we do the next best thing. If everyone is entertained, isn't that a win for us?

The concept

You should have an engaging concept for the monster you're creating. This should be easy, after all, we love telling tales. How big is it? How does it move? What's it look like? What special abilities does it have? In this example , we're creating the avatar of greed. When I think about greed, I think gold, corpulence, and bejeweled equipment. He's an avatar, so he should probably tower over the players. They are mere mortals, and he represents an ideal. So maybe the avatar of greed is a twelve-foot tall corpulent behemoth who wields a golden greatsword and wears bejeweled armor. 

Should he have a flaming sword, I think he needs a flaming sword.

Special abilities and attacks

what makes him special? What things can he do that separate him from other opponents? In this case, I decide he can vomit semi-precious stones that dissipate after a few rounds. While they are on the ground anyone who walks on top of them or is caught in the area or effect, must make a saving throw or fall down. When he attacks anyone with a decent amount of money or gold items he gets a bonus to hit and damage. He uses a giant gold greatsword and can swing it wildly to hit everyone in melee range.

So we have the concept and special abilities. That only took moments, and we're halfway there. The next step sounds daunting, but it is relatively easy. You have to come up with a stat block for him. The information you need is probably readily available in a chart.  It will be found in the section about creating new monsters, and it contains the average important statistics by level.  In each system, this will be found in different place, and I highly recommend that you print it off and affix it to your GM screen, have it in your notes, or just generally have it readily available. It's found in the DMG for D&D 5^th edition (pg. 274) and the appendices of the bestiaries for pathfinder. I'm not sure where it is for other systems, and it may not even exist, but if it doesn't I suggest you make one up and keep it somewhere handy.

It looks something like this

source

Deciding statistics, determining primary and secondary stats

For the purposes of this article, we're going to divide statistics into two classes, primary (scores players directly interact with) and secondary (scores players indirectly interact with). For the most part you only really need to decide primary scores, and some examples of primary statistics are AC and ability save DC.  These are numbers the players can figure out in short order.

Primary

You need to set the primaries, and you shouldn't change them once set. The exception to this is if you give a good story clue. For example, maybe halfway through the fight, you realize your monster is too hard to hit. Maybe his armor has been damaged so badly that it falls off exposing him to the parties attacks. Maybe he needs more armor, and loose gold and gems fly towards and sticking to him making his AC go up.

I'm going to walk through the above example as if I was playing Pathfinder, but the general process is applicable to any role playing system.  First, we figure out the CR.  This really isn't a stat at all, but it informs the rest of the abilities and saves, so you have to decide this first.  I know my party is APL 5, and I want the encounter to be challenging so I add two to that number, giving me a CR of 7. Using the chart I set the AC at 20. I figure the gem vomit ability should be a 15-foot cone, and that it should have a reflex save of 19, and should last only a round and be available for use every 1d4+1 rounds.

Secondary

Delicious hp

The secondary stats are more mutable. Things like his saves or hit points. You can change these on the fly and no one should notice. For best effect, sometimes, it better to never set them at all. Hp is a great example of this. You can, instead, watch your players and wait for a good reason for him to die. Maybe the barbarian just landed a massive critical, or maybe it's when the players start to lose their engagement for this encounter. Whatever the reason, the mob dies or tries to escape when he needs to best entertain the group and tell the story.

I decide that I really don't need to flesh out most of the rest of this.  I'm going to play the HP by ear, but the bonus for someone having a significant amount of gold for them should be +4, and his attack bonus is +13/+8 dealing 2d8+8 damage.  His saves should be fort:10 ref:6 will: 6. Now we can effectively play this creature.

You may wonder where I got some of my numbers, and in this case, it's all informed by the chart and my opinions.  If you made up the same exact monster for the same exact group it might very widely.  

What if a player attacks an unknown?

A great example of this is what if a player attacks his strength?  We didn't set his strength, so this might be concerning at first.  Really, there're only two things we care about when his strength is attacked.  Is his strength reduced to zero, and how much strength damage has he taken.  So we'll decide he has a strength of 26.  For every two points of strength damage he takes his attack and damage will go down by 1, and when his strength hits zero he'll die.  The important thing to remember is that we only fleshed out this stat because a player attacked it.  Had it never been attacked, we would have never defined it.

New abilities and clues

For the sake of fair play, if you create a new situational ability, like say a bonus to hit and damage, there should be some accompanying clue. In this case, we used the gold becoming hot when he hits you. It's not direct, but it's a small clue to make the players realize, maybe I should ditch this gold so he won't murder me so fast.

It's important

Remember to write it down! 

It's important throughout this to keep good notes. How much hp did he end up having, what stats did he end up with, what worked and what didn't. You want to be able to reproduce this villain if need be. Maybe you'll never use him again for this campaign or this group, but it never hurts to have extra engaging villains around to use.  

For some of you, this won't be useful at all.  For some this concept isn't supported by your game system, or it isn't needed.  Some magnificent bastards don't ever spend time preparing and can run an engaging story by the seat of their pants. But for the rest of us, this can help fill gaps when the unexpected happens.  I hope this helps, and as always:

keep those games rolling 

The game mechanic