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Although I’m still running my players through Keep on the Shadowfell, I find that I’m modifying encounters a lot, and in some cases rebuilding them or adding new encounters to the adventure that weren’t there at all. I’m doing this mainly because it’s fun, but also because I’m chomping at the bit to run my own material when KotS is done.
The thing that strikes me most about that paragraph is the simple fact that encounter design is fun. Really, really fun. It didn’t used to be in 3rd Edition (at least, I didn’t find it that fun). It was like doing math homework. And it took forever. And, if you design encounters at your computer like me, you had to have several different books spread around your computer in order to create an interesting encounter. Here’s what I do now.
First, I decide what I want the theme of the encounter to be. I come up with some sort of memorable terrain feature or monster or plot element that the encounter is going to focus on because, if there isn’t something memorable about an encounter, it may as well not be in there. Oftentimes I’ll have a monster or two in mind that I want to use, and that helps a lot. Then, I fire up the D&D Compendium (you’ll need to be a D&D Insider subscriber in order to really use that link). I absolutely love the monster search engine in the Compendium; it makes things so easy. I’ll search for the monster or monsters that I want, call up their stat blocks, copy a screenshot of them to the clipboard with the screenshot tool of my choice, then paste the image into a document. Once I’ve taken care of the specific monsters I want in there, I fill it out with other monsters. Usually, this means deciding what role I want those monsters to fill; maybe the monster I picked is a brute, and I want some artillery and maybe a controller in there to make things interesting for the PCs. Maybe I want them to be level 2, and maybe I want them to be undead. I put all those criteria into the search engine and call up a list of potential choices. Then I just scroll through them until I find something that looks interesting, and copy/paste the stat block into my document. If I need a map for the encounter, I’ll usually use Jai’s Dungeon Tile Mapper, but Wizards has a dungeon creation tool in the pipes, so I imagine I’ll use that eventually (Jai’s mapper hasn’t been updated for a while, so not all of the tile sets that I own are in there). And there you go, done. At least, for a simple encounter. I might also want traps or a skill challenge in there (sadly, the Compendium doesn’t allow you to search for those yet, if ever), and that’s another story that I haven’t really tried my hand at too much yet.
Once the encounter is done, I need to assign some treasure to it. I love the 4th Edition parcel system for the ease of use and flexibility of it. If I’m putting magic items in there, I’ll generally either search for items of the appropriate level using the Compendium, or the Character Builder. I like to use the Character Builder to print out my magic item cards, so that’s what I normally use.
At any rate, that’s the process that works for me so far. It’s easy, and it’s fun; it’s kind of like going shopping for cool stuff, and buying it with the XP budget that you’re using for the encounter. The fact that monster stat blocks are small enough to paste a few onto a page or two of a document is pretty nice, but the thing that really makes this whole thing a breeze is the presence of all the digital tools that Wizards is gradually making available. I love the fact that, being an Insider subscriber, I can search the compendium for monsters from any source, regardless of whether or not I own it. It’s fantastic value for money.
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