A while ago I gave a guide for designing a combat encounter in about 5 minutes. But what if you can’t be bothered to wait that long? What if your players are itching for a fight and you want to deliver it right now?

Follow these simple steps to get started immediately:

1. Pick up the Monster Vault or Monster Manual of your choice.
2. Go to the index. Spend about 20 seconds looking up a standard monster of the party’s level or up to +4 levels higher.
3. If there happens to be another monster around the same level on the same page, you’ve lucked out and can add it to the encounter. Either way, you are using a number of monsters equal to the number of players in the party.
4. If you have D&D dungeon tiles, draw 3 random tiles from your supply and arrange them in an interesting configuration. If you don’t, draw a weirdly shaped room on your grid map and put a couple of pillars in it.
5. If you have minis, pick random minis the same size of the monsters you plan to use. Otherwise, use whatever tokens or dice you would normally use.
6. Make everyone roll initiative while you describe the scene! If you are at a loss for words, say the following: “On your travels you suddenly encounter a group of horrible [INSERT MONSTER NAME HERE]. They are in no mood to talk. It would be a shame to die today, but every hero meets his or her end eventually!” See, it’s nihilistic. The players like that.
7. Do your best to kill the players. That will really piss them off.

I recommended printing this list out and keeping it in your back pocket in case of an emergency.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 12th, 2011 at 2:46 am and is filed under 4e D&D, advice/tools, RPG Hub. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.