How To Plan For Encounters 

I'm so used to seeing CEO Brennan it's really jarring seeing him answering questions and not having the whole thing slowly deteriorate XD

Funny when he was talking about the random encounters and he said "the dragon was easy it was the wolves along the way that almost killed us" I had a DM do that to us on purpose. A mage sent us to go kill an insane elder gold dragon and recover an item for him (it was a trap). The dragon lair was actually a dragon graveyard and the dragons had enchanted the surrounding forest so that all the animals were super strong and vicious because in his world in the last days of a dragon's life all of its strength and vitality (but not magic this is important) quickly fade leaving it extremely vulnerable. We had to fight squirrels with levels of paladin that shot lasers from their eyes (that was how they smited) and we get to the dragon only for the barb to 1-shot it then the mage teleport in and grab the dragons heart just before it died so he could create an orb of dragonkind and place the blame on us. Turns out our next adventuring arc was defending ourselves of against all the metallic gold dragons because we committed regicide and created a golden orb of dragonkind or at least that is what every dragon on the planet thought (mage had prepped spells that would hide his involvement from all divination magic and make it appear like we took the orb with us)

Imagine being such a good dm that you get Matt Mercer to play with you on your own channel where he’s the guest .0.

I've learned most of what I do as a gm from Dimension 20 and Adventuring Academy. Honestly Brennan is the best. Now I dm three days a week.

As an introvert, I was hoping that this was a guide to planning for human encounters in general, not just DnD. But this works too :)

Fantasy high and Brennan's DMing style has heavily influenced my own and it got me interested in DMing in the first place. Thank you Brennan!!!

I would love to see Brennan in an episode of Critical Role

Time Stamps of each answer: 1:14 If you could exist in the world of DnD 5E, what subclass of wizard would you be? 1:48 Do you believe CR (challenge rating) is the best way to balance encounters, or do you prefer some other method? 6:57 How much feedback do you get from your players between sessions? 10:02 What is your take on alignments? 14:12 What is your take on random encounters, especially if they are deadly? Do you think they make mistakes greater? Or do they simply annoy players and waste time? 18:04 Do you have a favorite clan/sect in Vampire: The Masquerade? What about favorite world of darkness game line, if not vampire? 18:39 How do I create a large campaign like Fantasy High? 21:20 Does that shirt say 'Borklyn' or am I trippin'? 21:53 Is it feasible to attempt DMing for a larger party of 6+ first-time players in a casual setting? If so, any and all tips would be so very appreciated. 24:17 I'm running my first campaign and am worried my story won't be interesting enough. Do you have any tips for nervous first-time DMs? 25:32 What should I keep in mind if I run a pirate/seafaring campaign? 27:30 Mini HP worldbuilding rant 28:22 How is it DMing for the McElroys in the upcoming season of D20?

I’ve run 17 sessions with my group, my first campaign. I’ve _never_ run a truly random encounter. I plan an encounter, sometimes pulling from the Frostmaiden’s encounter table.

I love it when he talks philosophy. He actually knows what he's talking about too, it's really refreshing to see benevolently used knowledge and understanding like this, on the internet.

I've always found the alignment system to make the most sense when you consider good/evil to be selfless/selfish and law/chaos to be rigid/malleable morality (often based on the law of their own culture but not necessarily)

Love your remarks on tone and setting being realistic verses truthful. My personal favorite way of worldbuilding is to come up with a ridiculous idea and then work backwards to have it make just enough sense. My favorite of these being a city built into the skeleton of a massive space dragon that's been reanimated by a powerful necromancer so it can walk around. Decided it travels from oasis to oasis in a desert environment to give it a reason to be a moving city, and then had a ton of fun exploring what a city/culture that saw necromancy as an inherently good practice (both morally and as a practical benefit to society) would look like.

I really love and appreciate Brennan's outlook in DM-ing. How in his mind telling your DM what you wanna do is so the DM can help you make your plan work better is so interesting and kind and I really aspire to be that kind of person

i love how he says "really great question : )" every time

You know you have reached godhood when you can truthfully say “I was talking to Matt Mercer about this…”

That’s one of the best explanations of alignment I’ve ever heard. So many people bash the system without having any sort of alternative other than “burn it down”. Thinking of Lawful vs. Chaotic as “Group system of rule” vs. “Individual concerns first” is really enlightening.

God, that stuff about one shots and campaigns. In campaigns, ideas make themselves. Players voice their interests, you delve into their backstories to come up with characters and elements for some plot that you know they'll be interested in. You can come into a session with a vague idea of how it's going to go, and then collectively everyone at the table somehow gets there. Meanwhile one shots have to have the details ironed out. You have to come into it with more than just vague notions.

25:10 huh. Damn. I take drama in school and we plan drama workshops and stuff, and that’s honestly a really great tip. A lot of my classmates and I try to stick to the workshop plan, but really knowing what the participants want and trying to blend it in with the plan really just helps the flow better than trying to kinda direct them to what you want them to do

Shadows are the greatest example of how inaccurate CR can be. Anything that deals ability score damage is way more deadly than the MM says.

I HAVE MISSED. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE. BY. AN. HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUURRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I genuinely like how the answer to "How do you balance fights?" is, in summary, "Vibe checks"

My favorite things with divination wizard portents is when you roll

I really like changing the axis' of alignment to Obedient Altruistic + Egotistic Defiant It's based on the thing that players do the most, interacting. Why is your character doing this quest? Do they support the system? Like breaking rules for the sake of others would be "Altruistically Defiant" this describes a way to get players to think how their character would interact with the world and each societies systems.

I actually gave a short questionnaire to my players after we finished our first arc. It’s my first campaign as a dm and I wanted to know what their fav and least fav things are, as well as what they’d like to do. I could have just asked, but I wanted physical copies to keep and reference

The description for a 'chaotic-good' character @11:30 is exactly how I viewed my selection when I filled it out on a character sheet. (It also really helped tie together the whole character sheet)

I would love this show to come back. Please Brennan!

LOVING these office hour videos!!!

Thanks for all the ideas, Brennan!

The way he said “your players are gonna be dead” killed me

I like to listen to this kind of videos as there is always some hint, clue or advice you can pick up and use it later ;) It was very entertaining and learning experience.

Thanks for the great insight big brain Brennan! My players will reap the benefits of your philosophical studies

I just found this, and by GOD am I happy I found it

I love that you touched on the nature of Alignment I like to refer to as TNarrative ies to the "Cosmic Destiny" of the setting. I strongly believe such a connection to the larger scope of the setting in question is needed in the general genre of heroic fantasy. And that belief is one of the reasons why the inclusion of alignment matters quite a lot to me.

write-in Brennan Lee Mulligan for NY City Mayor 2021

As a DM that just ran a one-shot session which was supposed to be 5-6 hours, that turned into a two-session 10 hour total mini-campaign. I can confirm, one-shots are hard, and this isn't even the first time I've done this. I didn't go in saying it was easy though, I was aware of the challenge, we just needed to fill a time slot. So funny that I'm watching this video after just wrapping that campaign up lol. Anyways, appreciate your very helpful information! Thank you for doing what you do Brennan!

the intro pitch on dropout's buck sale had brennan serving saul goodman in a way i have scarcely seen.... "For a *buck!*" is the particular moment where the voice goes full Odenkirk

the man simply never misses

People in Harry Potter write letters for the same reason I never answer my phone and reply through text: I hate talking to people.

I wish this show had more episodes

Awesome vid Brennan

Love the scenario.

Welp this randomly showed up in my recommended and I love it.

I would love to see Brennan DM a campaign with a more traditional fantasy theme.

I like your take on random encounters. I often will make my own table and come up with a story thread for that encounter so that it doesn't seem random but part of the story

Agreed. “Another person” is a fantastic username ^_^

I stopped just watching these for the advice and just to study how brennen speaks to people. He gives off such a friendly and reverent attitude that I can't help but feel like I'm getting better at being a person just listening while I cook.

Just chock full of great advice

I like to think of random encounters as less like running into whatever in the woods and more like stuff you can randomly find in the world. Like most of my encounter table is made up of things like old houses, ruins, or something magical.

If only more DMs would take this to heart. There is a huge difference between slogging through waves of hobgoblins on the way to town because the town is under siege by them and slogging through waves of random enemies on the way to town because the dice said so. As mentioned... “S”

The alignment question has me wondering if instead of good, evil, chaos, and lawful, you used the four lenses. I tried this out with my current campaign by dividing the city’s NPC by these four primary personality types. Additionally, I had the PCs start the campaign based on answers that indicate their personality alignment. Blue types ended up in a more spiritual naturist environment, orange ended up in a high adventure lawless regions, golds started in the high rule, high order area of the city, and greens started in a greedy financial district where laws are followed but only because people in the area see the value in them. Might be fun for you to try one day. Now on to the question: what tricks do you use and how do you keep track of what your monsters are capable of in big fights? Like what do you write down on the paper? How do you like to arrange your stat sheets and such so you’re not constantly flipping through notes and papers?

When running ToA I mapped out where they were going on the hex crawl before even playing. I always roll the randoms beforehand so even when random it feels part of the adventure.

I definitely like your take on alignment, it feels more in-tune with how people treat their alignments in game, rather than lawful meaning following the law or evil meaning you have to be a bad guy, it feels more like lawful is a tendency towards systems (whether that's your own code of honor or actual laws) and evil is the tendency towards egotistic goals and anti-social nature, like I've played a Lawful Evil noble sorcerer/rogue before, it didn't mean I played him as some sort of villain trying to find every loophole in the law to do evil things, it meant he had a tendency to follow his culture's laws of nobility and had an ego about his rights as a nobleman from a family that earned its nobility through hard work and politics (Sharn's Noble 60 works more like politics than a true nobility), and over time he lessened in his egotistic nature due to his experience's with the party and became Lawful Neutral, he still held his prior beliefs but not to an egotistic degree and was in that mid-point of not exactly a pro-social individual but no longer held anti-social views, and had that character not needed to leave the campaign due to story consequences/obligations then he may have even become Lawful Good just from how infectiously changing the party was for my evil characters haha.

Man has just changed my life with the perspective on One Shots. Good glory, and to think I'm building a campaign out of One Shots... I need to rethink a few things

Awesome!!

"I LOVE THEM DIRTY BOYS!" GANGREL FOR UNLIFE, KINDRED!

my favorite npc in these videos is the ancient office phone

Yes, that makes sense.

Furiously takes notes

Brennan: Gangrel baby! Brennan a confirmed furry.

I've found that the Law/Chaos Good/Evil is pretty easy to map on a work within/outside the system, society norms or status quo and selfless/selfish axis. A Lawful Evil character uses the systems for personal profit, a Chaotic Good character will break any rule to help others, a Neutral good person will generally follow law but will on occasion break it if it's "unfair", etc. Works pretty well as a starting frame of reference and it aligns fairly accurately with real life morality/politics views. I find it particularly useful to establish where your characters draw the lines, what's acceptable for them and what could reinforce their worldview or instigate a crisis in their beliefs.

With the "oh child..." part at 19:53, I just want to add that every one shot I've ever played has been too good to not go back to it; simple things often bloom into something much greater than their origins.

20:30 "The idea of a one-shot is: You're going to bring this story to a satisfying conclusion in X amount of hours. ... That is hard to do.". This is exactly why I think running one-shots is a good starting point for DMs. Because: 1. It allows you to create a single session without caring about the future, without the expectation of a campaign (even though it could become one). 2. It forces you to try and pace your session. (You could always continue next time or abandon the one-shot if you fail). I have played in campaigns where the individual sessions aren't well paced and getting experienced with the pacing of a one-shot teaches you to have better pacing in all your sessions (even if the pacing doesn't translate 100%). I do want to stress that good pacing doesn't necessarily mean fast pace, just right for the story the table is trying to tell. tl;dr: one-shots are good because it teaches pacing. And every session (even in long form campaigns) should have good pacing.

I was worried about my encounter being too challenging this week... then I rolled 1s 2s and 3s behind the screen, the paladin remembered to bless the party and turned one of the hags, and everyone rolled amazing against saves for petrify, charm, AND polymorph. I thought I was gonna wipe them that Coven of hags, especially since their main healer absent, but the dice gods saved them and made me look so soft. 🤭🤭🤭

On the topic of random encounters, going along with the idea of the final story encounter being a dragon, would an encounter that turns out to not be a true encounter be good storytelling. The idea being the dragon displacing apex predators or such which then push out stuff like wolves. The party would then on the trek become aware of something fast approaching, "encountering" a pack of wolves, rolling initiative. If the party attacks and maybe stops a wolf or two they go on the defensive to survive while the rest of the pack breaks past and flees. This could raise tension first by being an encounter but they more so as there is something more dangerous further on. Thoughts?

Now I wanna see a D20 Vampire the Masquerade season. I need to learn to play it, and watching people play it is the best way. I dont expect this to happen though. So if people reading this have recommendations, I'll take them!

Watching these videos feel like a conference call with the my manager lol

I love how all of your videos feel like conversations lol

Funny enough, because I mostly got my start in RPGs from playing/running games at our local cons, I actually find running a one shot to be way easier to bring to a satisfying conclusion and hit the right story/combat beats than running a long term campaign.

New DM, found this channel recently and absolutely love Fantasy High. I'm 30, a bit above the target audience age, but the setting story telling and set pieces are absolutely amazing.

I’m thinking about trying to be a dm as I ran two oneshots and really enjoyed telling the story and rewarding players for not only their in game choices but for character creation choices. Like a swarm keeper ranger that his swarm was demonic locus so he has a chance to make checks if holy stuff is around

The segment on alignment highlights why the three alignment system is better for me. Chaotic is anti-social and law is pro-social, and good and evil are just subjective descriptions of _acts_ and not beings.

I’m currently running a long campaign and the way I set it up is the end goal of the story is a big treasure that is on the other side of the planet, that a ton of pirates are looking for (one piece inspired campaign). So the campaign is long because of a very distant goal, along the way the players will discover more from their backstories and have smaller goals along the way. The planet is scattered with a thousands of islands so there’s potential for a lot to happen along the way. Unfortunately, the players that started and the players now have changed completely due to scheduling issues and life stuff but the current party is having a lot of fun.

I think of good v evil in dnd as selfish vs selfless behavior, so interesting to hear your view

Was wondering what people woud think about a Elder scrolls universe based campaign, revolving around mostly daedric influence. I feel like the potencial in the intricacies of the daedric princes woud make a fantastic campaign and alliances with said entities coud give you powers like wild magic from sheogorath, vampirism and blood magic from Molag Bal, insane stats at the cost of sanity from hermaous mora, insane stealth bonuses with a paranoia meter from boethiah, lycanthropy from Hircine, that sort of stuff. The Universe of TES is so well written i feel like it woud make a fantastic scenario for a mediaval fantasy setting

Couldn't agree more on the random encounters (or the related, and even worse "wandering monster"). I think the best solution is to design any encounter tables not as just "monster X shows up" but rather as story elements. The random encounter might not even be deadly. It could be a lost traveler that gives you information. It could be mauled cattle that the dragon feasted on. If it is a combat encounter put the same thought into it that you would put into a single dungeon room. What is this creature doing that is related to the story you are telling? It could be a patrol for the orc encampment. Maybe the wolves in the woods have been twisted and changed by the inherit magic coming from the abandoned wizard's tower. The encounter could be something that is normally a part of the static adventure, but you are encountering it in a different location ... which in turn may change the rest of the adventure. Personally, I perfer using index cards to represent each encounter. If an encounter happens, set it aside so that the same encounter doesn't happen again ... that way you're not entering groundhog day territory. If the creature, or the scouting party escape, then feel free to shuffle it back into the deck. Make some notes on the card: the scouts come back with reinforcements, or the creature comes back with it's pack, or when the party shows up at the encampment the orcs are more alert.

"Oneshots are *not* easier". True I've dm-ed a few oneshots and played a lot more. Maybe (and i'm not even sure of that) *one* of them actually was contained within a single session.

And now he is one of the hosts.

hey Brennan how do you prep for a encounter and how much prep is too much, and what monsters are best for level 1-5 .

Brennan, how did you not answer Mage The Ascension? It's Philosophy : The Game, and (I think) the best tabletop RPG ever!

I set out to write a one shot, and quickly decided that it would be a short campaign instead. I think dnd is best if it has some PC leadership in it, and I have not been able to see how to do that in a one shot. I definitely agree that one shots are harder if you try to let them breathe with player choice. If you just drop the party at the front of a dungeon, it might be relatively easy. Great, now I have an idea for a one shot.

The entire Crown of Candy has the highest stakes fights. Like the first fight had a cleric working their butts off, while later on it just got worse

Brennan is just Stever Carell in DnD O_o. And thats why I love him.

The danger room video combine did sort of dips it’s toes into this a little… it’s may be a good idea to run a simulation as the dm privately, where you control everyone, if you’re really worried about how hard an encounter will be

I appreciate deeply that he takes a moment to once again rant about the terrible worldbuilding of Harry Potter, apropos of nothing.

Also on the subject of encounter difficulty if you're running a dungeon where might be multiple encounters in a row you don't want every encounter to be one that's super challenging and pushes the players to the limit to win or there will be no progress made. Having super challenging encounters is great if it's the only one that day, otherwise you're just setting up the party to fail without them having much say in it.

My head cannon for the Harry Potter mail is that magic takes effort and teleporting can be tiring and there may be some amount of magic that shortens the owls travel time.

"someone might get a job" haha

Nice

Totally agree that one-shots are harder than a campaign. It takes much more skill to make a very short story that is also satisfying, than to let the campaign play out over many sessions.

His facial hair shape-up is really good here.

Every one-shot I have run became atleast 2 session adventure and I think they were all better for it

hell yeah Brennan's a Gangrel. Clan Brujah approves.

On the topic of Alignment Charts Reviewer and Funny Swear-y Knob Gag Man, Yahtzee Croshaw, suggested an alternative to the current labels of the alignment chart, one that he uses himself. I don't exactly remember what it was, but it was something like Egoist-SomethinElse-Altruist mixed with optimistic-SomethinElse-Pessimistic

13:00 aliment and the plans Thats why I dont like to use those planes. I keep the elemental ones and then I add a relm of truth and light and a shadow relm of darkness and lies. But the truth can be ugly evil and nast, and the lie can be kind, potective and peaceful. I added the realm of though where ideas are created that bridges all the other realms and is kind of like limbo as its constantly changing.

Honestly, the objectively correct answer to the Wizard subclass question is conjurerer. You can summon any non magical object less than 3 ft in any dimension? You can’t understate how incredible that is

I wanted to ask if Brennan would be at PAX Unplugged this weekend

Cr is under powered if you look at it one to one, but if you make 2-3 easy/medium, 2 hard, and 1 deadly between short rests, as written, youll see it line up more correctly

I really struggle with CR and everything. I ran Descent into Avernus and the game is laid out for characters to go up to LVL 13-15 while the 10 Lvl Characters could have already wiped the floor with the endboss. I'm glad you pointed out surroundings or other perils like time-based happenings. They are way nicer to up the ante. (This campaign also relies a lot on alignment and I kinda adjusted that on the fly a bit because the characters started to really worry about their mission and wanted to help people, even the morally neutral/gray ones and it felt just hollow to have celestial characters disregard them because "good" wasn't on their character sheet? I usually go by impressions wether or not a PC does something cruel or unnecessarily selfish which I consider way worse than just... idk care about the people you're with more than a larger group of people you don't know?)

I love the way you put the alignments, that's such an interesting way of looking at it. It is a LITTLE bit undermined by the fact that lawful characters usually come across as cops rather than "people who are more concerned with systems and less so with individuals". Noup. Cops. They're cops.

As a new game runner I am never sure of if the encounter is going to work or not so I tried to counter balance that by having either an NPC that brings then back or if it's looking like a tpk to move stuff to the after life to get story stuff but also make it a thing to get "back to life" in some way.