It all started with an Eldritch Horror. As a Dungeon Master (DM) I had a great idea for an encounter in my leg of the Dungeons & Toast guild (club) adventure in the previous year’s guild campaign, Heirs of the Dragon, and it involved an Eldritch Horror. The idea was sound; the execution was not. (At the time of this adventure, the Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition [5e] ruleset was used.)

I struggled with how to create the creature that I wanted and to make it fair, yet still a challenge, to the Player Characters (PCs). What got in the way and tripped me up was game mechanics.

Another thing that got in the way was my execution of the idea and the encounter. First mistake, I should have reached out to the players involved and asked beforehand if it was okay to have something potentially bad, and violent, happen to their characters, even if only temporarily. I felt bad doing what I planned to happen in the encounter to one of the PCs, so I did it to my own character in the campaign, who probably got the worst of it, all things considered.

In service of telling the story during this encounter, I took some agency away from the players to be in control of the destiny of their characters.

If I were to run the encounter all over again, I would do it differently, to address the aforementioned things. This is how we learn, right, from our mistakes?

Fast forward to this year’s Dungeons & Toast guild campaign, the Prophecy of the World Eater, where I am again serving as a DM. Yes, I’m at it again with creature and encounter design. In my leg of the campaign adventure, players will have more agency and be more in control of their character’s destinies than in the adventure with the Eldritch Horror. I intend to accomplish this by having more communication with players before the adventure and a redesign of encounters, based on my experience with the previously mentioned Eldritch Horror encounter, to allow for more player choice, control, and determination of what happens with their characters. This time, however, I completely dispensed with game mechanics in the process of encounter design to create what I envisioned. Then, and only then, did I turn to game mechanics to assign those in game statistics and mechanics that are necessary and that powers any RPG and makes them go; always with an eye towards making it fair for the PCs. More I cannot say, as I don’t want to give away more than I already have to the players. (Since the players may be reading this, perhaps it’s too late for that!)