Dungeon Room Appendix: Monsters, and Encounters

All things considered, I'm surprised this one took as long to materialize at it has.

The topic began bubbling in my mind when I wrote my room post on Animal Rooms. I will repeat some of what I said there, but I realized I could say more, so get comfortable, because there's a lot more to say.

So let's talk about monsters.

Here there be monsters

Why do dungeons have monsters? Resist the urge to get wistful and metaphorical (what is a "monster", anyways?), I don't write this blog to lift your mind to new places (for one, based on my actual qualifications that would feel pretentious), I write it to give you practical tools. Simply put, "monsters" are there to:

• Present a challenge. We're not just walking around a museum, right? Monsters are a source of tension and excitement, and an impetus for problem solving.
• Explain why the loot hasn't been carried off already. If this was just a dusty basement surely someone would have come through here already, and we're not generally playing an archaeology game.
• Make the dungeon come to life. The dungeon is a place. Hopefully not just a series of grey cubes. Things persist here, lurking in the shadows.
• Demonstrate how weird the dungeon is compared to the mundane world. Adventure is driven by a sense that we're going places and doing things that we don't generally get to do in our normal lives. Few things in normal life really qualify as "monsters", and the abundance of them within a dungeon reinforces that this place is not mundane--it's fantastic.

Depending who you ask, monsters are kind of "the point" of dungeon crawling. Because, be honest, you don't really go down there just for the game master to say "Wow, you found a dusty golden figurine of Donald Duck! What a find!". Meanwhile, I think many people would still go into that dungeon just because there are monsters to fight. (Sigh.) Basically, monsters are kind of the primary source of obstacle in these games (hazards are a close second), and challenge is what makes them games and not simply collaborative storytelling sessions (no matter what some people want to insist).

Now, I'm not saying that you can just remove one of these elements completely and still have a fun game ahead of you (at least not without replacing them with something that serves a similar purpose), I'm just saying monsters are important, y'know?

What is a monster?

I've lulled you into a false sense of security. We are going to go there. Sort of.

Because "monster" is an extremely nebulous term--one of those kind of porridge-y words that we all sort of get, but without any strict definition--and if we take it too literally we really limit our options and the kinds of gameplay experiences we can be having.

If we take the most obvious definition of "monster", we will probably end up with a grab bag of things like "scary", "weird", and "wants you dead". Even that is a bit vague, but it's broad in all the wrong ways. It leaves the aesthetics of a monster wide open, while dramatically narrowing their actual function in one particular direction. All we get are goblins, and ghouls, and strange oozes, and cackling demons. With a definition like that as our guide, monsters quickly become things that we can almost exclusively address by just running in guns blazing.

Remember those monster "purposes" above and step back to the wider view: "monsters" are the living entities that do those. What we are after are encounters that breathe life, texture, and--yes--challenge into a dungeon crawl.

Putting monsters to work

I'm waxing longwinded already, so let's cut to the goods. Dungeon dwellers should cover the following roles:

• Something to fight.  Yes, truly. People like this part! They want to do it sometimes.
• Something to avoid. That thing will kill you, like, with certainty. Better to lure it elsewhere, or go around, or some other creative avoidance. It's a good reminder that the players are not special cupcakes and that survival requires caution.
• Something to talk to. Not only is it important for variety's sake (we cannot just spend the whole time swinging swords around), but it's a great lever: whether this be some abandoned prisoner, a representative of a local faction, or just an intelligent "monster", someone that can be reasoned with is a potential ally or resource for new creative possibilities.
• Something that's just there. Like, it just lives here. And it's not going to chase you down for walking through. I elaborated heavily on this idea in that Animal Rooms post, but the short version is, bring this place to life with living things that don't just want to eat you. It's a good idea for lots of reasons (...I'll just copy paste it on the end of this post).

The balance of these roles is somewhat a matter of taste, but I would encourage you to make sure you have at least one entity geared towards each purpose.

Another angle to look at your dungeon dwellers from is to evaluate them on the following axes:

• Intelligent vs. Bestial. (The key question here is "could we negotiate with it?")
• Solitary vs. Grouped. (In particular, whether they work as individual units, or rely on group coordination)
• Aggressive vs. Friendly. (Of course "ambivalent" or "variable" are options on this axis; Reaction rolls are intended to force this kind of variety into your game)
• Deadly vs. Non-threatening
• Melee vs. Ranged
• Physical vs. Magical
• Familiar vs. Strange. (you could split this into two axes: in terms of body plan, or in terms of mindset or desires)

Think of it like a Myers-Briggs personality test. A single dungeon dweller is going to fall somewhere on each spectrum ("ya, I'm a BSANMSP sort of monster"). What you should really avoid is filling your dungeons with things that exclusively hit one end of those spectrums, and never the other. That's a recipe for a game that feels incredibly same-y. 

Too often, I think game masters rely on pure aesthetics to differentiate monsters. The popularity of such philosophies as Just Use Bears is sound evidence that there is much to be gained in this arena! But, let's put it in numerical perspective: with just the seven binary attributes above, you can define 128 different monsters. Do yourself a favor and don't limit yourself to basically-just-four. Plus, in practice it's not like you need to re-invent the wheel either: just look at your encounter table and do a gut-check to see if  there's an obvious gap you can fill to keep things interesting. For example, switching to ranged monsters can really shake things up!

Dealing with monsters

Along with presenting entities whose attributes spice up your usual encounters, it's worth thinking about the kinds of obstacles your monsters are presenting. There are just a few ways that monsters can present as "obstacles":

• The monster is standing in the way of something you need. It guards the gate, or the bridge, or just likes to sleep in this room we need to get through. The monster is merely near what you're after, and not liable to ignore passersby. In such cases, if we aren't killing the monster, we may be luring it away, sneaking past, or bribing it for safe passage. If we pull something sneaky, there are not likely to be lingering consequences.
• The monster has something you need. It's got the magical artifact you want, or it's liver juices are a cure for male-pattern-baldness, or it knows the secret to ending the plague, and so on. The key thing is that the monster is possessive of what you're after. In such cases, if we aren't killing the monster we are either bartering with it or stealing from it. Maybe capturing it. (And several of those options are sure to make it very mad.)
• The monster is the problem. The hag is kidnapping children, or the dragon is burning down villages. We're going to have to kill it, or capture it, or--if we're very, very persuasive--bribe it. The threat has to actually be neutralized; confrontation is probably a must.

This is another litmus test: are all of my monster-obstacles of only one variety? (Fun aside: wilderness encounters are kind of like inverting these points--now you're in the monsters way!)

Again, we can look at this same idea from another angle; what are the different ways we can interact with a monster?

• Fight it.
• Head on, direct confrontation.
• Lure it into a trap and let the trap do the work.
• Lead it into confrontation with something else. "Let them fight!"
• Negotiate with it.
• By barter; an exchange of value.
• By threat; we're the ones in control here.
• Observe it.
• Stake out; we need to learn something about the monster.
• Tail it; it will lead us to something we're looking for.
• Avoid it.
• Lure it away, with something it wants, or just a distraction
• Sneak past it, either with great skill, or patience to wait for the right moment.
• Just nope right out of there. We'll find another path to what we need.

You can shape the way players interact with monsters by crafting goals and monsters that don't require a single solution--wouldn't it be a shame if all we did was fight everything? (This is part of the problem with especially powerful player characters and/or perpetually "balanced" encounters: every problem quickly becomes resolvable by just stabbing things--the incentive for creative problem solving is at it's lowest.)

Monster strategies and tactics

Finally, it's worth talking a little about how monsters treat the players to keep things interesting. Even if your monsters are all the hungry/angry/malicious sort that exist purely to be battled, there are many ways they can make this more interesting, at least.

Let's rip a page from MCDM's book (uh... not literally... maybe that was a poor choice of idiom in this case) and look at the different combat roles a monster can take:

• Ambusher. Entities that specialize in being sneaky and taking you by surprise. The kinds of monsters that get the drop on you and always attack first.
• Artillery. Ranged attackers that always keep their distance.
• Brute. That big heavy who hits hard. The direct, confrontational kind of creature that get's in your face.
• Controller. Entities with non-offensive abilities that mess with you--creating disadvantages, manipulating the battlefield, or even literally moving their enemies around. Everything short of direct damage.
• Leader/Support. Similar to Controllers, but differentiated by how they create advantages for their allies through buffs, calling reinforcements, or other benefits.
• Minions. Basically entities that are pretty worthless individually, but rely on overwhelming numbers to be effective.
• Skirmishers. The hit and run types, they jump in for quick wins then fall back or disappear to set up their next attack.
• Soldiers/Tanks. Basically entities that fill the ranks and take the heat from their more tactically essential comrades.

That's a great overview of the kind of roles monsters can take in combat, and if you and your players enjoy tactics, it's good stuff to think about. It can give you ideas about how to make individual monsters more interesting, or how to group them up in ways that keep things lively, and it can even give you an idea of how your monsters might prefer to stage their encounters, or prepare their stomping grounds to suit their preferred strategies.

(As promised, the following is ripped straight from Animal Rooms)

A discussion on ecology

I love a good dungeon full of hungry monsters. I do! There is much fun to be had in just fighting or running from wild and wondrous beasts that want nothing more than to eat you, or torture you, or torture you then eat you. 

But, we can do more.

Don't get me wrong, if your dungeon is on the small end, or represents some high-concept, you may be best just sticking with the scary monsters. But, if your dungeon is meant to be big, or naturalistic, or part of a long-term campaign, or all of the above (where my megadungeons at?) I think we can benefit from thinking of them through the lens of ecosystem.

The circle of life

That could mean different things to different people, but basically I'm talking about including living things in your dungeon besides the overtly predatory kind.

Why? Well, because you might want to make your fantasy world feel like a world and not just half-price medieval Europe (or whatever time and place inspires you) with a few gryphons and hydras stapled on. What I mean is, if the only things of note in this world are the unbelievable things that want to eat you, then I think you run the risk of making your fantasy world feel a little bit thin (even more so if the only things that don't want to eat you are cows and sheep and other normal stuff.)

Of course, I don't want to create a bunch of extra work for you by giving you a big worldbuilding or speculative-evolution project. Instead, I just want to invite you to run through these questions when building your awesome dungeon or adventure site:

• What is the food chain like around here? I've got my scary predators, sure, but what do they feed on when they can't get adventurers? What are my prey creatures? What do they feed on? If nothing else, there should at least be some rats skittering around in these rooms.
• What sort of fantastic attributes would make even mundane, herbivorous creatures more interesting? Or elevate them to the level of non-trivial obstacles? Those giant slugs might not want to eat you, but they could still emit a drowsy mist when startled. Those sheep are wrapped in steel wool, etc.
• What kind of weird creatures can I come up with when my first concern isn't simple lethality? Constraints are great tools for creativity at times, but at others they're arbitrary limits on the imagination. Let yourself come up with interesting creatures that are benign.

Doing this isn't necessary for a good time, but I do think it can yield certain benefits:

• Fuller ecosystems are more lively. The mushroom forest is more immersive when it's teeming with colorful, pointless fungii, and ambivalent grazing creatures than when it's just a few purple mushrooms and a stalking-centipede.
• Fuller ecosystems can fill gaps in your encounter table. Empty spaces are important. But when we say "empty spaces are important" we don't usually mean "every other room should be a gray cube with nothing to look at". It's not always easy to come up with an interesting, lore-infused art piece to put in a room, or a really compelling hazard; innocuous, non-threatening creatures are just another tool in the toolkit to fill the gaps with something to look at and interact with.
• Ecological principles are gameable levers. If you know what a predator eats, you know what can be used to lure or bribe them. If you know where it's nest is, you know what to steer clear of, or how to effectively threaten something precious to it, or where to find some loot.
  A prey animal might be a source of a valuable potion component. A herd of docile creatures might be whipped up into a frenzy to cause a distraction. A fresh carcasse might alert you to a nearby threat. These don't have to be mechanically pointless inclusions; they can be just as functional and interesting as any other kind of set-dressings turned solutions-looking-for-problems.

Not just animals

For what it's worth, all of those ideas above can be applied to things that aren't just animals. While a very naturalistic dungeon might benefit from the addition of some grazers and whatnot, even a very fantastic and niche dungeon benefits from things that are not immediately threatening. For example, a crypt might have many animated corpses in various states of decay that are not actively hostile; just imagine how atmospheric it would be for your players to wade through legions of legless skeletons that can only grasp at their ankles without effect, or whispy ghosts that wail and moan but do no harm, de-materializing on contact. These things are fun and interesting and "alive" even if they're not a combat encounter waiting to happen! Food for thought.

And with that, I think to say more would be to overwhelm (if I haven't already). Thanks for reading.