Mike Mearls Games
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Building Encounter Building
🕑 Added 2025-07-15 15:28:51 +0000 UTCMany moons ago, encounter building in D&D consisted of:
Pick the monster you wanted to use or roll on a random encounter table
Roll the number of dice indicated on the table or in the monster's description to determine how many of those critters the party faced
Run the encounter
What that system lacked in precision in made up for with ease of use. Roll, roll, run. It's hard to argue with that!
For Odyssey, I figured out at way to make that work. This approach mostly replaces the prior system I had built. It works like this.
Odyssey levels are broken into tiers:
Apprentice tier is the two training levels for new players or campaigns that want to do the full zero to hero arc
Tier 1 covers levels 1 and 2. Tier 2 covers levels 3 to 6. Tier 3 covers levels 7 to 9. Tier 4 is level 10 and beyond.
Breaking the game into tiers lets me give a relative power rating for a monster at each tier. That rating is the number of monsters to use in an encounter per PC for a normal fight. Some creatures are too weak or too powerful to match up against a tier, so they don't get a rating.
I've defined a normal fight as one that could defeat the party. I want Odyssey to, at its baseline, be a more challenging game. It's also easier to build a default that challenges PCs, then give ways to dial things back, than to do the opposite.
I can then take that rating for each tier and convert it to a die expression. If five orcs match up against one tier two PC, the encounter table might tell you to roll 1d10 per PC. Or, a table might assume a party of four and specify 4d10.
Below are two stat blocks, one for a goblin and one for a bugbear. The nice thing about this approach is that I can create one stat block for a humanoid monster and use it throughout the game. I don't need to generate stats goblins of every level, or create a goblin each tier.
The encounter building section shows how many of a monster should appear per PC at the listed tier. Note that the stat blocks lack numbers for apprentice tier. I'll add that later.
Since these are basic monsters, I wanted to keep them simple. They have one ability each that aims to be easy for a DM to run. I've also removed static bonuses to damage and don't use skills as a default. Instead, the creature's ability bonus is set to reflect its natural talents and training. If a skill is important, I'll provide it in the stat block.
These guys also don't have static initiative. I need to figure out exactly how I want that to affect stats. You can assume that the goblin acts on 15 and the bugbear on 20. Since these are agile, swift monsters, they go sooner in the round. An orc probably acts on 10 and a troglodyte on 5.
Comments
Joseph Willis
Tiers remind me of "Dungeon Level" from earlier editions, each having a mildly varied range of encounter difficulty. I do think balancing "per PC" is more intuitive than balancing per an assumed number of PCs, when party sizes may vary wildly in practice.
Thomas Dunn
Could you expand a bit on what you mean when you say a normal fight is one that could defeat the party? Are we talking about a 50/50 chance here, or is it more like any chance?
