Áreas de trabajo durante el periodo 2011 - 2020

“You must understand that there is more than one path to the top of the mountain.” – Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

Create Your Own Combat Missions

Want to design your own combat missions, fully tailored to the people, places and things of your campaign and adventures? Today you’ll learn how to do this, including what design questions to ask and answer along the way. Let total annihilation scenarios take a back seat while you light a fire under your combat creativity.

Why Create My Own Missions?

Ever have your players look up and ask why they’re fighting their enemy? A steady diet of “kill ‘em all” scenarios gets repetitive, causes players to lose focus and eats up a lot of session time.

Last lesson, you learned how to re-imagine total annihilation combats by choosing from a list of alternative missions. Now it’s time for you to add to that list by designing your own engaging combat objectives.

Mission Design Questions

When you create your own missions, ask and answer the following questions. This exercise prepares you for the following step: how to fill out your custom Mission stat block.

Refer to the last section for a brief discussion of each of the three core mission design foundations below.

Tactical Ops

• What areas of the battlefield offer key positional advantages?

o Examples: higher ground, cover, magical phenomena that provide damage buffs

• What areas of the battlefield are particularly dangerous?

o Examples: pits, bridges, rockslides, smoldering fires, toxic vegetation or gas clouds

• What items or creatures on the battlefield are most valuable to either side? o Examples: prisoners, escape routes, treasure hoards

Monster Lore

• How intelligent is the enemy?

o Higher intelligence enemies tend to employ more complex tactics. For example, they’ll be more mindful of exits in the area and employ focus fire on the most threatening party, such as the most effective damage-dealer, most powerful healer, or leader of the group.

• What is the typical behavior and ecology of the enemy?

o How do these creatures fit in the world? Even bandits and goblins tend to have some kind of civilized code, while orcs and ogres tend to be more savage and blunt in their approach.

Adventure Goals

• Why is each side fighting?

o How does this fight tie into quests and adventure goals? What events led to this combat? Why is each side engaging in combat? What do they hope to gain and what do they have to lose?

• Who is each side working for?

o What benefactors, authority figures or power groups are behind the scenes? How do they treat the party or monsters? How loyal is each group to the cause behind the combat and adventure?

Create Your Mission Stat Block: 6 Steps

Now that you’ve identified key areas of the battlefield and explored monster and party motivations in the context of your adventure, it’s time to translate that information into the Mission Stat Block.

Refer frequently to last section’s Top 5 missions for fully detailed examples to guide you throughout the Mission Stat Block creation process.

1. Encounter Name & Mission Type: Give your combat a relevant and exciting name that includes reference to your world or adventure’s key people, places or things. Identify the specific combat mission with a word or short phrase. Your custom mission type should include an action word (see below for details) –

the party must do something. More specifically, the party must do something besides kill everything in sight. Example: Tergyn’s Haunted Shrine: Hold the Line.

2. Mission Success: Identify at least one end condition for success. You expand your mission type name or action word here by fully defining it.

3. Mission Failure: Identify at least one end condition for a failed mission. Here you make it clear what triggers a mission failure. Failure often means a time limit is reached, such as in the Escape Destruction mission. Failure can also mean the mission has changed or the objective is no longer achievable, such as when monsters with a valuable magic item escape the battlefield in the Acquire mission.

4. Encounter Elements: Identify monster types and roles that match up well for your mission. Do the same for features of the area, such as terrain and

furnishings. Add as much detail to the opposition as you like to further tailor encounter elements to your campaign, including key NPC names, for example. 5. Tactics: Identify the monsters’ thought process and priorities in the fight.

Summarize how you expect the combat to play out – movement, attack effectiveness, typical actions in combat – given the impact of the Mission. 6. Twists: Add at least one surprise or wrinkle to the mission. Borrow ideas from

other missions and combine them, or add an event that changes priorities or plans after mission success or failure. You can also refer to your twists in case your current combat encounter is falling flat in actual play. Twists serve as backup plans and surprises to delight your players and keep combat pacing and excitement high.

Mission Action Words

Use the following list of story-rich action words, classic combat objectives and sample Mission types for inspiration to create your own Missions, fully customized for your world and adventures:

• Acquire • Assassinate • Breach

• Break or Destroy Item • Capture

• Delay an Event • Deliver

• Disable or Knock Unconscious • Distract • Escape Destruction • Establish Truce • Escort • Force Surrender • Force Withdrawal • Hold the Line • Infiltrate • Protect

• Reach Before Enemy • Redirect

• Rescue

• Save the Innocent • Seal Away

• Seal Off • Secure

• Split Enemy Force • Steal

• Stop an Event • Survive

• Trap • Trick

Your Combats Now Have Purpose

You’ve now learned how to craft your own combat missions, fully tailored to your adventures and world.

Next, we’re going to delve deeper into how you expect your missions to play out during actual play. You’ll learn what makes a solid encounter planning process from start to finish, including time considerations and story structure-inspired combat pacing.

Resources

Find more at Roleplaying Tips: Mission-Style Roleplaying and 8 Tactics for Mooks. And even more at Leonine Roar: Attack With Your Social Skills!, Encounter as Story: Tiny Encounters, and Fight or Flight? Run Away!, and Monster Complexity and Selection.

2.04 Master Plans: Expand & Upgrade