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Build Single-Encounter Situations

by Mike on 5 January 2026

"Build situations, not plots" is, to me, a vital piece of advanced GMing. Building situations breaks GMs away from directing stories towards the characters and instead develops situations that can go many different directions based on the choices of the players and actions of the characters.

When you watch situations unfold at the table, as the characters interact with your setup, it really captures the joy of tabletop RPGs.

Sometimes situations are single specific scenes – like an encounter along a journey. Other times they're larger, the whole situation at a warlord's keep or a fey court banquet. Today we're going to focus on single-encounter situations.

Setting up situations often requires the following components:

A location
Inhabitants at that location
Something going on

We set up these components without assuming particular outcomes. These situations live with or without the characters. When the characters collide with them, lots of things could happen. There's no script. You haven't pre-determined how it plays out. You're playing to see what happens.

Single-Encounter Situations

Smaller situations take place in single scenes - perhaps the characters running into something interesting on their way along a journey.

The situation could be as simple as some dire wolves eating a couple of dead adventurers at a big fallen tree. Or it could be that, at a ruined watchtower, a dwarven caravan master is upset with a traveling priest for stating the heresy that the smith god Volund is actually in love with the gear goddess Rava.

Add Monuments or Landmarks

For smaller scenes, we can roll on a list of monuments (available in the Lazy DM's Companion and also in the Lazy GM's Resource Document) to create a backdrop for our situation. Add flavor with conditions, descriptions, origins, and maybe a roll on your custom faction list for your campaign.

These monuments or landmarks create a backdrop for the scene. They're also fantastic vehicles for Secrets and Clues.

Add Inhabitants

Situations often require inhabitants. These inhabitants might be monsters, friendly NPCs, or both. If you're stuck for ideas, roll on your favorite random encounter table for the region. If you need some inspiration, I love the random encounter tables from Level Up Advanced 5e. Though made for 5e, they work for lots of fantasy RPGs.

One of my favorite tricks for building a situation is to roll twice and mix two results together. Not all encounters need be monsters or hostile creatures – sometimes it's fun to meet some nice folk.

Set Up the Situation

What's going on at this location? What are the inhabitants doing there? Here's a short list of general activities inhabitants in a situation might be doing.

Sleeping
Eating
Preparing a camp or lair
Guarding
Hunting
Preparing for battle

One trick is to use a table-less oracle die to determine activities – the higher the number, the more extreme or aggressive their activity.

Here's a longer list for more detailed activities. These activities may or may not work well depending on the level of the sentience of the creatures involved.

Searching for treasure
Building something
Engaging in a ritual
Arguing
Taking prisoners
Researching the area
Hunting for something
Protecting someone or something
Preparing for war
Preparing to spring a trap
Decorating
Recovering after a battle
Trying to escape
Seeking revenge
Hunting something or someone
Magically drawn to the area
Gambling or engaged in sport
Preparing to rob passers by
Looking to buy or sell
Scouting for a larger group

You can often use quest tables to determine the activities of inhabitants at a location. NPCs go on quests too!

Attitudes

What are the attitudes of the inhabitants of a location? Attitude is a common consideration for more exploration-focused folk-fantasy RPGs. Maybe a creature is friendly or indifferent to the characters instead of hostile. Here's a short table of attitudes.

Friendly
Curious
Indifferent
Suspicious
Hostile
Violent

Like activity, you can roll a table-less oracle die where hostility increases the higher the roll.

The Draw

Why would the characters get involved in these situations? If the characters sneak up on a battle between two groups of monsters, what would make them want to get involved? We don't need to put too much pressure on this – but enough to at least have the characters question whether they should get involved or not. Here's a list of potential motivators:

They can see some treasure down there.
They get hints that there's some useful information there.
They can save someone.
They see a hated foe.
They might want to protect the monument.
They see hints of interesting lore.
They see a potential ally they can recruit.
A creature has an ingredient they might want to craft a magic item.
They see the opportunity to unveil a mystery.
They see the opportunity to plant some misdirection for their foes.

Tying Encounters to the Larger Story

Some players and GMs complain that these sorts of encounters, particularly random encounters, don't tie to the larger story of a campaign. They feel like filler.

Situations need not be independent from the larger story. We can use our faction list to not only flavor monuments but also NPCs or rewards as well. You might have your own idea how to tie these single-scene situations to something going on with the characters but you can also roll on your faction list and see what comes up.

All the elements of these single-encounter situations are fantastic vehicles for secrets and clues – which are tied directly to the interests of the characters and the events of your campaign. Because secrets and clues are abstracted from their method of discovery, you can apply them wherever they make sense in situations like this – items, locations, NPCs, monsters, and so on.

Use factions and secrets to connect single-encounter situations to the larger story of your campaigns.

Things that Came Before

Along with rolling multiple times on a table to mix two encounters together, you can use your rolls to determine things that happened before the characters arrived. Sometimes a situation already occurred and now the characters are figuring out what happened. Perhaps the characters stumble upon a blood-covered cenotaph of a champion of the Nameless King and find signs of a struggle between some travelers and a band of head-hunting gnolls. The characters see that the gnolls killed some of the travelers but dragged others off to their nearby lair. What do the characters do? That's a fun situation.

Signs of things that happened before are great ways to build investigative situations instead of simply dropping in on hostile monsters. Having the characters investigate events that happened before can also help with pacing if a big battle would take too long.

The Characters' Approach

For overland exploration and travel sessions, we sometimes use character roles to determine what the characters do during their journey. You can read more about these roles in Running Hex Crawls for D&D, 5e, or Shadowdark.

Three common exploration roles include scout, pathfinder, and quartermaster. How well the characters accomplish these roles can determine how they engage in the situations we built above. If the scout does particularly well, the characters can witness the situation without being observed. If they do poorly, the characters may stumble into it. If the pathfinder does poorly, the characters may stumble into another encounter entirely. If the quartermaster does poorly, the characters might find themselves engaging in the encounter exhausted and poorly prepared. You can use the rolls of these exploration tasks as variables to further change the situation the characters get involved in.

The Core Gameplay of Tabletop RPGs

Single-encounter situations encapsulate the best parts of tabletop RPGs. They lay things out in front of the characters and give players the agency to decide how to engage with them. Though focused on a single scene, we can take the ideas of these single-scene situations and expand them out to whole adventures and even campaigns, keeping the focus on putting interesting situations in front of the characters and seeing what happens next.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video.

Last week I also posted a YouTube video on Journey to Winter's Love – Dragon Empire Prep Session 50.

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

Run a single memorable encounter during a journey between two places.
Use travel roles like scouts, pathfinders, and quartermasters to see how well a journey goes.
If scouts do well keeping an eye out for danger, the characters might sneak up on a dangerous encounter. If they don’t do well, the characters stumble into it.
Offer a few paths the characters can choose from when they journey between two places. Make sure each path has a compelling reason to choose it.
Build travel encounters with weather, monuments or landmarks, potential NPCs, maybe a couple different types of monsters, their activities, and a compelling reason to get involved.
An easy way to change up weather is to roll a D6. The higher the roll, the more severe the weather.
Understand the journey system of your RPG of choice. Feel free to hand-wave it if it gets arduous.

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This work includes material taken from SlyFlourish.com by Michael E. Shea available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license.

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