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The Art of the Disruptive Encounter

Art is what you can get away with, so the disruptive encounter is clearly a piece of art in the GM realm.  Sometimes things get boring. Sometimes the PCs seem like they are a step ahead.  You get to that point where you need a big change.  This is your tool: the disruptive encounter.

The disruptive encounter has a few key characteristics that make is extremely powerful in altering your game:

  • It breaks a key assumption.  By breaking this PC assumption it requires a complete rethink.
  • It forces a change in the party plan. They may have had a lot of time to plan things before this, but now they are starting from scratch.
  • It rotates the alignment matrix.  By scrambling what is good, evil, lawful, and unlawful, the PCs may not longer know where they stand.
  • It denies an implicit pending success. The PCs were planning to find the leader in the next city and kill him, but now things have gotten a lot more complicated.
Let's do a quick example.  My PCs are chasing down an enemy in a dungeon.  The enemy is a real bad guy who has been killing people, stealing, and all that sort of stuff.  He seems connected to other bad guys they have been fighting. During the big fight, the party knocks a necklace off of the bad guy.  In a struggle to get it, they hit is with a weapon.  A portal opens and they are teleported.

On the other side of the teleport they find an ancient black shadow dragon.  He is sitting in a castle that has a hypermagic field x100.  He has an army of giants serving him.  He is controlling all of these bad guys and plans to take control of Waterdeep.

So the twists are definitely there.  The bad guys they have been fighting are victims of this dragon (rotating the alignment matrix).  This new big bad isn't something they can fight; their plan is out the window until they gather allies.  Their success against this current bad guy is snatched away and now they have a new problem to solve.

Disruptive encounters aren't something to use all the time.  They can, however, be used a couple of times in a campaign to give it a unique twist, and to switch up the adventures.  Use them when your players aren't engaged.  Use them when you, as the GM, gets bored.  Use them whenever you need them, and continue to have fun gaming.

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