Building Adventures

These are guidelines I am hoping all DM's will adopt. These are tools that make building adventures easier and will give some consistency and facilitate collaboration. I'd love to hear your input on what we can add or tweak to make this collection of tools even better!

Encounters
An adventure is built of encounters. Think of encounters like lego blocks. You can design them independently and drop them in where it makes sense.

An encounter can be either "minor" or "major." That designation is strictly based on the amount of time they take at the table. An encounter is not necessarily combat. It can be a social encounter, a skill challenge, or a trap to overcome.


 * A minor encounter should be resolved in little table time (Social encounters, simple combat w/o mat, traps, skill challenges).
 * A major encounter takes more time (generally combat with battle mats).

An adventure will also have one or more objectives.


 * A major objective is the focus of the adventure.
 * A minor objective is for a "side quest."

Random Generators
Chaosgen https://www.chaosgen.com/dnd5e/random-encounter/


 * This is my favorite name / NPC / location generator. The random names are a lot better than any of the others I've seen. hey are actually cool and pronounceable.

Session
An adventure should usually take a single session, maybe two or three at the most.

A session of content should generally have:


 * A Major objective
 * One Cinematic encounter (a setpiece battle near top end of XP scale)
 * One to two other major encounters
 * Two to four minor encounters
 * 1 treasure hoard

Secrets
See the Lazy Dungeon Master's Article: https://slyflourish.com/sharing_secrets.html

Come up with a list of 10 "secrets" the players might uncover during the adventure. They can be information that will help them in the current adventure, bits of lore about the world, fantastic locations the players might visit later, or leads about new quests. They are bite-sized bits of information you can drop to the players that are not tied to any specific location or action. They can be dropped in or handed out whenever it is appropriate.

Calculating XP
Combat XP can be in a minor or major encounter and is the encounter difficulty XP. That is, add up the XP for all the monsters based on CR and apply the multiple for more than one monster.

Minor is "easy" XP or combat XP

Major is "medium" XP or calculated from difficulty including multiplier for multiple monsters.

Climactic is "Deadly" or calculated (+ 10 - 50% if adding in lair and villain actions). Cinematic could involve lair actions, villain actions, and other complications. It is a set-piece battle.

Get full XP for the difficulty (not per monster) include the monster multiple

1/2 XP if bypassed, only get rest of XP if defeated

1/2 XP if partial success

1/4 XP if Wandering Monster / added complication

XP Bands
In the campaign, generally speaking, the areas get harder the farther you go from Galderia. Designing adventures around a few specific levels appropriate of a small range of character levels, gives us "level bands." It simplifies the building process by giving us fewer targets to have to build towards, but it also gives us a nice mix of "easy and hard." When characters are at the bottom of a level band, the encounters will be harder for them, but then they get their new abilities and those abilities feel pretty awesome as they have an easier time, but then things get harder again.

Instead of 5-level tiers, these are 3 level ranges giving us smaller, but more frequent ups and downs. Players can also drastically adjust the difficulty by going into areas outside of their level bands if they dare.

XP Band Table
XP Band - this is the level of the characters the band is intended for.

XP Range - build encounters with these budgets. Budgets are based on the XP for 4 characters of the middle range from easy to hard value, except the first band which is based on level 5. Minor encounters should be built towards the bottom value, major towards the middle of the range and cinematic towards the high end.

Loot Table - use that loot table for generating treasure hoards.

Cinematic Encounters
Build a single "set piece" encounter to use as the cinematic climax of the adventure. Consider adding in special twists, an interesting map, a custom "boss" monster maybe with special "villain actions," maybe lair actions, maybe "minion" monsters (as in D&D 4e: monsters with their HP lowered to 1). Watch Matt Colville's video on villain actions here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_zl8WWaSyI And here is Dungeon Coach's Take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xua9kgK9W1Q Also, if there are magic items as treasure, maybe they are being used by the monsters against the players here.

Zones
See https://theangrygm.com/schrodinger-chekhov-samus/

A zone, area, or dungeon can be "statted up" so that specific encounters will be easy to generate and the zone can interact with other zones.

The zone has a level around which encounters are built and a total number of XP. Once the XP value of monsters are killed or driven off, the zone is empty. The XP value should have enough for about 1 session worth of content.

The zone replenishes between sessions if the party leaves unless they lower the zone below its "depleted" threshold.

Other things may be triggered at other XP thresholds or other events.

The zone also has a roster a DM can select from to build encounters. To get things started, the DM just  generates some encounters based on the roster totaling the XP level of the zone.