A list of ideas to help design a fun encounter
I’m not so much of the “random encounter” team, I really like the combats with custom made difficulties and puzzles. Of course those take a really long time to make, but through the years I found out that I can boil down fun combat ideas to a short collection of categorized gimmicks.
Designing a custom fun combat with those is immensely more doable, and I built the document to make it a step by step process !
You can find it here, it’s a google sheet, there is even a tab with a randomizer and another one with an analysis of the battles in the dimension20 actual play, to pinpoint which design gimmicks were used in each battle episode.
Hope you like it !
edit : added a form in the doc, if you want to submit the battle you made using the framework!