Short Encounters to Make Players Excel
I plan to publish a series of small, simple encounters for Dungeons & Dragons (5.5e). Encounters that take just a few minutes to solve, and are designed to make PCs feel special because they’re an easy win if you’ve got a particular ability.
Not every encounter needs to be complex, resource draining, or a near death experience to make the players feel like they’ve accomplished something. It is a good idea to throw in small, quick encounters between big ones to break up the pace while still adding depth and interest to a campaign. Targeting a particular ability, skill or spell that a PC has, will make a player feel good by allowing them to use lesser used abilities. Take the classic Elf ability to resist magical sleep. In many campaigns these days this kind of ability is rarely exercised and many utility spells or abilities often go forgotten.
Of course, these encounters need to be solvable when that ability remains forgotten, despite the number of hints a DM might drop, so there are always ways to solve these problems without using the key ability that inspired them.
Perhaps I should just show rather than tell, here’s an example of what I’m talking about:
Black Fingers
Target Ability: Aasimar’s Inner Radiance racial ability
Ability Summary: Bright light shines from the Aasimar’s eyes and mouth, casting bright light in a 10ft radius and Dim in another 10. It also deals damage to creatures within 10ft.
Description:
The tunnel narrows ahead of you, you can make out black slimy tendrils, writhing in an non-existent wind like seaweed moving in a strong current.
Black Fingers are a type of undead mushroom that prey on insects and other small creatures by catching them in their sticky tendrils, dealing necrotic damage and then feeding off the corpses as they break down.
It would be possible to hover through the center of the passage, but as the clump extends for at least 30ft, jumping through would be difficult.
Light causes the tendrils to curl up, but creatures moving through the space take 2 damage per 5ft.
Any amount of Radiant damage destroys the fingers.
Fire damage causes the mushrooms to smoulder and produce a lot of smoke. Dealing 1 damage to anyone caught in the noxious fumes.
Any other kind of damage will destroy a patch, but the remains have to be laboriously cleared away without touching them, damage is still dealt by the dying/dead mushrooms.
So the idea is that this is a gimmie, a trivially easy task for an Aasimar possessing this ability. If the Aasimar’s player forget to use the ability, you can still describe the slow, damaging effect of the fingers as they are cleared. Either way, it shouldn’t take up more than 5 minutes of everyone’s time, and ideally, it will make the Aasimar’s player say “I’d forgotten I had that ability, but it was really useful here”.
I plan to write up a bunch of these and post them here, then maybe chuck them in a pdf if people find them useful. Most of these encounters are not playtested yet, so let me know if you give them a try and what inevitably goes wrong.