Plenty of RPG encounters, especially D&D encounters, are boring. How do you make them more interesting? By setting the stakes.

See, many GMs automatically see encounters as fights to the death, which will only end when just one of the two sides is left alive. At the same time, PCs aren’t supposed to die very often in order to build up investment in their character arcs. This mentality leads to encounters that have a 99% chance of doing nothing and a 1% chance of unceremoniously killing a major character through a fluke die roll, and that’s neither narratively interesting nor fun.

The good news is that there are a ton of possible consequences for losing an encounter besides killing the PCs outright, even some things that help the story rather than hurting it! If you design encounters with more appropriate stakes than life or death, you can make encounters as difficult, and therefore intense, as you want, since the players failing isn’t something you’re actively trying to avoid.

0:00 Bad Combat Encounters
2:04 Bad Noncombat Encounters
3:26 How to Set the Stakes
5:00 Good Combat Encounters
6:04 Good Noncombat Encounters
7:15 Conclusion

Next time: a surprise video, though I promise it’s RPGrelated.