Three Sides to Every Story - An Idea for Encounter Notes

[Weregrognard]

This is hardly revolutionary, but I think my encounters would benefit from writing notes for different ways to "solve" them. The main ones I can think of are combat, stealth, and non-combat. The "combat" notes are obvious: stats, tactics, etc. The "stealth" notes would include creatures senses, their alert status and such. Finally, the "non-combat" notes would include things like NPCs motivations (if social) and/or an appropriate skill challenge.

Thoughts? Ideas on format for this?

 

[Whisper72]

Hmmm... you seem to link it to the monster itself rather than the encounter in the broader sense. I think it would definately be a good idea to, beforehand, think how the players/PC's could solve the problem / advance the storyline if you will without killing the monster.

One way to reinterpret the 'three ways', when looking at it from the monster/adversary perspective is as follows:
- solve the problem 'through'/'against' the monster (i.e. kill or incapacitate it, the monster is in an adversarial state of being)
- solve the problem 'around' the monster (i.e. how you can somehow trick, guile, sneak around or whatever to get what you need)
- solve the problem 'with' the monster (i.e. what can you do such that the monster is willing to help you out of free will. This gets into monster motivation, what can your PC's do for the monster such that it cooperates. This could also be done by threatening the monster and bluffing that you can destroy it and cooperation is the only way to stay alive.)