Opponents of the dreaded "quantum ogre" argue that players lose agency if you move encounters to whatever path players choose. Breaking down encounters into the separate components of the eight steps
Opponents of the dreaded "quantum ogre" argue that players lose agency if you move encounters to whatever path players choose. Breaking down encounters into the separate components of the eight steps from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master – secrets, locations, NPCs, monsters, and treasure avoids moving entire pre-defined encounters from one spot to another and instead lets you build contextually relevant encounters based on the choices of the characters, the situation in the world, and what's fun for the table.
What Is a Quantum Ogre?
If you're not familiar with the concept of the quantum ogre, here's the original blog post with the term as best as I can find, and a rebuttal article for the concept. The quantum ogre defines a situation where the GM build an encounter and, no matter what path the characters choose, the characters face that encounter.
Some GMs argue moving encounters this way takes away meaningful choices for the characters. No matter what path the characters choose, they're facing the same ogre. Why have a choice at all? Others argue that the illusion of choice is what matters. We're all playing games here – who really cares if an encounter moves? Maybe that ogre encounter is a lot more interesting than whatever the GM can improvise at the moment.
What's In an Encounter
We're focusing on the ogre here, but there's more to an encounter than just an ogre. Deciding that the characters face an ogre in the woods isn't particularly interesting – other features to our encounter to make it interesting. We talked about the criteria for an interesting situation in Building Single-Encounter Situations. Components of an interesting encounter can include:
- A monument or backdrop
- Weather (if it makes sense)
- A situation
- Attitudes and behavior
- A "draw" (something to interest the characters in getting involved)
We might roll randomly to determine some of these things. The Lazy GM's Resource Document includes tons of tables to help you improvise some of these components. Others you can generate using a table-less oracle die.
Maybe you pre-roll some of these concepts and maybe you improvise some of them at the table depending on what happens in the game and what paths the characters choose. It's not a quantum ogre if the characters' choices change the encounters they face.
Building Encounters with the Eight Steps
The eight steps of lazy GM prep break out your prep into components to help you improvise situations, scenes, and encounters as you need them during the game. The eight steps split prep into locations, monsters, NPCs, secrets and clues, and treasure.
Then, during the game, you can build the scene – choosing the right components for the location, situation, and best opportunity for fun at the table.
Is that a quantum ogre? Some GMs might say it is, but choosing such things randomly seems to be ok. There's no GM thumb on the scale if you're rolling randomly. You might, for example, make a 1d6 list of the monsters the characters might encounter on their journey and roll on it for any given encounter along the way. You might mix two encounters together to build an interesting situation. I think it's just as fine deciding that a particular monster makes for an interesting situation without rolling but your own opinions might vary.
I also think it's ok to put some of these situations together into different scenes and drop in those scenes where they make sense. This isn't a situation where you have only one scene you dearly love – you have several scenes – but you're choosing the one that best fits the moment.
Meaningful Choice
The key here is to value the players' choices. You don't want to set up meaningless choices where the characters pick a path and their choice doesn't matter. When improvising scenes from your prep, ensure the scene you improvise benefits from that choice. Did they go into the wild woods to avoid being seen by corrupt guards along the main road? Show them some wild creatures and an overgrown monument with some lost treasure. Did they decide to brave the main road regardless of the corrupt guards? Let them run into some of those corrupt guards threatening some strange pilgrims carrying a grim reliquary and see how they react to it.
Don't ignore player choices – build off of them.
Prepare to Improvise
The real fun of tabletop RPGs comes when no one knows what's going to happen and we discover it together. A mix of tools, preparation, and improvisation helps us build meaningful and interesting situations without taking away the agency of the players to choose the paths they choose.
More Sly Flourish Stuff
Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs.
Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics
Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video.
- House Rules from Various 5es, Every Roll Doesn't Need Mechanical Outcomes
- Grotto of the Grandfather for Shadowdark
- Secret Project Update
- Land of Eem on Bundle of Holding
- Cairn Players Guides for Super Cheap
- The $140 Artificer Subclass
- Dungeon Masters Liveplay Thoughts
- Two Minute Session Zero
Patreon Questions and Answers
Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers.
Talk Show Links
Here are links to the sites I referenced during the talk show.
- Sly Flourish Podcast
- Sly Flourish RSS
- Sly Flourish Website
- Sly Flourish on Bluesky
- Sly Flourish on Mastodon
- House Rules from Various 5es
- Every Roll Doesn’t Need a Mechanical Outcome
- Land of Eem Bundle
- Cairn Player's Guide
- Cairn free on the Web
- Cairn PDF free on Itch.io
- Dungeon Masters liveplay D&D show
Last week I also posted a couple of YouTube videos on The Simplest Quest Model and Ossuary of Mot Part 2 – Dragon Empire Prep Session 64.
RPG Tips
Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. My list shrunk a little bit so I'm doing fourteen of them this week! Here are this week's tips:
- Use maps and terrain for exploration and roleplaying as well as combat.
- Use visuals to tie players to the world you're describing.
- Write the names and a quick description of improvised NPCs the minute they show up.
- Run mid-campaign session zeroes to get everyone back on board if things slip away.
- Use "pause for a minute" to ensure players are behind the actions of other characters.
- Embrace players who run into danger but ensure other players are on board with their antics.
- Write a short list of things that happened in a session right after the session completes.
- Build situations with locations, inhabitants, events taking place, and hooks to draw in the characters.
- Bring back popular NPCs. Where are they now?
- Good situations have several ways to get into them, several ways they can play out, and several possible conclusions.
- Two groups engaging one another at a location is a great lazy framework for a dynamic situation.
- Foreshadow the coming doom.
- Prep the tools you need to improvise challenges, threats, monsters, NPCs, and encounters.
- Build playlists of ambient music you can play behind your game – combat, suspenseful, and relaxing.
Related Articles
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- Fantastic Adventures
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