Add Flavor To Your D&D Game With Mini-Encounters

Mini-encounters, as I like to call them, are something I've used in my campaigns for years. What are mini-encounters? After I've finished designing any given adventure, I like to throw in between-scene fillers. These are usually meetings with inconsequential NPCs, sightings of worldbuilding that I've created which the players have never before been exposed to, or maybe a monster who runs away before anyone can even roll initiative.

A few years ago, I wrote an article on GeekDad about mini-encounters, and I'd initially intended to just republish it here. But with those few years of intervening DM experience, I'd like to expand on and flesh out what I'd initially written in that article. 

In my campaign, when the PCs do something that affects the world, I spend time between sessions thinking about how that might affect the world. Let’s say the PCs captured some criminals. Did one escape? Does he want revenge? Perhaps the PCs defeated a major bad guy. What kind of power vacuum forms, and who takes advantage of that? Or that rando lady that they saved - maybe she starts a bakery in town. Because of this kind of thinking, what begins as a simple and inconsequential mini-encounter can later become a major plot element. When you're running a game, it's about more than just the DM telling the players a story - it's collaborative storytelling, and when the players hook onto something in one of your mini-encounters, it can turn into something beautiful. 

Let's begin with my favorite example of a mini-encounter which went in a direction I'd never have expected. In the initial adventure, the PCs needed to travel downriver on a boat to reach a site that they’d be scouting to set up a watchtower to warn against hobgoblin raids. En route, I’d planned for them to encounter a group of four men drinking on the riverbank. The men were obviously inebriated and would wave and heckle from the shoreline. This was my mini-encounter, and I'd planned for it to take perhaps one minute of game time, after which the boat would continue on its way. These men had no real way to affect the players, as the boat was 50 yards away from the riverbank, and the players had no real reason to stop for these idiots. In my head, I reasoned that these men had been kicked out of one settlement for poor behavior and were headed to the village the PCs had just left. 

What happened is that before leaving that village, the PCs recovered a few barrels of mead from a kobold lair which turned out to be poisoned. I’d initially been thinking that either the PCs would drink it and have to deal with the poison or they’d sell it to a local tavern and catch the blame for the death of townsfolk. What ended up happening is that the PCs found out about the poison, warned the townsfolk, and left the mead in storage just outside the town’s church, thinking that they’d later use it to poison hobgoblins or something.

In between sessions, I got to thinking. These men hit the town while PCs are out adventuring. What happens when these rowdy men get to town? The next session, when the PCs got back to town, they found the townsfolk burying the bodies of these four men. The drunkards had gotten to town and found the poisoned barrels. Townsfolk warned them it was poisoned, but the rowdy men didn’t believe them. “Oh sure, you just leave poisoned mead sitting in the middle of town. Right.” I'd never planned for this to happen; it was emergent and collaborative storytelling.

Mini-encounters like these generally won’t lead to anything. But when they pan out, they can be beautiful and add a lot of flavor. Here are some others I’ve used.

• A ten-year-old boy in town nagging the fighter with questions. “Do you kill monsters? Can you cut the head off a dragon? Can I hold your sword?”
• The captain of the small ship transporting the PCs is having relationship issues, and he confides in a PC during the voyage.
• During a sea voyage, the party sees a locathah kid surfaced nearby, waving. He’d just come up to fetch some air for his dad.
• Clerics in the city dealing with a sewage issue by casting multiple purify water spells.
• The party passes some wizards experimenting with a water elemental-powered craft that’s supposed to work like a jet ski. It doesn’t work well and crashes.
• PCs asked to escort a town official’s doofus son who fancies himself an adventurer. The guy is insanely accident-prone.
• After a successful adventure, a newly-famous PC is asked to do numerous missions by random townsfolk, but they’re all very menial. Construction workers ask him to help move a huge boulder to make room for a foundation. A woman asks him to clear rats out of the basement, which isn’t even a combat encounter and is far more tedious than exciting. A barfly asks him to beat up someone who owes him money.
• PCs are asked to arrest a cabal of necromancers. Rather than this being an actual adventure, they get to the house in town, and the two immediately surrender. One guy was teaching the other guy a necromantic cantrip.

Another favorite was when I’d planned to have the party find a random farm on the way to their destination. At the farm, a half-orc farmer lived with his wife and two daughters, and they eked out a meager living. At the time, the party included one half-orc fighter whose life goal to this point had been to save up enough money to get a room above a tavern and spend the rest of his life drinking. After encountering this farmer, he had a revelation that life could be more, and the character’s entire arc changed. That single 5-minute mini-encounter transformed one PC from an aspiring drunkard to a man in search of more of his kind, and he began desperately searching for other half-orcs.