d6 Setpiece Encounter Spices
My rolls for the Prismatic Wasteland Random Blogwagon was as follows: - Assigned posting window: June 4, 2026
- Length of post: As short or long as you desire
- Include a Reference & Link to a Blog Post from: False Machine.
My plan last week was to draft this ahead of time and then just let it sit until it's ready. That didn't happen. But thankfully, I'm not going in totally blind. I used Elmcat's world-famous Blogosphere Map to pull a handy-dandy "best of False Machine" list and was drawn to this post on "Held Kinetic Energy in Old School Combat Arenas". I highly recommend reading it, but as a TL;DR, Patrick Stuart raises the importance of an interactive environment as a necessary ingredient in an interesting combat encounter, especially in systems that don't really put stock in badass combat feats and character builds. Windmills, pirate ships, all that great stuff.
I've been thinking a lot about ways I can make the "gridded battlemap" playstyle more palatable to my laissez-faire, "I've got executive dysfunction and too many damn hobbies to track" approach to GMing, and why a lot of the VTT-driven Pathfinder 2e sessions I've had just weren't hitting as hard as I would've liked, and this post was the thought-already-put-to-words that I needed. The secret, as usual, is level design
When your players are about to get into a scrap, use these d6 spark tables to brainstorm ways to stop that "everyone stands in place and pokes at each others eyes like the Three Stooges" slog. One roll on one of these tables should suffice for any standard encounter, but for major battles, roll at least once on each table:
| Roll | Static Arena Element |
|---|---|
| 1 | One large pit, or many small pits. They don't have to lead to instant death, but should at least take someone out of the fight for a considerable amount of times. |
| 2 | A choke point. Think Hyrule Fight Club, or that one part in every Team Fortress 2 Payload map where like 5 engineers have maxed out their sentries. |
| 3 | Total cover everywhere. A fight in a forest, or that room in The Matrix with a shit-ton of giant columns. |
| 4 | A precarious point of advantage. A ledge of a cliff, a big pedestal in the middle of the room, a place suitable for some king of the hill action. |
| 5 | One-way routes. Big conveyer belts, running streams of water, something that makes it easy to get somewhere and much, much harder to get back to where you once were. |
| 6 | Scaffolding or tunnels. An extra layer of combat for sneaky enemies to exploit. |
Optional rule: Flip a coin. On heads, the terrain feature you rolled is easily destructible.
| Roll | Dynamic Arena Element |
|---|---|
| 1 | Lines of danger; swinging pendulums, flame jets, electric grids. |
| 2 | Don't stand in the circle; magma spouts, bombs dropping down from overhead, spikes popping out from the ground. |
| 3 | Fast-travel element; portals, ziplines, rope swings. |
| 4 | Unsteady terrain; a rickety bridge, pit traps, mountain rockslides. |
| 5 | Shrinking arena; spreading fire, flooding arena, rapidly collapsing floor. |
| 6 | Red barrels.1 |
Dynamic elements should be as intuitive as possible; I recommend telegraphing at the beginning of a combat round and triggering the effect at the end. Make the red barrels very red, and maybe even consider sacrificing a kobold to a hidden pit trap to get the information out ASAP.
If your static elements end up high-prep, that somewhat defeats the purpose. If you're running on a VTT, find some blank floor textures and digital scatter terrain (I recommend finding tilesets on Spriter's Resource if you want something pretty), and if in-person invest in Jenga blocks and a set of d6s big enough to pose as crates, computer terminals, whatever cube-shaped objects you need. If your players are used to perfect-fit, literal-representation 1080p Patreon maps, get them used to a little more abstraction, those maps can be cool as hell but you pay a heavy toll in flexibility.
Roll the tables, plop down your elements and get your silly arcade-y fights to the game table as fast as possible.
If you haven't played a video game or watched a John Woo film in a while, these explode when you shoot them.↩