Rethinking Armor Class: A Split-AC & Glancing Blow System

 

In traditional d20 combat, Armor Class operates as a strictly binary gate: you either take full damage or walk away completely unscathed. From a pure game-speed standpoint, this abstraction is legendary—one roll against one static target number resolves the entire exchange.

From a tactical and verisimilitude standpoint, however, it leaves a lot on the table. A high-Dexterity rogue and a full-plate fighter can easily share an AC of 18, yet mechanically, the game treats dodging through an open window of air identically to a battleaxe deflecting off a hardened steel breastplate. Furthermore, high-AC stalemates often lead to repetitive rounds where nothing happens except players and GMs taking turns announcing, "That misses."

To bridge the gap between fast-paced combat and the tactile reality of armor, here is a proposal for a Split-AC / Glancing Blow system that replaces the all-or-nothing threshold without adding complicated math or extra dice pools.

The Core Concept: Split Armor Class

Every combatant tracks two defensive numbers on their sheet: Evasion AC / Total AC (for example, 10 / 18).

• Evasion AC (The Dodge Floor): Represents a creature's baseline capability to clear the line of attack entirely through agility, instinct, and footwork.

• Total AC (The Armor Ceiling): Represents the creature's full protective package, incorporating physical armor plates, shields, natural carapaces, or deflection wards.

Calculating the Split

• Player Characters:

  • Evasion AC = 10 + Dexterity modifier (plus innate unarmored traits, if applicable).

  • Total AC = Standard armor calculation (10 + Dexterity modifier + Armor + Shield + Magic).

• Monsters & NPCs (Zero-Prep):

  • Evasion AC = 10 + Dexterity modifier.

  • Total AC = The standard AC printed in the stat block.

Examples in Play:

• Knight in Full Plate (Dex +0): Evasion 10, Total 18 -- 10 / 18

• Rogue in Leather (Dex +3): Evasion 13, Total 14 -- 13 / 14

• Monk (Unarmored, Dex +3, Wis +2): Evasion 15, Total 15 -- 15 / 15 (no glancing band)

• Adult Red Dragon (Dex +0, Natural AC 19): Evasion 10, Total 19 -- 10 / 19

Attack Resolution

When an attack roll is made, compare the total against the target's split threshold:

• Below Evasion AC: Clean Miss. The blow misses entirely or is cleanly parried into empty space. Zero damage.

• Between Evasion and Total AC minus 1: Glancing Blow. The weapon strikes armor, shield, or thick hide. Roll damage with disadvantage.

• Equal to or Greater than Total AC: Solid Hit. The attack penetrates a joint, slit, or weak point. Roll standard damage.

• Natural 20: Critical Hit. Maximum damage or your table's standard critical rules.

Resolving Glancing Damage

Instead of dividing damage by two or introducing flat damage-reduction subtractions at the table, the attacker simply rolls their damage die pool twice and takes the lower result:

1. Weapon Dice: Roll the weapon’s damage dice twice and keep the lower result.

   • Single-die weapons (d8, d10, d12): Roll two dice and keep the lower (for example, rolling a 7 and a 2 on two d8s results in 2 base damage).

   • Multi-die weapons (2d6): Roll 4d6 and keep the lower pair.

2. Modifiers: Flat modifiers (Strength, Dexterity, weapon enhancement) are added as normal. A glancing blow deals a minimum of 1 damage.

Handling Combat Riders

• Burst Damage (Sneak Attack, Divine Smite, Superiority Dice): These effects require clean penetration to exploit anatomy or channel raw mystical power. They do not trigger on a Glancing Blow; they require a Solid Hit.

• Ongoing Hexes (Hunter's Mark, Hex): The extra die is rolled with disadvantage alongside the weapon die.

• On-Hit Conditions (Poisons, Grabs, Knockdowns): The defender makes their saving throw with advantage, as the blow lacked full purchase.

Magical Armor & Dexterity Offsets

A common point of debate with split AC is how magical enhancement bonuses (+1, +2, +3) should function.

Rather than bogging the game down with conditional math or tracking zero-caps on negative Dexterity penalties, apply the magic bonus directly to both numbers:

Rule: Magical Deflection

A magical bonus from armor or shields adds equally to both Evasion AC and Total AC.

• A knight with Dex 8 (-1) in standard plate has a split of 9 / 18.

• Putting on Plate +2 shifts both numbers upward by 2, resulting in a split of 11 / 20.

This keeps the width of the glancing band consistent while raising the floor, modeling how magical armor actively guides the wearer and subtly turns incoming hits into clean deflections before physical contact occurs.

Caveats & Mechanical Trade-Offs (Full Disclosure)

No house rule exists in a vacuum. Changing the core resolution engine introduces significant downstream shifts that every GM and player should consider before adopting it:

1. Combat Becomes Far More Attritional

Because the space between your dodge and your armor is no longer safe, damage lands far more frequently. Against a target with a split of 10 / 18, an attacker with a +4 attack bonus who used to hit 35% of the time will now deal damage (glancing or solid) 55% of the time.

Even with disadvantage on damage dice, static ability modifiers still add up. Front-line tanks who rely on high AC to stay upright will suffer steady chip damage over an adventuring day, which can alter the survival economy of long dungeon crawls.

2. Low-CR Mobs and Swarms Become Deadly

In standard play, a high-level paladin can walk through a dozen goblins without taking a scratch because their attack bonuses cannot clear the armor's high static ceiling. Under this system, those same goblins will land glancing blows regularly on rolls of 10 through 17. The horde becomes dangerous through sheer dice volume.

3. Concentration Checks Spike

For spellcasters, the frequency of damage is far more punishing than the size of the damage. A cleric in chain mail on the front line will be forced to make DC 10 Constitution saves nearly every turn.

(Table Fix: You may want to rule that Glancing Blows do not trigger Concentration saves unless the damage exceeds a set threshold, such as 5 or 10 damage).

4. Symmetrical Acceleration: Monsters Die Faster Too

The flip side of increased party attrition is that combat slog evaporates. Monsters with massive natural AC pools (dragons, golems, heavily armored bosses) will no longer cause round after round of frustrating party whiffs. Low attack rolls from secondary martial characters will steadily chip away at the monster's health pool, noticeably shortening combat length in terms of rounds.

Opening It Up for Feedback

This system is built to sit in that sweet spot between binary simplicity and crunchy simulation, delivering the verisimilitude of armor deflection while using existing d20 speed.

• For those running gritty or low-magic campaigns: Does the constant chip damage feel like an asset that makes weapons dangerous, or does it overly penalize heavy-armor players?

• How would your table prefer to handle flat ability modifiers on glancing hits—keep them flat, halve them, or drop them entirely so glancing blows deal only the low weapon die?

• Is stripping rider effects (like Smite or Sneak Attack) on glancing hits a fair trade-off to keep heavy armor relevant against burst-damage threats?

Why I Use AI as an Assistive Bridge in My Creative Work

There is a persistent narrative circulating right now that anyone using AI to write or create is just looking for a shortcut—a magic button to bypass the actual effort of thought. For me, that assumption couldn't be further from reality. I don’t use these tools to replace my mind, my voice, or my creative intent; I use them as an assistive bridge across a set of very real, everyday friction points that would otherwise keep half my ideas locked in my head.

The reality of sitting down to a blank document is complicated when your body and your wiring don’t play along. Start with the physical: my eyesight isn’t what it used to be. Squinting through small text, tracking tiny cursors across a busy interface, and hunting down formatting anomalies or missing punctuation turns what should be an imaginative flow into a grueling visual slog. By the time I have spent an hour simply trying to proofread two paragraphs without getting a migraine, the creative spark that started the session is already buried under sheer eye fatigue.

Then there is the internal machinery. Being neurodivergent means my brain rarely generates ideas in neat, sequential outlines. Instead, everything arrives in massive, simultaneous avalanches—a sprawling web of concepts, side paths, mechanics, and dialogue snippets, all competing for attention at the exact same second. My organizational skills, left entirely to their own devices, are frankly horrendous. I can spend days drafting brilliant fragments that end up scattered across half a dozen folders, lost to the void simply because the administrative overhead of structuring, categorizing, and linearly arranging thoughts feels like dragging a boulder uphill.

That is where AI genuinely changes the equation. It acts as an interactive soundboard and a tireless editorial clerk. I can dump a chaotic, half-cohesive wall of raw thoughts, disjointed notes, and rough mechanical concepts onto the screen, and ask it to help me find the spine of the argument. It handles the structural heavy lifting—grouping like ideas, maintaining consistency across drafts, and cleaning up the visual presentation so I don’t blow my eyesight fixing formatting errors. It gives me back the mental bandwidth to focus entirely on the substance: the nuance of the world, the logic of the system, and the authenticity of the voice.

Using these tools doesn’t make the work effortless, nor does it mean pushing a button and walking away. Every piece of work that carries my name still originates from my experience, undergoes my scrutiny, and answers to my vision. AI is simply the prosthetic that handles the friction. It bridges the gap between a chaotic, overloaded imagination and the clean, functional delivery of the finished page. At the end of the day, it keeps me building when my eyes and my executive function would rather I just throw up my hands and quit.

Hump Day Humor 7

 

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Fluency As A Filter: Fixing Game Language

The Quick Rules: Running Fluency at the Table

Stop telling players they "understand 30% of what was said." It halts play, forces the referee into bad improv, and gives the player nothing they can act on. Instead, treat fluency as an information filter.

When an NPC speaks in a tongue a PC only partially knows, drop the dice and use these three operational thresholds:

• Basic (Pidgin): Nouns & Numbers Only

  • What they get: Concrete items, directions, and quantities. No tenses, no conditions, no intent.

  • The Rule: Strip the dialogue down to three or four raw keywords.

  • NPC says: "If you pay five silver pieces now, you can hide in the hayloft until the patrol leaves."

  • The Referee says: "Silver. Five. Hay. Soldiers."

• Conversational: Pure Literal Meaning

  • What they get: The entire sentence and direct facts, but zero idioms, sarcasm, or cultural metaphor.

  • The Rule:* Deliver the statement deadpan at face value.

  • NPC says: "Keep digging that trench, friend, and you’ll find yourself sleeping with the worms."

  • The Referee says: "He warns that if you keep digging, you will literally be put underground dead."

• Fluent: Full Subtext

  • What they get: Everything, including regional accents, irony, veiled threats, social class markers, and deliberate slips of the tongue.

The Breakdown: Why Percentages Fail & How to Filter Speech

Telling a player their character understands a specific percentage of a sentence is one of the oldest bad habits in tabletop role-playing. In practice, a referee faced with communicating "30% comprehension" inevitably resorts to linguistic gibberish, speaking in broken syntax, skipping every second word, or mumbling phonetics until the player rolls their eyes. It turns dialogue into a guessing game of bad grammar rather than a test of wits. Real language does not function like a progress bar where a speaker gradually unlocks every third adjective; human comprehension operates in discrete structural registers based on vocabulary type and cognitive load.

Basic: The Concrete Anchor

When someone learns just enough of a tongue to survive on the borderlands or avoid getting gutted in an alley, they do not acquire a scattering of random conjunctions and prepositions. They pick up the concrete things that keep them alive: food, coin, weapons, numbers, and physical threats.

When running a Basic speaker, do not attempt to speak broken Common. Simply pull three or four load-bearing words out of your prepared dialogue and drop them onto the table as a blunt list. Let the players at the table do the heavy lifting of figuring out context.

If a dungeon guide warns, "Beware the northern corridor after the bells toll, for the drowned dead rise from the cistern," the referee delivers: "North. Bell. Water. Dead."

This immediately shifts the gameplay back to deduction. The players know there is water, they know something dies or is dead to the north, and a bell triggers it. The operational facts are preserved, but the nuance, timing, and conditions are left for them to piece together or verify through scouting.

Conversational: The Trap of Literalism

The vast majority of bilingual wanderers, sellswords, and travelling merchants operate at a conversational level. They have the mechanics down, they know the verb tenses, and they can barter over trade goods without getting cheated on the exchange rate.

The fatal weakness of the conversational speaker is cultural insulation. Every culture coats its speech in layers of metaphor, historical allusions, proverbs, and dry irony that sound completely unhinged when translated literally. A conversational speaker takes everything at face value.

When an NPC uses a colloquialism—such as saying a local lord "has deep cellars" to mean he has extensive criminal connections—the conversational listener takes it literally and assumes the man is merely wealthy enough to store immense quantities of wine or grain. Misunderstandings at this level should never be a dead end; they should generate actionable, plausible mistakes that complicate the situation naturally without feeling cheap or arbitrary.

Fluent: Reading the Social Current

Fluency is not merely about an expanded vocabulary; it is about detecting what is not being said. A truly fluent speaker catches the slight shift from formal to informal pronouns that signals disrespect, the sudden drop in a merchant’s cadence when an illicit cargo is mentioned, or the archaic turn of phrase that reveals a wandering beggar was actually educated in a noble court.

At this tier, the referee can hand out social leverage. You do not just convey the plain text of the dialogue; you give the player character the subtext and emotional register behind it.

Instead of an NPC simply delivering a rumor, the referee can tell the fluent character: "He's speaking the court dialect of the capital, but he's intentionally trying to disguise it with dockside slang—and he’s sweating while he says it." That turns language from a simple barrier to clear communication into an active tool for intrigue and social deduction.

The Argument For Why Eberron is Similar to DragonQuest

 

The Argument

The historical and structural argument that Eberron draws its core design DNA from SPI's DragonQuest rests on three verifiable pillars: corporate provenance, systemic philosophy, and feature-set convergence.

1. Corporate Heritage and Shared Custodianship

In 1982, Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) acquired Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI), absorbing its entire catalog, including DragonQuest. TSR kept the property active, publishing the DragonQuest 3rd Edition rulebook in 1989 and integrating DQ modules (such as The Shattered Statue) into the Forgotten Realms.

When Wizards of the Coast (WotC) bought TSR in 1997, they inherited the combined TSR and SPI design archives. When WotC launched the "Fantasy Setting Search" in 2002, the R&D team filtering through 11,000 blind submissions was led by industry veterans steeped in early '80s hobby history. Baker supplied the initial "Thrilling Tales of Swords and Sorcery" pitch, but the final published setting was refined internally by WotC's team (principally Keith Baker, Bill Slavicsek, and James Wyatt). The institutional memory of SPI’s systems resided directly within the company developing the book.

2. The Shared Paradigm of "Industrialized Arcana"

Before Eberron, mainline D&D campaign worlds (Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance) treated magic almost exclusively as a high-medieval miracle, a lost art of fallen empires, or an individual scholastic anomaly. The wizard worked in isolation; the cleric served a distant church.

DragonQuest pioneered a fundamentally different philosophical approach in 1980: magic as an applied science divided into formal Colleges, where practitioners operated like licensed professionals, artisans, and technicians. Eberron is built entirely on this exact premise. The concept of the "Magewright" and the Artificer is structurally identical to DragonQuest’s fusion of College Adepts with vocational Artisans—magic scaled out as a public utility to run an economy, build structures, and manufacture goods.

3. The Unprecedented Convergence of "Non-Standard" Character Lineages

When Eberron was released in 2004, it was marketed as a radical modernization of the player roster because it introduced:

• Weretouched humanoids as standard PCs (Shifters)

• Doppelganger-descended shapechangers as standard PCs (Changelings)

• Giant-kin and monstrous lineages as standard PCs (Goliaths/Eneko/Goblinoids)

• Living constructs and functional, accepted undead (Warforged, Deathless, Karrnathi military)

Every single one of these character archetypes was already present, functional, and codified in SPI's DragonQuest twenty-four years prior. In 1980, DragonQuest rejected AD&D’s strict demi-human limitations by making Giants, Ogres, and monstrous lineages standard options on its character-generation tables, while simultaneously providing rules for lycanthropes, shape-shifting talents, and revenants.

While Eberron packaged these ideas inside a 1930s pulp-noir aesthetic, the underlying world architecture—monstrous lineages walking the streets as citizens, corporate cartels running specialized magic, elementals trapped in machinery to power transportation, and magic treated as a trade vocation—is the exact mechanical and structural philosophy first established by SPI in DragonQuest.

Many of the elements in Eberron were actually first presented in Dragon Quest.

Side-by-Side Comparison

Design Domain	SPI's DragonQuest (1980)	D&D's Eberron (2004)
Monstrous & Giant PC Options	Table 13.1 ("Races") includes Ogres and Giants directly on the standard player generation chart alongside Elves and Dwarves.	Integrates monstrous goblinoids into civilized society and introduces Half-Giants/Goliaths (Eneko in Sarlona) as regular, integrated character options.
Lycanthropy & Shifting	Lycanthropy is a standard character background/condition with specific physical stat buffs, shifts, and systemic rules, rather than an automatic DM-controlled removal.	Features Shifters (the Weretouched) as a core player race who trigger short bursts of ancestral beast traits during combat.
Playable & Normalized Undead	Specific rules govern revenants, spirits, and undead status without requiring the character to be a mindless or chaotic evil dungeon boss.	Features the Deathless of Aerenal (venerated, positive-energy undead who guide society) and Karrnath's state-sanctioned, pragmatic use of undead soldiers.
Shapechangers	Features specific rules and colleges (such as Shaping and Ensorcelment) allowing innate or biological shapeshifting characters.	Establishes Changelings as a core playable player race with complete, at-will physical mimicry integrated into urban intrigue.
Magic as Tradecraft & Manufacture	The College of Shaping and the Artisan/Alchemist vocations define magic as physical crafting, invested items, and mechanical fabrication rather than abstract miracles.	Centers on the Artificer class and the Magewright NPC class—arcane tradesmen mass-producing items, infrastructure, and tools.
Hereditary Arcane Monopolies	Astrological aspects, hereditary gifts, and Collegiate affiliations dictate who can legally and practically wield specific disciplines of power.	Dragonmarks—hereditary mystical sigils tied to specific bloodline houses that control industrial and commercial monopolies across the continent.
Elemental Binding	The Elemental Colleges (Fire, Water, Air, Earth) include explicit rites for summoning, controlling, and housing elementals in vessels or focused tasks.	Khorvaire’s transportation infrastructure runs on bound elementals powering airships (House Lyrandar) and the lightning rail (House Orien).
Corporate/Guild Dominance	Adventuring happens under the shadow of powerful, continent-spanning Guilds and Colleges that control legal charters and trade secrets.	The Dragonmarked Houses act as supranational mega-corporations operating above national thrones under the Korth Edicts.

The Crucible in the Dark: Why the Dungeon Still Matters

Back in the summer of 2000, Gary Gygax took to the pages of Dragon magazine to plant his flag on what many in the hobby were already dismissing as obsolete ground. In his column, "Hooray for the Dungeon Crawl!", he famously reminded referees that banishing the underground environment was like a painter refusing to use red: it leaves your palette stripped of a primary color. At the time, late-stage second edition and the rising narrative-first movement were desperate to distance tabletop roleplaying from its operational wargaming roots. They wanted thespian drama, sprawling pre-plotted epics, and character sheets thick with tragic backstories. To that crowd, five-foot wide corridors, torch turns, and ten-foot poles were an embarrassing relic from the mid-seventies—a juvenile "hack-and-slash" phase the medium had supposedly outgrown.

Looking back with nearly five decades behind the referee screen, Gary was entirely right, even if the modern hobby still struggles to understand why.

The defense of the dungeon crawl is not a defense of the mindless funhouse meat-grinder, nor is it an exercise in blind nostalgia. It is an understanding of how procedural mechanics and physical space forge genuine drama. Over the years, modern game culture has fundamentally confused narrative scripting with actual roleplaying. In an effort to make games feel like interactive cinema or pre-written novels, many tables have traded away the sharpest tool a referee possesses: the crucible of the mythic underworld.

A properly designed dungeon is not an arbitrary sequence of combat arenas where the adventuring party is expected to kill everything, soak up damage, and wait for a long rest to reset their abilities. It is an operational ecosystem governed by gravity, time, light, and consequence. When adventurers descend into the earth, the safety rails of the surface world disappear. The local guard cannot be hailed. Retreat is not a simple footrace across an open meadow. Light sources dwindle by the turn; heavy sacks of copper and iron drag on weary shoulders; and every sound carries the weight of a wandering threat that does not care about encounter balance.

That logistical friction is where character is actually revealed.

A player does not discover who their adventurer is through three pages of creative prose written before the first die hits the table. Character is forged under pressure. It happens when the party is down to their last two torches, the oil flask is half-empty, and they have to decide whether to haul a wounded hireling back up the spiral stairs or risk everything for a chest of coins they can barely carry. It happens when a party uses their wits, a handful of iron spikes, and a sack of caltrops to outmaneuver an encounter they have no business fighting head-on. The story isn't something the referee writes ahead of time; the story is the wreckage, the close calls, and the hard-won victories left in the wake of the players' own decisions.

Where modern game design often falters is in assuming that physical consistency and open-ended exploration are mutually exclusive with rich roleplaying. A dungeon only becomes a tedious slog when the referee treats it like an untelegraphed obstacle course meant to trick the players on technicalities, or an artificial grid disconnected from architectural reality. But when a dungeon makes structural sense—when its staircases, access shafts, faction territories, and verticality reflect a coherent physical reality—it becomes an unscripted sandbox of pure player agency. The players own every choice. They decide which archway to breach, when to parley with an entrenched faction, and when discretion demands they pack up their gear and head for the surface.

Twenty-six years after Gary made his case in Dragon #272, the hobby has come full circle through the resurgence of open, old-school principles. Players are rediscovering that when you strip away the illusion of scripted plots and return to the grit, the mystery, and the unforgiving darkness of the crawl, you aren't playing a primitive version of the game. You are playing the game at its sharpest.

The underworld remains the primary color of the tabletop palette. If you refuse to use it, you aren't making your campaign more mature—you're just keeping the lights on in a room where true danger, and true courage, never get the chance to breathe.

The Art of the Cinematic Heist: Borrowing Challenges for Your Campaign

 

DM: Always have a plan to kill every character in the room, but hide your inspiration.

Every Game Master gets stuck staring at an empty notebook now and then. Coming up with a fresh challenge every week is tough, and looking to movies for inspiration is practically a hobby requirement. Albert Einstein allegedly said, "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." When you forget that rule, you end up with the scene above: the spikes are closing in, the noblewoman has cinnamon buns pinned to the sides of her head, and the party is rolling their eyes while trying to find an intercom to call the local wizard.

Lifting setups from film works because Hollywood already spent millions of dollars testing what makes an audience sweat. The trick is stripping the parts down to bare iron before dropping them into your own game. If your players recognize the beats, they should be scrambling for their dice, not guessing what you watched on Netflix last night.

Break the Scene Down to the Pure Threat

When an action movie scene grabs you, ignore the props and ask what the characters are actually fighting against.

• The Trash Compactor (Star Wars): Strip out the dirty water, the monster, and the magnetic hatch. Underneath, it is a hard deadline in a shrinking room paired with a hidden secondary target. The real problem requires half the party to physically wedge the mechanism while someone else works on the release switch from another room.

• The Laser Hallway (Resident Evil): This is just a timing trap with shrinking safe zones. The challenge is not trading blows; it tests movement, reflexes, and body positioning under pressure.

• The Bus Jump (Speed): A forced-movement crisis. The players must maintain high speed while scrambling to solve a fatal obstacle dead ahead on the road.

Once you reduce a scene to its raw mechanics—a ticking clock, divided attention, or bad footing—you can move it into any setting without leaving fingerprints.

Swap the Setting and the Details

The fastest way to blow your cover is keeping the scenery. If you want the boulder trap from Raiders of the Lost Ark, running down a stone hallway with a round rock is just asking for groans.

Put the group in the lower hold of a cargo ship during a violent storm instead. An iron ballast weight has snapped its chains and is rolling wild down the central corridor, crushing anything in its path while the hull takes on water. Now the fighter has to drive pitons into the decking, the rogue has to dodge whipping chain links, and the wizard is trying to slick the floor with grease to slide it into the bilge. The adrenaline is identical, but nobody at the table is humming the Indiana Jones theme.

Mash Two Unrelated Movies Together

Einstein's advice works best when you mix your ingredients. Grabbing an encounter straight out of one famous movie makes it too easy to spot. Smashing two completely different films together creates something that feels brand new.

Take the closing-wall trap from A New Hope and cross it with the sound rules from A Quiet Place. Now the party is stuck inside a grinding dwarven vault door, but the gears only move forward when the room gets too loud. Striking the iron, wedging a pry bar, or casting a spell with a booming verbal component instantly jerks the walls six inches closer. The players cannot just smash their way out; they have to solve the problem while whispering and keeping their panic quiet.

Borrowing from good media is just smart GMing. Pull the frame apart, change the paint, mash it with another idea, and your table will spend the next three sessions talking about your devious encounter design.