A Scene, an Encounter, and a Situation walk into a bar...

06 Apr, 2026

The Straight Dope

I'm trying to make this a habit, so here's the gist. In ttrpgs, play will usually follow this basic procedure:

1. Describe
2. React
3. Resolve
4. Repeat

This particular kind of game loop is called an "encounter", a "scene", a "situation", an "event", or whatever else strikes the designer's fancy. Some people may tell you these are different things, and they're not wrong, but some of them then tell you that one or more of these is better than the rest, and that's where you can stop listening to them. The reality is, these are not separate elements of game design, but different answers to the same question: What's happening?

Each of these answers may be as close or as far apart as possible, which makes their differences meaningful, but not final. I would like to go over some of these different answers and how their answer to the question says something different about how we treat our games.

Encounters

If you come from the D&D tradition, or one of the many offshoots, you will know Encounters imply you are meeting something or someone. They tend to be active scenarios where the PCs must act or else... This is why a lot of encounters tend to be combat encounters: the PCs must act or else end up on the wrong end of a sword. This is not the only kind of encounter, by any means. One of the more interesting definitions of encounters I have found comes from the AD&D 2e DMG:

First, an encounter must involve a thing, an event, NPCs (characters or monsters), or a DM-controlled player character. A meeting of two player characters (handled by the player alone) is not an encounter. It is an action between the players themselves.

Second, an encounter must present the possibility of a meaningful change in a player character's abilities, possessions, or knowledge, depending upon the player's decisions. The keys here are meaningful change and player decision. ¹

The basic assumption is that an encounter must a) involve the players and the GM and b) result in a player decision that leads to meaningful change. The example the DMG gives for an encounter goes as follows:

Rupert and Taras Bloodheart are riding across the plain. Just as they crest a low ridge, they see a cloud of smoke and dust in the distance. They halt and watch for a little while. The dust cloud slowly moves on their direction, while the smoke dwindles. Moving their horses to a hollow, the watch the approach of the mysterious cloud from a thicket. ²

In this framing, an encounter cannot simply be a combat, but a discrete event in the course of a game that meets the two criteria outlined earlier. In games of the d20 persuasion, the more common kind of encounter is combat, but by no means is it limited to that.
One thing to note is that this definition of an encounter is framed around a certain sense of urgency. A decision must be made now. While other kinds of events like this may not have that explicit time pressure, the combination of a GM element asking the players (what the DMG calls an "active force") for a decision with meaningful consequences basically leads us to the same watering hole.
2e considered encounters the "engine" that makes the game of Ad&d run ³, 3.5 viewed the encounter as a kind of mini-game that sorted of stacked on top of each other to make an adventure ⁴, while 4e described them as:

A single scene in an ongoing drama, when the player characters come up against something that impedes their progress. ⁵

5e took the notion that an encounter as an individual scene, but omits the drama (it does note that an encounter should only have one of 3 possible outcomes: success, partial success, failure)⁶, while 5.5 goes back to a 2-criteria model: an encounter is a single scene with an objective and an obstacle ⁷.
All of these definitions have something in common: They are viewed as discrete units that are meant to be a part of a larger adventure in which something confronts (or encounters) the player characters in a way that forces a meaningful decision. Latter editions frame this mostly as an obstacle, but I like the 2e example because it does not fit nicely into any "type" of encounter that proliferate in online discourse.
An encounter, then, is a discrete unit of the game that is framed as something on which the players must choose a course of action. In other words, an encounter forces action.

Scenes

On the other hand, scenes are less well defined in the games that use them. Some of them will make mention of "scenes" here or there, but will never stop to describe what a scene is⁸. Others, like City of Mist, will use the term "scene" more as a shorthand for a broader unit of game time that encompasses many player moves/die rolls ⁹.

Scenes do not refer, then, to a kind of game moment specifically, but rather the broader set of basic loops that make up gameplay understood in a theatrical/cinematic setting. I suspect that because most people know what a "scene" looks like and can intuitively tell when a scene opens and closes, the designers feel like they don't need to explain what a scene is in order to be understood. Games that use scenes tend to use cinematic or narrativistic language to describe other parts of the game: flashbacks, focus, acts, transitions, etc. These games also are more comfortable with calling the game a "story" with a "plot" (I can hear vague grumblings from the OSR already ¹⁰), though not all games who use scenes adopt a narrative framework for the game¹¹.

What I immediately notice about scenes that stands out from encounters is the lack of pressure on the players to make a decision about the situation they're in. Whereas in an encounter the player characters are faced with new information and are expected to do something about it, the only expectation a scene carries is that which the players brought with them. Perhaps this is why so many investigation games use "scene" as a term (Call of Cthulhu, Fall of Delta Green, the Yellow King RPG, City of Mist, etc.): when investigating, there is no clear objective other than "gather all the clues", which is not always obvious to the players in the way that an encounter would be. There is also no external pressure to gather all the clues.

A "Scene" is less a measure of what the players interact with, and more about where and when they so. Whereas an encounter requires some kind of challenge to the players' chosen course of action, a scene is there to provide a setting for that chosen course of action. The same kind of basic structure still exists― Describe, React, Resolve― but in this case the initial description is merely there to frame the reactions and resolutions that will happen between players. This fits in with the more passive role GMs take in these kinds of games. They do not interfere with the player's choices, they do not force them into situations where they must make a decision. They simply set the stage and let the players chew the scenery, make mistakes, and get messy.

Situations

A lot of online ink has spilt talking about "situations" in ttrpgs, almost always in the way Justin Alexander put it:

Prep situations, not plots.¹²

This, like most nonsense about ttrpgs on the internet (including mine) is mostly fine. But we're not in the business of "fine" here at Woo the Moon, we take big swings and miss all the shots we don't hit (I think that's how that goes). Situations, like scenes, are more concerned with the setting in which player action unfolds and, like the encounter, present the players with something that interacts with them in this space. Where Situations come into their own is the broader context of the playstyle they embody. While a more rigid game with pre-established structures can have encounters or scenes (think about particularly linear adventures in D&D or Scenarios in Call of Cthulhu), games that use situations tend to be antithetical to that playstyle.

For all the claims from Alexander that this approach requires less prep than so-called "plotted" games, the true advantage of situations is completeness. Thinking of events in your game as situations makes you think of them as a whole experience, unlike encounters or scenes which view themselves as parts of a larger whole. A situation can be a scene, or an encounter, or an entire adventure if you structure it properly. Because of this situations best describe the state of the secondary world, geared towards the ways in which the player characters can interact with it.

Conclusion

You may have noticed that the more I go into depth with these definitions, the more they tend to blend together. That's because each of these is, at their core, the same procedure: Describe, React, Resolve, Repeat. They accent different aspects of the game, and each can be used in the same game to greater effect. Encounters embody the part of the game that challenges the players to make decisions based on incomplete information, Scenes allow characters to breathe and express themselves, Situations tie encounters and scenes together to make a whole that is consistent with the reality of the secondary world.

These are not the only ways to describe the basic unit of gameplay that exist, and they are not definite categories either. These blend and change and morph over time as our interpretations and our practices change. For the moment, these are the ones we have, and we can already see how they are moving away and towards each other as our understanding of running the game goes.

Sidebar about 7th Sea

The 2nd edition of 7th Sea (aka the best one and I will fight you on this), divides its basic units of gameplay into action and dramatic sequences, which delivers exactly what it says on the tin: a sequence of actions over a specific period of time. Action sequences are for when you need to account for a scene that requires a lot of fast-paced action,like a fight, or a chase, or some other kind of swashing and buckling that the heroes might do over the course of their adventures ¹³. Dramatic Sequences, on the other hand, compress longer periods of time in a few minutes so that the pacing of the game doesn't flag. Examples include: attending a ball, sneaking through a castle, surviving an interrogation ¹⁴.
This perfectly encapsulates another dimension to the whole Encounter/Scene/Situation thing: Time. All of these basic units of game are units of time to some degree or another.