Our First Encounter
Let’s build a simple encounter for Rowan. Since Rowan’s Motivation for adventuring is To Escape a Series of Poor Decisions, it makes sense that the consequences of those poor decisions will catch up with him. We’ll say a debt collector for Rowan’s wizard student loans has showed up at the tavern Rowan is drinking at and demanding Rowan repay immediately. Unfortunately, Rowan is broke, so he’ll need to try and convince the debt collector to come back later (preferable when Rowan is two towns over).
Looking over the Playing the Game section (pg. 8), it looks like to convince the debt collector, we’ll need to roll a Saving Throw. Looking at the Abilities, Wisdom seems the most likely to be associated with quick wits, so we’ll need to make a WIS Saving Throw with a difficulty of 13 (the default difficulty for saves, since this is a fairly standard problem). Rowan rolls a d20 and adds his WIS to get a result of 15. The debt collector is swayed for now, but he’ll be back in two days. Rowan therefore needs to not be anywhere near here.
Before Rowan leaves town though, he needs to collect a magic tome from the local wizard. For reasons. So Rowan heads over to the wizard’s tower. Going through the front door would draw the wrong sort of attention, so Rowan is going to scale the outside to reach the top level’s window. We make a DEX saving throw (since Dexterity is associated with moving silently and poise, and Rowan gets a 6. While scaling the tower, one of the bricks come loose in Rowan’s hand and sends him falling to the ground.
Looks like Rowan is not going to get that tome easily…