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I am currently preparing the first Racing to Ruin session and would like to hear from those of you guys, who already went through the module, about the following things:
How often did you roll for random encounter?
How did you handle the time between two keyed entries on the track? Did you just fast forward or play out every day?
Especially the second topic concerns me a little because I don't want the game to drag and at the same time would like to give the players the feeling of a real journey and make them understand the relief caused by a settlement on the horizon when they get to Kalabuto.
I rolled random encounters 4/day, 15% chance of an encounter each quarter. I also did this all ahead of time and made a little book of it to keep things flowing at the table. I don't play out days between encounters unless the PCs want to roleplay, but I must say that the journey is taking a long, long time -- more than a month now, of weekly 4 hour sessions. The PCs are having fun, but I for one am glad that they're nearing Tazion.
What Demiurge listed above is the "correct" formula, but I've been doing something similar to this (it's similar to how these things ran back in 1st ED):
In-between each scripted encounter, for every 10 miles that exist, I roll a 2 d10s. If any d10s come up as "1"s, there is an encounter. If the distance is at least 50 miles, and I didn't roll anything, then I have a "narrative only event." (example: a 110 miles has me rolling 22d10)
Note!! an "encounter" does not mean "roll for initiative, time to fight it", sometimes (oftentimes) it is just a sighting of something weird that some Survival skill checks can avoid. That way it feel a little more like watching National Geographic, and a little less like "outdoor dungeon crawl."
A "narrative only event" is inspired by the previous book's nightmare system: I just have some prewritten flavor text, and I read it out loud, to symbolize the passage of time. (Waxing philisophical about the heat, or the endless savanna, or about how their wagon is falling apart, or how they've totally run out of things to talk to their guide about, etc.)
EDIT: I don't use the XP system in my games - I just "level them up when it feels good" - if you use my above system, you'll have to massage the amount of XP characters get if you want to keep them "on track"
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I'm not really a fan of random encounters- I tend to use them "non-randomly" when I need to get a game to shift gears if its dragging out, or if I'm woefully unprepared (improvising because I got called to run something last minute). My suggestion (if you have the prep time) is to figure out how long you want the PCs to spend traveling and then really try to set up some challenges/encounters to reflect that. Then make those encounters feel random. I try to get skill challenges as well so you get a variety conflicts that aren't all combat oriented.
An example might be having the PCs stumble upon an encampment of two tribes gathered around a large ring, placing bets of fighting lizards. PCs interrupting the event are blamed for cursing whichever side's lizard looses the match. Or helping a fisherman save his son, stuck in a particularly rapid section of the river. If you use XP, you can easily justify giving it out for such types challenges.
Erik's use of narrative only events are also spot on, and an easy way to move the PCs to the next point of action without totally glossing over the grueling journey. You can even add a Survival check or two for particularly harsh conditions, extreme weather, or getting lost. Throwing a weird fork in the road (such as the trail being completely washed out by rains) can serve as a "random encounter" as much as a creature encounter can.
Thank you all for your answers!
The narrative-only events sound interesting though if overused might take the feeling of control away from the players.
I do know that encounter != combat and I usually start random encounters from far away of the actual creature/situation so the players can decide whether or not and in what way they want to engage. As I am not a big fan of extensive notes I guess I'll mix all of your approaches and will roll 1d100 for a (10 times the number of days)% chance of an encounter during each leg of the journey, picking a creature/situation that I deem appropriate.
Thanks again for your posts!
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I rolled random encounters 4/day, 15% chance of an encounter each quarter. I also did this all ahead of time and made a little book of it to keep things flowing at the table. I don't play out days between encounters unless the PCs want to roleplay, but I must say that the journey is taking a long, long time -- more than a month now, of weekly 4 hour sessions. The PCs are having fun, but I for one am glad that they're nearing Tazion.
Yeah, for a 55 day travel time, that's an expected 33 random encounters during the journey. Yikes. Does anyone know if the expected avancement rate depends on this frequency of random encounters? When I ran this I used "plot" based XP, just levelling up the characters when the adventures advancement advice said to.
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I rolled random encounters 4/day, 15% chance of an encounter each quarter. I also did this all ahead of time and made a little book of it to keep things flowing at the table. I don't play out days between encounters unless the PCs want to roleplay, but I must say that the journey is taking a long, long time -- more than a month now, of weekly 4 hour sessions. The PCs are having fun, but I for one am glad that they're nearing Tazion.Yeah, for a 55 day travel time, that's an expected 33 random encounters during the journey. Yikes. Does anyone know if the expected avancement rate depends on this frequency of random encounters? When I ran this I used "plot" based XP, just levelling up the characters when the adventures advancement advice said to.
I tried to make it so you only needed a couple of random encounters to level (Sorry I can't be more specific as a wrote this a year ago, plus things get swapped around in the edits).
In any event, it was not my intent for GMs to play out each of the 55 days of travel in game time. You can certainly create a Narrative Encounter that encompasses a week of travel.Like "After an eventless week of trekking through the dense jungle, you emerge soaked in your own sweat and spattered in dark Mwangi mud, a pitiful attempt to ward of the thick swarms of ravenous, feasting mosquitos." Or something like that.
I rolled random encounters 4/day, 15% chance of an encounter each quarter. I also did this all ahead of time and made a little book of it to keep things flowing at the table. I don't play out days between encounters unless the PCs want to roleplay, but I must say that the journey is taking a long, long time -- more than a month now, of weekly 4 hour sessions. The PCs are having fun, but I for one am glad that they're nearing Tazion.Yeah, for a 55 day travel time, that's an expected 33 random encounters during the journey. Yikes. Does anyone know if the expected avancement rate depends on this frequency of random encounters? When I ran this I used "plot" based XP, just levelling up the characters when the adventures advancement advice said to.
I've made a rather elaborate encounter table, and a lot of the encounters are just with non-hostile wildlife. So an encounter might be "you're attacked by monsters!" or it might be "you see a herd of wildebeest on the horizon".