I like planning my encounters because it helps me learn as a DM.
Now, I also don't run Pathfinder. I go with more old-school games (Castles & Crusades is my current game). Combats go a lot faster when players don't have to look over a list of feats or a tactical battle grip trying to decide what trick to pull out next and where to maneuver to maximise AOOs, reach weapons, and flanking bonuses.
Yeah, I forgot to mention that. The slower nature of most modern RPG combats is another reason I don't really favour them in pathfinder. With the older games its easier to chew through a round in a few minutes, even with lots of combatants. That makes random encounters less of a drag/distraction from the story.
Who says they have to be combats? Yes, they drain time away from main plot (unless you have them tie back TO that plot, but they seem less random then somehow) but the combat is up to you.
I had the party traveling along and took a page out of the module "Hollow's Last Hope". The characters were traveling through the forest and yeah, they ran afoul of a giant spider, but I wanted something more so I rolled on a random chart I'd made and got...Stone Circle.
I had some notes on what it looked like, what it might do for the party, but that was it. I figured it'd be a quick skill challenge and move on. The players explored everything they could with it: not just what they were (knowledge: history) but how long they were there, were they untended or tended, was the ground disturbed, how deeply were they buried, what was the writing, detect magic and evil, talk to a squirrel with a 1/day speak w/animals granted power, even did a Survival check over top of them to see if they were disturbing the local weather patterns.
So...they ended up being an old fey relic from the First World. They were definitely magic but the magic appeared to be waning. All their info told them the stones hadn't been used since long ago and they were deeply encrusted with moss and lichen. But when they got to the weather...
The stones seemed to generate static; not enough to shoot lightning but like static cling. fibers from their clothes and hair stood on end and were attracted to the stones. Also these things were not buried (decent knowledge: engineering plus a 21 Knowledge: Dungeoneering) but in fact seemingly grew, right out of the ground.
Later on in the adventure I'd made a set-piece encounter with a korred and these creatures can shape stone and make rope and twine dance with their will. For that reason the static field made them giddy, lightheaded, like the were being tickled (korreds' hair tickles nearby foes). The players had to roll Fort saves or suffer Hideous Laughter while inside the stones.
After this rousing random encounter the party went on through their adventure. At the wrap-up, once they discovered the korred and confronted him, much of the stone circle encounter came back to the wizard PC. The player decided that the monster must have made the old stone circle, or his people did in antiquity, and now he was constructing a new one just outside of town. It ended up being a nice tie-in with that roll even though I hadn't planned it (the 2nd "stone circle" outside of town was a roughly circular stone plaza with an altar and natural pilasters. I'd not intended the 2 to be similar, but when the player made the leap I said "sure").
Who says they have to be combats?
Most of them arent combats (in our experience, anyhow) but some of them are.
In my latest two games, there is no 15 minute work day because they have to upgrade a keep and engage in roleplaying.
In the other one, there is no 15 minute workday because they are trying to quickly escape a computer game they are stuck inside (Sword Art Online), and if they are too lax, other adventuring groups will become more powerful than they (which could cause a lot of problems, PKers and the like).
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I love them. Combat or non combat, random is awesome.
Suddenly... SLAAD!
I hope you guys like rust monsters.
We were in hills, it was bound to be beholders.
The behir came from beh-ind!
They are throwing darts at us? Charge up the hill and kill those kobolds.
An ooze? *gulp*
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And so on and so fort, random encounters add a lot of fun.
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Best random encounter I've ever been in as a player:
Back in 1e our GM had us slogging through the Tomb of Horrors. After the umpteenth trap we're literally just rolling our eyes with the following chant: We move up, cautiously, searching the walls, floor and ceiling for traps. We were bored, frustrated and thoroughly demoralized. Our GM could tell we weren't having any fun so he improvised.
He dropped a chest into a side chamber that was supposed to contain a gas trap. We spot the chest and decide to throw caution to the wind and open it. It's not locked and no obvious traps, so we flipped the lid...
GM: out jumps...(rolls some dice) A FULL GROWN BENGAL TIGER!
We blink..."What?"
GM: you hesitate and are SURPRISED! He attacks; you take 13 points of damage!
we proceeded to destroy the freaking thing unleashing hours of pent up frustration on the poor beast. "Full grown Bengal tiger" is still a catch-phrase in that gaming group synonymous with getting surprised.
We seem to have wildly varying opinions on what a "random" encounter is.
Some people are saying "I like random encounters if they're set parts of the story that advance the plot". How is that a "random" encounter? What you're describing there is very not random - it's a preplanned set encounter. OK, sure, it's not inside the castle you're going to invade, instead it's out in the forest on your way to the castle, but it's still a scripted plot element; the location being separate from where you expected to do your fighting doesn't make it "random".
Some people are saying "I like random encounters if they introduce entire sub-plots or story arcs". Again, how is that a "random" encounter? Sure, a DM could start with an actual random encounter and then build something from there, and it evolves into a sub-plot or an arc, in which case it was random in the first place. It's a wonderful and awesome thing when a DM puts that kind of work and energy into something that started out as a purely random encounter. But if he introduced it with that intention all along, then it was never actually "random" to begin with.
"Random" is a word we still use to mean, uh, random, right?
Some people in this thread are defining the word "random" to mean "I (a player) didn't expect it even though the DM planned it all along as part of the essential story of the main or sub plot of the adventure".
To me, that's not a "random" encounter.
So, dropping all those definitions and just leaving the actual meaning of "random", then I as a DM am not overly fond of them for these reasons:
1. They waste my time rolling them up.
2. I often find that I overlook fun tricks the encounter could have done, special abilities, battle tactics - I usually don't overlook these things when I plan a battle in advance, but a quick read of a random encounter sometimes doesn't give me all the depths of strategy and tactics that the encounter might deserve.
3. They waste the player's time. Even though they might gain XP or loot, and they might even need it before reaching the next scripted area of the story, I would rather pre-plan some set encounters and maybe even make a side-adventure or sub-plot to tie them together but, as I mentioned above, this is no longer "random".
I'm surprised that so many people mentioned the dislike of encounters that are too underpowered or overpowered.
What happened to the concept of verisimilitude? Why is it that when we're first level, the world seems overflowing with goblins, kobolds, and orcs, but when we're tenth level, we never see those anymore but the world is overflowing with giants and outsiders and dragons?
How strange such a world must be...
For me, the concept of verisimilitude requires that noob PCs could run into impossible battles. Why should they be immune to getting eaten by trolls when every other NPC in the world has to worry about that? No, the troll doesn't need to kill the PCs - hopefully they are smart enough to run away or maybe even figure out a way to beat it with good strategy and tactics, preferably luring it onto a battlefield of their choice.
It also requires that superstar PCs can on occasion run into goblins. Why should they be unable to ever find the enemies that so plagued their entire world just a few months ago? It sure makes them feel pretty good when they remember "Wow, not that long ago this battle would have been scary, now look at us! Took us just one round to mop up these weaklings. We Rock!"
Best part, it makes the world seem more realistic, well, you know, for a fantasy world and all. That's what verisimilitude is all about, after all.
I didn't read the entire thread and am just responding to the OP right now. Sorry if it's off-topic for the flow of the thread.
I just wanted to add my own take on random encounters.
I don't really have random encounters in my game. I have semi-random plot-hook encounters.
The main thrust of my campaign is centered around three different groups of undead, and a lone vilkacis (werewolf ghost) that can spread lycanthropy. I can prettymuch put undead anywhere or come up with a reason for them to be there. But that's boring. Players don't want to just fight undead all the time, even if there's a lot of variety in the undead.
So, if my players are out on the road (this happened recently), they encounter a worg. The worg is talking, yelping, and snarling at nothing, and occasionally snapping at the air. The party makes some skill checks to determine it has rabies. It attacks them, and bites one (it bit our only PC with a bite attack, by chance not design), and that character contracts rabies. (Not to worry, rabies has a 2 week incubation period.) After the party defeats the worg, another, larger, worg approaches and thanks them for killing the first. She explains that her pack has been torn apart by rabies, and the worgs themselves can't deal with their rabid members because fighting them will spread the rabies further. So the (mostly CN) party makes arrangements with the worg alpha female to help her deal with rabid members of her pack. They also request she pass on information to them about undead in the area, at which point she suggested they buy a dog.
This sets up opportunities for me to have worg encounters both hostile and benign with the party, without such encounters feeling random.
Yeah, sometimes they do go out in the woods and stumble into a man-eating plant or wolf-in-sheep's-clothing (hasn't happened yet, but I want it to), but even then, I don't roll for it. I try to pick something that would be cool, CR-appropriate, and thematically suitable. So far they've had "random" experiences with a Cobra Flower and a dire bat. (Both were underwhelming for their CR, BTW.)
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I do note a big thing, and this is what I feel the need to restate.
If your party encounters stuff only on their CR level, you're playing Pathfinder the Arms Race, not building appropriate encounters. This is a problem I had with stuff like Neverwinter Nights in the days of cRPGs.
Once I hit level 12, normal orcs ceased to exist. Instead they were all 'warlords,' where this cadre of military geniuses was up until level 12, was not made abundantly clear.
Random encounters should encompass a wide range of things.
Does your level 1 party balk when they encounter a reddragon on the wing in the mountains? Well yeah, he lives there. So you might run into him if you go there. He doesn't care what level you are. Best run and hide. You're busy hiding under the brush as the flaming engine of destruction flies overhead and maybe in your PC brain you think, "One day I'll grow strong and free these people of this danger!"
Your level 12 str 34 barbarian character takes the road and finds a man and his wife arguing over a broken wagon wheel. The hero picks up the wagon and his friends slide the wheel back on, and they get to move on feeling like superheroes. The challenge of the 'encounter' doesn't even merit xp, but it makes the players feel cool .
Similarly, there's a visceral feeling mages get when they run across hordes of tightly packed goblins. Or a warrior feels when he kills 9 of them in one strike and they start running screaming about 'They're demons!' A challenging fight is one thing, but heroes need a chance to feel like they're bad-asses and random encounters also help with that.
The intrinsic hillarity of a band of numerous but inept bandits trying to mug the party. It lets the players show if they're going to try to be reasonable, or Lina Inverse their way through it.
Also like Wolf says above, where else are they going to run into stuff like Sheep-in-Wolf's clothing or other cool monsters?
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@ Blake the Snake: here's my example to help illustrate what I consider "random" and therefore what I enjoy as a GM:
GM: you're walking through the woods on the way to the tower you've been hired to explore and clean out. Up ahead you see...(rolls on random chart) an old woman with a basket of apples.
Player 1: You've gotta be kidding. Umm...wow; a witch with some apples? How droll. Ok, I approach Apple Lady and ask her how it's going.
GM: Ok, umm...(hadn't considered how bored the players would be with "lady with apples" random encounter; quickly switches gears) roll a Perception check. The woman seems not to respond; her face is cloaked in the folds of her hood.
Player 1: 17
Player 2: 14; I'm looking for some kind of ambush. Can I roll Survival for tracks?
Player 3: I got a 22.
GM to Player 3: you notice she's not moving and the apple in her hand appears to be rotten. You also notice that your initial assessment of her age was based on her gaunt appearance; on second glance you note the long, blonde tresses of a young woman slipping from her cowl.
Player 1: Umm...I poke her with a stick.
GM: The corpse slumps to the ground, her hood falling back to reveal pale flesh and sunken eyes below. Her body is rigid; she is not among the living nor is she one of the undead. Yet there is no mass of bugs on the body and some of the apples are still yet intact. She can't have been here very long, perhaps just this morning.
Player 2: I rolled a 13 for Survival
GM to Player 2: there are obvious signs of passage along a narrow path coming out of the woods, resembling the woman's own feet. However there are no other tracks in the area. It seems she was alone when she died, sitting here on a tree stump.
So...there's no fight, there were no notes on the random encounter chart, and there's no obvious reward for the party. However this singular, random event could lead literally off the beaten path into a new adventure if the PCs decide to investigate. Perhaps though they just bury the corpse, say some last rights and move on. Or perhaps they do nothing. Whatever the case it might or might not have ANYTHING to do with what they were doing.
I want to scare my players, not annihilate them. So there are monsters in my campaign that are beyond their CR. I'm playing in Ustalav, for Pete's sake. (Not really, there's nobody named Pete... but there should be, and they should have to rescue him... for his sake.) But those monsters of high CR are usually seen from a distance, or spoken of in rumors.
The worg my (level 3) party spoke to in my example above, for instance, had the advanced AND giant simple templates, and is CR 5. (Her name is Midnight Terror and she's a coal-black large worg, who may have some winter wolf ancestry to explain her size.) They did not want to fight her. They could have attacked her as easily as parlayed, but she was big and scary so they were glad she was talkative.
You know what scares my party? My vampire-festrogs. (Advanced festrogs with fast healing 2 and a small bonus to turn resistance equivalent to that granted to vampire spawn.) I've rated them at CR 2, but two of them (rated a CR 4 encounter) can tear the party up if the party doesn't fight them intelligently. (AKA "Don't let the creature with two claw attacks, and a self-healing bite attack get full-round attack actions.")
The party has also fought a berbalang, but only in incorporeal form so it was limited to half its hp, and a single melee touch attack.
They fought a Menadoran festrog (CR 5, I think) that would have torn them up except it was in the area of a kere pyschopomp's slow effect. (They didn't know why it was slowed at the time, but a kere had recently claimed that graveyard, which they discovered on further investigation of the effect.)
The idea isn't that all the encounters have to be CR-appropriate, but that the overwhelming CR encounters shouldn't be random. If there's a dragon on the mountain, my players are more likely to see it from afar, or see it doing damage, than run into it when it's 7 levels above them. (Unless they go looking for it, of course.) My campaign has a CR 13 undead living near town. The party knows about him, but not about his CR, of course. The party's Pharasmin cleric got a Harrow reading from the village hedge witch (not staged at all, but a shuffled deck) to predict her chance of survival if they went to the vampire's castle. The reading was a poor result, so she convinced the party to explore other avenues for the time-being. (When the rest of the party heard that the vampire was a nosferatu, they also decided not to go--though I don't even think they know what a Pathfinder nosferatu is like.)
I'm not saying at all not to run deadly monsters in the campaign. The same kind of ecology should exist in a region at level 1 and level 20, unless the party has wiped out the low-level threats. But just because a rock troll lives in the old mines doesn't mean it should randomly attack the PCs when they walk past the mines at level 2. Instead they should hear rumors, or catch glimpses of it. Let them know it's there and they don't want to fight it. That's not going to work for campaigns where you have a character that charges into battle no matter what, but if you've got that problem than you have more immediate fish to fry than verisimilitude.
One thing that will kick the "I charge it" attitude out of a player is a lot of bleeding. My current campaign has no deaths, but it's had lots of negative hitpoints where I didn't know if a character was going to live or die. (And if I as the GM was unsure, imagine it as a player on the other side of the screen.) In some cases it came down to stabilizing before bleeding to death, or hoping for a lucky roll on the # of rounds paralysis would last.
I'm no snake, I'm THE tarrasque. There's a difference.
Your example is cool. I great example of what starts out as an actual random encounter and might turn into something more interesting. Your example says the DM "switches gears" - was it a witch? What would have happened if the players had rolled initiative and opened fire? Dead witch? Dead mysterious girl?
In any case, your example with "rolls on random chart" seems to indicate that this encounter is not pre-scripted as part of the adventure story. Whatever else happens, it started out as a time-sink, a diversion, something that distracts from the main story line and delays the players from progressing through that story line. Even if it turns into an awesome, fun, memorable sub-plot or side quest, it still started out as a time-sink and apparently evolved into something more interesting as a reaction to the players' initial disinterest in the time sink.
If I want to delay the main story line progress, then I prefer to have reasons, plan it out, and include it as a pre-planned diversion from the main story line and, if I don't want the players to think it's just a time sink, I'll include main story elements in this little side trek.
Yes, a good DM can do that on the fly, yes I respect one who does, yes I've done it too. Nevertheless, I still believe this kind of thing is better served as a planned story element, even if it's planned to not feel like a story element, hence my previous answers.
I think one of the biggest hangups I'm seeing in this thread is whether it's random to the DM or simply feels random to the player. I've found that DMs with semi-customized lists, charts, or even simply a pile of potential encounters are able to pull off "random" encounters quite well because the core of the encounter is at least somewhat developed already, even if the details of it's presentation are made up at the time of presentation; to the players, it's still effectively random because of those on the fly details. On the other hand, encounters that are entirely random even to the DM tend to not go so well for most DMs, and can turn off both the DM and the players to them very quickly. As with everything that goes with running the game, just that little bit of prep on the DM side of the screen before the game to come up with potential scenarios and outlines makes a big difference when it comes to game time and presenting what to players come off as completely random encounters.
The other big hangup seems to be the expectation that a random encounter must be combat; encountering higher CR creatures (or lower CR levels, for that matter) isn't nearly as big a problem if you get rid of this expectation. Maybe that red dragon just fed so he isn't particularly hungry and he's off to take a nap, knowing full well that the party of adventurers below him is of no threat to him. Maybe the goblin raiding party the party stumbled upon simply scattered rather than put up a fight. Either way, it doesn't take much game time to describe, and gives the players the opportunity to choose what, if any, reaction their characters are going to have to it, both immediately and in the future. The key to all CRs in these kinds of encounters is presenting creatures in their natural state and going about their normal business, which is not the same as every creature and NPC the party meets wanting to immediately kill them.
If I want to delay the main story line progress, then I prefer to have reasons, plan it out, and include it as a pre-planned diversion from the main story line and, if I don't want the players to think it's just a time sink, I'll include main story elements in this little side trek.
This depends on the nature of the campaign as it does on the DM. I, personally, am more likely to run open ended campaigns where the players shape large elements of the campaign. The plot hooks are set up out in the world, aside from a few basic ones to keep the party moving, and as the party encounters them, they are eventually led to deeper and deeper plot hooks, but how they eventually reach the end BBEG, and what the final encounter looks like, is entirely up to their actions, not a prescribed script. In this scenario, it's less about if they are going to have random scenarios, and more about which ones end up being the triggers that draw them deeper into the story. Even tighter stories, like APs, usually need some flexibility in how the characters progress through the story, and this is where making sure you have a list of acceptable potential encounters ready becomes very important as a DM. Very few campaigns that require the level of focus that you describe get off the ground in my experience because the players will usually go off the rails sooner rather than later anyway; they can work, but you have to have the player's cooperation to make it happen.
I agree: random encounters are, by their very nature time-sinks/distractions. I also agree: I enjoy keeping my game pointed at the goal of the main plot. However there's just one other minor, inconvenience on my railroad tracks; the speed-bump known as my players.
Not every GM has to run like me and that's not what I'm saying. What I am saying however is that when I started my current campaign I asked the players what kind of game they wanted and they all agreed to keep it fairly linear since we're all new to one another. The first game in I LITERALLY gave them a straight line path to their destination intending to hand wave the journey in favor of main plot. What'd these "linear" players do? They veered.
They fought a giant spider; said spider was a set-piece encounter with trappings on the spider meant to tip them to mites in the area. They were then supposed to move on to the city they were escorting a merchant to. I asked them if they had any questions for the guy, they said no; figured I was home free. So I proceeded with "...leaving the spider's lair behind you make your way to Tashtanshire. On the outskirts of the city you meet..."
My players interrupt with questions: how long is that journey; what do we see along the way; can I do some hunting; what time of month is it?
I answered them politely and risked a "time-sink" by rolling and saying "what you see is... a stone circle." The barrage of investigation continued and they diverged for an hour of game time on what I expected to be a 5 minute hand-wave. You see, my players had either lied or not explained themselves well - they didn't like my carefully planned railroad.
Since then they've admitted some of their favorite moments weren't the set pieces or even the main plot, but the random stuff. Hunting off the main trail; the weird books I throw in their hordes; the interesting NPCs I've thrown into their travels. I've come to suspect that they really wanted a sandbox all along and just didn't have the heart to tell me.
Anyway, my point is that I use random encounters more, less, or not at all based on my players, not my own purview. Of course they derail the main action but sometimes I intertwine them with the goal; other times I just let it stay separate. Again, this is largely due to whatever clues or vibes I'm picking up from my players. Random encounters are all about improv; it's not something everyone does and it's not something everyone enjoys. When it works for the table though, it just works.
I like encounters randomly picked from a list of preprepared scenes.
This, I usually prepare some encounters for a "chapter" and then randomly use them. I don't like just looking at a random encounter table in a book and rolling on it mid-game.
Though as a player, some of our most exciting combats were from watching the GM roll some dice and bam...someone awakens us during our sleep.
I like encounters randomly picked from a list of preprepared scenes.
You mean as a DM?
As a player, how can you distinguish between a randomly selected encounter from a list of preprepared scenes from just a preprepared scene?
Sure (that's true of just about anything really). But I mean how do you practically distinguish between them - what would suggest to you that this was a random selection from a list or the scene the DM had decided was going to happen?
But I mean how do you practically distinguish between them - what would suggest to you that this was a random selection from a list or the scene the DM had decided was going to happen?What does that have to do with my preferences about random encounters?
Err...Maybe I misunderstood. I thought you meant that you liked playing in a game where the encounters were randomly selected from a list of preprepared scenes rather than where the scenes were just determined by the DM. I wondered how you would tell (since having a preference between two things which you cant distinguish between seems a little odd to me).
I'm not challenging you, I just dont get what you mean.
I think I would dislike a game completely devoid of random encounters. If your group is traveling in the wild, it stands to reason that you'd encounter creatures hunting for food. But, like others have mentioned, random encounters aren't always attacking monsters. Unexplored ruins, caravans of traders, pick-pockets, ghostly encounters, romances, terrible weather---all of these can add color to the region, create adventure hooks, and lessen the railroady feel of some games.
I've told this tale before, but it's worth telling again, if only to warn new players - especially GMs - of the possible dangers of an unchecked random/wandering monster table.
Way back in 2nd Edition, when I was not the full-time forever GM, and we actually had another guy who took over on occasion, said other guy was a real old school slave to the wandering monster table. Basically, he rolled every time we camped, and through a series of positive rolls over several sessions, our characters ended up spell-less, fatigued, and half-crazed due to sleep depravation.
What made it worse was that we were lost. We were in some kind of bizarro forest, and we knew where one keep was, but they wouldn't let us in due to some kind of plague they were afraid of, and we simply could not find the other town. Why could we not find it? Because whatever adventure he was running, required dice rolls for discovering said town, and again, the dice simply would not cooperate with us.
I don't have to say how tedious this became. And it's not that we were not creative players - we definitely were. We wanted to sneak into the keep, find a way through the forest, etc. The problem was that the GM (himself a great player), was a real slave to all dice rolls and all charts. If the adventure said we needed to roll a 20 to find the town, or that we could not get into the keep unless we fulfilled some task, then that was it. No amount of creativity on our part could persuade him to go off course.
Kind of like playing with Spock.
So I guess this is not just a warning of the dangers of an unchecked wandering monster chart, but of inflexible GMs who cannot bear going off script or off chart, even when the game is floundering because of it.
Anyway, long story longer, one day many years later, when he GMed again for us, I saw him picking up this old habit, and I said to him, "you realize you don't HAVE to roll for wandering monsters EVERY SINGLE TIME, right? You could just let one night pass without them." He sheepishly grinned and set his dice down, and his GMing was a lot better after that.
But I mean how do you practically distinguish between them - what would suggest to you that this was a random selection from a list or the scene the DM had decided was going to happen?What does that have to do with my preferences about random encounters?Err...Maybe I misunderstood. I thought you meant that you liked playing in a game where the encounters were randomly selected from a list of preprepared scenes rather than where the scenes were just determined by the DM. I wondered how you would tell (since having a preference between two things which you cant distinguish between seems a little odd to me).
I'm not challenging you, I just dont get what you mean.
When you play adventures, particularly modern adventures, which are mystery-heavy, as in an actual detective/investigation, you find that you actually have to concentrate on random events playing out in various locations, and you have to prepare to move them from one location to another, as fits the flow of the PCs' actions.
That's because the point of the thing is for the players to discover the clues naturally. It's the sort of setting where they definitely will sense if they are being led. And it also is an amorphous sort of game playing; events change drastically depending on what the PCs find and when they find it.
So I am well acquainted with this game theory. When I write detective adventures, particularly in our modern horror games, I write a general outline of each area, and and what might be found there. I also make notes on what might change, depending on what has already happened. And I write out the "events" separately, with notes as to which locations they might take place in. Again, depending on what has so far transpired.
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We seem to have wildly varying opinions on what a "random" encounter is.
Some people are saying "I like random encounters if they introduce entire sub-plots or story arcs". Again, how is that a "random" encounter? Sure, a DM could start with an actual random encounter and then build something from there, and it evolves into a sub-plot or an arc, in which case it was random in the first place. It's a wonderful and awesome thing when a DM puts that kind of work and energy into something that started out as a purely random encounter. But if he introduced it with that intention all along, then it was never actually "random" to begin with.
"Random" is a word we still use to mean, uh, random, right?
They are still random if you improvise connexion. You roll a bandit encounter, randomly. You then, on the fly, give the bandits shields +1 with a certain insignia. A Grey Hawk let us say. Random.
Then, after the dungeon with the ogre king, you roll another random, a black knight. He too has this Grey Hawk on his tabard. He challenges your fighter to single combat. Random.
And you proceed to rescue the mayor's daughter from the mad alchemist with the wererats.
Then,on the way to the city, you roll a random encounter: Goblin Ninjas. You drop this Grey Hawk down again, suddenly you've created an organization or something, randomly. This organization employs bandits, ninjas and knights errant. You now have a random sub-plot, or perhaps a major plot.
Maybe you learn the mad alchemist and ogre king too were agents of this Grey Hawk. Maybe all these seemingly random, and truthfully actually random, events were the work of a mastermind who has travelled back in time to stop the heroes at level 20 from killing his evil god, but the process has left him weak, forced to rely on agents until he can restore his powers. Then, after explaining this, he reveals he is now full strength and will kill them: BBEG!
So two or three unconnected "dungeons" and five or six random encounters, with a few unrelated stone giants and owlbears, make for a grand campaign, with just a little improvising.
This is how truly random encounters can become stories. FTR, I made all that up as I wrote. That may be a campaign for a few weeks now. Thank you.
Random encounters can also be markers of future quests. The tracks say these monsters came from over the border. Your neighbours are clearly not safe from incursions.
Or humanoid monsters are wearing the equipment of a destroyed army or war band. World building opportunities are everywhere.
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I've been a fan too of having random monsters present flavor for an area.
Like my dragon example from earlier. The idea that its on the chart because it lives there, helps to build things up.
The DM should treat his random encounters as something more then just 'you walk down the road and a marlboro jumps out at you, you earn 200gil'
Random encounter charts should be made by the DM, and should contain 'Meets with Blah the Wizard' or 'Encounters stuff dealing with plot A' along with '1d4 wolves.'
Think of Bethesda and its random encounters. They give quest directions, show you how your own quests have effected things in the world and the like. You're attacked by a random assassin, oh its because we freed that prisoner. Oh, these guys are running from dragons. Sure are a lot of bears around here, I wonder why. More raiders on the road, maybe thats because I burned their city down. That sort of thing.
Dungeon random encounter charts, good ones, also tend to have stuff like 'this dude is gone if he dies,' to represent that there's only the one ogre living in the complex as opposed to infinite possible ogres.
And to use the Futurama quote.
If you do your job properly, it'll be like you were never there at all.
- Like burning a house down for insurance?
Sure, if you make it look like an electrical thing.
So from the last few posts can we say this:
Random Encounter + setting specific detail/relevance = good?
Like G-nome up above said, running into a Deepspawn on a country road is...confusing. However, running into a Deepspawn on a country road...that's lying dead at the heart of a summoning circle? Now you have a setting-specific detail that helps it make sense (sort of).
Brunhilde - I love that story. I love it b/cause I played alongside that version of player/GM in my own games. He ran a GURPS module and b/cause we had to give a present to the princess we HAD to go shopping. On said trip it took 5 minutes for one of the PCs to find a helmet maker; another hour and 10 to get a helmet (not in the script of the module). Random encounters were rolled here too but could not be investigated/followed up for any more detail than the chart would give them. Good times...
Anywho, I like the formula. I also like Humpy McOne-eye's campaign creation method. I'm going to try that in future games, so thanks Doc.
Used to hate them, never really knew how to make the most out of them.
Im running S&S with a heavy sanbox element, I have random tables for EVERYTHING! Weather, ships, monsters, hazards, shipboard encounters, settlements, treasure, dockside encounters and so on and so on...
Now I would never be without them the amount of really intersting Role-play opertunites that have sprung up by just rolling one thing on a table has really made the game.
For example the players raided a random settlement, the tables gave me a small walled fishing village of natives in huts, rolling on a comlictaion table gave me a spirit protected the site, I rolled on the wandering monster coast table giving me a Coral Golem. So the village had an statue/totem as its centre. Players raided said village, killing the guards and elder, Golem came to life, players ran away with tails between legs barley escaping with thier lives.
Granted I may have thought about something like this but the beauty of tables is that the ideas are instant and can get the imagination flowing during the game prompting many improve sessions with ideas bouncing between you and the players. They break the monotony of an otherwise scripted adventure and keep you as a GM on you're toes.
Love them now, im a true convert.
I usually make a random encounters table for my adventure, with a few monsters (4-5) who are relevant to the background of the quest or the place, but who are not part of the central plot. My players generaly meet two or three of them. It works well.
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I like encounters that aren't directly (or at all) related to the current main plot. They can fulfil many different functions;
* a bit more treasure
* make the PCs expend some resources
* seeding the beginnings of a future story
* couleur locale - encounter some Aberrations to illustrate that this is The Weird Forest, encounter some skeletons to show that this is the Old Battlefield
* break monotony
* slow down the PCs if they've been travelling too fast (for example, when chasing someone)
* slow down the PCs if they've been going through the plot too fast
So are these encounters "random"? Not exactly. They're unrelated, but not entirely random either. What's good to have though, is variation. I find that I sometimes get stuck in a rut; rolling a bit on random tables can push me in new directions, which then stimulates my creativity. "I rolled a dragon - what does that mean?"
So just because you rolled a particular monster doesn't mean you should immediately set up the battlefield. Think for a moment about what the monster is doing there, about what twist you can add to the encounter. If the monster has motives, goals, then the players can attempt to interact with it - backing away if it's defending a nest, buying it off if it's after booty, luring it away with meat if it's hungry, scaring it off if they can convince the monster they're stronger than it, and so forth.
I tend to run fairly short sessions, so I can usually guess how far my players are likely to get into one session, based on their plans. So I can come up with random encounters beforehand and then spin them around a bit during session prep.
I love random encounters, especially when they are used to present campaign themes and ideas, and used to support a deeper familiarity with the setting. It's also great when they seamlessly integrate.
I've become a big fan of settings that are presented in such a way as to offer players a feeling of choice, with the idea of prompting them to follow up on those things that catch their fancy or match their agenda.
I mix pregen thematic stuff, with story seeds and the good ol' truly random encounters and go from there.
One of the main expectations of PF is that when monsters are encountered, fights happen. The fact that there is no system to determine distance away an encounter begins sort of shows that they are not expecting groups to, say, see a group of strong enemies in the distance and run away before getting attacked.
It takes a bit of math, but you can use perception rules to do this.
I hate random encounters. What hate about them as GM is rolling the percentage chance they occur each interval which sometime hourly, twice daily and so on. There is time and place for it but just out of the blue random is waste of my time. If there is 20% chance a guard is in the room then fine, not really random just the guard might be some where else. But you walking down the road and I'm rolling 5% chance of encounter every hour then I couldn't be bothered rolling. I'll just pick an encounter the fits if I need add a bit excitement between point A and point B.
The term 'Random Encounter' has different meanings to different players from different times. When I started, JDW rolled on the table in front of us all, we knew what the encounter was and were prepping before he could locate it's entry in the monster book. In the game I just concluded, REs were a way of teaching the players game mechanics, tactics, getting them clues or needed items for latter parts of the game, etc. On the flipside, I drop enough red herrings that the players couldn't be too prepared.
I don't like random encounters. As in... GM rolls whatever random encounter table he has at hand for no reason other than the fact he has said table.
It takes valuable gaming time for a pointless exercise.
I do enjoy plot-irrelevant encounters. The ones the GM creates to give us the sensation of a living world, even if they're not at all related to the main plot. These encounters are not trully random, however, so I don't know if they should count.
If I'm travelling through the woods, I expect there is a chance our party will be ambushed by wolves. If the party is in the Dark Lands, I imagine there is a pretty good chance they'll face a purple worm or some such.
GM-prepared encounters to show us this is a living world: okay, but not really random.(although the GM might roll just to decide which one attacks us)
Randomly-rolled encounter for the sake of having a random encounter: boring and pointless.
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Love 'em - been so immensely happier since I started another campaign with them as common.
For me, they provide a huge spark of liveliness to the campaign world.
I do prefer to roll ahead of time so I can add in details and plan for it.
Random encounter chart: the Gnarl (a tangled temperate forest)
1. x3 Grinning Goats (normal goats; muzzle has a "grin" of white fur)/CR 1
2. Fetid Fungus/CR 2 (note: in the area is a half-rotted corpse; some treasure)
3. x3 Goblin Warrior 1, Goblin Expert 3/CR 2 (note: they have a masterwork lantern with a Fine masterwork lock on the damper; fey hunters)
4. x5 Bramble Mastiffs (normal dogs with Simple: Advanced and Thorny templates)/CR 6
Just the start of a new one I'm working on...
I have a chart full of 'signs of' encounters.
Given that someone in the party always has a decent perception score, it's a little jarring to just stumble into situations. There's also the fact that given the relative rarity of a lot of the things typically in random encounter tables, it starts to feel like a surplus of coincidence.
I'm revising my chart since the party leveled recently, but I like to have monster tracks, abandoned wagons, fresh kills, old bones, dropped items, chances to spot nests/burrows, and those sorts of things. It makes it a more immersive world than just saying you run into a X. It helps set the stage for why you're running into an X. If of course you chose to go find it/stay in the area long enough for it to find you/fail to escape it as it tracks and runs you down.
It also helps keep random encounters from being mandatory time sinks. If the players are really into the quest, they hustle along and try to avoid the X. If they want a change of pace, they go investigate. If they're intrigued but are prioritizing, they make a note to come back and check it out later.