I was thinking recently of the difference between Outdoor Encounters and Dungeon Encounters and to a realization I should have reached some time ago: most outdoors encounters (in adventures i've read and run) are a single skirmish during which the players will most likely use their strongest abilities, with no thought of conserving them (i'm running Kingmaker now, and this occurs a lot, at least during the first two books).
Sure I could drop some terrible,big, and ugly adversary at them which will hurt them badly, but the moment they enter a dungeon they'll know (call it metagaming if you wish) that they should conserve their strong abilities/spells as long as possible 'cause "this aint nothin yet, the big bad is deeper in..."
I want to instill this in the players always. Never to be sure that this one is just a short combat and well sleep it over soon. Keep them on their toes, so to speak, only without the ballet shoes.
Then I remembered that one adventure i've run did do this to a certain extent: Red Hand of Doom. This one had many of their encounters having several waves of enemies converging on the party once combat began.
So that's what i realized i should do: i should sometimes have encounters occur in several waves of baddies (logical waves, of course); at other times have encounters all thru the day and night; or maybe just a regular one encounter...
The idea is to make the players feel nervous about walking out in the wilds...
Just wanted to share my thoughts. Be welcome to write and advice on how you handle outdoor encounters.
cheers,
-arnon
You're on the right track.
First, it's not "metagaming" to conserve resources in a dungeon or anywhere else. Whether your characters expect a BBEG at the end of a dungeon or not, they certainly expect that it could have several rooms or lairs of monsters and therefore they need to be ready to handle many battles in this dungeon. The same holds true anywhere else.
Just because they fight a band of ogres in the morning doesn't mean they can go full-bore nuking and expect there won't be trolls at lunchtime. If, in your game, you typically run one wilderness encounter per day and they are making that assumption, then THAT is metagaming. If they're blowing all their resources on one fight and the players know they can get away with it because the GM allows it to work every time, then you've found your problem.
Regardless of whether you use waves of enemies during one encounter, or simply let them have 3 or 4 separate encounters each day during their wilderness travels, either way, you're forcing them to do what their characters would try to do anyway: conserve resources so they will be prepared for trouble later.
The only question is verisimilitude. If EVERY DAY walking down a road in the wilderness is likely to have 4 dangerous encounters, then how does anyone in the whole world ever travel anywhere? So, to maintain any semblance of verisimilitude, I normally don't have encounters on well-known roads, or in patrolled kingdoms where monsters and even bandits would or should be rare. PCs can travel there without encounters, or with only rare ones, and sometimes those rare encounters are super deadly and require them to nova all their resources to survive, but sometimes not. It's when they go off the track into the scary wilderness where normal people never go, where monsters lurk in every shadow - that's when they get multiple encounters every day.
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Yeah, this is one of those things that OSR had right, that d20 kinda-sorta killed - wandering monsters.
See the old versions had little connection between the difficulty of the monsters and the amount of XP gain. (It was all about the treasure, really.) 3e flipped that paradigm with the notion of CR and matched encounters. In this world, killing the things is what levels you up best, and you can expect to be able to get XP off of (read: kill) just about anything you meet.
So a table of creatures you might run into sort of stopped making sense. If it respected CR it got a little wonkey. As in, "last week this road had orcs, but this week it's crawling with trolls". If you ignore CR you're flirting with a TPK. "What's a Red Dragon doing here? Oh well, we attack!"
The solution lies in the middle, or in story awards, but it just naturally evolved towards the laziest answer - ignoring it altogether.
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Varying frequency and difficulty of random encounters to how dangerous the area is works nicely. It preserves versimilitude because it makes sense that the well-travelled trade route between two cities will have at most the occasional bandit while the Forest of Grim Darkness would be crawling with terrible beasts, and the kinds of encounters in each area will be similiar over time. And smart low-level characters will stay out of the Forest of Grim Darkness, thus avoiding overly dangerous random encounters (though under-CR encounters might crop up in safer areas occasionally).
If you don't want too many random encounters (they can slow down the main plot) just set up a percentile system where most days have one or no random encounters, but a day with 2-4 encounters is still possible. The possibility of being hit with several encounters will keep players on their toes even if it doesn't happen all that often.
Thanks for the responses...
I don't like much the idea of rolling random encounters, so most of the times my random encounters aren't that random; though I do use the tables (in the bestiray of the AP at this moment) to see what monsters might lurke in the area.
I'll start doling out longer or more outdoor encounters in the coming sessions... Of course, moderation is key here (as in many things).
XP isn't a problem, I ditched it the moment I started GMing (a short time after I started playing) and the players go up levels when I tell them to.
The term "Random Encounter(s)" need not be well..."random".
My suggestion is this: For your campaign, module, situation etc. figure out a "logical" place, for instance between "point A" to point B" of their journey, where your PCs could potentially be encountered randomly.
Come up with/Roll randomly on said table for that specific area (or roll randomly ;p) the monsters/creatures/other the party will meet. For instance choose three + zero encounters. "Rate" them as Easy, Medium, Hard + No Encounter. This can range from "easy": a small band of goblins, TO "hard": a forest dragon!
OK...MAAAYBE a dragon encounter is MORE than "hard" but I think you get muh drift!
Using this example the party could have a three in four chance of "random encounter" OR GM's prerogative to vary the chances to your liking.
The reason for this approach/suggestion is so the GM can "plan ahead" and ready what tactic(s) or method(s) your NPC encounters will use so that GMs DO NOT need to do too much "on the spot" research/thinking. You'll be surprised that your party will come up with ideas that you didn't think they were capable of!
THUS the "random encounter" is planned (not necessarily random), BUT GMs have the creative freedom (technically the responsibility) to choose WHAT the encounter is by rolling on the tables.
Yeah. Unplanned, unprepared encounters slows, if not ruins, the "pace" of the game.
That'll be 2 cps please,
Rom001