the Forest of Random Encounters

[the David]

Suppose you'd throw out your detailed map of the world. Instead you say there's a forest near a village and you come up with a few plot hooks.
- Kobolds are raiding nearby farms.
- A bunch of mites have kidnapped a child.
- People have dissappeared in the forest.
- Zombies covered in strange plants walk around the forest.
- A star fell down and landed in the forest.
Instead of placing all locations on a map, you could just make a list of random encounters and let your players explore by trial and error. In my example they could run into a bunch of kobolds, mites or yellow musk zombies. They could also stumble onto tracks of various creatures as I don't think random encounters have to be limited to combat encounters. In other words, I prefer to tell my players that they see a couple of bunnies playing in the meadow over "there's no random encounter". The party could use perception to find tracks and survival to track down opponents. It might require an expanded random encounters table, but I think it is a better way to explore a region than roll a perception check to find the entrance to the dungeon.

I suppose you could call this a lazy GM's map? Has anyone used this method in actual play?

[Matthew Downie]

I've tried various things.

Trickery is an option. For example, you can just decide what a good order of encounters would be and pretend you're generating them randomly, or let them move around a map and tell them they found the location of whatever thing is next.

However, it feels better as a player to be actually exploring/mapping an area and finding out more about it than it does to have things just happening at random.

Is it really much easier to make an encounter table (remembering to prepare for what happens when there's only a few things left they haven't dealt with already) than to draw a grid / hex map, and put things on it?

[Wheldrake]

Absolutely!

Once you know what sorts of critters have their lair in an area, it's relatively easy to adopt an elastic approach to the exact placement of that lair. You can tie yourself into knots over how to get your group of PCs to a given lair, or... you can have them come across the lair in the location that the PCs happen to choose to travel to. Retroactively assigning a specific location to the lair rather than marking its placement once and for all on your DM map.

I love overland adventures and often put significant effort into mapping out the terrain the PCs travel through rather than just narrating their journey to a given "place of mystery". One example from my RotRL campaign, at one point the players need to travel from Magnimar to Turtleback Ferry, a 2-week journey. I don't need "random" encounters as such, but using the DM map I prepared (shamelessly stealing details from several guys like PH Dungeon who post on the RotRL board) I developed this:

1) A detailed map of the region
and
2) A pdf of the text descriptions compiled from that thread

The "random" encounters I used included several pages of monster listings and statistics I compiled (from pfsrd) and printind out in advance, without actually using a random encounter table of any kind or even deciding in advance where and when they would happen.

Works great!

[Mark Hoover 330]

If you're not going to use the Hex Exploration alternate rules from Ultimate Campaign and you're also not limiting yourself to random encounters always being combat, you have to think: how often do you have random encounters? 1/hour, 1/day?

I have 2 different rates depending on what the PCs are doing. If the players are just randomly exploring/traveling through an area I've got encounter times broken out into 4 hour blocks: Early Morning, Late Morning, Early Afternoon, Late Afternoon, Early Evening, Late Evening. Then I've got a couple random encounters that are time-dependent. For example you won't run into 1d4 vampires in a Late Morning block, and during Early Evening its highly unlikely the PCs would find 1d6 wild goats grazing.

On the other hand if the PCs are in camp or exploring a fixed area while searching for a specific thing such as a dungeon entrance, cave suitable for camping in or what not, I'll have the encounters speed up; say, 1/hour or more depending on how heavily patrolled an area is.

This overland map/all random encounters style is very old school. On a personal note this is how I like running journeys. I've never understood how, traveling through roughly 15 miles of barely explored wilderness, a team of attentive, adventurous people would only spot ONE thing of note.

Consider: on a 2 hour hike up a big hill and back down again a couple years back I came upon 2 different animal dens dug into the soil, a stream I wasn't expecting, some really bizarre red bush just randomly in the midst of a sea of green, and a handful of interesting birds.