So some of us have been utilizing Tension Pool mechanics.
See this site for its origin and a too wordy explanation of it.
And here you can find an extended forum conversation we had about it several months ago.
"When the pool is rolled, if any die comes up a 1, a Complication occurs. Complications can be anything at all and the GM should consider preparing a list of possible Complications in advance. In a dungeon, Complications might represent random monster encounters or trap encounters, they might represent earthquakes or other sporadic hazards, or the magical effects of a haunting. If the party is playing cat-and-mouse with a ghoul in a labyrinth, a Complication might indicate an ambush by the ghoul. If the Tension Pool is part of a social encounter, a Complication might represent the NPC growing impatient and making some random demand of the party, or taking offense at something, or deciding enough is enough and ending the encounter. The only stipulation is that Complications must always make things worse. Or harder. Or more inconvenient. They are NEVER beneficial."
I like to point to Dungeon World's Hard Moves as an example of how this works. Whatever you do to the players should make sense within the fiction
In my experience, the tension pool works well for exploration mode between encounters in a dungeon as a way to try and keep players from taking forever between fights. Treating Wounds means adding another dice to that pool, which is often worth it, but waiting an hour to treat them again means your dice pool gets rolled an entire extra time, resulting in another complication. (I think the odds of getting a one on any of six d6 is about 2/3rds, according to one of my players.)
Where it doesn't work as well is overland travel. Rolling the pool every hour means a minimum of 8 pool rolls if you only roll for time spent marching and 24 rolls if you roll for every hour in the day. That's a lot of crap to squeeze into a single day of adventuring, including a very strong chance of being ambushed multiple times during the course of the same night. And it is also an excessive amount of dice rolling.
By contrast, a bunch of PF1 adventures recommended having about a 30% chance of a random encounter during every hour of active adventuring, but only allowing for no more than 2 or 3 random encounters in a given day. Assuming a 8 hour "work day," that entails 8 percentile rolls per day. That is repetitive as heck.
Also, capping your encounters at 2 or 3 means they aren't especially random and are unlikely to accomplish much but waste time because they aren't going to really push your parties resources. Even if you have a pre-written encounter in the same day, because your players will have time to heal between fights and will probably be willing to nova more than when you bust out the map and start drawing dungeons.
There are also skill checks to consider. Good stealth rolls while Avoiding Notice seem like they should reduce the risk of encounters in the right terrain, and a Survival check might be used to create a hidden camp sight and avoid ambush in the middle of the night.
So there are a couple of solutions I can think of.
1) Use a tension pool, but only add dice for time the party chooses to delay. They are going to spend 8 hours traveling no matter what, so it doesn't really make sense to penalize that, but if they choose to dally further (like repeating their Treat Wounds cycle hour) then it seems like there should be a risk. This feels VERY meta though. It also raises questions like "well can I Identify Magic during the time we were already stopping for lunch." Pass.
2) Adjust the tension pool's time to an hour per dice. That means you're going to roll 4 times over the course of a day. That cuts your dice rolling in half, which is good. But at least one of those rolls will be during the party's rest, which is highly likely to interrupt sleep and make your players have to restart their rest cycle or accept fatigue and no spell slots. Ouch.
3a) Reduce each day to a single dice roll to determine if a random encounter happens that day. Say, a 50% chance. The exact probability should probably be adjusted by a better statistician than me.
3b)As above, but you also add a lower chance of an encounter while the party camps each night. Say, 10%. Being attacked in your sleep serves a purpose, but it also gets old fast and further delays getting to other crap if you need to restart your sleep afterwards.
3c) As above, but when a random encounter triggers in a day, you roll again to see if another random encounter triggers in the same day. You keep rolling after each encounter so there is a real risk of attrition. You might also roll to determine how soon after your previous encounter the next one begins. You could reduce the odds of another encounter that day after each one, if you like, say shaving 10% off each time.
4) Allow skill checks to reduce odds of encounters as described above. This can be used in conjunction with any of these other solutions.
Also, to clarify, not all encounters or complications need to involve initiative being rolled. They could represent an obstacle you need to bypass, an enemy you can talk down or sneak by, a lost child in the woods you need to escort to safety, or anything else.
So what ideas do the rest of you have for making travel interesting? Or do you think any sort of random encounter while traveling just serves to distract from the actual narrative?
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There's also part of me that thinks that randomly determining if there is a chance for an encounter is the wrong way to look at it. If an encounter is fun, you and your players should all want to have it. If it isn't fun, why bother spending an hour of your precious table time on it?
Maybe the right solution is to come up with a series of encounters or challenges you think will be interesting and then roll to determine when along the journey they happen?
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Spitballing here.
Maybe a two-tier system, divided into applicable units of time, appropriate to the narrative tension of the phase of play, but rendered binary: The PCs are either in a Time Sensitive narrative moment, or they are not.
Four examples:
Dungeon Crawl (Normal): Add a die whenever the PCs take more than a 10-minute break between encounters. If the PCs skip a 10-minute break, remove a die.
Dungeon Crawl (Time Sensitive): Add a die whenever the PCs take a 10-minute break.
Overland Travel (Normal): Add a die whenever the PCs take more than a 1-hour break between encounters. If the PCs skip a 1-hour break, remove a die.
Overland Travel (Time Sensitive): Add a die whenever the PCs take a 1-hour break.
I generally only use tension pools during "dungeons" (doesn't have to be literal dungeons, just whenever the party is within enemy territory and danger could be behind every corner). For overland travel, the tension pool I use would become way too unwieldy. What I use instead could be seen as a variant of random encounters.
Basically, I print "encounter cards" that I draw from a deck. The way I usually do things is I have a daytime deck and a nighttime deck; the daytime deck includes encounters such as "you pass a merchant's wagon, the wheels of her cart are broken so she asks for assistance" or "the Kobold, Ragamund the Cursed and his bandits lie in wait to ambush".
The nighttime deck is similar, but features events that could happen while most of the party is sleeping. Notably, neither deck is majorly comprised of combat encounters - a daytime card might be spotting a decrepit tower in the distance that the party could explore if they wanted to, and a nighttime card could be a large but peaceful creature passing the party at night.
For some days, I will run a scripted event rather than draw from the deck if I have an idea for a particular encounter that would fit/advance the story somehow. Depending on how long the party travels for, you might want to draw from the deck less - I find this method works best for travel that takes up to a week at most.
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The "rules" for tension/random encounters should be built to support the encounters and game flow we want to have. That much seems obvious.
Let's look at different sorts of situations and what kind of thing we'd like the mechanics to do;
A small-scale dungeon where monsters in one room can easily hear a fight in the other room
In this situation we probably don't need any kind of extra randomness since there's already no breathing room in between encounters. The encounters should probably be on the easy side because the characters will have to do multiple encounters in a row.
A more spread-out dungeon where resting in between encounters is possible
We don't want the party to feel too comfortable in the middle of enemy territory. But they do need some time to rest. Sometimes even more than 10 minutes. We don't want to chain ourselves to a strict "you better have an encounter every 10 minutes" rhythm because that would be silly; but we do want there to be pressure not to just relax at whim.
A tension pool sort of system may work here, where you start filling the pool as the party dawdles, quite slowly at first (say, not adding any dice in the first 10m, only one die in the second 10m, two dice in the third 10m..)
I'd personally like to add an element of skill to it, where the party can try to find or create a good hiding spot that gives them a bit more time, but still not unlimited. Say that finding a good hiding spot makes the speed at which dice accumulate a lot slower, but finding a good hiding spot has a DC proportional to the dungeon's overall level. Or perhaps the hiding spot gives them a bonus on checks to dodge encounters spawned by the tension pool.
Something that I think ought to become part of the game if you include random (and therefore not plot-critical) encounters is that it becomes more acceptable to avoid encounters. If the tension pool spills over and a random encounter threatens to happen, maybe the party manages to hide from it. Like all hiding behind furniture as a patrol passes by. The DC for this could still go up and up as they wait longer.
A truly vast megadungeon
We're talking stuff on the scale of whole lost cities here, where the idea of a single continuous gridmap of the dungeon is not practical anymore. Rather, the dungeon contains different zones. It's possible for the PCs so pacify some zones and turn them into relatively safe bases where they can recuperate, while they can raid into enemy territory further in the dungeon.
At this point you would want maybe the occasional incursion into PC-held territory just to show that not all inhabitants are taking this all sitting down. But the focus would be on high-tension raids into enemy territory, make some progress, have some encounters, and get back to safe territory before things get out of hand.
So you'd use the tension pool only in enemy territory, but it ramps up fairly aggressively. Raids are exciting because the players can't rest extensively between encounters and have to keep an eye on their escape route. You get periods of high tension in the enemy zone and relaxation (and item identification and gear repair) in the safe zone. Varying tension is a good thing to have in the game.
Overland travel
The role of random encounters in overland travel has always been controversial. Some writers see the "only one encounter per day" as an excuse to pick out monsters that will burn through your entire daily resources. Others have a tough time figuring out a mathematical formula for how many encounters you might have per day, and the results can be all over the place.
This is where the difference between "random, because we didn't know if it would happen" and "random, because not connected to the main plot" starts to become a big topic.
A mechanical use of random encounters used to be to keep spellcasters on their toes, because they couldn't easily predict how many encounters were still remaining in the day. PF2 has moved a bit away from that style of design, by giving casters cantrips and focus spells that make them more all-day classes. I think that's fine, because it just makes the game awkward if some characters are more all-day than others.
A narrative use of random encounters is to make the distance between points on the map noticeable. If you go from A a thousand miles to B and nothing happens in between, they don't feel very far apart.
Another narrative use of random encounters is to give some characterization to the area through which the characters are traveling. By using terrain-appropriate monsters and perhaps some monsters who are thematically in tune (but not lockstep) with the adventure's overall theme, you can help set the mood of the adventure. Or the reverse: use some very different creatures to show that "this world isn't all about X and only X".
I don't really see a tension pool playing a big role in this, except perhaps as a bit of obfuscation. Rather, I think well-designed random encounter tables, filled with both monsters and harmless encounters are what you need here. The point of an overland travel random encounter isn't to put pressure on the heroes' resources, but to provide a fun encounter in itself and to fill in gaps. So tension pool to "hurry along" people isn't really needed here.
I said obfuscation because it can help for setting the tone of "random" encounters to either make their chance of happening random, or to make it seem as if it were random. So you could roll for random encounters even if you'd already decided whether it would happen or not.
I think a loose approach to random event chance is better than dogmatically rolling. A system calibrated to deliver "enough" random encounters for a two-day journey might give you way too many random encounters if the journey's destination is two months away. For example, if you're traveling to the venue of the next book in an AP, you don't want that to take months of play because of all the random encounters on the way. One or two encounters per distinct geographical area crossed would make more sense. For example, if you have to travel across the plains, through the forest, and then the highlands to get to the next major site, then you might want to have an encounter with some merchants or bandits in the plains, some crazy heretic cult hiding in the forest at the edge of civilization, and a manticore in the highlands where mankind doesn't dare go. This number of encounters is entirely independet from whether it took days or weeks to make this journey.
So my specific upcoming scenario is a week long journey down the Long Walk, a duergar controlled underground highway. The AP has 2 scripted encounters left but otherwise had an uninspired random encounter tables as described above. The bestiary has a lot of cool Darklands critters, so I wanted to show them off.
What I decided on doing was coming up with a list of encounters and then rolling a d8 to determine which day each encounter would happen on. On an 8, I rerolled and that encounter happens while the party camps for the night of the new roll.
Not all of these are combat encounters, or at least don't have to be. The party is also level 12, but I'm sprinkling in some cloakers and ghouls and other nonthreats to attack the party. Those I won't bother rolling out-- I'll just ask the party if they kill the creature or not.
This method ensures a random distribution of encounters. Some days wound up very packed while others have nothing at all. But I'm not skipping anything interesting, nor am I rolling during a session for it.
Now to come up with more non-combat encounters... The Darklands is a pretty hostile place, so it is harder than on the surface.
The essential problem with random encounters is that the poor overworked gym is forced to come up with a cool encounter on the spot. The best way round this is to have a series of pregenerated encounters, either using a card system (encounters tied to a deck of cards, draw one at random and play the encounter associated with the draw) or predetermined (first encounter is with a war band of orcs, second with a gelatinous cube, etc.)
I can see the idea of a tension pool working, although 1 dice every hour seems a bit high (though it would depend entirely on the area). Assuming the pcs are wandering in the wilderness, encounters with a potentially deadly creature would occur about 1/day (if you add 1/hour at night too, there would be another 1/night). While this is fantasy, that seems a high preponderance of potentially dangerous creatures. Most expeditions in the modern world will go days between such encounters, if they ever have one.
Of course, if you are wandering around the local orc tribal lands, encounters should be more likely. If you include terrain hazards (rivers, gorges, cliffs, quicksand, marshlands, forest fires, etc.) you can maybe dial up the rate.
The most obvious use for a tension pool is where the party is trying to achieve something and failure doesn’t automatically mean an encounter. For example, the pcs are trying to sneak onto the aforementioned orc tribal lands. They roll stealth every hour, failure means another dice in the tension pool. Or maybe they are climbing the dragons mountain, every hour they try their climb roll, if they fail they add another dice to the tension pool. Or maybe they are working to a deadline, where the longer they take the more likely the BBEG will complete the ritual.
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There's also part of me that thinks that randomly determining if there is a chance for an encounter is the wrong way to look at it. If an encounter is fun, you and your players should all want to have it. If it isn't fun, why bother spending an hour of your precious table time on it?
One option is to make the tension pool's 'complication' more alert enemies. If you've avoided complications, you've got a chance to attack the enemy in favorable circumstances (sleeping, divided, unarmed...) or avoid them entirely. If you've been too slow/noisy, you're facing an ambush or a hostile patrol.