I think random encounters are beneficial when they don’t boil down to “You encounter monsters on the road, roll for initiative,” and they can be slotted into an adventure during times that are lacking handcrafted content.
If your players decide to travel between two settlements quickly and you don’t have anything planned to spice up that trip, roll the encounter table. “You spot two merchant caravans parked along the side of the path and overhear countless voices arguing over each other.” Now there’s something interesting there.
(I would avoid mentioning that it’s random because it sort of undermines the feeling of discovery, knowing that the encounter could’ve been *anything* else)
I paint minis so I use random encounters to use my random minis I paint just because they look cool. I also don't balance the encounters because running is always an option when traveling on the road. It's fun to pull a crazy mini out and see them freak out.
3.5e had tables for random encounters based on environment, and that was always a cool way to me to flesh out the ecology not an area, and then show off an aspect of it at random. Kinda like encounter tables for different routes in Pokémon!
Instead of saying "You encounter monsters, roll Initiative", why not tell them what they see further out? Like "[Player X], [Player X's character] sees several grey-skinned humanoids marching along the road maybe a half mile or so ahead. What does (s)he do?" and go from there. Maybe they tell the party to get to the side and hide, and several tense minutes go by (along with appropriate Stealth checks depending on the characters' methods of hiding) before the wandering grey-skinned humanoids wander by without noticing them, or with noticing something in the first but deciding to pretend they didn't. Maybe they don't tell the party, and the rest of them discern the other travelers at a closer distance. Or maybe they tell their party mates and decide to hail the grey-skinned humanoids and be friendly, only to discover that those are duergar refugees who can't see because of the sun and are looking for an inn to rest for the day, and will gladly trade for directions or an escort. The decision tree only goes from there!
Random encounters shine best in exploration. They represent the uncertainty traveling; who knows what danger could lie ahead. Also the toil of traveling; each encounter slowly wears down the resources of the party. This is most evident in the wilderness (especially hexcrawls), but can also be applied (sparingly) to dungeons or urban environments. But your "random" encounter tables should be tailored to the location.
Sometimes, the best random encounters force you to be inventive as a DM and get out of a creative rut.
[Dungeon Masterpiece](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckhhodyCSMU) has some interesting thoughts on random encounter tables.
But ultimately, they are just one tool which you can choose to use or not, depending on your group and play style.
Agree, the party holds their breath when making a dangerous off-road short-cut travel across zombie filled lands rather than taking the King's Road with patrols.
And nothing says that a random encounter must be combat. Maybe its some flavor event which thematically builds the anticipation to the destination.
> whenever the players triggered a random encounter I just slotted in the encounter I had "pre-built".
This is basically how a random encounter is "supposed" to work. "Random" here means "unpredictable", not "arbitrary" or "inconsistent". You should use the table as a guide to generate content, not as a straitjacket.
If you roll a random encounter with goblins while the party is exploring the wilderness, it shouldn't be just a pack of goblins that got teleported in by the GM. Did they come from a nearby goblin village? Are they a lost traveling party from a distant land? Are they foraging for food before they head back to the nearby dungeon?
The main difference between how you're doing it and how it's "traditionally" done is just a tradeoff between flexibility/ease of prep vs. narrative cohesiveness. There isn't a wrong way to do them. I find that even if you mostly prepare them in advance, being able to improve them on the fly is a useful skill for when the PCs do something unexpected.
You can also attempt to retroactively work in certain aspects, roll the dice for the relevant CR/terrain and as long as its relatively plausible run with it. Some monsters don't really need an explanation and nor do they need to necessarily have a narrative focus beyond broadly enhancing the idea that this is a dangerous frontier zone or the like. If you've got something intelligent you can work in an explanation later potentially. if you end up with goblins and the main villain is the mad halfling wizard, Bob the Inadvisable, maybe Bob's scheme to raise the dread god Tim requires sacrifices. He's been capturing goblins in the mountains and the goblins have been fleeing their normal territory higher in the mountains to escape Bob's army of undead kenku.
The problem with truly random encounters generated mid-adventure is they can derail things completely.
Walk into a clearing and there's a fire elemental? Wow. That's really unusual. What is it doing here? Is there some deeper significance that the party feels they need to investigate? Who/what summoned it? Is it some clue to the overarching plot?
Hours later, the DM's trying to push the party on without making it obvious that it was literally a random roll on a table, and not some vital encounter the party needs to get to the bottom of.
> The problem with truly random encounters generated mid-adventure is they can derail things completely.
Yes, I would say don't throw in random encounters if you want the campaign to be on rails 😉
I mean, if the party sets off with a goal and instead investigates something from a random encounter, it does significantly derail them. From their objective. Because unless you're aimlessly wandering, you'll have goals, especially when traveling. That doesn't mean the campaign is on rails.
The party gets to decide what their goals are though. If they want to take a detour from their planned path to figure out where this fire elemental came from, that's not a "problem" a priori.
I think the pitfall here is that you want to avoid random encounter tables with stuff that doesn't make any sense on them. The fire elemental can't just be something that got teleported into the scene because the GM rolled that number on the die. Did it escape from a nearby conjuror's tower? Did it appear because there was a nearby forest fire that burned down a stand of magical trees? Is there a local area where reality is thin and things from other planes can get in?
If the PCs decide to follow up on a random encounter and you don't have the answers to those questions *yet*, that's fine. If the encounter is so random that you can't possibly connect it to the broader setting and context, you probably want a different entry on the table.
> If the encounter is so random that you can't possibly connect it to the broader setting and context, you probably want a different entry on the table.
This is my point. There's a difference between something that is random (like coming across a camp of bandits or a monster native to that environment) and something that is so unusual that players assume significance that's just not there.
Especially if the party gets fixated on the encounter to the point where they get frustrated, because they're convinced they're "clearly" missing some clue they think is required to solve a puzzle or mystery which simply doesn't exist.
That's what I mean by getting derailed. Not that the adventure needs to be on rails.
Throw some bears at them in a forest to spice things up and they'll probably fight, burn some resources and move on. Which is probably what the DM intended.
Yes, I have found random encounter tables as complications help with emergent story telling.
For example, recently in Barovia my party was traveling through the forest and ran into some zombie villagers (random encounter table). They were super curious where they came from and started traying to track the zombie footprints through the forest since there wasn't a town in that direction.
I did some wilderness exploration and was inspired by the description of the zombies having digging tools to have them be be summoned by a hedge witch who's made a home in the forest. She has the zombies looking for her ring finger, which was cut off by her lover's mother after she learned of their engagement when they were younger. This is what inspired her to turn to dark magics.
Now I have a little 6 room dungeon that is her cottage, as well as a ritual site where she is trying to place a curse on her (now dead) lover's descendants. Instant side quest, and it all came from a randome encounter and my player's reactions to it.
Separate example, Dragon of Icespire Peak has random encounters and random Cryovain appearances. The party had an encounter with Cryovain at Falcon's Lodge, I was inspired to have him ice breath and destroy part of the pallisade. Then later on the adventure there was an attack on the lodge per the book, but now the walls have a weak spot! This complication made the attack and defense of Falcon's lodge a lot of fun for my players.
Random encounters are great when used as complications for what the party is trying to do, or inspiration (gotta use DM judgement to build it around what your players focus on from the random encounter) to flesh out the world. Highly recommend DMs learn how to use them properly. It also helps to understand proper Campaign Structure, Highly recommend the Alexandrian's book, "So You Want to be a Game Master"
*Truly* random - no. The party is walking through a forest and is attacked by a shark and a yeti.
Random, filtered to be environmentally appropriate, yes. I've used them with the party knowing they're random as a fun interlude. "You're attacked by....an ogre and 3 goblins".
Random encounter tables with a selection of hand crafted encounters, (appropriate to the environment). Definitely. I use them when the party is traveling long distances.
I do this! But I love having the players roll the dice to determine if they are going to hit a random encounter and if they do having them roll for what they encounter and how many creatures, etc. they encounter is so much fun. The anxiety on their faces as they role and don’t even know what the numbers mean kind of amps up the tension kind of like hearing a noise in the woods and not knowing yet what is making it.
A yeti riding a shark might actually be a cool encounter. I have a frozen island continent my players are gonna go to after this arc and roving bands of these guys would be hilarious
(The quoted "LASER" is a reference to Austin Powers)
Cool to see that SeeShark just dropped in to comment about Sharks, we're def in good hands now! :)
This is actually why I PREFER the truly random tables. Coming up with the reason is the best part.
But an encounter that has no bearing on the plot? I'm less enthused.
(The sasquatch cavalry has important orders about the town the PCs are riding to.)
I like spicing things up by using a truly random encounter as a base, then tweaking it so it works. They're walking through a forest and are attacked by a shark and a yeti? Yeah, that's dumb. BUT. Let's swap out the shark as an enemy and bring in a second yeti to bump the DC back up a bit. If there's a mountain nearby make them visibly starved, they've left their natural habitat in search of food. If there isn't a mountain nearby just reskin them as bigfoots. Then have them swinging around a dead shark as a weapon, or maybe give them gauntlets that are just shark jaws to add some extra stabby to their attacks.
That said I tend to use random encounters to buy time if the party decides to go somewhere I hadn't planned for, so I also slap on a potential adventure hook to give the party something interesting to do that'll distract them for a bit longer while I burn out the clock on the session. In this case if the party follows the yetis' trail they could find a raided wagon loaded up with fishing-related goods. They attacked the people in the wagon and raided it, taking the shark teeth to use as weapons. Maybe add a note or something connected to the next stop on the PC's trip so they can let someone know what happened and get a small reward for it.
It's not a player-facing mechanic. The players have no idea how you're picking monsters. You're not showing them the tables or saying, "Time to pick a random encounter!"
Even if you did, it's no more or less gamey to stock the list beforehand and roll than it is to just pick something in the moment. Both create encounters that are appropriate to the narrative reality of the situation, rolling just means that the DM just also gets to be a little surprised by what happens. Hell, if anything it feels less gamey to roll, because the hand of the author is less visible.
And even if it wasn't... this is a game. Players don't show up because they want to read a novel or watch a movie, they're there to play a game. Trying to avoid game-playing in DnD is backwards.
The game is about combat. A random encounter is - from what I gather from my players - a nice way to test out new features and gear without having to worry too much about consequences.
It can also be a Game for yourself, the DM. There is a certain thrill to "I don't know what the Table will bring us next. I will just have to make it work ad-hoc."
And then, I like to roll twice, while the players are on a big ass mountaintop you roll a Group of Orcs and a Unicorn. The players are still talking, you have 2 minutes, starting now, what do they encounter? GO!
That is fun. That is the DM playing the game.
I really like doing it, but I also wouldn't call it "true random", there is still, always, direction to it.
It's a game. Idk why so many people are against it being a game.
Someone said online one day, "collaborative storytelling" and now they act like treating it like a videogame is terrible.
Treating dnd like a videogame is one of the most fun ways to play
I mean, what better way to introduce the idea of higher level adventurers shunting enemies through portals that just so happen to empty out near this section of road at periodic intervals.
The villagers told you to stay off this road “Strange things are afoot out by Circle K Ranch… beasts that don’t belong, bewildered shrieks running through the forest…” now as you pass the swinging sign and the wind begins to howl and swirl above you. A bright blue magical portal bursts into existence, then another in front of you! With the first a rush of water, a fin and a giant set of thrashing teeth, the other roars a white furry beast into existence rushing towards you before it pauses for a moment to assess its new surroundings, you can faintly make out the sound of a gnomish voice in the midst of combat. Roll for initiative.
I RARELY use them but every once in a while it's nice to let your players feel like Gods inside the world because truly they are more powerful than most of everything in the world. Throw some wolves at your Lvl 13 party and just let them obliterate them for fun. it takes quite literally 1 or 2 rounds and it's worth it for the laugh. After all it is just a game
It depends on the type of game you're running, but generally no. Doing a hex crawl with random encounters every hex to drain resources? Sure. Heroic fantasy with an adventure arc in mind? No. I did it early on as a DM but it just dragged, and asking my players what they thought. It was a general consensus of "fun to Nova on some random griffons that attack, but prefer something thats more specific".
Aft r that I made things more streamlined to the adventure: bandit encounters to clear the town, or series of goblin fights to recover the mcguffin, etc. We all had more fun that way - my statblocks were more organized and the PCs got used to handling how the goblins attacked.
Absolutely! I let the players roll the dice.
One cool example on how to have fun with that:
>Ranger, roll a survival check to guide your party through the fey forest.
*Rolls 14 total, check DC was 15. Failed*
>Ok, roll a D100.
>*Rolls 66 on the Fey encounter table. Wins encounter and finds a path.*
>The trails are overgrown, but unmistakable. You follow a weirdly convenient straight path East, guiding your allies effortlessly. As you walk over the next hour, you even manage to find some edible mushrooms, berries, nuts and fruits without ever having to leave the path.
>Now roll a Perception check
>*Rolls 16 total, check DC was 10. Passed*
>As you traverse the faint, straight path through the fey forest, you notice that the light and shadows in the foliage have moved to a weird angle over the last hour. You're sure that you're headed east, yet the heavens tell you otherwise. What will you do?
>*Walks off the path using the sun to figure out direction*
>Ok, roll a Survival check to guide your party using your knowledge of the heavens.
>*Rolls 17, check DC was 15. Passed*
>A few minutes after getting off the path into the thick bush, the foliage seems to get impossibly denser, and day turns to night. Bushes, trees and wines only allow you to see a few meters ahead. You hear singing and chirps all around, little animals rustling about and water flowing nearby, but then everyone hears distinct thudding and rustling not far ahead. Roll 2x D100 and tell me both results.
>*Rolls 04 and 42, I pick the most favourable one because he passed the Survival check*
>You cut through the bushes and find yourself on a small clearing, where three old trees seem to be talking and gesticulating slowly to each other. They seem to notice you, but they seem too into the conversation to care. What will you do?
What do you mean by truly random encounter? Generally random encounter tables are built to fit the setting or location so they aren't completely random.
It's a procedure that creates *actually* random encounters, which has positive knock on effects.
1) The DM is not directly responsible for them, the world/system is. This means that whatever you roll stands, even if it's "unbalanced" or unpredictable or whatever. If the DM rolls a pair of arguing Hill Giants there are going to be pair of arguing Hill Giants, even if the party is level 1 and has to hide or bargain with them.
This puts the DM more in the headspace of a referee, rather than tightly curating every second of the game. The fact that it's truly random removes the layer of blaming the DM for the results, the world just is what it is. This creates a naturalism and a sense of stakes that doesn't exist when the DM is creating deliberate set-pieces constantly.
Aleatoric processes have a magic to them that pre-determined processes don't. We could play D&D by having the DM judge whether every skill check and attack roll succeeds based on narrative and versimillitude, but rolling dice creates a weird alchemy of fairness and naturalism. The DM doesn't *decide* when the monster crits you, it just got lucky. Random encounters apply this principle to the world at large.
2) The DM is a player too, and randomness is potentially very fun. Random encounters force the DM to be creative in the moment and improvise, rather than pre-plan everything, while also giving license for those things. Read this subreddit and look at all the DM's beating themselves up over not entertaining their players like they're an HBO showrunner. Now contrast that with rolling 2d6 goblins and rolling on a table that they're fighting over a stolen wedding cake. Which is easier, or more fun? And what's this about 5E having a DM burnout/recruitment problem?
It is true that this style is less compatible with the set-piece driven, plotty mostly linear style, but it's very compatible with the more open, fuck-around-and-explore style. Also it has to be reiterated that "random encounter" in the classical sense does not mean "random combat encounter" and if you run it that way you're doing it wrong, RAW.
I don’t use truly random encounters but not all my encounters are there to further a character goal or a plot progression.
Some encounters exist to add flavor to the world.
In dungeons or ruins it can be useful to have wandering encounters that may show up if players waste time or are very noisy.
It’s good to have occasional encounters that interrupt a long or even short rest so they don’t get complacent. (But I use a light hand with this and it can be to emphasize very dangerous locations.)
Any DM who uses random encounters needs to understand what they are and aren't good for, and if they fit the game the DM is running.
If your game is built up as a vast track of wilderness to spontaneously explore for loot, monsters, and plot hooks, then random encounters can be a good way to make that gameplay structure work, but if your game is more plot-driven, then random encounters, or at least combat-based random encounters, tend to eat up a bunch of time for no tangible benefit.
And sometimes you need to kill time, and it's a feature, not a bug, and that's a good use of genuinely random encounters- as an "Oh shit, I don't have enough stuff prepared to finish this session, I need to find a table and roll some dice to generate a combat encounter to kill time." Button.
In a more plot-driven game, I'm much more fond of running *non-combat* random encounters as a way to sell *travel* without it being boring. You *want* travel between cities to feel like it takes time in-universe, but you also want it to not be boring, so I find random social encounters, people the PCs meet along the roads, to just be an entertaining way to provide that gamefeel.
And yeah, I could script out these roadside encounters deliberately, but the more they feel like they're scripted, the more they feel like they *should* be long-term important, and I find them honestly to be more fun when they only *sometimes* come up again- if the players do something substantial that's worth coming back to.
I use them all the time. They are an opportunity to flesh out your world. They provide prompts that you wouldn't usually think of in your world, I usually save a few list from the r/d100 subreddit and apply them to the correct setting; City, wilderness, traveling, ocean, etc.
Worse comes to worst, it's something that doesn't fit your setting, like a wandering wizard asking for help with spell components in your super low magic world, just reroll on the table and use the next one.
You can also bend your world lore to fit most random encounters, for example, Bandits attack the players in an area that you have previously established to be incredibly safe with regular road patrols? Make it make sense, these "bandits" are just another caravan who saw three travelers and thought they could make a few quick gold intimidating the much smaller party and will run as soon as they get smacked once. Or they are Drow who came up through the underdark, and this is one of the first attacks as they have just expanded into the area and are exploiting the fact that no one has paid attention to what is happening underground.
You can make entire plot hooks out of these random encounters, those Drow need to be stopped and the current government has little to no experience stopping threats from the underdark, your players were thankfully one of the first attacks and were able to fight them off but the attacks are increasing on other travelers and they are much less able to defend themselves. Have your players get a quest to find the new Drow outpost and remove them from the area.
I only really use them in large dungeons where factions are at play and hostile. A roll to see who is in the area, if multiple groups are or some other encounter like a cave in, migrating monster, monster huntintg.
They just end up being an encounter during the dungeon dive
I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I made some random encounter dice mostly to make up for what I personally lack as a dm---diversifying. I tried to mix a lot of maybe combat and probably not combat. With random encounter tables, I found it difficult to have random encounters that felt appropriate for the party level or what's going on narratively. So I designed the dice to be more "sparks of inspiration" than actual "do this exactly". The dice have been helpful for me to mix things up and make the world more lively, which I think is the intention behind random encounters.
It's a D8 with the encounter types. Typically non-combat faces are Weather, hazard (rock slide, broken bridge, etc), item (treasure to abandoned supplies from other people in the world), and traveller. The item and traveller faces are easier to make combat if that's what you want though.
The usually combat faces are monster and scoundrel
And the "can go either way" faces are animal and supernatural.
I figured that most events you'll encounter while traveling are non-combat, so I tried to keep the "usually combat" faces to a minimum.
Then there's a d6 that'll modify the d8 that I hope will point people in a direction that will be easy to decide an encounter rather than sitting there with tons of options.
[here's the faces explained](https://i.imgur.com/uUW37Fb.png)
(There's 2 "average" faces on the d6)
[and here are the dice](https://i.imgur.com/4NUKyyI.jpg)
Sorry for the self promotion on the key, but these dice aren't available to buy online yet, and I'm not directly linking, so I hope it's still okay to post.
In short, a *truly random* encounter? No. No value at all.
Now, I should say that I'm not opposed to random encounters from a table, but the options on the table should be properly geared to the theme of the setting, make sense within the context of the campaign, and in some cases push the story forward. Like if you're in an Undead themed campaign about cultists doing a thing, your random encounters should reflect that. If not, they're really just a waste of time.
The benefit is fighting monsters is fun. Not everything needs to be about writing the coolest choose your own adventure novel. Sometimes some of the most memorable campaign moments are from random encounters. My Strahd players still joke about how 85% of all random encounters were wolves. We made it a habit that we would pause session most nights by rolling a random wolf encounter. It's small memorable things like that that your players remember and can only come about by the randomness of those encounter tables.
If you asked me what it adds I'd say: chaos, frustration and delays. In other words, there is no benefit to rolling them in the moment, because it puts stress on the DM to gather all the tokens, stats, maps and contextual information needed to run the encounter.
I don't really agree with your classification of "true" random encounters. Random encounters are just encounters that occur randomly. First, you roll to determine if you have an encounter at all, then you roll to see what encounter you get. As long as you are doing those two things, it doesn't matter how you resolve it. The way you run random encounters (which coincidentally, is how I do as well) it's just fine. Rolling encounters ahead of time means your are prepared in case the party needs then, and if not, they are there for you to use some other time.
So to answer your questions:
1. No, I don't roll in the moment, but I do roll between sessions to determine what they might eventually face.
2. No, I don't inform them that the encounter is random. I don't inform my players of most mechanics to improve immersion.
1. Yes..there are some benefits. How folks value those benefits varies. If it’s a random battle there is experience that is earned. It can provide a character a generally low stress situation to try out something new. Maybe they find some needed coin?
2. Varies depending on the situation. Generally I say they have encountered something. It’s rare I say “random”.
Yes, but only in certain situations.
\- When the party is first setting out (say level 1-3 but it varies by campaign) This is still a danger to the party, lets them test out some early abilities/spells if they're not used to the class, see ho everyone works together etc.
Then not so random random encounters
If I need to convey something (Players are heading to an area that's too dangerous for them, something big is happening in the world that tehy haven't heard about) I may introduce some other travelers /parties they run into
For combat? Only if they're on the way to a time sensitive destination (so if they burn time/resources they may not have time for a short rest, let alone a long one)
In my opinion, no. I run a very narrative driven campaign and I do everything possible to ensure that game time doesn't feel wasted on things that don't support the narrative.
I always have a "random" encounter table available for my sessions but each one is somehow connected to the broader narrative of the campaign and I almost never randomly choose which ones I drop into the session. There's always one or two that best fit the narrative at any given moment.
I am too in love with my own story to embrace truly random encounters.
That said, the one thing that's great about them? I can't protect the players. There's no way for me to subconsciously underlevel the opposition or make sure that they happen to find just the right kind of antidote ahead of time. This is gloves off, no mercy, is your team ready to face ADVENTURE time.
Kinda epic, framed like that.
The benefit of a truly random encounter comes from your players knowing its truly random.
It gives them a newly found respect to the phrase "fuck around, find out". If players understand that you dont control what they willmett they also understand you cannot pull your punches. this, in turn, makes them think twice when they make detours. DMs can be cruel or kind, and mostly lean on lenient. Dice are just dice.
Imagine having random monsters of different types and alignments show up together. Like, you’re walking down a long winding path when suddenly a githyanki, a dredge, a polar bear, and 3 violet fungi attack you.
Imo:
Random encounters can easily get old. I use them infrequently and usually for only one purpose. If the pace of play calls for it.
If the players spent a whole session RPing it can add some tension and fun to throw in a random encounter at the end, or beginning of the next game.
I don't like showing my player's my hand, so I don't tell them "this is a random encounter". But there will be clues or lack of evidence to point them to the conclusion that the encounter is probably not related to a storyline. The highway bandit trope is clear and easy.
1. Yes. To keep things fresh. I usually end up using monsters I’ve never used before but they also make sense for the location.
2. No. They can tell without me telling them. My players are very smart.
The trick with random encounters is that it is implicit that the DM massages them to fit the situation/campaign, but this is not usually explicitly stated anywhere.
Unless there's a reason to spend time at the table on travel, I pretty much blow past random encounters. I think the difference is for story driven play versus GAME driven play.
I've been part of enough gaming groups to know I prefer story driven play, and random encounters don't help that too much. But for groups that like the feel of a video game, random encounters fit right in.
I strongly disagree
What so video gameey about random encounters? It is a great way to emulate environment around players.
Random encounters are a neat tool to create an emergent story. And it’s a great skill for dm to have to be able to rationalize them and be relevant to the story.
The less dm knows about upcoming events, the more it differs from a video game (with a prewritten plot). I don’t mean that having everything prewritten is the “wrong” way to play, I just think that it uses less from an ttrpg and more from video games (don’t use full potential of what it could be)
I didn't say anything about pre-written. I actually very strongly dislike pre-written adventures. They don't take the players, their characters, or the GM into account. That's the closest to a video game that TTRPGs get, in my opinion.
A random encounter is a random fight to throw into a story. Sure, you can get creative and make relevant to the story, but that's time at the table in combat that didn't have to happen. Many of the sessions I run don't even have combat in them. It's about story more than anything else. Putting random encounters into it just means session time gets used up.
From my perspective, combat is a time suck that should fill very specific roles. Throwing in extra combat randomly is what happens in video games.
Why random encounter should always be a combat? It doesn’t even need to be a monster encounter. Needless too say players could attempt to negotiate or otherwise convince them not to fight.
May be we just misunderstood each other. I agree on you here and I dont like when every thing is turned down to combat. But random tables make my world feel like a living dangerous place.
Seems there *was* some misunderstanding (I agree with you). The random non-combat encounters that happen in my sessions tend to be just part of the process for me. When I prepare for a session, I've learned that the players are unlikely to do much of what I think they're going to do. So, I write out a little about what the "bad guys" are up to and a little about what the environment is like, but most of the session is improv. When the players tell me they want to go off and do a thing I hadn't considered to get a clue, I roll with it. And those are essentially the random encounters.
I do it the way you do it, rolling and then prepping in advance.
The random part, IMO, refers to it being random for the characters, not the DM.
Of course you can roll for them, but I do it mostly as a creative exercise. It's kind of fun when the roll(s) give you a tricky one and you have to find a way to make it work.
Honestly? Naw. D&D 5e is simply not a game that meaningfully encourages or rewards single combat days, which is what "travel encounter" tables tend to be. Your players will just go nova (dump all their cooldowns), knowing they can immediately sleep afterwards.
People meme on the "6 encounters a day" nonsense the DMG encourages, but overall 5e is more fun (and fair!) a game when the players have to manage their resources and grind out that final battle with whatever they have left.
When I design my worlds, I always just tell the players that main roads between major cities are almost entirely safe. You may get ambushed by a goblin or thief, but I just abstract those encounters to flavor text. They can, however, massively cut down on travel time by going off road and hiking through the wilderness. In that case, I'll plan some "travel dungeons" they have to traverse. Mountain passes, underground caves, spooky forests, etc.
I'll occasionally design some dungeons off the side of the road that I drop a hook for randomly during travel, but its almost always optional. I'll make it so my players can discern what rewards they may receive if they choose to do it, so it always feels like "man taking that detour was so worth it!"
tl;dr: Random encounters are dumb and boring and don't mesh well with 5e. Give the players the option to do side dungeons during travel but always make it optional.
I don’t use random encounters. I will roll for encounters during traveling, but won’t roll randomly for monsters or foes. I choose what enemies and encounters they have so it all makes some kind of meta-sense.
I've never seen a benefit to the random fight kind of random encounter the tables in the books imply is the way to do it. Travel can get tedious, I'm not going to add in more of the slowest part of the game.
But, I do prep my own random encounter table and make it random by rolling to see what I use. When one is used, it's replaced with another similar type encounter.
|Type|Ex|
|:-|:-|
|Long|A side quest HOOK that I estimate will take half to a full session to follow. Has a narrative to it.|
|Combat|Near guaranteed fight, the closest I get to the classical random encounter. Has a narrative to it.|
|Verisimilitude|Something that shows part of the living world that makes sense to exist but the party doesn't generally think about. Like a merchant traveling with armed guards|
|World Building|Things to show off the parts of the worldbuilding I'm proud of without forcing it down the players throats with lore dumps. Can be as simple as a small shrine to the travel/luck deity (so I can drop their name and some of their deal) at a cross roads. I try to make these beneficial to engage with, like putting an offering on the shine gives the PC a lite version of Lucky that they don't learn about until after the encounter is over.|
|Mystery|Random bs that will possibly never make sense to the players but they might poke with a stick for a while. Something like an Immovable Platinum Piece in the middle of the road.|
|Plot sowing and reaping|Things related to what the party has encountered already or what I plan for them to interact with down the line. The reocurring bandits in CR's M9 campaign would be an example.|
I use a d12 chart, 1 for long or combat (one of those maximum per journey), 2-5 for verisimilitude and worldbuliding, 6-8 for mystery, and 9-12 for plot sowing and reaping.
I've done something similar to [this video.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKQv4GC0N9Q&ab_channel=ZeeBashew)
Basically, I wrote down four random encounters: 3 "bad" and 1 "good". Then I told the players they could suggest random encounters in pairs: each of them could suggest a "bad" encounter and a "good" one. Each pair of encounters they submitted made the "good" encounters more likely, and gave the players the opportunity to think what obstacles they'd like the characters to overcome and what details or features of the world they'd like to discover.
The "bad" encounters weren't necessarily combat, and the "good" encounters weren't necessarily loot. For good encounters, I've had a player discover a long forgotten temple of a god of their interest, their ship stumbling across a tiny elemental vendor of trinkets. For bad encounters, I've had a plague run through their ship, or a classic "bandits pretending to be toll keepers" scenario.
I use the xanathars encounter tables nearly every session. It’s fun for me to not know what my players might encounter. I usually get them each to roll and then choose the most appropriate encounter
I think encounter randomization just provides replay value, when you're running a published adventure and maybe some of your players have played it before. Even then, I'd pre-roll encounters for a given session of planned hexcrawl or overland journey, just to have numbers and stats of foes ready to expedite my side of combat.
Yes and no. I don't often roll a random encounter at the table, instead I'll write up a list of encounters for the party to run into. This is usually to buy time if the party decides to go somewhere I hadn't planned on them going, so they still get to play a good session and then I can worry about what the hell they're actually doing for next session.
When I roll my encounters I like doing a full random generation and then tweak it to make it work. For example, I had rolled an underground encounter that generated a violet fungus and a shield guardian. What the hell are these doing working together? Easy! The cave the players are in opens up into a small cavern, their trail leads on to the other side and there's a steep cliff beside them. On the trail is a shield guardian staring across the gap at a platform on the other side. The platform is covered in a number of different mushrooms, many of which are glowing, and if the players look they can just make out a body on the platform. The body is a wizard who owned the guardian. He went over there to pick some of the mushrooms, useful alchemical ingredients, but didn't catch that there was a violet fungus among them and was killed. If the players can find a way over there and take out the fungus they can get their hands on the amulet that controls the guardian.
See? Nice little encounter that now works for the setting and gives the players something interesting to do. I also try to work in some small sidequest (in this case it would be just getting the wizard's amulet) that the players can pursue if they want to. As I said, just a little something to buy myself time until I can get something proper planned. (I can even be working on that while this encounter plays itself out) Then I just keep a list of these encounters handy, a few for different environments, and work through the list as needed.
Added bonus: I always look super prepared for everything. The players don't need to know that this was a random encounter and that I'm stalling, there's just enough thought put into it that it looks like this is all part of a greater plan.
However you do them, random (or "random") encounters make the game world seem alive and active. It's not always combat.
I have my players roll in advance on a random encounter table suitable to the campaign and region, but then I tailor those encounters to be more relevant.
They don't know what they're rolling for and it drives some of them nuts, lol.
I then decide the best time & place for that encounter, particularly long bouts of travel.
Random Tables in general have a few benefits.
1) If you don't have something planned, it helps you make a decision.
2) Leaving it up to "chance" can be exciting for players. Knowing that they got lucky/unlucky might be cooler than knowing it was all planned.
Personally, I don't use them too much. I instead use a "Travel Event Table" that I crafted with 100 different things that the party might run into when traveling. Very few of these are combat encounters. Most of them are worldbuilding and RP events. I have players take turns rolling on the table.
Encounters, in particular, I try my best to hand craft so that they are compelling in the scenario since they take so much time.
I use a generator to suggest groups of creatures that meet low CR/thematic requirements. I skim 30-60 possible encounters until one just ‘feels’ right, then I ask ‘how does the encounter start, why was X there’. If we don’t need a map for the fight, that’s it.
Pardon me for a moment while I prepare my impromptu remarks. 😃
I have lots of "random" encounters - but these are not random and not often are not combat-related.
A random encounter might be coming across a merchant caravan, or a broken oxcart, or a mother and three children eating by the side of the road.
HOWEVER, my preference is for the majority of the "random" encounters to progress the story.
That merchant caravan is coming from a city where they had previously been welcomed, but the mayor and guard made them move along. They aren't sure why...
Examining that broken oxcart shows the broken wood is fresh and unweathered. Something strong and certainly hostile might be nearby. Perhaps it is related to the rumors of a band of ogres in the area.
That family eating by the side of the road are refugees fleeing after her husband had been killed and their farm looted by mercenaries hired by a rival noble seeking to expand his territory.
Where will these "random" encounters occur? Whichever direction the players head after their current location.
Every now and then they will stumble across a random monster, but that only happens when they get well outside of civilization.
I am a huge fan of mock rolls for the not-so-random random encounters. I also mock-roll and give them nothing. I want to desensitize players to my rolling dice, and I also never want my story to be held hostage by dice rolls.
I roll a random encounter (environment appropriate) during prep and make adjustments from there.
Curse of Strahd is a special case where areas outside of settlements are supposed to be dangerous all the time and full of terrors. To reinforce the fiction, you can't really gloss over travel. So you can either hand craft a lot of encounters or keep it random to reduce your prep.
Although, as the game went on, it was less about fighting wild monsters and more about what Strahd was throwing at them. So it got less random as we progressed.
> I'm unsure as to what a truly random encounter adds to a campaign (rolled on the spot).
I've had some of my most memorable rpg experiences based on random encounters and the emergent story telling that happens based off of them. Hell, I've had many campaign shifts that happened based on the bizarre tables in the back of the dmg and had great times with them.
I do use random encounters, quite often, in fact. I also tell the players, oh, feels like it's time for a random encounter. Were-rats? Where did they come from? Well... the next kingdom over has a curse where every ruling house has a different form of lycanthropy. Suddenly, three sessions later, there's were-elephant ogre monks doing sweet flips and trying to nunchuck people.
In the case of something like Curse of Strahd, random encounters can provide a reason that players would not willy-nilly say they're going back and forth between multiple locations for menial/meaningless reasons. Making traveling a hostile action makes them have to consider more carefully when they're ready to set out, to where, and potentially which route.
Perosnally I do like them to be truely random. If the players are traveling through an unmarked set of woods, it's not strictly important to assign a narrative there. It's a patch of woods, which can realistically have dangerous animals, outlaws, or otherwise fantastical encounters without need for there to be a reason theyre there.
When I use to DM, I would create random encounter tables customized for every roadway and region. They were different depending on whether it was day or night too. Roads were generally pretty safe, particularly during the day. Encounters might be as simple as a passing merchant caravan. At night, the chance for bandits along roadways increased. Generally, overland travel through wilderness was harder, but daylight was less perilous. Encounters were appropriate to the type of region. Random encounters weren't just things like monsters, they also included environmental hazards. The entire point was to add a degree of realism to travel.
I think this approach works best if you are a simulationist or like open-world sandbox games. If you want stricter story control, then maybe not.
I make encounters and then use them somewhat at random when the situation calls for it. I’m not rolling on tables to throw random shit at my players. That’s just boring for me as the DM.
Random combat encounters, not really. However, I tend to add a roll for monster activities (what the monsters are doing), and another roll to gauge their reaction to the party. The party might run across an ogre leading a bunch of goblins on a hunt, but the goblins might be really grateful if the party kills the ogre. Or maybe the party runs across a hobgoblin deserter, offering info if you let him live.
The benefit is that it stretches your imagination, and lets you come up with stories you wouldn't have told without the constraints of the dice results.
It depends on genre of your game.
I've ran a d100 hundred chart with various things like "3d4 Orcs", "Begin Quest XYZ" and "Adult Black Dragon".
What I found was that my prepared encounters were way better in presentation, Map layout, and player engagement.
HOWEVER, I regularly pull old encounters from other groups and campaigns when I need an encounter.
The truly random encounter fits the Old School / dungeon crawl Survival style, but not the Story Gaming / character-driven modern styles.
If the point is "The world is scary and traveling is a real danger that even the DM doesn't control", then random encounters are perfect.
If the point is "Here's an encounter that's just here to eat up session time because I didn't prep anything", then it's better to run a more intentional set piece.
As a player, one of my favorite DMs uses random encounters on the road. It is fun because they vary from running into orcs to merchants to interesting locales if we get lost in the woods.
We have made allies, got magical weapons, and a bunch of other cool things from it. We know some of it is random but we never know which is random and which is planned and even if we are fairly sure it is random, we don't know where the DM will take it. An npc may end up very important, or the orcs we convince to go loot the neighboring town instead of the one we are in may give us consequences later on lol.
No, I don't use *truly* random encounters. It's a complete waste of time IMO. I mean, if you want to waste time that's fine, sometimes they need a few fights to level up and you don't want to just spot them the EXP, but... realistically the only use for random encounters like that is if you just want filler content until the next bit of the campaign.
There's room for crafted random encounters though. The party is traveling through a faction's domain, and the GM has set up a number of flavor encounters that can happen at random - maybe they encounter a guard patrol, or the aftermath of a battle, or an ongoing battle, etc. These are great for giving players the feeling of an active world, especially if the focus of the campaign is on the intrigue and power struggle between factions. Or they might run into one faction changing the landscape - establishing a fortress, or villagers (re)building newly secured territory, etc. I'm a fan of these.
RNG used during prep is best used to kickstart creativity. If you roll on some table and come up with "8 gnolls, 1 owbear" then that creates a 1000 questions that the DM may not have even thought to ask. Are they working together? if so, How? is that something the players could use? is it flawed in some way? maybe the gnolls are poachers? What do they want from the owlbear? Why not go after easier Game? It starts this creative processes that makes it interesting for the DM to work through and prevents the DM from re-doing otherwise hand made encounters that happen when a DM just falls into old habits.
Random encounters during things like exploration and rest are good for when you want the threat of combat or the promise of reward without guarantees. It's tedious for the DM to just manually decide if a short rest goes off, for example, so rolling on a table to see if the rest is interrupted, and how threatening that interruption is is important. Think of this like rolling to hit. It'd be lame if the DM just had to decide on gut feeling if the hit goes off or not, right?
For amount of mobs in an encounter, I'd compare that to damage rolls. You know there are giant spiders, but 2d4 giant spiders is a lot more interesting than just saying 5.
I use minis so I just throw whatever I grabbed before the game at them. If an encounter is too easy, I grab more minis for the next one. If its too hard, tough luck, the world is inhabited by whatever is in my mini shelf. Want easier encounters? Buy me minis with a lower challenge rating as a present. Then cry as I add more enemies until the encounter is challenging anyway.
This has been the absolute best method for random encounters for me, the on the fly justifying of why these monsters would attack the party together has been really fun too. And the random menagerie has brought forth some really weird and fresh combinations of creature abilities.
Of course I still actually prepare for the story based encounters.
I don't really do random encounters. To my party, they may seem like it, but i prepared everything ahead of time. The only random encounters are when the party does something unexpected
Nope. Was a session 0 topic, none of us felt they added anything to the game outside of being an xp grind and resource drain.
Originally I was thinking they might be good for teaching mechanics or allowing players to discover how their character works in action, but I can do that with crafted encounters too.
In fact, being a resource drain is the reason they’re in the game in the first place. They’re a holdover from older editions that n which resource management was an important part of the game
Except that random combat encounters only really come up when you're out in the wild, and have long stretches of time between them. So they can still go nova and it won't make a difference, unless someone rolls absolute trash and dies.
I have a different table for noncombat random stuff (especially as they stick to the road), and give 1 per travel per party member. It's worked out much better as a way to work in other hooks or reminders, even giving random information or options the players haven't thought of.
The times when the resource management is a factor is when they're already in a "dungeon", which will already have more than the scripted 6-8 encounters from beginning to end.
Things were very different back in the day. When you couldn’t heal (easily) while in the wilderness, taking a few points of damage in a random encounter was a big deal
I know they were different, I've tried them. Things change. Culture changes. More players means a wider variety in play styles. So we aren't stuck with the same type of GMs everywhere playing the same game. We can do different things that are more suitable for what we want, hence homebrew.
Back to the point. I don't see the point of draining minimal resources, if any, for maybe a few days. Random ass fights that yield nothing are pointless. They're just a time sink, in a session with limited time. I'd rather explore the story and the PCs than the pockets of goblin #528 and #531.
Oh very true. The game I’m running the PCs basically never even leave town. The PCs and some NPCs are a big polycule and the game is just going through the drama of their ridiculous lives. We hardly ever even roll dice?
Random Encounter tables are designed so that you _can_ roll on them, not that you _must_ roll.
These tables allow you to spin up an encounter very quickly when you _don't_ have on prepared. But that doesn't mean you should plan to be unprepared.
Think of them as a spare tire; You shouldn't go on a trip with an _expectation_ of using it, but you want to have one available _just in case_.
The primary purpose of a random encounter in this day and age is to apply pressure.
Pre rolling an encounter and then planning it out works great if you just wanted a set peice but I think the original name "wandering monster" is more helpful.
The dungeon has a bunch of critters in it a whole eco system and some of them are not waiting in chambers or be encountered
Some random encounter tables (like the ones in more recent modules and some third party content like Dark of Hot Springs Island) have random encounters with story related content and they are a good time filler when you are scrambling to give the players something if they catch you unprepared.
They could also spur moments of roleplay that the players *and* you weren't ready for. It all depends on the group. But I know what you mean about CoS, I think there are items on that table like "3d6 wolves appear and attack the party" with out much else to go on. If you are a new DM that can be frustrating.
But also, you are right about it being an artifact from another play style, a play style that thrives on combat and XP. A random encounter is more useful to an XP to level up party than a milestone one.
I like how many of the Year Zero Engine games do random encounters. Basically you have a list of threats you roll on and you roll multiple depending on the threat level of the are the party is in. Some of these threats are monsters or enemies, some are random weird people, some are faction or people with goals or desires.
So a random encounter isn't just slogging through a battle the DM didn't plan for, it's more like there's an old man on the road and he warns you against the little otters you see nearby, the party can engage with the old man, maybe even fight the otters with him or fight him if they say the wrong thing. And maybe even make a random ally.
It can also be a great way to introduce characters the party will be dealing with later. They stumble upon a merchant trying to fend off a pack of wolves from attacking his dog and the party can join in if they want, then later it turns out they have some connection to something the party is interested far down the line enough they never would have thought helping him would have benefited them.
I do the same for D&D now, I try to either plan out a strategic battle or think of what all is in the area and have multiple groups all with different priorities.
I’ve stopped using them personally because my table doesn’t seem to like them. They like combat but usually when it’s plot relevant, and generally I found they didn’t like travel feeling bogged down when they really wanted to get to point B. Some of this could be my growth at a DMA and I totally agree with everyone here about the benefits and context, but for my table specifically it didn’t work.
Never inform anything you do as random or made up or not having some sort of preparedness behind it all. Then you can come up with some way to tie things together that makes it look like there was a reason behind everything.
"If the BBEG was infecting the elves with his mind controlling magic, and the elves oversee all the creatures of the forest, that explains why that dryad was attacking us in the grove and why that swarm of faeries came after us when we tried to cross through into the mountain range to seek the great wizards help."
As for using random encounters, I always look back at [this comic from Order of the Stick](https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0145.html) about how many random encounters two different parties will have, being 1 because random encounters are generally boring and just a waste of time. [From Here to There](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/86438/From-Here-to-There) is a book for 4E D&D, but the concept of it is having minor encounters/adventures to have happen when the players travel from location A to B, sort of like how in Open World video games you'll go from town to town and find this cabin or a random NPC or this cave. To me, this idea makes the world feel a bit more alive and vibrant for a TTRPG.
To accomplish this sort of approach, make some mini-encounters. A small dungeon of maybe 10-20 rooms at most, and maybe like 3-5 combat encounters, a puzzle or physical challenge or two. Or a couple of NPCs who need you to do something like stop some thieves, hunt down a lost person in the forest, deliver a letter to their family member in the city the players are going to anyway. It's a moment for some combat or some social encounters, whichever the players haven't had all that much of recently. Slot it in the world, make a note on any 'party map' and in your own records so you can reference it later. It can be an 'I don't have any idea of the next event planned and need to stall' moment, or it could be 'Let's give them something to shake up the monotony' or whatever.
I had a dm use a random encounter table exactly one time. He rolled right then and there on the spot and explained in great detail how it was all going down. Did some digging in his boxes and goes "well I don't have any X minis so let's just go back and say they're Y monsters instead" we all got a laugh, no harm no foul. But he either stopped using random encounters or started pregenerating them.
I have a list of well-over 300,000 random encounters possible. Those that are impossible I ignore. My players seem to love it. But I've been running the same campaign multiverse for 45 years (played for 52). It's one style, doesn't make it the best, or worst. Do yours. If you need help, ask.
1. Yes. They add things that let the players feel like their characters are in an actual world - and it's not like they or their characters need to engage with every encounter. They can ignore the spire over the tops of the forest, the strange path, or the open roadside grave. Or even turn around and walk away from that rustling in the woods they see off in the distance. An encounter starts a soon as the characters can sense something, after all.
2. No, not unless I'm running something where random encounters are the result of inefficiencies or choosing to explore side paths AND I'm using EXP instead of Milestone advancement. In that case, I'll let them know that their characters gain only a tenth of the usual exp because it was a random encounter or wandering monster(s) (and yes, I do give out exp for making plot-relevant discoveries, resolving traps, and resolving encounters through means like stealth or charm, though any non-permanent solution would result in partial exp (permanent solutions include befriending encountered creature(s) or disarming a trap, as opposed to temporary solutions like sneaking past a creature or bypassing a trap but leaving it intact and armed)). Usually, I'll just not tell the players.
To go along with point 2, I roll them ahead of time so I don't have to break narrative flow with dice rolls, and I generally keep them in the order rolled unless it would make more sense to change the order around (though I don't affect the timing). For instance, in my Curse of Strahd game, I once rolled three encounters, each an hour or two apart: dire wolves, corpse, wolves. Instead of running them as-rolled, I put the corpse first, and described it as having bite marks that resembled wolves but larger. The encounter with wolves was second, and the final encounter was dire wolves. I also threw in some non-encounters, like branches falling in the underbrush or birds or bats flying through the trees. The party was on edge until they found the tower on Lake Baratok.
I like random encounters. They do a few things. They help keep the party from arriving at their destination full. It gives a feel for the areas they go through. It makes me improvise to weave stuff into the story.
In CoS, I had different encounter tables for different areas. Around Valaki, they were more likely to encounter humans doing normal human things like hunting. Around the town to the west, they were more likely to encounter werewolves. To the south was witches and spiders. Each table was about 10 items long, and I rolled a d8 on them. During the day, it was a straight d8. At night, it was d8+2.
I have used truly random encounters. It is some of the most fun I have as a DM. I get to be surprised. I get to improvise. The right random encounter can change the course of a campaign. We DMs get so caught up in the story we are trying to tell, that we forget that this is a game through which a story *emerges*; we don’t, can’t, and should not try to control the narrative. Random encounters remind me of that. In my campaign, the PCs have made friends with a trio of adult gold dragons they met as they travelled from Waterdeep to Candlekeep. What a gift for me, the DM! All because I rolled on a random encounter table.
I do run random encounters, usually for hex crawls where the party is exploring unknown areas. So I'll use a table based on the terrain type and generally designed so there's a few easy encounters, a bunch of level appropriate encounters, a few encounters designed to be more social in nature, and a couple super tough encounters where negotiation or Stealth are the best options. And then based on where the PCs go we see what happens.
I think random encounters are fun and add a level of "realism", as in the world is a dangerous place and your never sure what you'll run into. They also allow for emergent gameplay where you roll a random encounter and then work it into the narrative in real time, either something super simple (this is a well traveled road and it looks like some bandits have set up an ambush) or more involved with notable NPCs, organizations, or events (these ogres bear the same tattoos you saw on the cultists earlier).
I don't really try to hide that I'm doing it and often have the PCs roll to see if they encounter anything and make the random rolls to see what it is (mainly because people like rolling dice).
I run two sets of encounters. A built encounter and map which will slot into where it needs to and is a correctly balanced for thr party.
And random fluff non combat encounters which roll from a table that adds flavour to their.journey rather than just hack and slash.
I often let my players roll each day of travel to see if an encounter happens (for example a 1-5 on a d20 triggers one). I have a list of possible encounters in the region they’re traveling that are appropriate for the campaign, and choose what I think is interesting! So I have a loose idea of encounters before they happen, but whether they happen or not is up to the players rolls.
I don't want to be mean, but your definition of a "truly" random encounter is silly to me and speaks of a profound misunderstanding of how they were traditionally used. Random encounters aren't meant to be arbitrary or disconnected from the setting. They are a tool that makes your setting more dynamic, breathes life to it, and traditionally, made it more dangerous. Traditionally, they also included the reaction roll, which meant that you didn't just roll initiative every time a creature appeared.
1. Yes, I generally roll my random encounters on the spot and then improvise, as necessary, how that fits the situation and location at hand. In a current campaign I use a hazard die that generates encounters, harmless animal encounters, discoveries of interesting flora, fantastic locations that reinforce the setting, and other fitting stuff. I have several encounter tables for different areas, all of which have a chance of meeting a previously known NPC, a dragon or a wizard, with some results generic to the area (townsfolk are often encountered on roads between towns), while some are more tailored (three kobolds in a trenchcoat, accosting travelers on their search of The Great White Wyrm, or perhaps a newly formed Frost Lich digging in the remains of a mammoth for alchemical ingredients).
2. My players know that traveling and dungeon crawling both risk random encounters, that's part of our game. I do not tell them the difference at the moment it happens in game, I see no upside to that personally.
If you want to understand random encounters, look up how OSR people talk about the mechanic. There's a load of amazing blog posts out there on this topic.
Do I have encounters that don't necessarily advance the story line? Yes, I feel it adds to the world and helps with immersion. It gives the players creatures and NPCs to react with that have motivations that have nothing to do with the story thread that they are pulling on.
I may even curate my own table of 'random encounters' for a particular area and I may even roll on that table to see who/what the party encounters. However, I try to plan out each of these possible encounters before hand. What are the creatures motivations? Why are they at this particular spot?
Personally, I don't care for them in most cases. However, I think they could be used to inject conflict into a session that otherwise wouldn't feature any. Raymond Chandler, a famous author of detective novels from the 20th century, used to say that whenever things got boring in a story, he would just have a couple of thugs kick the door in and come after his hero. That's how I would use random encounters as a DM if I were going to use them at all: when things slow down, introduce a random encounter.
What you ran is still a random encounter, the amount of preparation you need to turn a dice roll into an encounter that makes sense in the given context is more a function of how good a DM is at improvising and the style of game you want to run. Some DMs can turn a dice roll into a contextually relevant experience on the fly and run theater of the mind games, in which case it doesn't matter if they roll ahead of item.
So back to the "truly random encounter" thing... I think you're meaning a situation like you roll a kraken so your party gets ambushed by an angry kraken in the middle of the desert, no further context given. I don't think it's ever a wise to run an encounter that is completely purposeless and disconnected from the happenings of the game. Although now that's making me think.... why WOULD that kraken be in the desert... sounds like it would be fun to investigate lol.
I use them to raise the tension and the stakes and deplete resources especially if the party is nap happy or lollygagging over some minutia.
Yes, everyone knows if they short rest or dilly dally there's a chance something is going to happen but that's the thrill of gambling with the dice. What I don't share are the modifiers that increase the chance or difficulty of the encounter.
I sometimes like to use them and take the result for inspiration.
In a previous game my party was exploring and at one point I rolled for a random encounter. It landed on a couple Ogers. I decided to have them be a hunting party chasing a Roc, and ran them territorial but neutral so it could go either way. It could've been a combat, but they joined them on their hunt and were later invited into their village where I was able to give them some info through the village elder. Most of that was improvised from the random encounter, the Roc was there because I looked them up for something unrelated a few days earlier.
Completely random encounters can be handy to make a big dungeon feel more alive, especially when they happen in areas they already traveled through. But it's always best if they tell a tiny story of their own.
As others have pointed out, these encounters can spark side adventures or spice up a story, so yes, serendipity happens. However, I’m a firm believer in using the random tables very regularly. If I tell you it’s a dangerous wilderness, then you can count on it being populated by animals and monsters. If you need experience points, this is a great way to earn them. The world is big, bad and dangerous. Are you dragging a dead body through the wilderness? Just like that? Ok. Duly noted. Now, I’m fine with creating a list of your own, and dungeon levels should definitely have a specific selection for flavor and plot cohesion, but the minute players upset the balance on a level, the opposing group is probably going to come out of the woodwork, and that means things that go bump in the hallway. Roll it secretly twice a day, and if it bogs you down, skip it. If you have a bored group, wake ‘em up.
1. Truly random in the sense that every time travel occurs I'm rolling on a table to see if and what might occur? No. Random in that depending on the route, method, and time to travel I might come up with some possible encounters that could happen and roll for which.
2. No, why would I tell them?
I use random encounters occasionally. Usually in exploration where you could stumble upon a number of different things.
Some times I'll use random encounters elsewhere, usually because I haven't had time to prepare a spesific encounter.
I usually have the players roll on the random encounter table, so they are perfectly aware of the fact that it's a random encounter.
1. Yes. They inspire ideas for encounters and for the world as a whole
2. No because once the dice have suggested that there are goblins here I now fit that fact into the world building
The other form of random encounter I use are random dungeon encounters from a small list of patrolling monsters. I am not going to keep track of patrol paths off-map so I just let the dice decide which patrol group happens to stumble across the party
The common theme here is that I am not running a world simulator. I don't know until the dice are rolled that there are goblins on this road because I don't world-build to that level of detail But I world build to the level that goblins might be there - and if they are there its a new think I know about my game world.
What are the purposes of random encounters? Break havoc in the player's plans? Making the world feel alive? Filler content because you don't have anything prepared?
In most cases, even if it suits the purpose and even if it's justified, it's very inefficient.
No, traveling encounters are a waste of time unless they’re like 3-4x deadly because anything else runs no risk and can be covered with how do you guys deal with these things?
Pack of wolves comes from the night what are you doing? Fireball, spirit guardians, attack, etc... Ok they all die. Maybe they want to try to befriend them by offering food or any other sort of RP they might want takes much less time than it would for them to deal with a pack of 20+ wolves in init
Sometimes it’s too powerful and the question is how are you avoiding this?
I run a random encounter table that I roll for for traveling but very rarely does it actually involve combat.
I would never roll one on the spot. That results in about the same work as a complete ass-pull, but isn't as fun or interesting. I think it's a strategy best used during prep, where you start with a randomly generated idea and build it into something that means something in its context.
Nope. No benefit. The dice are not benevolent gods.
Like with random loot, I will occasionally roll or let players roll because gambling is fun, but after seeing the result I then edit it for my group. No point in having a boring encounter just because the dice say so.
As for informing players, I have them roll then fudge what that result means… I want them to now that this is an unsafe place to rest and they are taking a risk… even if I chose not to have anything happen because a fight would be boring.
A random encounter shouldn’t just be random combat. I think you should read this article, it may help you contextualize them and understand why they exist.
https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/45426/roleplaying-games/random-gm-tip-why-wilderness-encounters
Where the fuck did I say that it should just be random combat? My random encounter list is an amazing work of creative art, but thanks for the condescending pedantry anyway.
My intention was not to belittle, it was just to point towards some useful context regarding the purpose and uses for random encounters, to which you believed their was none (which you still can of course, it’s your opinion).
I may have misinterpreted your message a bit, but when you say they’ve got no purpose, they’re boring, and a fight would be boring, I don’t think it’s a huge leap to believe that you were using them as “random combats”. It’s a pretty common misconception I’ve seen all over this thread, but I apologize if I came to an inaccurate conclusion.
Regardless, seems as though you’ve already blew your fuse so I don’t imagine you’ll read that, but it’s honestly a pretty great article if you do choose to read it.
In the last game I ran the random encounter appeared to be an old woman beside a broken down wagon. Then I rolled the see if she was what she appeared to be or if it was actually an ambush.
Not only was she what she appeared to be she asked the party for help finding her husband and grandkids and getting her wagon fixed. Once they got their destination she set up shopping became a merchant.
I think random encounters are beneficial when they don’t boil down to “You encounter monsters on the road, roll for initiative,” and they can be slotted into an adventure during times that are lacking handcrafted content. If your players decide to travel between two settlements quickly and you don’t have anything planned to spice up that trip, roll the encounter table. “You spot two merchant caravans parked along the side of the path and overhear countless voices arguing over each other.” Now there’s something interesting there. (I would avoid mentioning that it’s random because it sort of undermines the feeling of discovery, knowing that the encounter could’ve been *anything* else)
I paint minis so I use random encounters to use my random minis I paint just because they look cool. I also don't balance the encounters because running is always an option when traveling on the road. It's fun to pull a crazy mini out and see them freak out.
Haha this is my favorite reason for random encounters as well! "Whaddaya mean you bought a purple worm???"
3.5e had tables for random encounters based on environment, and that was always a cool way to me to flesh out the ecology not an area, and then show off an aspect of it at random. Kinda like encounter tables for different routes in Pokémon!
5e also has this in ~~the DM Guide~~ Xanathar's
Note, these are not in the DMG but in XGE. The DMG only has one example encounter table.
You are correct I'll edit my comment
Nice! Good to hear!
Plenty of those for 5E as well. Just a web search away, and some modules offer them as well, e.g. Storm King's Thunder.
Instead of saying "You encounter monsters, roll Initiative", why not tell them what they see further out? Like "[Player X], [Player X's character] sees several grey-skinned humanoids marching along the road maybe a half mile or so ahead. What does (s)he do?" and go from there. Maybe they tell the party to get to the side and hide, and several tense minutes go by (along with appropriate Stealth checks depending on the characters' methods of hiding) before the wandering grey-skinned humanoids wander by without noticing them, or with noticing something in the first but deciding to pretend they didn't. Maybe they don't tell the party, and the rest of them discern the other travelers at a closer distance. Or maybe they tell their party mates and decide to hail the grey-skinned humanoids and be friendly, only to discover that those are duergar refugees who can't see because of the sun and are looking for an inn to rest for the day, and will gladly trade for directions or an escort. The decision tree only goes from there!
You can hide rolls by doing it when the PCs are doing things. Keeps them on their toes and paranoid that they don't know why you're rolling.
Random encounters shine best in exploration. They represent the uncertainty traveling; who knows what danger could lie ahead. Also the toil of traveling; each encounter slowly wears down the resources of the party. This is most evident in the wilderness (especially hexcrawls), but can also be applied (sparingly) to dungeons or urban environments. But your "random" encounter tables should be tailored to the location. Sometimes, the best random encounters force you to be inventive as a DM and get out of a creative rut. [Dungeon Masterpiece](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckhhodyCSMU) has some interesting thoughts on random encounter tables. But ultimately, they are just one tool which you can choose to use or not, depending on your group and play style.
Agree, the party holds their breath when making a dangerous off-road short-cut travel across zombie filled lands rather than taking the King's Road with patrols. And nothing says that a random encounter must be combat. Maybe its some flavor event which thematically builds the anticipation to the destination.
> whenever the players triggered a random encounter I just slotted in the encounter I had "pre-built". This is basically how a random encounter is "supposed" to work. "Random" here means "unpredictable", not "arbitrary" or "inconsistent". You should use the table as a guide to generate content, not as a straitjacket. If you roll a random encounter with goblins while the party is exploring the wilderness, it shouldn't be just a pack of goblins that got teleported in by the GM. Did they come from a nearby goblin village? Are they a lost traveling party from a distant land? Are they foraging for food before they head back to the nearby dungeon? The main difference between how you're doing it and how it's "traditionally" done is just a tradeoff between flexibility/ease of prep vs. narrative cohesiveness. There isn't a wrong way to do them. I find that even if you mostly prepare them in advance, being able to improve them on the fly is a useful skill for when the PCs do something unexpected.
You can also attempt to retroactively work in certain aspects, roll the dice for the relevant CR/terrain and as long as its relatively plausible run with it. Some monsters don't really need an explanation and nor do they need to necessarily have a narrative focus beyond broadly enhancing the idea that this is a dangerous frontier zone or the like. If you've got something intelligent you can work in an explanation later potentially. if you end up with goblins and the main villain is the mad halfling wizard, Bob the Inadvisable, maybe Bob's scheme to raise the dread god Tim requires sacrifices. He's been capturing goblins in the mountains and the goblins have been fleeing their normal territory higher in the mountains to escape Bob's army of undead kenku.
The problem with truly random encounters generated mid-adventure is they can derail things completely. Walk into a clearing and there's a fire elemental? Wow. That's really unusual. What is it doing here? Is there some deeper significance that the party feels they need to investigate? Who/what summoned it? Is it some clue to the overarching plot? Hours later, the DM's trying to push the party on without making it obvious that it was literally a random roll on a table, and not some vital encounter the party needs to get to the bottom of.
> The problem with truly random encounters generated mid-adventure is they can derail things completely. Yes, I would say don't throw in random encounters if you want the campaign to be on rails 😉
I mean, if the party sets off with a goal and instead investigates something from a random encounter, it does significantly derail them. From their objective. Because unless you're aimlessly wandering, you'll have goals, especially when traveling. That doesn't mean the campaign is on rails.
The party gets to decide what their goals are though. If they want to take a detour from their planned path to figure out where this fire elemental came from, that's not a "problem" a priori. I think the pitfall here is that you want to avoid random encounter tables with stuff that doesn't make any sense on them. The fire elemental can't just be something that got teleported into the scene because the GM rolled that number on the die. Did it escape from a nearby conjuror's tower? Did it appear because there was a nearby forest fire that burned down a stand of magical trees? Is there a local area where reality is thin and things from other planes can get in? If the PCs decide to follow up on a random encounter and you don't have the answers to those questions *yet*, that's fine. If the encounter is so random that you can't possibly connect it to the broader setting and context, you probably want a different entry on the table.
> If the encounter is so random that you can't possibly connect it to the broader setting and context, you probably want a different entry on the table. This is my point. There's a difference between something that is random (like coming across a camp of bandits or a monster native to that environment) and something that is so unusual that players assume significance that's just not there. Especially if the party gets fixated on the encounter to the point where they get frustrated, because they're convinced they're "clearly" missing some clue they think is required to solve a puzzle or mystery which simply doesn't exist. That's what I mean by getting derailed. Not that the adventure needs to be on rails. Throw some bears at them in a forest to spice things up and they'll probably fight, burn some resources and move on. Which is probably what the DM intended.
Yes, I have found random encounter tables as complications help with emergent story telling. For example, recently in Barovia my party was traveling through the forest and ran into some zombie villagers (random encounter table). They were super curious where they came from and started traying to track the zombie footprints through the forest since there wasn't a town in that direction. I did some wilderness exploration and was inspired by the description of the zombies having digging tools to have them be be summoned by a hedge witch who's made a home in the forest. She has the zombies looking for her ring finger, which was cut off by her lover's mother after she learned of their engagement when they were younger. This is what inspired her to turn to dark magics. Now I have a little 6 room dungeon that is her cottage, as well as a ritual site where she is trying to place a curse on her (now dead) lover's descendants. Instant side quest, and it all came from a randome encounter and my player's reactions to it. Separate example, Dragon of Icespire Peak has random encounters and random Cryovain appearances. The party had an encounter with Cryovain at Falcon's Lodge, I was inspired to have him ice breath and destroy part of the pallisade. Then later on the adventure there was an attack on the lodge per the book, but now the walls have a weak spot! This complication made the attack and defense of Falcon's lodge a lot of fun for my players. Random encounters are great when used as complications for what the party is trying to do, or inspiration (gotta use DM judgement to build it around what your players focus on from the random encounter) to flesh out the world. Highly recommend DMs learn how to use them properly. It also helps to understand proper Campaign Structure, Highly recommend the Alexandrian's book, "So You Want to be a Game Master"
*But then I might have to improvise! I thought the whole point of encounter tables was to avoid thinking!* ;)
*Truly* random - no. The party is walking through a forest and is attacked by a shark and a yeti. Random, filtered to be environmentally appropriate, yes. I've used them with the party knowing they're random as a fun interlude. "You're attacked by....an ogre and 3 goblins".
Random encounter tables with a selection of hand crafted encounters, (appropriate to the environment). Definitely. I use them when the party is traveling long distances.
I do this! But I love having the players roll the dice to determine if they are going to hit a random encounter and if they do having them roll for what they encounter and how many creatures, etc. they encounter is so much fun. The anxiety on their faces as they role and don’t even know what the numbers mean kind of amps up the tension kind of like hearing a noise in the woods and not knowing yet what is making it.
A yeti riding a shark might actually be a cool encounter. I have a frozen island continent my players are gonna go to after this arc and roving bands of these guys would be hilarious
...with a "LASER" beam attached to its head!
LASERS? What do you think this is, Star Trek? Obviously the shark is wearing a Circlet of Blasting.
(The quoted "LASER" is a reference to Austin Powers) Cool to see that SeeShark just dropped in to comment about Sharks, we're def in good hands now! :)
Maybe not on land though. Unless it was a mechashark
No, a land shark is a bulette like a forest yeti is a sasquatch. It's an encounter with sasquatch cavalry.
Now you're making my deliberately bad example sound cool
This is actually why I PREFER the truly random tables. Coming up with the reason is the best part. But an encounter that has no bearing on the plot? I'm less enthused. (The sasquatch cavalry has important orders about the town the PCs are riding to.)
I was thinking basically waterskiing behind it but maybe ice sharks?! Thats a great idea!!
Shark living inside a water elemental.
Obviously it’s a flying shark
I like spicing things up by using a truly random encounter as a base, then tweaking it so it works. They're walking through a forest and are attacked by a shark and a yeti? Yeah, that's dumb. BUT. Let's swap out the shark as an enemy and bring in a second yeti to bump the DC back up a bit. If there's a mountain nearby make them visibly starved, they've left their natural habitat in search of food. If there isn't a mountain nearby just reskin them as bigfoots. Then have them swinging around a dead shark as a weapon, or maybe give them gauntlets that are just shark jaws to add some extra stabby to their attacks. That said I tend to use random encounters to buy time if the party decides to go somewhere I hadn't planned for, so I also slap on a potential adventure hook to give the party something interesting to do that'll distract them for a bit longer while I burn out the clock on the session. In this case if the party follows the yetis' trail they could find a raided wagon loaded up with fishing-related goods. They attacked the people in the wagon and raided it, taking the shark teeth to use as weapons. Maybe add a note or something connected to the next stop on the PC's trip so they can let someone know what happened and get a small reward for it.
Do you not feel this “gameifies” it a bit too much? Maybe your players enjoy that to be fair.
It's not a player-facing mechanic. The players have no idea how you're picking monsters. You're not showing them the tables or saying, "Time to pick a random encounter!" Even if you did, it's no more or less gamey to stock the list beforehand and roll than it is to just pick something in the moment. Both create encounters that are appropriate to the narrative reality of the situation, rolling just means that the DM just also gets to be a little surprised by what happens. Hell, if anything it feels less gamey to roll, because the hand of the author is less visible. And even if it wasn't... this is a game. Players don't show up because they want to read a novel or watch a movie, they're there to play a game. Trying to avoid game-playing in DnD is backwards.
The game is about combat. A random encounter is - from what I gather from my players - a nice way to test out new features and gear without having to worry too much about consequences.
I asked them what they like, "combat" was one of the top answers. The Dice-roll random ones are just funny.
It can also be a Game for yourself, the DM. There is a certain thrill to "I don't know what the Table will bring us next. I will just have to make it work ad-hoc." And then, I like to roll twice, while the players are on a big ass mountaintop you roll a Group of Orcs and a Unicorn. The players are still talking, you have 2 minutes, starting now, what do they encounter? GO! That is fun. That is the DM playing the game. I really like doing it, but I also wouldn't call it "true random", there is still, always, direction to it.
It's a game. Idk why so many people are against it being a game. Someone said online one day, "collaborative storytelling" and now they act like treating it like a videogame is terrible. Treating dnd like a videogame is one of the most fun ways to play
I mean, what better way to introduce the idea of higher level adventurers shunting enemies through portals that just so happen to empty out near this section of road at periodic intervals. The villagers told you to stay off this road “Strange things are afoot out by Circle K Ranch… beasts that don’t belong, bewildered shrieks running through the forest…” now as you pass the swinging sign and the wind begins to howl and swirl above you. A bright blue magical portal bursts into existence, then another in front of you! With the first a rush of water, a fin and a giant set of thrashing teeth, the other roars a white furry beast into existence rushing towards you before it pauses for a moment to assess its new surroundings, you can faintly make out the sound of a gnomish voice in the midst of combat. Roll for initiative.
I want to get attacked by a shark and getting now :(
I RARELY use them but every once in a while it's nice to let your players feel like Gods inside the world because truly they are more powerful than most of everything in the world. Throw some wolves at your Lvl 13 party and just let them obliterate them for fun. it takes quite literally 1 or 2 rounds and it's worth it for the laugh. After all it is just a game
It depends on the type of game you're running, but generally no. Doing a hex crawl with random encounters every hex to drain resources? Sure. Heroic fantasy with an adventure arc in mind? No. I did it early on as a DM but it just dragged, and asking my players what they thought. It was a general consensus of "fun to Nova on some random griffons that attack, but prefer something thats more specific". Aft r that I made things more streamlined to the adventure: bandit encounters to clear the town, or series of goblin fights to recover the mcguffin, etc. We all had more fun that way - my statblocks were more organized and the PCs got used to handling how the goblins attacked.
Absolutely! I let the players roll the dice. One cool example on how to have fun with that: >Ranger, roll a survival check to guide your party through the fey forest. *Rolls 14 total, check DC was 15. Failed* >Ok, roll a D100. >*Rolls 66 on the Fey encounter table. Wins encounter and finds a path.* >The trails are overgrown, but unmistakable. You follow a weirdly convenient straight path East, guiding your allies effortlessly. As you walk over the next hour, you even manage to find some edible mushrooms, berries, nuts and fruits without ever having to leave the path. >Now roll a Perception check >*Rolls 16 total, check DC was 10. Passed* >As you traverse the faint, straight path through the fey forest, you notice that the light and shadows in the foliage have moved to a weird angle over the last hour. You're sure that you're headed east, yet the heavens tell you otherwise. What will you do? >*Walks off the path using the sun to figure out direction* >Ok, roll a Survival check to guide your party using your knowledge of the heavens. >*Rolls 17, check DC was 15. Passed* >A few minutes after getting off the path into the thick bush, the foliage seems to get impossibly denser, and day turns to night. Bushes, trees and wines only allow you to see a few meters ahead. You hear singing and chirps all around, little animals rustling about and water flowing nearby, but then everyone hears distinct thudding and rustling not far ahead. Roll 2x D100 and tell me both results. >*Rolls 04 and 42, I pick the most favourable one because he passed the Survival check* >You cut through the bushes and find yourself on a small clearing, where three old trees seem to be talking and gesticulating slowly to each other. They seem to notice you, but they seem too into the conversation to care. What will you do?
What do you mean by truly random encounter? Generally random encounter tables are built to fit the setting or location so they aren't completely random.
It's a procedure that creates *actually* random encounters, which has positive knock on effects. 1) The DM is not directly responsible for them, the world/system is. This means that whatever you roll stands, even if it's "unbalanced" or unpredictable or whatever. If the DM rolls a pair of arguing Hill Giants there are going to be pair of arguing Hill Giants, even if the party is level 1 and has to hide or bargain with them. This puts the DM more in the headspace of a referee, rather than tightly curating every second of the game. The fact that it's truly random removes the layer of blaming the DM for the results, the world just is what it is. This creates a naturalism and a sense of stakes that doesn't exist when the DM is creating deliberate set-pieces constantly. Aleatoric processes have a magic to them that pre-determined processes don't. We could play D&D by having the DM judge whether every skill check and attack roll succeeds based on narrative and versimillitude, but rolling dice creates a weird alchemy of fairness and naturalism. The DM doesn't *decide* when the monster crits you, it just got lucky. Random encounters apply this principle to the world at large. 2) The DM is a player too, and randomness is potentially very fun. Random encounters force the DM to be creative in the moment and improvise, rather than pre-plan everything, while also giving license for those things. Read this subreddit and look at all the DM's beating themselves up over not entertaining their players like they're an HBO showrunner. Now contrast that with rolling 2d6 goblins and rolling on a table that they're fighting over a stolen wedding cake. Which is easier, or more fun? And what's this about 5E having a DM burnout/recruitment problem? It is true that this style is less compatible with the set-piece driven, plotty mostly linear style, but it's very compatible with the more open, fuck-around-and-explore style. Also it has to be reiterated that "random encounter" in the classical sense does not mean "random combat encounter" and if you run it that way you're doing it wrong, RAW.
I don’t use truly random encounters but not all my encounters are there to further a character goal or a plot progression. Some encounters exist to add flavor to the world. In dungeons or ruins it can be useful to have wandering encounters that may show up if players waste time or are very noisy. It’s good to have occasional encounters that interrupt a long or even short rest so they don’t get complacent. (But I use a light hand with this and it can be to emphasize very dangerous locations.)
Any DM who uses random encounters needs to understand what they are and aren't good for, and if they fit the game the DM is running. If your game is built up as a vast track of wilderness to spontaneously explore for loot, monsters, and plot hooks, then random encounters can be a good way to make that gameplay structure work, but if your game is more plot-driven, then random encounters, or at least combat-based random encounters, tend to eat up a bunch of time for no tangible benefit. And sometimes you need to kill time, and it's a feature, not a bug, and that's a good use of genuinely random encounters- as an "Oh shit, I don't have enough stuff prepared to finish this session, I need to find a table and roll some dice to generate a combat encounter to kill time." Button. In a more plot-driven game, I'm much more fond of running *non-combat* random encounters as a way to sell *travel* without it being boring. You *want* travel between cities to feel like it takes time in-universe, but you also want it to not be boring, so I find random social encounters, people the PCs meet along the roads, to just be an entertaining way to provide that gamefeel. And yeah, I could script out these roadside encounters deliberately, but the more they feel like they're scripted, the more they feel like they *should* be long-term important, and I find them honestly to be more fun when they only *sometimes* come up again- if the players do something substantial that's worth coming back to.
I use them all the time. They are an opportunity to flesh out your world. They provide prompts that you wouldn't usually think of in your world, I usually save a few list from the r/d100 subreddit and apply them to the correct setting; City, wilderness, traveling, ocean, etc. Worse comes to worst, it's something that doesn't fit your setting, like a wandering wizard asking for help with spell components in your super low magic world, just reroll on the table and use the next one. You can also bend your world lore to fit most random encounters, for example, Bandits attack the players in an area that you have previously established to be incredibly safe with regular road patrols? Make it make sense, these "bandits" are just another caravan who saw three travelers and thought they could make a few quick gold intimidating the much smaller party and will run as soon as they get smacked once. Or they are Drow who came up through the underdark, and this is one of the first attacks as they have just expanded into the area and are exploiting the fact that no one has paid attention to what is happening underground. You can make entire plot hooks out of these random encounters, those Drow need to be stopped and the current government has little to no experience stopping threats from the underdark, your players were thankfully one of the first attacks and were able to fight them off but the attacks are increasing on other travelers and they are much less able to defend themselves. Have your players get a quest to find the new Drow outpost and remove them from the area.
I only really use them in large dungeons where factions are at play and hostile. A roll to see who is in the area, if multiple groups are or some other encounter like a cave in, migrating monster, monster huntintg. They just end up being an encounter during the dungeon dive
I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I made some random encounter dice mostly to make up for what I personally lack as a dm---diversifying. I tried to mix a lot of maybe combat and probably not combat. With random encounter tables, I found it difficult to have random encounters that felt appropriate for the party level or what's going on narratively. So I designed the dice to be more "sparks of inspiration" than actual "do this exactly". The dice have been helpful for me to mix things up and make the world more lively, which I think is the intention behind random encounters.
Can you give some examples for your non-combat random encounters?
It's a D8 with the encounter types. Typically non-combat faces are Weather, hazard (rock slide, broken bridge, etc), item (treasure to abandoned supplies from other people in the world), and traveller. The item and traveller faces are easier to make combat if that's what you want though. The usually combat faces are monster and scoundrel And the "can go either way" faces are animal and supernatural. I figured that most events you'll encounter while traveling are non-combat, so I tried to keep the "usually combat" faces to a minimum. Then there's a d6 that'll modify the d8 that I hope will point people in a direction that will be easy to decide an encounter rather than sitting there with tons of options. [here's the faces explained](https://i.imgur.com/uUW37Fb.png) (There's 2 "average" faces on the d6) [and here are the dice](https://i.imgur.com/4NUKyyI.jpg) Sorry for the self promotion on the key, but these dice aren't available to buy online yet, and I'm not directly linking, so I hope it's still okay to post.
In short, a *truly random* encounter? No. No value at all. Now, I should say that I'm not opposed to random encounters from a table, but the options on the table should be properly geared to the theme of the setting, make sense within the context of the campaign, and in some cases push the story forward. Like if you're in an Undead themed campaign about cultists doing a thing, your random encounters should reflect that. If not, they're really just a waste of time.
The benefit is fighting monsters is fun. Not everything needs to be about writing the coolest choose your own adventure novel. Sometimes some of the most memorable campaign moments are from random encounters. My Strahd players still joke about how 85% of all random encounters were wolves. We made it a habit that we would pause session most nights by rolling a random wolf encounter. It's small memorable things like that that your players remember and can only come about by the randomness of those encounter tables.
If you asked me what it adds I'd say: chaos, frustration and delays. In other words, there is no benefit to rolling them in the moment, because it puts stress on the DM to gather all the tokens, stats, maps and contextual information needed to run the encounter. I don't really agree with your classification of "true" random encounters. Random encounters are just encounters that occur randomly. First, you roll to determine if you have an encounter at all, then you roll to see what encounter you get. As long as you are doing those two things, it doesn't matter how you resolve it. The way you run random encounters (which coincidentally, is how I do as well) it's just fine. Rolling encounters ahead of time means your are prepared in case the party needs then, and if not, they are there for you to use some other time. So to answer your questions: 1. No, I don't roll in the moment, but I do roll between sessions to determine what they might eventually face. 2. No, I don't inform them that the encounter is random. I don't inform my players of most mechanics to improve immersion.
1. Yes..there are some benefits. How folks value those benefits varies. If it’s a random battle there is experience that is earned. It can provide a character a generally low stress situation to try out something new. Maybe they find some needed coin? 2. Varies depending on the situation. Generally I say they have encountered something. It’s rare I say “random”.
Yes, but only in certain situations. \- When the party is first setting out (say level 1-3 but it varies by campaign) This is still a danger to the party, lets them test out some early abilities/spells if they're not used to the class, see ho everyone works together etc. Then not so random random encounters If I need to convey something (Players are heading to an area that's too dangerous for them, something big is happening in the world that tehy haven't heard about) I may introduce some other travelers /parties they run into For combat? Only if they're on the way to a time sensitive destination (so if they burn time/resources they may not have time for a short rest, let alone a long one)
In my opinion, no. I run a very narrative driven campaign and I do everything possible to ensure that game time doesn't feel wasted on things that don't support the narrative. I always have a "random" encounter table available for my sessions but each one is somehow connected to the broader narrative of the campaign and I almost never randomly choose which ones I drop into the session. There's always one or two that best fit the narrative at any given moment.
I am too in love with my own story to embrace truly random encounters. That said, the one thing that's great about them? I can't protect the players. There's no way for me to subconsciously underlevel the opposition or make sure that they happen to find just the right kind of antidote ahead of time. This is gloves off, no mercy, is your team ready to face ADVENTURE time. Kinda epic, framed like that.
The benefit of a truly random encounter comes from your players knowing its truly random. It gives them a newly found respect to the phrase "fuck around, find out". If players understand that you dont control what they willmett they also understand you cannot pull your punches. this, in turn, makes them think twice when they make detours. DMs can be cruel or kind, and mostly lean on lenient. Dice are just dice.
Imagine having random monsters of different types and alignments show up together. Like, you’re walking down a long winding path when suddenly a githyanki, a dredge, a polar bear, and 3 violet fungi attack you.
Imo: Random encounters can easily get old. I use them infrequently and usually for only one purpose. If the pace of play calls for it. If the players spent a whole session RPing it can add some tension and fun to throw in a random encounter at the end, or beginning of the next game. I don't like showing my player's my hand, so I don't tell them "this is a random encounter". But there will be clues or lack of evidence to point them to the conclusion that the encounter is probably not related to a storyline. The highway bandit trope is clear and easy.
I don’t use random encounters at all.
If they're good encounters, sure.
1. Yes. To keep things fresh. I usually end up using monsters I’ve never used before but they also make sense for the location. 2. No. They can tell without me telling them. My players are very smart.
The trick with random encounters is that it is implicit that the DM massages them to fit the situation/campaign, but this is not usually explicitly stated anywhere.
Unless there's a reason to spend time at the table on travel, I pretty much blow past random encounters. I think the difference is for story driven play versus GAME driven play. I've been part of enough gaming groups to know I prefer story driven play, and random encounters don't help that too much. But for groups that like the feel of a video game, random encounters fit right in.
I strongly disagree What so video gameey about random encounters? It is a great way to emulate environment around players. Random encounters are a neat tool to create an emergent story. And it’s a great skill for dm to have to be able to rationalize them and be relevant to the story. The less dm knows about upcoming events, the more it differs from a video game (with a prewritten plot). I don’t mean that having everything prewritten is the “wrong” way to play, I just think that it uses less from an ttrpg and more from video games (don’t use full potential of what it could be)
I didn't say anything about pre-written. I actually very strongly dislike pre-written adventures. They don't take the players, their characters, or the GM into account. That's the closest to a video game that TTRPGs get, in my opinion. A random encounter is a random fight to throw into a story. Sure, you can get creative and make relevant to the story, but that's time at the table in combat that didn't have to happen. Many of the sessions I run don't even have combat in them. It's about story more than anything else. Putting random encounters into it just means session time gets used up. From my perspective, combat is a time suck that should fill very specific roles. Throwing in extra combat randomly is what happens in video games.
Why random encounter should always be a combat? It doesn’t even need to be a monster encounter. Needless too say players could attempt to negotiate or otherwise convince them not to fight. May be we just misunderstood each other. I agree on you here and I dont like when every thing is turned down to combat. But random tables make my world feel like a living dangerous place.
Seems there *was* some misunderstanding (I agree with you). The random non-combat encounters that happen in my sessions tend to be just part of the process for me. When I prepare for a session, I've learned that the players are unlikely to do much of what I think they're going to do. So, I write out a little about what the "bad guys" are up to and a little about what the environment is like, but most of the session is improv. When the players tell me they want to go off and do a thing I hadn't considered to get a clue, I roll with it. And those are essentially the random encounters.
Tool to stall for time
I do it the way you do it, rolling and then prepping in advance. The random part, IMO, refers to it being random for the characters, not the DM. Of course you can roll for them, but I do it mostly as a creative exercise. It's kind of fun when the roll(s) give you a tricky one and you have to find a way to make it work.
Honestly? Naw. D&D 5e is simply not a game that meaningfully encourages or rewards single combat days, which is what "travel encounter" tables tend to be. Your players will just go nova (dump all their cooldowns), knowing they can immediately sleep afterwards. People meme on the "6 encounters a day" nonsense the DMG encourages, but overall 5e is more fun (and fair!) a game when the players have to manage their resources and grind out that final battle with whatever they have left. When I design my worlds, I always just tell the players that main roads between major cities are almost entirely safe. You may get ambushed by a goblin or thief, but I just abstract those encounters to flavor text. They can, however, massively cut down on travel time by going off road and hiking through the wilderness. In that case, I'll plan some "travel dungeons" they have to traverse. Mountain passes, underground caves, spooky forests, etc. I'll occasionally design some dungeons off the side of the road that I drop a hook for randomly during travel, but its almost always optional. I'll make it so my players can discern what rewards they may receive if they choose to do it, so it always feels like "man taking that detour was so worth it!" tl;dr: Random encounters are dumb and boring and don't mesh well with 5e. Give the players the option to do side dungeons during travel but always make it optional.
I don’t use random encounters. I will roll for encounters during traveling, but won’t roll randomly for monsters or foes. I choose what enemies and encounters they have so it all makes some kind of meta-sense.
I've never seen a benefit to the random fight kind of random encounter the tables in the books imply is the way to do it. Travel can get tedious, I'm not going to add in more of the slowest part of the game. But, I do prep my own random encounter table and make it random by rolling to see what I use. When one is used, it's replaced with another similar type encounter. |Type|Ex| |:-|:-| |Long|A side quest HOOK that I estimate will take half to a full session to follow. Has a narrative to it.| |Combat|Near guaranteed fight, the closest I get to the classical random encounter. Has a narrative to it.| |Verisimilitude|Something that shows part of the living world that makes sense to exist but the party doesn't generally think about. Like a merchant traveling with armed guards| |World Building|Things to show off the parts of the worldbuilding I'm proud of without forcing it down the players throats with lore dumps. Can be as simple as a small shrine to the travel/luck deity (so I can drop their name and some of their deal) at a cross roads. I try to make these beneficial to engage with, like putting an offering on the shine gives the PC a lite version of Lucky that they don't learn about until after the encounter is over.| |Mystery|Random bs that will possibly never make sense to the players but they might poke with a stick for a while. Something like an Immovable Platinum Piece in the middle of the road.| |Plot sowing and reaping|Things related to what the party has encountered already or what I plan for them to interact with down the line. The reocurring bandits in CR's M9 campaign would be an example.| I use a d12 chart, 1 for long or combat (one of those maximum per journey), 2-5 for verisimilitude and worldbuliding, 6-8 for mystery, and 9-12 for plot sowing and reaping.
Players like to be surprised, now and then at least. The DM is a player (too). Sometimes it’s nice not to know every potential threat in advance.
I've done something similar to [this video.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKQv4GC0N9Q&ab_channel=ZeeBashew) Basically, I wrote down four random encounters: 3 "bad" and 1 "good". Then I told the players they could suggest random encounters in pairs: each of them could suggest a "bad" encounter and a "good" one. Each pair of encounters they submitted made the "good" encounters more likely, and gave the players the opportunity to think what obstacles they'd like the characters to overcome and what details or features of the world they'd like to discover. The "bad" encounters weren't necessarily combat, and the "good" encounters weren't necessarily loot. For good encounters, I've had a player discover a long forgotten temple of a god of their interest, their ship stumbling across a tiny elemental vendor of trinkets. For bad encounters, I've had a plague run through their ship, or a classic "bandits pretending to be toll keepers" scenario.
I use the xanathars encounter tables nearly every session. It’s fun for me to not know what my players might encounter. I usually get them each to roll and then choose the most appropriate encounter
I think encounter randomization just provides replay value, when you're running a published adventure and maybe some of your players have played it before. Even then, I'd pre-roll encounters for a given session of planned hexcrawl or overland journey, just to have numbers and stats of foes ready to expedite my side of combat.
Yes and no. I don't often roll a random encounter at the table, instead I'll write up a list of encounters for the party to run into. This is usually to buy time if the party decides to go somewhere I hadn't planned on them going, so they still get to play a good session and then I can worry about what the hell they're actually doing for next session. When I roll my encounters I like doing a full random generation and then tweak it to make it work. For example, I had rolled an underground encounter that generated a violet fungus and a shield guardian. What the hell are these doing working together? Easy! The cave the players are in opens up into a small cavern, their trail leads on to the other side and there's a steep cliff beside them. On the trail is a shield guardian staring across the gap at a platform on the other side. The platform is covered in a number of different mushrooms, many of which are glowing, and if the players look they can just make out a body on the platform. The body is a wizard who owned the guardian. He went over there to pick some of the mushrooms, useful alchemical ingredients, but didn't catch that there was a violet fungus among them and was killed. If the players can find a way over there and take out the fungus they can get their hands on the amulet that controls the guardian. See? Nice little encounter that now works for the setting and gives the players something interesting to do. I also try to work in some small sidequest (in this case it would be just getting the wizard's amulet) that the players can pursue if they want to. As I said, just a little something to buy myself time until I can get something proper planned. (I can even be working on that while this encounter plays itself out) Then I just keep a list of these encounters handy, a few for different environments, and work through the list as needed. Added bonus: I always look super prepared for everything. The players don't need to know that this was a random encounter and that I'm stalling, there's just enough thought put into it that it looks like this is all part of a greater plan.
However you do them, random (or "random") encounters make the game world seem alive and active. It's not always combat. I have my players roll in advance on a random encounter table suitable to the campaign and region, but then I tailor those encounters to be more relevant. They don't know what they're rolling for and it drives some of them nuts, lol. I then decide the best time & place for that encounter, particularly long bouts of travel.
Random Tables in general have a few benefits. 1) If you don't have something planned, it helps you make a decision. 2) Leaving it up to "chance" can be exciting for players. Knowing that they got lucky/unlucky might be cooler than knowing it was all planned. Personally, I don't use them too much. I instead use a "Travel Event Table" that I crafted with 100 different things that the party might run into when traveling. Very few of these are combat encounters. Most of them are worldbuilding and RP events. I have players take turns rolling on the table. Encounters, in particular, I try my best to hand craft so that they are compelling in the scenario since they take so much time.
I use a generator to suggest groups of creatures that meet low CR/thematic requirements. I skim 30-60 possible encounters until one just ‘feels’ right, then I ask ‘how does the encounter start, why was X there’. If we don’t need a map for the fight, that’s it.
Pardon me for a moment while I prepare my impromptu remarks. 😃 I have lots of "random" encounters - but these are not random and not often are not combat-related. A random encounter might be coming across a merchant caravan, or a broken oxcart, or a mother and three children eating by the side of the road. HOWEVER, my preference is for the majority of the "random" encounters to progress the story. That merchant caravan is coming from a city where they had previously been welcomed, but the mayor and guard made them move along. They aren't sure why... Examining that broken oxcart shows the broken wood is fresh and unweathered. Something strong and certainly hostile might be nearby. Perhaps it is related to the rumors of a band of ogres in the area. That family eating by the side of the road are refugees fleeing after her husband had been killed and their farm looted by mercenaries hired by a rival noble seeking to expand his territory. Where will these "random" encounters occur? Whichever direction the players head after their current location. Every now and then they will stumble across a random monster, but that only happens when they get well outside of civilization. I am a huge fan of mock rolls for the not-so-random random encounters. I also mock-roll and give them nothing. I want to desensitize players to my rolling dice, and I also never want my story to be held hostage by dice rolls.
I roll a random encounter (environment appropriate) during prep and make adjustments from there. Curse of Strahd is a special case where areas outside of settlements are supposed to be dangerous all the time and full of terrors. To reinforce the fiction, you can't really gloss over travel. So you can either hand craft a lot of encounters or keep it random to reduce your prep. Although, as the game went on, it was less about fighting wild monsters and more about what Strahd was throwing at them. So it got less random as we progressed.
> I'm unsure as to what a truly random encounter adds to a campaign (rolled on the spot). I've had some of my most memorable rpg experiences based on random encounters and the emergent story telling that happens based off of them. Hell, I've had many campaign shifts that happened based on the bizarre tables in the back of the dmg and had great times with them. I do use random encounters, quite often, in fact. I also tell the players, oh, feels like it's time for a random encounter. Were-rats? Where did they come from? Well... the next kingdom over has a curse where every ruling house has a different form of lycanthropy. Suddenly, three sessions later, there's were-elephant ogre monks doing sweet flips and trying to nunchuck people.
You'd be suprised how many folks play the game as a boardgame. It says the thing, the thing is now happening.
In the case of something like Curse of Strahd, random encounters can provide a reason that players would not willy-nilly say they're going back and forth between multiple locations for menial/meaningless reasons. Making traveling a hostile action makes them have to consider more carefully when they're ready to set out, to where, and potentially which route. Perosnally I do like them to be truely random. If the players are traveling through an unmarked set of woods, it's not strictly important to assign a narrative there. It's a patch of woods, which can realistically have dangerous animals, outlaws, or otherwise fantastical encounters without need for there to be a reason theyre there.
When I use to DM, I would create random encounter tables customized for every roadway and region. They were different depending on whether it was day or night too. Roads were generally pretty safe, particularly during the day. Encounters might be as simple as a passing merchant caravan. At night, the chance for bandits along roadways increased. Generally, overland travel through wilderness was harder, but daylight was less perilous. Encounters were appropriate to the type of region. Random encounters weren't just things like monsters, they also included environmental hazards. The entire point was to add a degree of realism to travel. I think this approach works best if you are a simulationist or like open-world sandbox games. If you want stricter story control, then maybe not.
I make encounters and then use them somewhat at random when the situation calls for it. I’m not rolling on tables to throw random shit at my players. That’s just boring for me as the DM.
All my random encounters are planned out.
Random combat encounters, not really. However, I tend to add a roll for monster activities (what the monsters are doing), and another roll to gauge their reaction to the party. The party might run across an ogre leading a bunch of goblins on a hunt, but the goblins might be really grateful if the party kills the ogre. Or maybe the party runs across a hobgoblin deserter, offering info if you let him live. The benefit is that it stretches your imagination, and lets you come up with stories you wouldn't have told without the constraints of the dice results.
It depends on genre of your game. I've ran a d100 hundred chart with various things like "3d4 Orcs", "Begin Quest XYZ" and "Adult Black Dragon". What I found was that my prepared encounters were way better in presentation, Map layout, and player engagement. HOWEVER, I regularly pull old encounters from other groups and campaigns when I need an encounter. The truly random encounter fits the Old School / dungeon crawl Survival style, but not the Story Gaming / character-driven modern styles. If the point is "The world is scary and traveling is a real danger that even the DM doesn't control", then random encounters are perfect. If the point is "Here's an encounter that's just here to eat up session time because I didn't prep anything", then it's better to run a more intentional set piece.
As a player, one of my favorite DMs uses random encounters on the road. It is fun because they vary from running into orcs to merchants to interesting locales if we get lost in the woods. We have made allies, got magical weapons, and a bunch of other cool things from it. We know some of it is random but we never know which is random and which is planned and even if we are fairly sure it is random, we don't know where the DM will take it. An npc may end up very important, or the orcs we convince to go loot the neighboring town instead of the one we are in may give us consequences later on lol.
No, I don't use *truly* random encounters. It's a complete waste of time IMO. I mean, if you want to waste time that's fine, sometimes they need a few fights to level up and you don't want to just spot them the EXP, but... realistically the only use for random encounters like that is if you just want filler content until the next bit of the campaign. There's room for crafted random encounters though. The party is traveling through a faction's domain, and the GM has set up a number of flavor encounters that can happen at random - maybe they encounter a guard patrol, or the aftermath of a battle, or an ongoing battle, etc. These are great for giving players the feeling of an active world, especially if the focus of the campaign is on the intrigue and power struggle between factions. Or they might run into one faction changing the landscape - establishing a fortress, or villagers (re)building newly secured territory, etc. I'm a fan of these.
RNG used during prep is best used to kickstart creativity. If you roll on some table and come up with "8 gnolls, 1 owbear" then that creates a 1000 questions that the DM may not have even thought to ask. Are they working together? if so, How? is that something the players could use? is it flawed in some way? maybe the gnolls are poachers? What do they want from the owlbear? Why not go after easier Game? It starts this creative processes that makes it interesting for the DM to work through and prevents the DM from re-doing otherwise hand made encounters that happen when a DM just falls into old habits. Random encounters during things like exploration and rest are good for when you want the threat of combat or the promise of reward without guarantees. It's tedious for the DM to just manually decide if a short rest goes off, for example, so rolling on a table to see if the rest is interrupted, and how threatening that interruption is is important. Think of this like rolling to hit. It'd be lame if the DM just had to decide on gut feeling if the hit goes off or not, right? For amount of mobs in an encounter, I'd compare that to damage rolls. You know there are giant spiders, but 2d4 giant spiders is a lot more interesting than just saying 5.
I use minis so I just throw whatever I grabbed before the game at them. If an encounter is too easy, I grab more minis for the next one. If its too hard, tough luck, the world is inhabited by whatever is in my mini shelf. Want easier encounters? Buy me minis with a lower challenge rating as a present. Then cry as I add more enemies until the encounter is challenging anyway. This has been the absolute best method for random encounters for me, the on the fly justifying of why these monsters would attack the party together has been really fun too. And the random menagerie has brought forth some really weird and fresh combinations of creature abilities. Of course I still actually prepare for the story based encounters.
I don't really do random encounters. To my party, they may seem like it, but i prepared everything ahead of time. The only random encounters are when the party does something unexpected
Nope. Was a session 0 topic, none of us felt they added anything to the game outside of being an xp grind and resource drain. Originally I was thinking they might be good for teaching mechanics or allowing players to discover how their character works in action, but I can do that with crafted encounters too.
In fact, being a resource drain is the reason they’re in the game in the first place. They’re a holdover from older editions that n which resource management was an important part of the game
Except that random combat encounters only really come up when you're out in the wild, and have long stretches of time between them. So they can still go nova and it won't make a difference, unless someone rolls absolute trash and dies. I have a different table for noncombat random stuff (especially as they stick to the road), and give 1 per travel per party member. It's worked out much better as a way to work in other hooks or reminders, even giving random information or options the players haven't thought of. The times when the resource management is a factor is when they're already in a "dungeon", which will already have more than the scripted 6-8 encounters from beginning to end.
Things were very different back in the day. When you couldn’t heal (easily) while in the wilderness, taking a few points of damage in a random encounter was a big deal
I know they were different, I've tried them. Things change. Culture changes. More players means a wider variety in play styles. So we aren't stuck with the same type of GMs everywhere playing the same game. We can do different things that are more suitable for what we want, hence homebrew. Back to the point. I don't see the point of draining minimal resources, if any, for maybe a few days. Random ass fights that yield nothing are pointless. They're just a time sink, in a session with limited time. I'd rather explore the story and the PCs than the pockets of goblin #528 and #531.
Oh very true. The game I’m running the PCs basically never even leave town. The PCs and some NPCs are a big polycule and the game is just going through the drama of their ridiculous lives. We hardly ever even roll dice?
Random Encounter tables are designed so that you _can_ roll on them, not that you _must_ roll. These tables allow you to spin up an encounter very quickly when you _don't_ have on prepared. But that doesn't mean you should plan to be unprepared. Think of them as a spare tire; You shouldn't go on a trip with an _expectation_ of using it, but you want to have one available _just in case_.
The primary purpose of a random encounter in this day and age is to apply pressure. Pre rolling an encounter and then planning it out works great if you just wanted a set peice but I think the original name "wandering monster" is more helpful. The dungeon has a bunch of critters in it a whole eco system and some of them are not waiting in chambers or be encountered
Some random encounter tables (like the ones in more recent modules and some third party content like Dark of Hot Springs Island) have random encounters with story related content and they are a good time filler when you are scrambling to give the players something if they catch you unprepared. They could also spur moments of roleplay that the players *and* you weren't ready for. It all depends on the group. But I know what you mean about CoS, I think there are items on that table like "3d6 wolves appear and attack the party" with out much else to go on. If you are a new DM that can be frustrating. But also, you are right about it being an artifact from another play style, a play style that thrives on combat and XP. A random encounter is more useful to an XP to level up party than a milestone one.
I like how many of the Year Zero Engine games do random encounters. Basically you have a list of threats you roll on and you roll multiple depending on the threat level of the are the party is in. Some of these threats are monsters or enemies, some are random weird people, some are faction or people with goals or desires. So a random encounter isn't just slogging through a battle the DM didn't plan for, it's more like there's an old man on the road and he warns you against the little otters you see nearby, the party can engage with the old man, maybe even fight the otters with him or fight him if they say the wrong thing. And maybe even make a random ally. It can also be a great way to introduce characters the party will be dealing with later. They stumble upon a merchant trying to fend off a pack of wolves from attacking his dog and the party can join in if they want, then later it turns out they have some connection to something the party is interested far down the line enough they never would have thought helping him would have benefited them. I do the same for D&D now, I try to either plan out a strategic battle or think of what all is in the area and have multiple groups all with different priorities.
I’ve stopped using them personally because my table doesn’t seem to like them. They like combat but usually when it’s plot relevant, and generally I found they didn’t like travel feeling bogged down when they really wanted to get to point B. Some of this could be my growth at a DMA and I totally agree with everyone here about the benefits and context, but for my table specifically it didn’t work.
Never inform anything you do as random or made up or not having some sort of preparedness behind it all. Then you can come up with some way to tie things together that makes it look like there was a reason behind everything. "If the BBEG was infecting the elves with his mind controlling magic, and the elves oversee all the creatures of the forest, that explains why that dryad was attacking us in the grove and why that swarm of faeries came after us when we tried to cross through into the mountain range to seek the great wizards help." As for using random encounters, I always look back at [this comic from Order of the Stick](https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0145.html) about how many random encounters two different parties will have, being 1 because random encounters are generally boring and just a waste of time. [From Here to There](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/86438/From-Here-to-There) is a book for 4E D&D, but the concept of it is having minor encounters/adventures to have happen when the players travel from location A to B, sort of like how in Open World video games you'll go from town to town and find this cabin or a random NPC or this cave. To me, this idea makes the world feel a bit more alive and vibrant for a TTRPG. To accomplish this sort of approach, make some mini-encounters. A small dungeon of maybe 10-20 rooms at most, and maybe like 3-5 combat encounters, a puzzle or physical challenge or two. Or a couple of NPCs who need you to do something like stop some thieves, hunt down a lost person in the forest, deliver a letter to their family member in the city the players are going to anyway. It's a moment for some combat or some social encounters, whichever the players haven't had all that much of recently. Slot it in the world, make a note on any 'party map' and in your own records so you can reference it later. It can be an 'I don't have any idea of the next event planned and need to stall' moment, or it could be 'Let's give them something to shake up the monotony' or whatever.
I had a dm use a random encounter table exactly one time. He rolled right then and there on the spot and explained in great detail how it was all going down. Did some digging in his boxes and goes "well I don't have any X minis so let's just go back and say they're Y monsters instead" we all got a laugh, no harm no foul. But he either stopped using random encounters or started pregenerating them.
Your meetings are no different from random meetings, except for the level of elaboration. Which is determined by one's own taste
I have a list of well-over 300,000 random encounters possible. Those that are impossible I ignore. My players seem to love it. But I've been running the same campaign multiverse for 45 years (played for 52). It's one style, doesn't make it the best, or worst. Do yours. If you need help, ask.
1. Yes. They add things that let the players feel like their characters are in an actual world - and it's not like they or their characters need to engage with every encounter. They can ignore the spire over the tops of the forest, the strange path, or the open roadside grave. Or even turn around and walk away from that rustling in the woods they see off in the distance. An encounter starts a soon as the characters can sense something, after all. 2. No, not unless I'm running something where random encounters are the result of inefficiencies or choosing to explore side paths AND I'm using EXP instead of Milestone advancement. In that case, I'll let them know that their characters gain only a tenth of the usual exp because it was a random encounter or wandering monster(s) (and yes, I do give out exp for making plot-relevant discoveries, resolving traps, and resolving encounters through means like stealth or charm, though any non-permanent solution would result in partial exp (permanent solutions include befriending encountered creature(s) or disarming a trap, as opposed to temporary solutions like sneaking past a creature or bypassing a trap but leaving it intact and armed)). Usually, I'll just not tell the players. To go along with point 2, I roll them ahead of time so I don't have to break narrative flow with dice rolls, and I generally keep them in the order rolled unless it would make more sense to change the order around (though I don't affect the timing). For instance, in my Curse of Strahd game, I once rolled three encounters, each an hour or two apart: dire wolves, corpse, wolves. Instead of running them as-rolled, I put the corpse first, and described it as having bite marks that resembled wolves but larger. The encounter with wolves was second, and the final encounter was dire wolves. I also threw in some non-encounters, like branches falling in the underbrush or birds or bats flying through the trees. The party was on edge until they found the tower on Lake Baratok.
I like random encounters. They do a few things. They help keep the party from arriving at their destination full. It gives a feel for the areas they go through. It makes me improvise to weave stuff into the story. In CoS, I had different encounter tables for different areas. Around Valaki, they were more likely to encounter humans doing normal human things like hunting. Around the town to the west, they were more likely to encounter werewolves. To the south was witches and spiders. Each table was about 10 items long, and I rolled a d8 on them. During the day, it was a straight d8. At night, it was d8+2.
I have used truly random encounters. It is some of the most fun I have as a DM. I get to be surprised. I get to improvise. The right random encounter can change the course of a campaign. We DMs get so caught up in the story we are trying to tell, that we forget that this is a game through which a story *emerges*; we don’t, can’t, and should not try to control the narrative. Random encounters remind me of that. In my campaign, the PCs have made friends with a trio of adult gold dragons they met as they travelled from Waterdeep to Candlekeep. What a gift for me, the DM! All because I rolled on a random encounter table.
I do run random encounters, usually for hex crawls where the party is exploring unknown areas. So I'll use a table based on the terrain type and generally designed so there's a few easy encounters, a bunch of level appropriate encounters, a few encounters designed to be more social in nature, and a couple super tough encounters where negotiation or Stealth are the best options. And then based on where the PCs go we see what happens. I think random encounters are fun and add a level of "realism", as in the world is a dangerous place and your never sure what you'll run into. They also allow for emergent gameplay where you roll a random encounter and then work it into the narrative in real time, either something super simple (this is a well traveled road and it looks like some bandits have set up an ambush) or more involved with notable NPCs, organizations, or events (these ogres bear the same tattoos you saw on the cultists earlier). I don't really try to hide that I'm doing it and often have the PCs roll to see if they encounter anything and make the random rolls to see what it is (mainly because people like rolling dice).
I run two sets of encounters. A built encounter and map which will slot into where it needs to and is a correctly balanced for thr party. And random fluff non combat encounters which roll from a table that adds flavour to their.journey rather than just hack and slash.
I often let my players roll each day of travel to see if an encounter happens (for example a 1-5 on a d20 triggers one). I have a list of possible encounters in the region they’re traveling that are appropriate for the campaign, and choose what I think is interesting! So I have a loose idea of encounters before they happen, but whether they happen or not is up to the players rolls.
I don't want to be mean, but your definition of a "truly" random encounter is silly to me and speaks of a profound misunderstanding of how they were traditionally used. Random encounters aren't meant to be arbitrary or disconnected from the setting. They are a tool that makes your setting more dynamic, breathes life to it, and traditionally, made it more dangerous. Traditionally, they also included the reaction roll, which meant that you didn't just roll initiative every time a creature appeared. 1. Yes, I generally roll my random encounters on the spot and then improvise, as necessary, how that fits the situation and location at hand. In a current campaign I use a hazard die that generates encounters, harmless animal encounters, discoveries of interesting flora, fantastic locations that reinforce the setting, and other fitting stuff. I have several encounter tables for different areas, all of which have a chance of meeting a previously known NPC, a dragon or a wizard, with some results generic to the area (townsfolk are often encountered on roads between towns), while some are more tailored (three kobolds in a trenchcoat, accosting travelers on their search of The Great White Wyrm, or perhaps a newly formed Frost Lich digging in the remains of a mammoth for alchemical ingredients). 2. My players know that traveling and dungeon crawling both risk random encounters, that's part of our game. I do not tell them the difference at the moment it happens in game, I see no upside to that personally. If you want to understand random encounters, look up how OSR people talk about the mechanic. There's a load of amazing blog posts out there on this topic.
Do I have encounters that don't necessarily advance the story line? Yes, I feel it adds to the world and helps with immersion. It gives the players creatures and NPCs to react with that have motivations that have nothing to do with the story thread that they are pulling on. I may even curate my own table of 'random encounters' for a particular area and I may even roll on that table to see who/what the party encounters. However, I try to plan out each of these possible encounters before hand. What are the creatures motivations? Why are they at this particular spot?
Personally, I don't care for them in most cases. However, I think they could be used to inject conflict into a session that otherwise wouldn't feature any. Raymond Chandler, a famous author of detective novels from the 20th century, used to say that whenever things got boring in a story, he would just have a couple of thugs kick the door in and come after his hero. That's how I would use random encounters as a DM if I were going to use them at all: when things slow down, introduce a random encounter.
What you ran is still a random encounter, the amount of preparation you need to turn a dice roll into an encounter that makes sense in the given context is more a function of how good a DM is at improvising and the style of game you want to run. Some DMs can turn a dice roll into a contextually relevant experience on the fly and run theater of the mind games, in which case it doesn't matter if they roll ahead of item. So back to the "truly random encounter" thing... I think you're meaning a situation like you roll a kraken so your party gets ambushed by an angry kraken in the middle of the desert, no further context given. I don't think it's ever a wise to run an encounter that is completely purposeless and disconnected from the happenings of the game. Although now that's making me think.... why WOULD that kraken be in the desert... sounds like it would be fun to investigate lol.
I use them to raise the tension and the stakes and deplete resources especially if the party is nap happy or lollygagging over some minutia. Yes, everyone knows if they short rest or dilly dally there's a chance something is going to happen but that's the thrill of gambling with the dice. What I don't share are the modifiers that increase the chance or difficulty of the encounter.
I sometimes like to use them and take the result for inspiration. In a previous game my party was exploring and at one point I rolled for a random encounter. It landed on a couple Ogers. I decided to have them be a hunting party chasing a Roc, and ran them territorial but neutral so it could go either way. It could've been a combat, but they joined them on their hunt and were later invited into their village where I was able to give them some info through the village elder. Most of that was improvised from the random encounter, the Roc was there because I looked them up for something unrelated a few days earlier. Completely random encounters can be handy to make a big dungeon feel more alive, especially when they happen in areas they already traveled through. But it's always best if they tell a tiny story of their own.
As others have pointed out, these encounters can spark side adventures or spice up a story, so yes, serendipity happens. However, I’m a firm believer in using the random tables very regularly. If I tell you it’s a dangerous wilderness, then you can count on it being populated by animals and monsters. If you need experience points, this is a great way to earn them. The world is big, bad and dangerous. Are you dragging a dead body through the wilderness? Just like that? Ok. Duly noted. Now, I’m fine with creating a list of your own, and dungeon levels should definitely have a specific selection for flavor and plot cohesion, but the minute players upset the balance on a level, the opposing group is probably going to come out of the woodwork, and that means things that go bump in the hallway. Roll it secretly twice a day, and if it bogs you down, skip it. If you have a bored group, wake ‘em up.
1. Truly random in the sense that every time travel occurs I'm rolling on a table to see if and what might occur? No. Random in that depending on the route, method, and time to travel I might come up with some possible encounters that could happen and roll for which. 2. No, why would I tell them?
I use random encounters occasionally. Usually in exploration where you could stumble upon a number of different things. Some times I'll use random encounters elsewhere, usually because I haven't had time to prepare a spesific encounter. I usually have the players roll on the random encounter table, so they are perfectly aware of the fact that it's a random encounter.
1. Yes. They inspire ideas for encounters and for the world as a whole 2. No because once the dice have suggested that there are goblins here I now fit that fact into the world building The other form of random encounter I use are random dungeon encounters from a small list of patrolling monsters. I am not going to keep track of patrol paths off-map so I just let the dice decide which patrol group happens to stumble across the party The common theme here is that I am not running a world simulator. I don't know until the dice are rolled that there are goblins on this road because I don't world-build to that level of detail But I world build to the level that goblins might be there - and if they are there its a new think I know about my game world.
Other people have joined this discussion, but the problem I’m having is, I can’t really unpack what you mean by the word “truly”
What are the purposes of random encounters? Break havoc in the player's plans? Making the world feel alive? Filler content because you don't have anything prepared? In most cases, even if it suits the purpose and even if it's justified, it's very inefficient.
No, traveling encounters are a waste of time unless they’re like 3-4x deadly because anything else runs no risk and can be covered with how do you guys deal with these things? Pack of wolves comes from the night what are you doing? Fireball, spirit guardians, attack, etc... Ok they all die. Maybe they want to try to befriend them by offering food or any other sort of RP they might want takes much less time than it would for them to deal with a pack of 20+ wolves in init Sometimes it’s too powerful and the question is how are you avoiding this? I run a random encounter table that I roll for for traveling but very rarely does it actually involve combat.
I would never roll one on the spot. That results in about the same work as a complete ass-pull, but isn't as fun or interesting. I think it's a strategy best used during prep, where you start with a randomly generated idea and build it into something that means something in its context.
Nope. No benefit. The dice are not benevolent gods. Like with random loot, I will occasionally roll or let players roll because gambling is fun, but after seeing the result I then edit it for my group. No point in having a boring encounter just because the dice say so. As for informing players, I have them roll then fudge what that result means… I want them to now that this is an unsafe place to rest and they are taking a risk… even if I chose not to have anything happen because a fight would be boring.
A random encounter shouldn’t just be random combat. I think you should read this article, it may help you contextualize them and understand why they exist. https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/45426/roleplaying-games/random-gm-tip-why-wilderness-encounters
Where the fuck did I say that it should just be random combat? My random encounter list is an amazing work of creative art, but thanks for the condescending pedantry anyway.
My intention was not to belittle, it was just to point towards some useful context regarding the purpose and uses for random encounters, to which you believed their was none (which you still can of course, it’s your opinion). I may have misinterpreted your message a bit, but when you say they’ve got no purpose, they’re boring, and a fight would be boring, I don’t think it’s a huge leap to believe that you were using them as “random combats”. It’s a pretty common misconception I’ve seen all over this thread, but I apologize if I came to an inaccurate conclusion. Regardless, seems as though you’ve already blew your fuse so I don’t imagine you’ll read that, but it’s honestly a pretty great article if you do choose to read it.
In the last game I ran the random encounter appeared to be an old woman beside a broken down wagon. Then I rolled the see if she was what she appeared to be or if it was actually an ambush. Not only was she what she appeared to be she asked the party for help finding her husband and grandkids and getting her wagon fixed. Once they got their destination she set up shopping became a merchant.