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View Full Version : DM Help Random Encounters on the way to the dungeon



Yora
2016-09-05, 02:54 AM
I want to give a try at running a campaign that is only location based adventures and in which each session is in and out of the site with the players having the option to keep going to each place until they feel ready to move on to somewhere else. Usually the site will be some distance from the next settlement and there's an opportunity to have encounters along the way. And I kind of like the idea of having encounters in the wilderness but I am not really sure what the purpose of these would be in such a campaign.

Even if you have wandering monsters inside dungeons that make it impossible to rest, setting up camp some distance outside is almost always an option that I would expect players to always make after arriving at the dungeon and before making the return trip to the town. So any encounters along the way wouldn't really cut meaningfully into their resources when running a game like D&D where spells and especially magical healing recharges after resting.
When running an oldschool system random encounters don't give significant amounts of either experience or treasure so the only impact they really have is costing play time. And when each session is meant to end with leaving the dungeon to accomodate players who aren't playing every session or only occasionally then they probably want to get as much time in the dungeon as they can.

I'd like to have random encounters in the wilderness for "aestethic reasons", but I am struggling to find a purpose. And if even I don't see what gain there would be in these encounters, how would the players?

hymer
2016-09-05, 03:50 AM
There are various things I can suggest if you feel this way.

1: Ask the players.
They probably already know what random encounters are. How would they like them? How many? How significant?

2: Be cavalier.
If you roll a random encounter you don't like, don't have it. Pick one you'd rather have, or have no encounter just then. If it's a truly minor encounter, just inform the players they met two goblins and killed them before they could do any damage. You may even give them a little bit of loot for that.

3: Make the random encounters more interesting and varied.
Like you would come up with dungeon encounters, build random encounters. Have a map, participants, treasure and knowledge to be gained, however minor. Give the NPCs motives (beyond fight to the death against any PCs they encounter) and a place they belong. Also have non-combat random encounters. Have some of them be non-hostile NPCs who could trade stuff or information, or try to steer the PCs in a particular direction for good or nasty reasons. Have others be with cliffs to be scaled, rivers to be crossed, a flock of crows making a racket while the PCs are trying to rest, a sudden squall, a briar patch to be dealt with, etc.

4: Make random encounters meaningful.
Make sure random encounters say something about the area they occur in, and ideally more than 'here be goblins' (though that information can be useful and important in itself). Use them to point the way to adventure sites (tracks, interrogation, exchange of information, finding papers on the enemy), to inform the players they're in an area way more dangerous than they think ("Hill giants? Screw this!"), or in a safe place (people less powerful than the PCs seem to live here without much fear). Have missions that deal with random encounters, like a bounty on bandits, finding (by random encounters) a particular herb, or making it important to try not to kill the local X, even though they can be hostile.

Vitruviansquid
2016-09-05, 04:11 AM
1. Abandon the aesthetic because it is impractical.

2. Simply shake your head when players say they want to rest right outside of the dungeon, when resting inside of the dungeon is impossible. Or, I dunno, say the dungeon monsters sometimes patrol the outside.

3. Set up random encounters that are less full-blown combats and are more strange things happen to the party. Instead of "you are now fighting 2 ogres and a duck" have a random encounter where it's something like "the party unwittingly enters a magic-draining field, everyone who has spells memorized loses a spell" or even attach a skill check to it, so the party might find and avoid the magic-draining field with the proper roll. You could set up a system where the party constantly needs supplies, of which there might be different types, and outline how a shortage will affect your players' party before the campaign starts. Then, random encounters could result in your party losing or gaining supplies, much like Oregon Trail.

Mastikator
2016-09-05, 05:10 AM
Instead of having encounters you could just describe the countryside they're traveling though, what kind of road they're traveling on (gravel? cobblestone? stomped dirt?). What kind of trees are there, how many? Is there farmland? Is it hot or cold? Is it windy? Do they cross any rivers or bridges?

An encounter could be useful, like a traveling merchant that they can barter with, the merchant might serve as an exposition dump too.

Pugwampy
2016-09-05, 05:11 AM
And I kind of like the idea of having encounters in the wilderness but I am not really sure what the purpose of these would be in such a campaign.



I am struggling to find a purpose. And if even I don't see what gain there would be in these encounters, how would the players?

Purpose ? reason ? ...........Its DIFFERENT and different is always cool . I call it kill things in the forest . My old and first DM did that all the time . Please note this encounter is unfair to certain classes .

This is perfect substitute to wandering monsters in the dungeon which makes dungeon crawling twice as long and boredom sets in which can result in incomplete dungeon bumming .
It is also a good reason why players should make use of taverns . Why waste gold if nothing bothers you sleeping under the stars . Perhaps the players want to go hunting , or take an escort job for a rich man wanting to hunt . My players spent a whole afternoon catching bunnies to raise as food . The rogue said that was his most wilderness fun he ever had .

How do you have fun in the land of the lost hiding in safe dungeons which only raptors can fit in . That cool T Rex is outside in the jungle . Forest Bandits have loot and XP too . That wild beastie can have ivory or fancy leather to fashion into armour or even a magic undigested goodie in its stomach .


Basically if players dilly dally too long or a new dungeon is a mega distance away . They have to camp out in the bushes . Now they have decide who takes watch and when and also deal with the fact that anyone not on watch duty , wont be wearing heavy or medium armour if something hungry comes a knocking . That boring Endurance feat becomes more attractive now .
Life can get interesting if a thief sneaks past your guard player .

Its an open space , with lots of trees . If its a wolf thingy encounter , climb up trees then attack .
Suggest to tank players to buy a second set of light armour PJ,s to sleep in .

Yora
2016-09-05, 05:36 AM
Wandering monsters require a certain type of game to be excting. When you are trying to sneak through hostile territory to grab stuff without drawing too much attention they are a critical element to keep up the excitement. When just travelling through the wilderness where you can set up camp when needed this isn't the case.

I think perhaps an alternative way to include wilderness encounters would be to have one session dedicated to finding the ruin or cave in the first place. Once the players have found the entrance they can get from there to the next town and back again whenever they like without repeating the process.

Frozen_Feet
2016-09-05, 06:30 AM
It depends how far away each location is from a settlement.

I myself check random wilderness encounters once each day. 80% nothing happens. The remaining 20% is divided among various events. Each event is something which could stop the player characters on their tracks. Their purpose is to make players understand they cannot come & go between distant locations without thinking things through. In case of extremely distant locations, just the journey there is an adventure in its own right.

Of course, this can have odd side-effects. Players occasionally choose to pursue random encounters instead of the location. Say there's a bear. Bear hides sell for good money. Deer and the like make for good eating and add to supplies. Foreign people can be traded with or robbed.

Yora
2016-09-05, 06:55 AM
Odd side effects are the best part.

But I think with games like D&D, there isn't really much "thinking it through" when you expect to have one or two encounters along the way. Unlike with a dungeon, where the amount of encounters can be influenced by spending less time hanging around looking for secret doors or avoiding making loud noises, there isn't really anything you can do about one outdoor encounter check per day.
Encounters in a dungeon have a meaningful consequence. Any hit point or spell might be needed later and force you to leave earlier than you want. And when you're gone for half a day all kinds of things can happen in the dungeon before you get back to resume your exploration. When travelling overland you keep going, make a rest at the end of the day, and you're ready to continue the next day as if nothing happened.
There is little tension in it. You might occasionally get a decent mini adventure out of it if the players decide to track a group of bandits they fought off back to their camp, but when you try to get a whole dungeon adventure done in 4 hours that probably doesn't seem very attractive either.

Keltest
2016-09-05, 07:22 AM
If the point of the campaign is just a series of dungeon crawls, then may I suggest treating the wilderness as another dungeon? Outdoors has lots of different types of terrain that a dungeon lacks, such as trees to climb or rivers that need to be circumvented before you can reach your enemies (or before they can reach you!) It allows for you to keep encounters varied and interesting.

falcon1
2016-09-05, 08:15 AM
I usually do a three column encounter table:

One is the monster, one is what it would like to be doing, one is it's current situation(This one occasionally has something special like a note stating it was hired as an assassin).
)
So they might get a frost giant who wants to hunt something dangerous trapped under an avalanche, or an artic owlbear sleeping that would like to continue to do so.

Yora
2016-09-05, 08:16 AM
That's also a good idea. I want to try running the dungeons as pointcrawls (http:// http://hillcantons.blogspot.de/2014/11/pointcrawl-series-index.html) with only the interesting locations being mapped and the endless corridors, store rooms, and cell blocks being represented simply as lines connecting the mapped areas.
And whether you do that indoors or outdoors really doesn't make a difference except for the larger time scale and that characters can easily make camp most of the time. You can still have random encounters, but they would need more preparation. In an outdoor adventure I would probably use almost only prepared encounters but divide them into those with fixed locations that happen whenever the PCs get there and those that could happen anywhere and at any time when the players have a random encounter. If these are patrols send out by the static encounters they would also have a lasting impact even after the party takes a rest. When the party flees or the patrol escapes someone will be expecting them and be prepared. A patrol that never comes back would also change something. Sometimes the players might decide to hide the bodies in case someone comes looking for them. Or alternatively they might encounter someone who can give them useful information about what lies ahead.

Really good idea.I think this is how Slumbering Ursine Dunes is designed. That adventure was always confusing me.

hymer
2016-09-05, 12:34 PM
But I think with games like D&D, there isn't really much "thinking it through" when you expect to have one or two encounters along the way. Unlike with a dungeon, where the amount of encounters can be influenced by spending less time hanging around looking for secret doors or avoiding making loud noises, there isn't really anything you can do about one outdoor encounter check per day.

You can't affect the amount of checks if the checks are set. If that bothers you, have it be changeable. Even if you don't, it'll be up to the players to choose how or if to engage with a random encounter. If they don't feel like fighting, odds are they can evade the enemy outdoors, which is harder to do in a dungeon.


When travelling overland you keep going, make a rest at the end of the day, and you're ready to continue the next day as if nothing happened.
There is little tension in it.

Do your players resent the lack of tension? Mine like variety.


You might occasionally get a decent mini adventure out of it if the players decide to track a group of bandits they fought off back to their camp, but when you try to get a whole dungeon adventure done in 4 hours that probably doesn't seem very attractive either.

How about throwing that schedule out? What's it good for? Let the players decide how much time they want to spend on stuff, just as you do with what they spend their time on. :smallsmile:

Yora
2016-09-05, 12:44 PM
No, that's the whole point of the campaign I am planning: Letting players drop in and out at short notice at a regularly scheduled game that happens with whoever is showing up. Picking up from a session that was left hanging is very difficult under those circumstances.

Thrudd
2016-09-05, 03:08 PM
Random encounters during travels may serve a couple purposes.

1, they show how the world is a living place and serve to inform the players about what different regions are like. The animals, monsters and people they see traveling give character to the country they are in.

2. You control the frequency of checks and dangerousness of the possible encounters in different areas. This might mean that players need to choose between taking a shorter route through more dangerous territory, risking more dangerous encounters but getting to the destination faster, or a longer route with less frequent and less dangerous inhabitants. This may be a more important choice for the trip home rather than the trip out.

Also, wilderness encounters put a time limit on the dungeon the same way wandering monsters in the dungeon do. There is nowhere totally safe to recover except for town.

Slipperychicken
2016-09-05, 03:29 PM
Wilderness encounters can be used to build the game's setting, including things relevant to the coming adventures. For instance, if the players are going to be sent on a quest to deal with a hole full of beastman raiders, wilderness encounters can establish the problem in several ways. For instance, the players could be attacked by beastman marauders, have a brief exchange with a caravan whose guards are nervous about beastmen, or the players could come across the remains of travelers and merchants who have been slain by weapons that beastmen typically use.

They can also make the players' lives harder, in ways they don't always anticipate. Getting their treasure out of the dungeon was one problem, but now they need to get through dangerous roads on the way back. Their problems are compounded if some bad-guys realize the players might be easier prey on the way back. Some thieves or brigands might hear of the players' plans, and get ready to ambush them after they emerge from their dungeon, hoping to get easy pickings from a bunch of exhausted spelunkers who are weighed down by treasure and injured companions. If the players don't have a good watch, then the opportunists might even steal the treasure-wagons and horses right out of their camp!

Frozen_Feet
2016-09-05, 03:59 PM
@Yora: the way I built my random encounter tables, they serve as an outdoor simulator rather than just monster generator. Majority of possible encounters are based on local wildlife, local people and weather effects. These are things the players could know of and prepare for by asking around, or by applying common sense and outdoor survival skills.

In case of prey animals, bows & arrows help you hunt and replenish supplies.
In case of fog, sticking close to mapped roads or using a compass will prevent getting lost.
In case of storm, having waterproof containers and blankets prevents supplies from being destroyed.
In case of predators, sources of fire and keeping the campsite clean of food leftovers help keep them away.
In case of locals, someone who knows the language & culture helps prevent wacky misunderstandings.

In addition, if the encounters happen in the same area, I build continuity between them. For example, if an encounter roll comes up with a local tribe multiple times, it's usually the same tribe. Which means a bad initial contact serves to make the situation progressively worse in successive encounters.

Method of travel also affects number and quality of encounters. Sea has a different table than land, so taking a ship can avoid some encounters the players would rather not face. Faster forms of travel, allowed by extra horses and the like, obviously cut at the number of encounters and increase chances of getting there and back again without issue. Carts and other ways of hauling equipment allow for more supplies, more versatile tools, and more loot to be recovered.

Failure to think things through typically leads to longer trips, which means more chances for encounter, which means more ways for things to go hilariously wrong. An example from a convention game: two characters took a trek through the woods to a nearby temple. They had no compass and ran out of packed foodstuffs in the first three days of the journey. They had to play dead to avoid being eaten by bear, sneak around a camp of hostile tribesmen, huddle in a forest clearing for days eating nothing but blueberries because they couldn't advance without getting lost in the fog, and due to failed Bushcraft checks, made no progress in several days. When they were just a day's journey from the temple, a storm struck, and the other character was knocked out by the cold and the hail. So when they finally reached the temple, they were out of food, wet, cold, malnourished and injured.

For contrast, another group made a journey to the same temple taking similar amount of in-game time despite their route being twice as long, because they kept on roads and stopped to sleep in towns and villages on the way and packed enough food.

Wilderness crawling like above doesn't necessarily take a whole lot of time. Both journeys to the temple took approx. 30 minutes playtime, even if in-game two weeks passed. Using a light system like BECMI or LotFP, even a combat encounter typically only lasts five minutes or so - either the player characters are all dead at that point (at least in low levels) or they fled or the enemy has been subdued or failed its morale check and fled.

The amount of thinking required for succesful long distance travel can be lessened if the player character have access to spells like know direction, create food & water, protection from the elements etc., but my play groups have rarely had a right mix of cleric, magic-users and known spells, so they've had to rely on mundane means & ingenuity.

hymer
2016-09-06, 03:40 AM
No, that's the whole point of the campaign I am planning: Letting players drop in and out at short notice at a regularly scheduled game that happens with whoever is showing up. Picking up from a session that was left hanging is very difficult under those circumstances.

Make sure the players are aware of this, and ways they can push to try to avoid random encounters; and then let them make that decision for themselves. And hey, there's your tension: Will we get bogged down in random encounters, or can we avoid them enough to do what we set out to do?

Yora
2016-09-06, 03:48 AM
Wilderness encounters can be used to build the game's setting, including things relevant to the coming adventures. For instance, if the players are going to be sent on a quest to deal with a hole full of beastman raiders, wilderness encounters can establish the problem in several ways. For instance, the players could be attacked by beastman marauders, have a brief exchange with a caravan whose guards are nervous about beastmen, or the players could come across the remains of travelers and merchants who have been slain by weapons that beastmen typically use.

They can also make the players' lives harder, in ways they don't always anticipate. Getting their treasure out of the dungeon was one problem, but now they need to get through dangerous roads on the way back. Their problems are compounded if some bad-guys realize the players might be easier prey on the way back. Some thieves or brigands might hear of the players' plans, and get ready to ambush them after they emerge from their dungeon, hoping to get easy pickings from a bunch of exhausted spelunkers who are weighed down by treasure and injured companions. If the players don't have a good watch, then the opportunists might even steal the treasure-wagons and horses right out of their camp!

Tailoring the encounter tables to the destination instead of the area they travel through? Very interesting idea. I quite like this one, too. Maybe also make a check every night the party makes camp outside the dungeon? That way they have to consider whether they want to risk being attacked by lingering or pushing trough to the town in their current state. And loaded with treasure the return trip might be longer than getting to the dungeon.
It also becomes even more interesting if they go to the dungeon more than once. Then having encounters on the way really gets to shine.
I think one could just think of the path to the dungeon as Dungeon Level 0, where encounter checks are made for every 2 hours of travel or 8 hours of rest instead of every 20 minutes and rolled on a special table. You could even have a few "rooms" along the way, like sentry posts, hermits, and so on. Or branching paths of different length but some of which offer save resting places.

That's way more interesting and relevant to the adventure than an encounter list with animals and some random bandits.

AMFV
2016-09-06, 08:31 AM
Well the main thing to think about is: "Why are you including these?"

Aesthetic reasons doesn't really necessarily make all that much sense, combat in almost all roleplaying systems tends to be pretty strong on conservation of details, and a group of Northern Mountain Orcs are going to be pretty identical to a group of Southern Desert Orcs in a combat encounter (possibly with different weapons). If you're wanting the aesthetic then you'd have to realize that as far as realism and verisimilitude goes, random encounters are kind of ridiculous, large predators avoid other large predators, bandit groups are much likelier to try to rob unarmed caravans. So possibly the best random encounters for the players are those that don't actually involve an abrupt straight up fight, but rather some kind of surprised encounter with another group, or possibly a fight that they interrupt.

I think tying them to dungeons is an interesting concept, but again it runs against the same problem, now you've kind of removed all reason to have them, because their main purpose is to make the real world feel more populated, but if they're just dungeon related, then you're sort-of pressing the dungeon outwards onto the real world, and it might be better situated just to have a planned dungeon approach with planned and meaningful encounters rather than a random encounter.

The main virtue of random encounters is that they burn time and force the players back to town to rest. That's kind of their metagame purpose, to heighten the stakes and to force a different kind of resource control. That's why they've fallen increasingly out of favor in newer systems, because those don't have as harsh a resource management system, and players have many ways of defending against being caught without spells or what-not. If the main point for you though, is the dungeon, then you don't need that as much. Their other metagame virtue is that they slow pacing, which can be useful if your players are bulldozing too rapidly through the dungeon, or gaining too much stuff. If that's a factor in your games I might include them, but otherwise it seems a little bit extraneous.

Yora
2016-09-06, 09:16 AM
Having spend some more thought on it I think the main reason to have wilderness travel is as buildup to the dungeon itself.

Armchair RPG theorists (which is basically all of them) have made some good arguments for the concept of the Gateway that marks the transition from the mundane world into the Mythic Underworld of major dungeons. Which is something you see in fiction all the time. When you crawl through the rabbit hole you immediately realize that you're not in Kansas anymore. The idea is that the fantastic appears much more fantastic when you can contrast it to something relatively mundane. RPG towns usually have magic and nonhumans quite visible and openly and we're used to take these things for granted and don't regard them as supernatural. It's simply the new normal for this world and we roll with that without even thinking. Both the town and the trip through the wilderness establish the normal for the setting so once you passed through the Gateway you can say "well, this is odd".

Chris Kutalik has ordered his Hill Cantons setting into three zones: The mundane world of civilization, the total weirdness of the magical wilderness, and between them the borderlands that are a bit strange and somewhat off. A transitory zone in which the weird bleeds over into the mundane world and foreshadows to the players the crazy stuff that lies ahead. The trip from the town to the dungeon often takes on such a fuction until you finally reach the Gateway where you leave the mundane world entirely. If you want to run a campaign with episodic one-shots that's probably the more entertaining option. And I think any encounters on the trip should reflect that.

Slipperychicken
2016-09-06, 10:19 AM
Tailoring the encounter tables to the destination instead of the area they travel through? Very interesting idea. I quite like this one, too. Maybe also make a check every night the party makes camp outside the dungeon? That way they have to consider whether they want to risk being attacked by lingering or pushing trough to the town in their current state. And loaded with treasure the return trip might be longer than getting to the dungeon.
It also becomes even more interesting if they go to the dungeon more than once. Then having encounters on the way really gets to shine.
I think one could just think of the path to the dungeon as Dungeon Level 0, where encounter checks are made for every 2 hours of travel or 8 hours of rest instead of every 20 minutes and rolled on a special table. You could even have a few "rooms" along the way, like sentry posts, hermits, and so on. Or branching paths of different length but some of which offer save resting places.

That's way more interesting and relevant to the adventure than an encounter list with animals and some random bandits.

I got the idea from a module I read (Sinister Stone of Sakkara, if you're interested). It had a similar idea: the players were supposed to be looking for a dungeon with bandits and beastmen in it, so on the way there (or rather, in certain wilderness hexes around the town and dungeon), most of the encounter table includes monster behavior relating to the quest. The Orc encounters for instance, might believe the PCs are actually looking to serve the dungeon's boss, and the PCs could use that as cover to avoid fighting the orcs and several other monster-groups. There are also benign merchants who wish the PCs neither good nor ill, but are willing to trade and if asked can help point them in the direction of the dungeon.

I think that if my players camped nearby the dungeon (within one hex of it), I might give them encounter rolls off the wandering monster table for that dungeon. The reasoning is that monsters come and go from the dungeon on a semi-regular basis (all those raiders need to get their victims, supplies, and treasure somehow. They might have patrols or other business in the area around the dungeon too) and might themselves stumble into the PCs' camp. Of course, what the monsters do when they notice the PCs' camp depends on what they find there, what sort of monsters they are, and other circumstances. One option is for monsters to recognize the PCs as the ones who have been assaulting the dungeon, and either burn their camp or try to steal something like their horses or wagons. Some more organized monsters might withdraw, then gather their colleagues for a proper assault on the camp.

SowelBlack
2016-09-06, 01:05 PM
Also, wilderness encounters put a time limit on the dungeon the same way wandering monsters in the dungeon do. There is nowhere totally safe to recover except for town.

Well, and even that may have city/town encounters. Pickposkets, beggars, searches by city guards, creatures in the sewers. Really, no place is completely safe. Just varying degrees. :)

Tanarii
2016-09-06, 11:09 PM
Random encounters serve two purposes: to make resting risky, and to make dawdling (spending in-game time) risky. (Edit: on rereading, that's technically one purpose, not two.) If you aren't furthering either of those with them, there's no point. OTOH if you're not furthering either of those, you could also just ask yourself why not? There's no particular reason it should be safe to camp outside a dungeon. The time to make a random encounter check is when they players have already expended resources and are trying to rest or get further away from the dungeon. Or when they are moving towards the dungeon, and make the mistake of trying to set up camp right outside. Then again when they realize their mistake and are backing away.

Technically in the old days the also served a third purpose in the case of wilderness encounters: to make the wilderness deadly. If that's the kind of campaign you're going for, you can certainly include a single daily check. A random encounter with a group of powerful Giants or an old dragon would be about not getting spotted or running the hell away ... survival is winning in this case.

The latter is perfect for a CaW site-base sandbox where it is established that dungeons are level-appropriate zones (albeit not necessarily the party's level), but wilderness is not.