Advice on creating random encounter tables [Archive]

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Albions_Angel

2018-02-02, 06:21 AM

AnimeTheCat

2018-02-02, 08:17 AM

Here's a method I enjoy and prefer to fully built tables of random encounters.

Every time you would have the party roll for a random encounter create 3 categories; No Encounter, Friendly Encounter, Enemy Encounter. Each different area will have different chances for each of the three categories. For instance, on a decently traveled road between to minor villages the party is as likely to not encounter anything as they are to encounter highwaymen or a travelling merchant so on a percentile roll you would have 34% chance of encountering nothing and 33% chance to each to encounter friends or foes for a total of 100% chance. Figure these numbers out ahead of time to make life easier for yourself. Haunted woods? 20% nothing, 5% Friendly, 75% enemy. In the City? 30% Nothing, 60% Friend, 10% enemy (cutpurse or something...).

Next, if you want true randomization, make two decks of note cards. One with the stats, stock, wares, personality, etc. of friendly encounters and one with monster stat blocks. Give each monster card a dice roll for the number of that monster encountered. An example of this could be on the Skeleton stat card at the bottom you have (CR 1, 1d6 if Partly Level<4, 1d6 + Draw another card if Party Level>3) and when you draw the other card have another dice roll. You can end up with a fair number of lowish CR monsters for the party to face and create pretty good challenges without too much effort.

To top it all off, you're the DM. If you draw a Skeleton Card in the Holy Temple of Heironeous you're completely within your rights to just skip that card and shuffle it in to the deck again. You're also completely within your rights to just pick the monster card that suits the enviroment, like human highway men (warrior 2/Expert 2) on a road instead of a Beholder or something. When you make your monster cards you could even just build different decks for the random encounters so you don't even have to concern yourself with drawing something thematically bad. Think of it as a deck building game against your PCs where you're not trying to outright kill the party.

I like this method more than building out tables and the Monster Cards really come in handy for more than just random encounters. They have the creature stat blocks and CR on them to make the XP easier to calculate (especially if you're using a DM screen with it printed on the inside for you) and those can be used as quick references for Knowledge checks against them. You would be surprised at just how much stuff you can put on a note card.

On the note of building cards, Spell Cards are also incredibly useful and I can't recommend them enough.

unseenmage

2018-02-02, 08:20 AM

Arguably none of your rolled options should be boring. If you're putting in the work to make the thing then why populate it with events you or the players would not enjoy?
The same advice goes for empty or nothing options one would think.

Just make sure the work you put in generates fun and all should be well.

In my sig is a Jumping the Sharks CR link to a list I made of a bunch of the aquatic predators in PF.
Its an example a) of a badly made encounter chart with CRs too different from each other and b) a good example of a focused list that does what I wanted it to with precision.

Also in my sig is another set of lists I made of every playable creature in 3.x (a WiP to be sure) the point being that for that list I wanted almost even odds for every creature regardless. Unlike the Sharks list where I wanted a higher chance to roll lower CR sharks.

Altair_the_Vexed

2018-02-02, 08:36 AM

Back in the old, old days (BECM boxed sets), there was generally a fixed chance of there being any sort of wilderness encounter - say 1 in 4, or 1 in 6, or whatever you feel like. Roll once per day of travel. If you had an encounter, you'd then roll on a creature type table for the type of terrain you were in.
Once you'd found your creature type, you roll on the table for those creatures. There were several creature types, some very broad ("Flyers", "Swimmers"), some more specific ("Undead", "Animals").
To give you an idea of the scale of these tables, there were about a dozen different terrains, each of which had 12 or so entries (some duplicated, so that 7-9 would get you "Humanoids", or whatever), and each creature type table was about the same (including the duplication).

Example: you're travelling through the hills, and the GM rolls that there is an encounter. She rolls on the Hills / Mountain encounter table, and gets "Humanoids". Now, the Humanoids table is split into a few different tables for sub-types of terrain - "Settled lands", "Wilderness", etc - each with more or less appropriate encounters for humanoids in such an area.

If you want to add some flavour encounters along the way, then I'd go for the option of having a table of "set dressing" and "extras" to roll on when there's no action encounter. Separate to that, I'd make up some rumours for my extras to give the party (to keep the extras interesting) - some random, but mainly things I wanted to get over to the players, clues and the like.

Elder_Basilisk

2018-02-02, 04:07 PM

As others have said, there should be a mix of potentially friendly and most likely unfriendly encounters. This is what makes the random encounters more than "we run into our obligatory thug attack on the way."

There should also be a chance for multiple encounters per day and for encounters at night. This serves two purposes. First, it gives the PCs a reason to hold back and not simply alpha strike every combat encounter they run across. It also allows staples of D&d like watch orders to be relevant, justifies all those spells like alarm and secure shelter that are designed for making watch better. It also makes some of the less appreciated feats like endurance relevant.

Finally, there should be a range of ELs. This serves several purposes beyond the "fun factor" of the encounter itself. First, it aids verisimilitude. All of the packs of wolves in the game world don't level up to dire bears just because the party went from level 3 to level 8. Likewise, the twisted assassin woods don't lose all their assassin vines just because the players hit level 8. By allowing the odd easy encounter, you let the players feel their own progress (hey, wolves are no problem now! Aren't we awesome?). You also create the opportunity for disguised encounters. If there are no inappropriately weak encounters, the super enchanted werewolves who look like a weak encounter at first won't be able to surprise the players. The inappropriately challenging encounters also serve a purpose. Just because you're low level doesn't mean you can waltz into the dragon's hunting ground confident that it will be somewhere else. They provide the opportunity for different kinds of encounters (the object of this encounter is to get away for example or "the dragon/demon demands treasure/a sacrifice to pass). And they provide a marker for later. "Remember that dragon who took all our treasure on our way back from the tomb? We're a lot tougher now, let's track it down and whack it! Yeah, I hate that bastard!"

Together with the possibility of multiple encounters, the range of encounter levels also provide another reason not to simply alphastrike everything. "What if these are just wolves? No need to blow all our highest level spells and 1/day abilities--especially since this is dragon country and we need to hold something back in case the dragon does show up."

BowStreetRunner

2018-02-02, 04:55 PM

Vary your random encounters. Make sure that a wide range of creature Types are covered, as well as ensuring that a variety of PC abilities are being challenged besides just combat. No one likes to be the charisma-based rogue con-man when all there are is combat encounters. Nor does the Ranger want to always fight bandits and undead when he picked orcs and goblins as his favored enemies.

Make it modular. Instead of having fully constructed preset encounters use encounter templates that can be encountered more than once without repeating the same exact circumstances. Each time the encounter comes up you draw or roll for each element in the encounter, whatever that might be. If the mcguffin changes along with the npcs/monsters being different, players may not even realize it is the same encounter being reused.

If you take the advice of AnimeTheCat above, keep an open mind to Friendly encounters that can turn into Enemy encounters, and vice-versa.

Another option is to completely write up all of the random encounters in advance and just have the rolls determine when the encounters actually take place. You won't know when they are going to encounter the Trolls playing keep-away from Treant with the unconscious dryad, just that at some point it's going to come up. This is especially important if you are running a campaign that is carefully plotted based on the XP progression, as it gives you greater control.

Albions_Angel

2018-02-03, 05:16 AM

Thanks guys, thats super helpful :)

I think I have a feel now for the types of encounter to have, but I am still wondering about a few more tricky details.

I want to build as few tables as possible, otherwise it eats up all my time. My world has 9 distinct regions, and each region has a little geographical variation. For example, Jarlheim is a northern Temperate-Arctic region with boggy marshland and lots of coastline in the south, cold plains and forests in the middle and icebound mountains in the north. For Jarlheim, I feel comfortable making about 4 tables, all of which overlap heavily. One for the south, one for the middle and one for the north, and a final one for night time. There is general overlap with bandits, wolves, fey and what not, but the north also has giants and neanderthal raiders from across the mountains and things, while in the south there are will-o-wisps and hags thrown in.

I would want to go the route of having all the encounters statted out as much as possible. The goal is I spend a month doing heavy prepwork NOW, so I dont have to spend 3 days doing heavy prepwork before each session, I just have to figure out the story and main encounters. Random encounters would be rolled, and I would just pull up the relevant encounter as and when.

I do have concerns though. How big does a random encounter table need to be. There was this wonderful table by Malimar that I dug up and I feel like its the right sort of table for me https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-c_3A-A27ZjSldSRE9sMmplM28/view?usp=sharing .

As you can see, it runs off a d411, with 150 possible encounter types, but in actuality, only a handful are actual encounters. A roll of 1 to 150 provides nothing for example.

That table seems the right size, but... well... how do you come up with something like that. How do you decide on whats common and whats not? I would, I fear, have a tendency to chicken out and end up with 6 things on the table, rolling a d10, which suddenly isnt so random.

And while I understand a table should have low EL encounters for high level parties, what about the other way round. Its one thing if the party of level 1s encounters the trolls playing treant in the middle because they will likely spot them. But what if its a pack of dire wolves? Or a bandit ambush with a caster? Do I just ignore encounters say... 2 EL higher than the party?

Ill probably have an upper limit on random encounters of somewhere around EL 10 or so. A party that can tackle those easily wont be having random encounters any more due to teleport, and EL 10 is around where my high end official guards sit, so anything randomly walking around higher than that would have wiped out the populus by now. I can have scripted encounters for parties that get that high.

Pugwampy

2018-02-03, 10:06 AM

I am used to running very story driven campaigns, but even then, the need arises for road encounters that arnt plot related. And often I burn myself out setting these up ahead of time.

Can you honestly say you have tried every last monster you ever wanted to try ? These table are for bored DM,s who have done it all .

I divide minor encounters into dice rolls and then sub divide those too . Dont go nuts on variety choose a dozen or half dozen of your favorite monsters, this is your game too . You need a make a flip file full all your monsters , humanoids and adventurers for easy access .

Enemy adventurer party : Your choice of classes . Warning this can be a bit of admin depending on how many classes you use at once . The easiest way is one class type of adventurers eg group of thieves or monks only .

One big champion . eg.s a high level Duelist.

multiple Weak Animals attack Your choice of animals Roll d6 or D10 eg ,Dire rats or baboons

One big animal roll dice for big animal. Eg Tiger

multiple Weak Enemy humanoids attack Your choice of humanoids roll D6 or D10 . eg a group of orcs

One big monster Your choice of big monster roll da dice. eg Frost giant or high level kobold monk .

One thief trying to steal your goodies while you sleep . No combat just stealth . eg. 1 Halfling or goblin . He tries to escape if detected .

Nothing happens ................just nothing happens dudes . :smallsmile:

<On a side note , you dont have to adjust for player levels everytime players level up . You can just add HP or add in +2 attack or extra spell slot or even just add an extra monster . >

johnbragg

2018-02-03, 10:57 AM

Hi all,

I am used to running very story driven campaigns, but even then, the need arises for road encounters that arnt plot related. And often I burn myself out setting these up ahead of time.

Now my world is nearing completion, I am moving more towards a semi-sandbox type game, and I want random encounter tables for different areas. I know I dont need to do random encounters, but I really want to. It would make my life easier to have the tables and encounters all ready to go before the campaign even starts. Its one less thing to worry about.

OK. What I would recommend is that you DO actually sketch out the encounters ahead of time, in some degree of detail (monster stats, information the peasants will give, what benefit the party will get from successfully befriending the possible-hostile, possible-trade-partner).

I think 2d6 is actually enough for an encounter table.

On a 6-8, nothing important happens. (47% chance.) (You don't have to say "nothing happens", but narrate and expedite what happens--7 they talk to some peasants, 8 they chase away a hungry predator, 6 weather changes--rain makes the road turn to mud, or the rain stops, or it's hot or cold or whatever--and the players don't get to do anything unless they REALLY want to. )

5 and 9 are way-under-CR encounters, but things that the party actually has to interact with. (11% chance of each.)
--mook bandits with some prisoners
--party comes across the escaped victims of some mook bandits.

4 and 10 are just-under-CR encounters. The world is a dangerous place, even outside the dungeon. 8% chance of each.
--An easy fight.
--A pond where, if you fail a Will save, you throw your rations into the water to feed the Psionic Carp who live in the pond. Roll a 1 and you're geas-ed to keep coming back and throwing bread in until you get a remove curse/ break enchantment/ dispel magic.
--A caravan with a chance to buy-and-sell--no XP.

3 and 11 are CR-appropriate encounters, or maybe over-CR-ed party-better-run-encounters, or the party stumbles over a major plot point. 6% chance of each.

2 and 12 are big encounters, either boss fights or a massive plot point. "I rolled a 12 on the encounter table! The plot finds you!" 3% chance of each

Other questions
1. How often. That depends. (I know, I'm super helpful) Often enough to keep the players' interest. (Or your interest). If they're traveling less than a day between the town and the dungeon, I'd say once. Camping overnight, I'd say once, and roll to figure out whose watch it's on.

2. Levelled encounters. I'd say try to tweak it to your party's level. IF they're 1st level and they're in a wilderness where dragons and giants and trolls are as common as state troopers are on a US interstate, they're in the wrong area. OTOH, if they're 12th level and half their encounters are 1 HD mooks, it's fairly trivial.

BowStreetRunner

2018-02-03, 11:08 AM

How big does a random encounter table need to be

A good start would be the random encounter tables in the DMG (pages 78-102). DMGII has additonal tables as well (pages 65-72). They mostly use percentile dice which I've always found to be more than sufficient. You can swap out the listed encounters with your own, trying to keep things equivalent in terms of Challenge Rating. Additionally, if you have some unique encounters you don't want to happen more than once you can swap those out once they are rolled too.

My best advice is just to start small and get it done. If you keep trying to come up with the 'perfect' solution more than likely you won't be ready in time and will end up rushing things at the end. A lot of the more complex systems used came from years of DM experience making a few leaps here and there from one approach to another and more often just minor tweaks along the way trying to improve the outcomes. Don't overthink it, especially as the random encounters should generally be less memorable than your planned encounters.

Florian

2018-02-03, 11:18 AM

"Story-driven" and "Semi-Sandbox" are the key words here. In this combination, it´s basically enough to use a 10-point table, but keep updating and modifying along the way and, as this is d20, along the levels. An even mix of "oddities", "neutrals", "friendlies" and "Enemies" should do the trick and be reasonably easy to keep up-to-date.

DuelingBlue

2018-02-03, 11:23 AM

Albions_Angel

2018-02-04, 05:48 AM

Thanks all. I think I will take a look at the DMG and DMGII and try to go for a sweet spot between them and the excel table I found (as that is a really neat system with seemingly a good balance of encounters and non-encounters). Sort of between 50 and 100 "events" and a "nothing happens" encounter that takes up the plurality (but not majority) of rolls. If I want my players to roll, I will probably leave "nothing happens" off the table and have them roll a d100, as they can still land on non-encounters, but I will also run the table in excel with a d150 or so for when I want to make secret rolls.

I guess I still wasnt explaining myself very well with what I was trying to do. The problem I was having was I was running "random" encounters that were unique to each session, appropriately CRed and honestly were more hassle to set up than I could deal with. When I ran 8 hour sessions, if people were traveling, there were roughly 2 encounters per day and one per night. When I moved to 4 hour sessions with a different group, I cut it down to one day/night encounter for every 2 days travel. I borrowed the formula from my first 8 hour group when I was a player for them, where typically one session would be travel to the objective, the next was completing the objective, and then the third was moving back to base or heading on to the next objective. About half the time we would make it to the objective in the first session and clear half of it. We were story driven and encounter heavy, with typically 6 or 7 encounters per session, but then we had 8 hours to play with.

My issue was, the formula was very rigid. Have people roll high/low or have a roll that added from person to person, hour on hour until you hit 30 or so. Then roll 1d6. 1 was nothing. 2 was a non encounter. 3-6 were encounters ranging from 2 lower to 2 higher cr, and from ambush to totally avoidable. But I would stat out each one every new session, adjusting for party EL, where we were, etc. They would easily take just as long as stating out an entire dungeon and I would end up fried, and burn out on the tiny details. I am working on the perfectionism, but still have a way to go.

My idea for these random encounter tables is that I will stat out each and every encounter on them. Totally. Bandits A will be an ambush with 3 warriors, a ranger and a rogue. Wolf pack C are really werewolves. Shepherd B and one of his sheep have been mind swapped or polymorphed, while Shepherd A and his sheep are non-magical. Shepherd C and his sheep are all faintly magical, but otherwise totally normal. Etc, etc, etc.

That way, when I come to DM again (still a little burnt out from the last time!) I will not ever have to worry about journey time unless I need a plot point. I can just roll on the table and be linked to the google sheet with the stats on it. Bish-bash-bosh, Bob's your uncle, lets have another cuppa tea, 'ave a banana, and all that jazz. Id rather sit down and spend a month or 2 now, than be freaking out half the week when its time to DM. Id love to kick back and just play, but none of my friends, or local groups, will touch 3.5 or Pathfinder, and having tried 8 times, in 5 games, with 3 groups, I just cannot get into 5th.

Fizban

2018-02-04, 07:27 AM

But I would stat out each one every new session, adjusting for party EL, where we were, etc.
Ah, well there's your problem. Random encounters are part of the status quo: they should never care about the party's level, the party should care about the random encounter's level (and weather they should be adventuring in this area).

My idea for these random encounter tables is that I will stat out each and every encounter on them. Totally. Bandits A will be an ambush with 3 warriors, a ranger and a rogue. Wolf pack C are really werewolves. Shepherd B and one of his sheep have been mind swapped or polymorphed, while Shepherd A and his sheep are non-magical. Shepherd C and his sheep are all faintly magical, but otherwise totally normal. Etc, etc, etc.

That way, when I come to DM again (still a little burnt out from the last time!) I will not ever have to worry about journey time unless I need a plot point. I can just roll on the table and be linked to the google sheet with the stats on it. Bish-bash-bosh, Bob's your uncle, lets have another cuppa tea, 'ave a banana, and all that jazz. Id rather sit down and spend a month or 2 now, than be freaking out half the week when its time to DM. Id love to kick back and just play, but none of my friends, or local groups, will touch 3.5 or Pathfinder, and having tried 8 times, in 5 games, with 3 groups, I just cannot get into 5th.
I feel like this is kinda the opposite of the point for random encounters- people like to say "make random encounters important," but the whole point kinda is that they're not important. When traveling, they're the guys you pass on the road, the animals grazing or hunting, the smoke in the distance- and sure, the bandits that attack you personally. Unless you're trying to have every single encounter lead to a plot, they really shouldn't be that unique.

Each region worth counting as its own region should have a set of random encounters set around a certain level, some lower and some higher. The balance of hostile/non-hostile is whatever is needed to, in combination with how often you check it, result in the number of encounters you want overall. If there's a plot going on in the area, any or all of these could be tied into that plot, but otherwise they're just not important- just stuff on the road you should be able to avoid if you want. Roads should really just be roads with nothing but fluff unless you specifically want an ambush or the PCs are at a level where actual basic bandits are a threat- and the PCs are an armed group so small-time bandits should be avoiding them (big-time bandits are plot).

There's also a somewhat significant question of realism vs area and predators: it takes a ton of herbivores to support one predator, and similarly it takes a ton of weaker population to support bandits or adventurers. Unless the PCs are travelling across vast distances (multiple different regions), there really shouldn't be all that many major or fantastical things they run into. I'd find it kinda weird if criss-crossing a certain area had a bunch of encounters that were just so far apart. Anything more than a few major antagonistic monster types and the place starts to feel like a zoo (though if they never roll more than a few checks there it wouldn't be apparent).

Dungeons have random encounter tables built to keep a certain amount of pressure on the PCs to discourage them from lolling about, though they're often tied into a written pool of local monsters that can be depleted, and also will often have some major NPC for the dungeon either as a random bad thing or a random good thing. Doesn't sound like these are the problem though.

There are plenty more example random encounter tables in other splats and of course modules. Frostburn, Sandstorm, and Stormwrack all have massive tables spanning multiple ELs for environments of their leanings. of course these are huge tables so they probably run into the zoo problem. There's also more individualized tables for the various Touchstone site in Planar Handbook and Sandstorm.

johnbragg

2018-02-04, 09:34 AM

My idea for these random encounter tables is that I will stat out each and every encounter on them. Totally. Bandits A will be an ambush with 3 warriors, a ranger and a rogue. Wolf pack C are really werewolves. Shepherd B and one of his sheep have been mind swapped or polymorphed, while Shepherd A and his sheep are non-magical. Shepherd C and his sheep are all faintly magical, but otherwise totally normal. Etc, etc, etc.

This is part of how you roll as a DM, so I don't think you're going to change that.

If you're doing this, I *strongly* recommend cutting the table down to less than a dozen encounters on each table, with a few in reserve so that you don't repeat encounters. 2d6 is your friend, 6-7-8 are no encounter / "flavor text encounter"--something happens, but not something important that the party has to do much about. HAve backup "flavor text encounters" for 6 and 8 if you get repeats there, if you get repeats on the other numbers, use the "mirror image" (2-12, 3-11, 4-10, 5-9). Maybe have backup encounters to slot into 2-12, 3-11, 4-10, 5-9.

That way you only need to design new encounters at the rate your party burns through them.

There is no reason that you, as a DM, need 30 or 50 random encounters for each environment ready for a session. You're going to have a couple of different environments ready (on-the-road, in-the-town, in-the-dungeon)--that's already 30-40 encounters. More if you do tables for each dungeon level.

A table like http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/indexes-and-tables/encounter-tables/#TOC-Forest-Temperate-Avg.-CR-5- is fine if you're an on-the-fly guy, roll the dice, look it up, roll initiative. But if you're putting some thought into each encounter, that's just not possible. Take a piece of paper, write 2-6, click a PFSRD link that vaguely makes sense, copy 2-3 encounters at each probability level. Maybe you need to plunder two or three tables to get stuff you want. No one's going to know except the NSA and FVEY.

You might want to look up some OSR tables for non-combat (or trivial combat) encounters, because they're into that sort of thing.

Florian

2018-02-04, 09:53 AM

@Albions_Angel:

At this level of detail, you can already start populating a hex crawl sandbox full of encounters and end up with something like the Wilderlands.

Yahzi

2018-02-05, 02:51 AM

I am not really sure where to start though.
Or you could download Sandbox World Generator (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/217951/Sandbox-World-Generator), edit the .xls file to your heart's content, then create a random world (one button click), zoom into a region that looks like your terrain (or edit the terrain to match), and run with that.

Calthropstu

2018-02-06, 03:06 AM

When using a table as a random encounter, I like to have it as an animated object. Alternatively, you can also have it be a mimic.

I suppose you could have some sort of table golem, and technically a trapped table is an encounter so you could randomly throw that at them.

Hope this helps.

Fizban

2018-02-06, 04:20 AM

You mention Mimics in jest, but I feel like they may be a rather underutilized monster, simply because they're so well known. Unlike in most video games, Mimics in dnd aren't super tough mini-boss tier murder-beasts no matter where you find them: a standard Mimic is CR 4, and while farily devastating to anyone it actually catches with the mimic-shtick, isn't all that scary one its revealed. Any encounter specifically built around a mimic requires the PCs to approach and touch a particular item, and players can often pick up on this no matter how well the DM tries to hide it.

So the best Mimic encounter will be the one where it might very well be overleveled, and not even the DM knows its coming. A random encounter where the players have no reason to suddenly declare they're examining every object with maximum scrutiny, where they've already heard the layout of the room and the DM can simply reveal that the rock they sat on or this item they never examined before happened to be a mimic the whole time and surprise round, actually lets the mimic do their thing.