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Samriddha
2018-08-13, 06:37 AM
So i am a new dm and i will conduct my 1st game soon. I will play siege of salorium campaign thorough the app digital d20 adventures if anyone has played this campaign give me tips and how do i use random encounters? (a chart full of encounters is given but how do i use it?)
- thanks

MrZJunior
2018-08-13, 03:34 PM
I've usually rolled random encounter tables every couple of in game hours or so. Also, if the party does something that might attract attention like push over a statue, I will roll them to see if anything noticed and wanted to investigate. Basically any time you might want to insert an encounter or chip away at the party's resources.

Anonymouswizard
2018-08-13, 03:59 PM
First off, being a GM is one of the most rewarding experiences in roleplaying, if you're willing to put in the work.

For random encounters, the general idea is to use them to discourage frivolous resting and time wasting. The general idea is that every [time period] there is an X% chance of a random encounter. The 'standard' is roughly every couple of hours in a dungeon and about every day in wilderness, although this should be altered depending on the pace you want.

E.g. If there's a 5% chance of a random encounter every hour then a party that searches a room for an hour has a 5% chance of an encounter, while a party that rests for eight hours has a 5% chance every hour.

Saintheart
2018-08-14, 02:45 AM
As far as random encounters go, the experience that a lot of people have is that their novelty starts to wear off after the first few consecutive wandering monster encounters show up.

The basic idea of them is to tax the party's resources so they don't come into every "set" encounter fully armed and ready to go necessarily, but in practice the joke is that there will always be one random encounter per party journey because after the single encounter, the DM and the players become sick of the forced combat and the game is just moved on to the next planned encounter. For some weird reason, dice and probability seem to hate my parties - either there are too many wandering monsters or the ones they get seem to constantly be well above appropriate EL.

I love the Angry DM's take on random encounters (http://theangrygm.com/megadungeon-monday-random-encounters/), but he assumes at least having run a few adventures before you try and implement his systems I think. For the present my personal advice would be, as a starting GM, don't get hung up on insisting that they play through every single random encounter by the book if you sense your party's getting bored with it all.

HighWater
2018-08-14, 05:47 AM
So i am a new dm and i will conduct my 1st game soon. I will play siege of salorium campaign thorough the app digital d20 adventures if anyone has played this campaign give me tips and how do i use random encounters? (a chart full of encounters is given but how do i use it?)
- thanks

Congrats on taking up the DM mantle! I am afraid I can't give any advice on that campaign, I can weigh in on how I feel about Random Encounters:


[D]on't get hung up on insisting that they play through every single random encounter by the book if you sense your party's getting bored with it all.

This!

I started with random encounters "by the book", after a few sessions moved to "custom 'random' encounters" and dropped that another few sessions later for "all encounters are custom and directly or indirectly story related".

Why?
- Because they undercut the story, by taking the speed out of story progression,
- Because they bog down play (as I have to grab the proper monster stats, improvise a "starting situation" etc),
- They generally don't fulfill the purpose they were invented for =>

Now, your mileage may vary, but so far the "problems" that Random Encounters are supposed to solve have not actually materialized in my playgroup:
- They don't go NOVA and then rest for 8 hours, every single room. So there's no need for Random Encounters to drain resources or spur them onwards,
- The world is generally plenty alive as-is with the regular encounters that make direct sense in the context.

Don't take this to mean that the group is never attacked when resting, just that I know in advance that if they rest in area X that they can expect a visit from encounter Y at time Z.