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View Full Version : Ideas to make Random Encounter battles more interesting?



Svartalfheim
2019-04-23, 11:01 PM
I'm playing with five 1st-lvl players in D&D3.5e. I like Random Encounters, so I have these occurring. However, I want to avoid the "here's some goblins" type battles. Instead, I'd like to have a series of interesting battle-maps that make the combat more exciting. I can add interesting monsters and use them well etc, but I want some tactical map stuff to get the combat going really well.

I'm looking for ideas. So far I've got:

Players are on one side of the river, monsters on the other, there's only a single crossing and some cover here and there
There's an old ruined guard tower, some baddies are at the top, terrorising the players below. Players have to work their way up the tower (jumping acoss broken stairs etc)
Players are in a forest, there's plenty of cover and concealment
Two opposing hills with a small foggy depression at the bottom that provides concealment

Glimbur
2019-04-24, 10:57 AM
Interesting terrain, like you are thinking of, helps. Another option is different win conditions. Fighting a pack of thieves who just want to steal something and get away is very different. Critters that just want to defend their home or young or whatever can work but are much rasier to bypass. Rescuing hostages can work but is trickier to set up in random encounters.

You shouls also consider the purpose of the encounter. It can show that an area is dangerous, introduce evidence about a villain, teach the party about a new enemy, or otherwise tie into the larger plot.

Saintheart
2019-04-24, 11:44 AM
Obligatory link to the Angry DM's article on rethinking random encounters. (https://theangrygm.com/redesigning-random-encounters-1/)

Less obligatory link (https://theangrygm.com/how-to-build-awesome-encounters/)to the Angry DM's article on creating better encounters and running better battles (https://theangrygm.com/the-angry-guide-to-akicking-combats-part-1-picking-your-enemies/).

Man_Over_Game
2019-04-24, 03:06 PM
Make the encounter less of a "You and some bad guys happen to be in the same battle map" but rather "Your adventures led you to this encounter".

A few good examples:


A merchant is being held hostage by some bandits, and the heroes decide to intervene.
Some trolls were tracking your horses and are looking for a quick bite before sunrise.
A thick smoke column is off in the distance, near where your Ranger believes is a river. Inspection shows that undead are surrounding a burning house adjacent to the river.
As you pass through the canyon, you recall that someone warned you of ambushes in these parts. You warn the party to be on alert, and sure enough, a goblin party attempted to ambush you within the hour.


As to how to make the fights themselves interesting, just add a bunch of random obstacles and terrain features. Add swamps, foliage, trees, boulders, stairs, vines, tapestry, chandeliers, ornamental statues/weapons, firepits, etc. You don't have to have a plan for the items; that's not your job. Your job is to provide the tools needed for your players to make things interesting, and THEY'RE the ones that come up with the weird plans.

It might take a while, but about 1/3 of your battle map should be covered in random stuff. Unless you're fighting on a plains, most areas have a lot of obstacles getting in the way of a real fight. Consider how much open space you have in your own home, then ask yourself why a dungeon would have an open floor plan.

Svartalfheim
2019-04-24, 06:05 PM
Thanks for the suggestions everyone. This leads me to think about why I've put certain baddies in my random encounter tables.

Pauly
2019-04-24, 07:18 PM
I think the most important thing is to roll them up in advance. Nothing screams more to player “This encounter is not important” than to have the DM rolling on tables and looking up a bestiary.

This also allows the DM
- to change the critters to ones better suited to the environment or the BBEG. Don’t change all of them, just the ones that are wrong for the area of the campaign you are in.
- fit the encounters to fit the geography. It nstead of running into the goblins when resting at night, have the party find them at a river crossing.
- fit the encounters to fit the local history. I once had a campaign where the PCs had to cross a forest which had old standing stone circles which were dedicated to forgotten gods. I had all the random events fitted to these circles. Also it allowed me to describe the circles in a way that gave players hints as to the nature of the event. Much better than “I walk into the circle and hope the DM rolls a positive result on the random table” way the events were described in the sourcebook.

Just because they are random doesn’t mean the DM has to be unprepared.

Kaptin Keen
2019-04-25, 01:16 AM
I'm playing with five 1st-lvl players in D&D3.5e. I like Random Encounters, so I have these occurring. However, I want to avoid the "here's some goblins" type battles. Instead, I'd like to have a series of interesting battle-maps that make the combat more exciting. I can add interesting monsters and use them well etc, but I want some tactical map stuff to get the combat going really well.

I'm looking for ideas. So far I've got:

Players are on one side of the river, monsters on the other, there's only a single crossing and some cover here and there
There's an old ruined guard tower, some baddies are at the top, terrorising the players below. Players have to work their way up the tower (jumping acoss broken stairs etc)
Players are in a forest, there's plenty of cover and concealment
Two opposing hills with a small foggy depression at the bottom that provides concealment


Looking at these, it seems they might actually be ... avoidable. Find another crossing (it's unlikely this is the only crossing on the entire river), go around the tower, don't go into the depression.

Anyways, this got me thinking of avoidable encounters. Say you crest a pass, and descending into the valley, you can see some sort of warband is camped there. It's a big valley, you can walk around it if you want, you can scout it for information, or you can attack (provided it's even hostile). It could be related to the plot, an advance force of the main villain - or it might be a side plot (clear the warband, and you can settle your followers in the valley).

Could be all sorts of things - following a similar pattern. An ancient temple, in the process of being busily rebuilt. A thriving new community of greenskins, built on human slaves captured from neighboring valleys. Some natural ressource that has drawn in monsters - let's just say rust monsters around a rich iron vein - to gain the ressource, you need to kill off the monsters.

redwizard007
2019-04-27, 09:14 AM
A few things.

Never random. A DM should always have pre generated encounters ready to drop into a campaign. This gives you time to work interesting features. Elevation changes are an easy one. So is water, difficult terrain of various types (rubble, loose stone, thick brush, etc) and visual impairments (smoke, fog, brush, darkness, etc.)

Once you have your battle map, you can work in creature features. This should be campaign specific and tailored to the region. If thri-kreen don't live in this particular desert, then I don't care what the desert random encounter chart says. No thri-kreen. If this desert is dominated by manscorpions, then your encounters should feature them. This doesn't mean hordes of scorpion men. It could be scavangers picking through a raided caravan. It could involve an ambush predator that either preys on, or avoids the manscorpions. It could involve creatures fleeing from or hunting the manscorpions. Might be a rescue party trying to bargain for (or forcibly persuade) the return of a person or object. Could even feature an unrelated creature of such power (or evasive abilities) that it ignores the manscorpions all together.

If I stat out 3 random encounter forces pre-session, 1 each of easy, moderate, and hard difficulty as well as getting a rough idea (or map) for 3 different locations, then it gives me the flexibility to mix and match as needed during the session. As a bonus, anything that I don't use today, I can tuck back into a folder for tomorrow.

Aotrs Commander
2019-04-29, 12:20 PM
I think the most important thing is to roll them up in advance. Nothing screams more to player “This encounter is not important” than to have the DM rolling on tables and looking up a bestiary.

This also allows the DM
- to change the critters to ones better suited to the environment or the BBEG. Don’t change all of them, just the ones that are wrong for the area of the campaign you are in.
- fit the encounters to fit the geography. It nstead of running into the goblins when resting at night, have the party find them at a river crossing.
- fit the encounters to fit the local history. I once had a campaign where the PCs had to cross a forest which had old standing stone circles which were dedicated to forgotten gods. I had all the random events fitted to these circles. Also it allowed me to describe the circles in a way that gave players hints as to the nature of the event. Much better than “I walk into the circle and hope the DM rolls a positive result on the random table” way the events were described in the sourcebook.

Just because they are random doesn’t mean the DM has to be unprepared.

I would concur. When I do random encounters, I predominatly use them as something that happens on long journeys, so that it doesn't become "and then you arrifve at the dungeon." I always rolls them up in advance so that I can try and do something with them, if I can. (And if the PCs avoid them fine, they get all the XP as if they'd beaten it. Rarely are they so interesting that a party of 6-8 characters will have any particular difficulty anyway.)

Occasionally, I use those encounters to throw a really hard combat at the PCs, if there's space in the module; in the third part of Rise of the Runelords, I threw an encounter that was basically just an eveil adventuring party at the PCs, while they were on a boat on a lake, which made for a fun encounter (even if it had no lasting impact on the story other than the loot).



Having read a good chunk of that linked article, I'm afraid I have to disgree with the gentlemen the greatest benefit of random encounters is to essentially force time-pressure, because I fundementally disagree that forcing time-pressure is (outside of specifically designed circumstances) a fun thing to do. I certainly hate it as a player, and it's one of the fastest ways to get me to stop playing a computer game, say. (Never inished Mask of the Betrayer because I felt like I was being forced t rush through the game.) I thus basically never use random encounters at a static location.

(But, I ALSO not only expect but encourage the ten-minute adventuring day, because typically, when my PCs stop to rest they NEED to be allowed to rest unless I want to basically end the campaign, because of the sort of encounters I will tend to chuck at them. (If running an adventure path, for instance, this can mean several combats at once that the designers might have intended to be one at a time!))

The Jack
2019-04-29, 08:49 PM
A few things.

A DM should always have pre generated encounters ready to drop into a campaign.

What? Never! I just make stuff up as I go along, and it really works well. Just think of something fun that you think suits the journey and players. I generate subplots on a whim.

Then again, I just sandbox with a world in mind. What goes on in that world is easy. A lot of the time I just tease things that I haven't actually worked out, like how the last three sessions of destabilising nonsense is now the well thought out plot of a secret war between X and Y...

Pauly
2019-04-30, 07:10 AM
I would concur. When I do random encounters, I predominatly use them as something that happens on long journeys, so that it doesn't become "and then you arrifve at the dungeon." I always rolls them up in advance so that I can try and do something with them, if I can. (And if the PCs avoid them fine, they get all the XP as if they'd beaten it. Rarely are they so interesting that a party of 6-8 characters will have any particular difficulty anyway.)
))

The first I played a campaign with this type of pre-prepared random events we didn’t know that was how the DM did things. We were given the usual starting quest of go forth and find out what’s happening in Village X. Our first three encounters went Goblins - Wargs - Warg riders. So we the players assumed that it was a goblin hunt. Tracked the goblins to their lair, destroyed it and returned triumphantly to the Duke. Only for the Duke to lambast us for being idiots as he knew about the Goblins and they weren’t a threat his militia couldn’t handle themselves. (The DM later told us he recycled an old Goblin fort layout he had when we decided to go goblin hunting). We got sent back to do the quest only properly this time.
We as the party made that “error” because of the seamless way the DM had integrated the random encounters into the journey. If he’d done it the old way of rolling on tables we as players would have known that it was just a random encounter. But we reacted to it in character because we didn’t know it was random.

Resileaf
2019-04-30, 09:22 AM
I would suggest having some random encounters have to do with previous questlines. For example, the players in my previous campaign had collapsed part of a mine to cut off a tribe of goblins from a mining company, and the owner of the company sent henchmen to beat them up. This wasn't a planned encounter though, they just so happened to be traveling on a road near where that company was when I rolled a random encounter, and so decided to have a group of thugs waiting for them be the encounter.

Jay R
2019-04-30, 09:37 AM
CR is a fallacy. Drop it and more interesting encounters become possible.


An inferior force that is ambushing the party (Tucker's kobolds)
A superior force that the party sees in advance and could ambush
A large force the party must avoid
Two superior forces already fighting each other
A superior force that needs help (Aesop's The Lion and the Mouse)
An encounter that is annoying rather than deadly (a prankish brownie)


The crucial realization is that what makes an encounter interesting is making choices.


You find a lion caught in a pit trap. Do you release it? Will the trap-makers come after you?
You come upon a field that had a recent battle. Off to the side, there is a single baby wrapped in a wool blanket. Nothing indicates what side the baby was with, or why a baby was there. There are no other survivors.
You find a badly mauled man in robes, near death. His staff and amulet are clearly Evil.
You reach a raging river -- and see somebody caught in the rapids.



Fights are important, but they are not the only kind of encounter.

Aotrs Commander
2019-05-01, 04:32 PM
The first I played a campaign with this type of pre-prepared random events we didn’t know that was how the DM did things. We were given the usual starting quest of go forth and find out what’s happening in Village X. Our first three encounters went Goblins - Wargs - Warg riders. So we the players assumed that it was a goblin hunt. Tracked the goblins to their lair, destroyed it and returned triumphantly to the Duke. Only for the Duke to lambast us for being idiots as he knew about the Goblins and they weren’t a threat his militia couldn’t handle themselves. (The DM later told us he recycled an old Goblin fort layout he had when we decided to go goblin hunting). We got sent back to do the quest only properly this time.
We as the party made that “error” because of the seamless way the DM had integrated the random encounters into the journey. If he’d done it the old way of rolling on tables we as players would have known that it was just a random encounter. But we reacted to it in character because we didn’t know it was random.

Are you saying that was... Bad...?




CR is a fallacy. Drop it and more interesting encounters become possible.

I have never used CR as anything more than thing that value of XP. (I mean, I play well outside CR's original design paradigm, with high-power PCs in parties of six to eight, ten-minute adventuring days and equally high-power enemies, so it is laregly meaningless). I have always just balanced encounters more or less by eye anyway.

Pauly
2019-05-01, 07:33 PM
Are you saying that was bad?

No, I’m saying it was fantastic. It really helped us believe we were in the world and reacting to the world.

Aotrs Commander
2019-05-01, 08:23 PM
No, I’m saying it was fantastic. It really helped us believe we were in the world and reacting to the world.

Oh, right, cool. I asked because I was completely baffled as to why that wouldn't be brilliant but for some reason I had drawn that implication from your wording and just could not grock that...!

Quertus
2019-05-01, 09:42 PM
As others have said, random encounters should be encounters, not just combats. Patrolling soldiers, other adventurers, woodsman's traps, mischievous pixies, waterfalls, baby dragons, metal flowers - anything that exists in the world, but isn't explicitly drawn on the map.

I mean, I had the BBEG as a random encounter one campaign, because his exact location was not terribly interesting.

To the extent that your world is coherent, and you want to show your world off, your random encounters shouldn't be "random", but indicative of the world, the current area that the PCs are in, etc.

AMFV
2019-05-01, 10:17 PM
I think the key thing to making random encounters more interesting is to roll them beforehand, so that you can see what you're actually dealing with instead of trying to interest them up in game. Say you get a monster like a Hydra, well then start to think about what environment would offer the most interesting challenge. Say you get something like a bunch of bandits, well figure out what they are doing there and what their plans are. That way you can have your padding be thought out at least, which is really helpful in setting up more interesting combat encounters.

Edit: Also it let's you figure out if the players are going to have an encounter that they may assume is part of the plot (in which case you may have to alter it either to make it more or less relevant) or one that they may need to figure out how to escape from, in which case you can (occasionally) have a way out set up.

Pauly
2019-05-01, 11:05 PM
Oh, right, cool. I asked because I was completely baffled as to why that wouldn't be brilliant but for some reason I had drawn that implication from your wording and just could not grock that...!

Well when the party returned to the Duke saying “behold the head of the goblin chief who was attacking the village” only for the Duke to go all Gordon Ramsey on us was disconcerting at the time. In hindsight it was one of the highlights of the campaign. However the big thing it did was make us treat the world as a lived in world where we couldn’t tell if an encounter was truly random or plot relevant until we had resolved the encounter fully.