Random Encounters are Stupid and Should Feel Bad!

[Easy e]

How is that for an inflammatory title intended to create discussion?

As background, I am strongly in favor of placing narrative structures on my gaming sessions. There needs to be a "goal" or "theme" to the session and the adventures. This is not for every GM and I understand many people run open-world/sandbox games. However, even in these types of games NO encounter should be random.

All encounters should be planned by the GM in order to do one of the following:

1. Be a plot hook
2. Add physical, emotional, or dramatic conflict for the players
3. Provide information or items the Players will need
4. Add a complication to an existing character arc/story line
5. Provide a consequence to previous activities or actions

Therefore, no encounter should be random and should instead meet the needs of the game, instead of being random. If an encounter needs to happen, it should be because the GM wants it to happen; not because a dice roll says it should happen.

Your thoughts?

[HumanFighter]

Um yeah I totally agree dude. I once had to suffer under a GM who absolutely seemed to love "random" encounters. Our party was assembled one time and we had to make our way across a world map to a certain dungeon, for a certain reason (don't remember). Turns out he had planned for us to go through 6 or 7 random encounters before we even made it to the dungeon. And these encounters were not easy. With this GM, they never are. We never actually finished the campaign or got to the dungeon that day, as we were all exhausted after the 3rd or 4th really hard encounter.

They say a good GM learns from his mistakes. But an even better GM learns from the mistakes of others as well.

When I GM, I allow random encounters to happen, as it makes the world feel a little more alive and dangerous. But it isn't just random, as I keep track in my GM's notes the overall "danger level" of the region or world the players are traveling in. The higher the danger level, the higher the chance of an encounter happening. Certain story and quest decisions the players make may influence this danger level, for better or worse.
And I really only allow ONE random encounter between point A and B, usually. If it is an especially long journey, I may throw in two. Also the rewards for random encounters are relatively low compared to normal ones, like gaining less XP and less loot. This is partially because random encounters are not that important in the grand scheme of things, but also random encounters should be more like a punishment than a reward, a consequence, if you will, for committing atrocities or other murderhobo crap the players might have done. If I don't reduce XP and loot rewards for random encounters, then the players will simply say "bring it on" and spam the random encounters so they can farm XP and loot.

[kyoryu]

Depends on the game.

In the context of early D&D, random encounters represented a cost/risk of exploration and other time-consuming activities within a dungeon. IN that context, they're great - they give you a tradeoff between continuing to search for things and just going on.

They're absolutely not necessary. I do think that if you remove them (which is fine) you should look at what they're in place to create cost/benefit tradeoffs for, and make sure you do something else to add those back in.

(Note - most games I run don't use random encounters).

[Batcathat]

I agree, though to be fair I don't think I've ever used a random encounter when GMing so I suppose I can't really judge them fairly. None of the games I played early on had any suggestions about random encounters in them (if I remember correctly) so I suppose I never really had a reason to use them when I was starting out and haven't found one since. Even if the GM improvises everything and the point of an encounter is only to liven things up with some combat, spending a few moments to pick something suitable seems like time well spent. I suppose it could be good for variety but that can easily be done without making it completely random.

[MartianInvader]

Depends on the game.

In the context of early D&D, random encounters represented a cost/risk of exploration and other time-consuming activities within a dungeon. IN that context, they're great - they give you a tradeoff between continuing to search for things and just going on.

They're absolutely not necessary. I do think that if you remove them (which is fine) you should look at what they're in place to create cost/benefit tradeoffs for, and make sure you do something else to add those back in.

(Note - most games I run don't use random encounters).

This.

Random encounters work when they are reflective of player choice - especially a type of choice the players make over and over. "Should we rest in the dungeon or go back to town?" "Should we take the long safe road or the shortcut through the Woods of Doom?" It might be tiring to have an encounter every time players try to rest in the dungeon, or take a shortcut, but having a chance of an encounter each time makes it a real decision and adds some excitement without needing to bog it down every time.

Random encounters are much less fun when it's just the DM saying "I'm going to roll the die to see if you get attacked, and there's nothing you can do to change that."

[Yora]

What game are we talking about? Though I think it depends more on the GM's campaign than the game mechanic, D&D 5th edition still lacks most of the mechanics and game structures that make random encounters an important game element.

[DwarfFighter]

So the PCs are out and about and randomly run into a band of Orcs.

Maybe the players can offer up some suggestions as to why they are there. Raiders? Scouts? Deserters? Diplomats? Stag party?

After all, the GM has about as much idea why those Orcs are there as do the players.

Random encounters aren't always fight-to-the-death either. I've had a session where the players encountered a band of bugbears they figured were heading back to the base they had just cleared, and for some reason they exchanged insults at a distance instead of blows, and each went their separate ways.

[icefractal]

All encounters should be planned by the GM in order to do one of the following:
...
5. Provide a consequence to previous activities or actions

Don't most "random encounters" actually fall under this one? Where the action is "choose to travel through this area".

Now you could ask what the randomness adds - instead of "you may face one or more patrols if you travel through this empire's territory", you could have "you will face one patrol consisting of a half-dozen typical soldiers, two veteran archers, and one captain on horseback".

To which I'd say that the randomness can sometimes add to the strategic complexity. If combatants always hit and did a fixed amount of damage, it would be much simpler to determine the optimal action at any given time. Variability means you need to consider risk vs reward. Of course too much randomness does the reverse and removes complexity - if random encounters are so random you could have any number and any type occur in any location, then it doesn't really matter what route you take.

As a separate potential advantage, using an oracle (like a random encounter table) can shake things up from patterns that the GM unconsciously follows. For example, if you subconsciously tend to arrange encounters in an "easy, easy, hard, repeat" pattern, randomly rolling a "hard" encounter first or 3+ "easy" encounters in a row will prompt you to do something different (or to consciously commit to the prior pattern).

[Vahnavoi]

You can literally set up a randomized procedural generator to fill in all five traits of a proper planned encounter, proving that random generation has equal power to planning or, even more simply, is just a tool for planning. -_-

More often than not, the case against random generation is based on neglecting proper implementation because you know somebody else screwed it up and cannot think past their failures.

[McGarnagle]

I think they work fine for an adventure like Curse of Strahd. You take a shortcut through the woods, the random encounters on average become harder, and a range of possible outcomes means that no one, not even the DM, knows exactly what will happen next.

[Pex]

I'm not a fan of them either but can tolerate if used sparingly. If the DM is always rolling (or pretending to roll we get one anyway) for them I feel they are time wasters. I know it doesn't have to be a combat, but just because the party travels from point A to point B doesn't mean something must happen before reaching point B.

I won't say never have an encounter that has absolutely nothing to do with the current plot point or any campaign plot point. They can be fun, but they should be used sparingly and not every game day. This even includes camping at night keeping watch. It should be enough as flavor text we keep watches. I hate it when the DM has each person on watch roll a perception check or he rolls dice behind the screen for every watch every game night of traveling, even if nothing happens. It's not atmosphere. It's annoying. It's perfectly fine to just say 3 days later we arrive at point B and continue on with the adventure. If something is to happen during a watch I don't care if it's metagamey to know something is up because perception checks are only ever called for such an interruption.

[Thrudd]

"The needs of the game" are completely dependent on the game. Random encounters might just serve the need of making the game more interesting for the GM, which really is all the reason you need. There are many ways to implement "random", and the best way is when the the list of potential encounters are designed to reflect the particular environment in which the characters find themselves. It serves the need of reflecting the fact that the world is unpredictable and dangerous, demonstrating its character, and also the need of letting the players know that the danger for the characters is real. When they know you aren't just designed encounters to "serve the story", they have to think like their characters would, weighing options for travel and preparation; whether to fight or hide or run.
If the name of the game is improv acting and co-creating an epic narrative, that's fine. I can play along. But it's far more exciting and immersive to me when I'm not thinking "what story purpose does this encounter serve, what am I supposed to find for the quest? What character-arc or story beat should I be acting out?", but rather just seeing everything as the character would, being afraid for my life and the lives of my friends, weighing greed vs survival vs honor vs fulfilling my duty or mission or whatever. The meta stuff can live somewhere farther back in my mind, making sure we thoroughly search for important items and information, etc.

[HidesHisEyes]

How is that for an inflammatory title intended to create discussion?

As background, I am strongly in favor of placing narrative structures on my gaming sessions. There needs to be a "goal" or "theme" to the session and the adventures. This is not for every GM and I understand many people run open-world/sandbox games. However, even in these types of games NO encounter should be random.

All encounters should be planned by the GM in order to do one of the following:

1. Be a plot hook
2. Add physical, emotional, or dramatic conflict for the players
3. Provide information or items the Players will need
4. Add a complication to an existing character arc/story line
5. Provide a consequence to previous activities or actions

Therefore, no encounter should be random and should instead meet the needs of the game, instead of being random. If an encounter needs to happen, it should be because the GM wants it to happen; not because a dice roll says it should happen.

Your thoughts?

I disagree but maybe not as vehemently as I thought I would from the inflammatory title (good job on that btw).

For me, I do want certain things from all my encounters (random or otherwise), and your list of things seems pretty decent, but it’s enough to make sure they have the potential to provide those things. If I find myself sitting down to craft an encounter specifically to guarantee certain things then I will put the GM notebook aside and write a short story instead. Yes I want plot, drama, conflict, all that good stuff. But my prep is only one of the alchemical ingredients to make that stuff. The alchemy happens at the table.

[Anonymouswizard]

As had been said, the point of random encounters in early D&D was to have consequences for risky actions, particularly in dungeon or hex crawls. Remember that in 0e-2e exploration was conducted in turns, so a monster wandering into the dungeon room the players are in if they spend sixteen turns looking everything with ten foot poles in case they're mimics is the game's easy of making them move on and keep finding new sources of treasure.

Also note that random encounters are meant to have their tables weighted t a particular level of challenge (in addition to only a certain chance of having a random encounter), so six hard encounters on the way to a dungeon is a good sign that you might have difficulty with it

That said, if you're trying to emulate narrative or character arcs they're basically pointless. I don't use them. But then again, how often are random encounters in dungeon crawls actually random?

[Satinavian]

I didn't like them very much and hardly used them.

But playing and running a lot of Splittermond lately, we regularly use the quite elaborate framework for overland travel. Which does include a chance for random encounters. This chance does depend on the area and also on the PCs actions during travel and their abilities to find a way through wilderness and avoid trouble. The random encounters are also sorted into "enemies","obstacles","friendies" and "lucky events" and a really well prepared and skilled group in a peaceful region will either likely encounter lucky events and friendlies when they take their time or travel really fast or get some other benefit (their choice).
It also helps that most of the regional supplements do provide region specific random encounter lists for all those options providing regional flair to travel.

I mean, it is possible that we all eventually get sick of it, but so far it is still fun enough.

[oxybe]

How is that for an inflammatory title intended to create discussion?

As background, I am strongly in favor of placing narrative structures on my gaming sessions. There needs to be a "goal" or "theme" to the session and the adventures. This is not for every GM and I understand many people run open-world/sandbox games. However, even in these types of games NO encounter should be random.

All encounters should be planned by the GM in order to do one of the following:

1. Be a plot hook
2. Add physical, emotional, or dramatic conflict for the players
3. Provide information or items the Players will need
4. Add a complication to an existing character arc/story line
5. Provide a consequence to previous activities or actions

Therefore, no encounter should be random and should instead meet the needs of the game, instead of being random. If an encounter needs to happen, it should be because the GM wants it to happen; not because a dice roll says it should happen.

Your thoughts?

1) a random encounter could very well be a plot hook. remember that somewhere along the way, Random Encounter got twisted to mean Random Fight. an RE doesn't mean combat. It could very well mean that along your travels, you meet up with a caravan of merchants or travellers and someone tells a ghost story about some spooky tower in a lake. Bam. Random adventure hook.

2) I'm pretty sure "an angry owlbear barrels out of the forest and attacks you" is a physical conflict

3) Random rumour tables are a thing. mix them in with a random city encounter table and there you have it.

4) this is admittingly a bit more specific then what most random encounters try to cover, but who says the GM can't say that yeah, that orcish warband you bumped into? Among the loot they carry are items that have carving or quilting patterns similar to those from Bhaube the Elf 's hometown... and when you arrive at his home, guess what's been recently pillaged and needs help rebuilding?

5) the actual point of random encounter "you're resting 8 hours in this highly dangerous area? i'll roll once each hour to see if something may occur.". You decide to take a shortcut through a dangerous forest? sure, but there's a chance you may bump into the reason folks stay out of the danger woods. It's the consequence of their actions/activities.

[Batcathat]

1) a random encounter could very well be a plot hook. remember that somewhere along the way, Random Encounter got twisted to mean Random Fight. an RE doesn't mean combat. It could very well mean that along your travels, you meet up with a caravan of merchants or travellers and someone tells a ghost story about some spooky tower in a lake. Bam. Random adventure hook.

Wouldn't that require either that the GM plans adventures for an entire list of random hooks or that the GM has to figure out an adventure to go with the hook after it comes up? Either way, it seems like it would mean an increased workload and/or more improvisation (granted, not necessarily a bad thing) from the GM than just deciding where to use what hooks.

It occured to me that my feelings towards random encounters are very similar to my feelings regarding another D&D staple – alignments. They're not necessarily bad, but the combination of potential pitfalls and very slim upsides makes me question using them.

[oxybe]

Wouldn't that require either that the GM plans adventures for an entire list of random hooks or that the GM has to figure out an adventure to go with the hook after it comes up? Either way, it seems like it would mean an increased workload and/or more improvisation (granted, not necessarily a bad thing) from the GM than just deciding where to use what hooks.

It occured to me that my feelings towards random encounters are very similar to my feelings regarding another D&D stable – alignments. They're not necessarily bad, but the combination of potential pitfalls and very slim upsides makes me question using them.

Only as much as our GM feels it's necessary.

An adventure doesn't need to be a 30 session affair, it could very well be "hey, we're in no rush to do anything at the moment, want to check out that spooky tower those guys mentioned?" and the spooky tower could be just that: a old, run down tower in the middle of the lake, where the inhabitants are long gone and looks spooky when the mists are rolling on the lake early in the morning.

Or the gm could decide to put more effort and make it a thing, with a cult meeting up under the moonlight to do some rituals to call down some ancient sealed being and just spooking away any nosy kids.

Or whatever. Sometimes a rumor is just that and a tall tale is just a tall tale.

[Xervous]

I’m not seeing solid reasoning for randomness being unable to meet the needs of the game. Also missing from the list is 6. Scenery. Encounters that do not force themselves upon the player and go ignored are just descriptions. A painting on a wall is just a description until one player decides he wants to steal it, at which point its function within the game is shifted by player action. The dead merchants are scenery if nobody gives a hoot. Plot hooks that players never bite are functionally little more than scenery.

Random encounters are a way to add variety, as outside of running multiple GMs you are giving your players unreviewed single author fiction. Break up patterns to reduce a bit of the unconscious monotony, chance upon a better option through inspiration. Random encounters are all manner of things that the players could bump into. You populated and approved the list after all, it’s just the dice narrowing down the options rather than you.

Am I going to map out where every bar patron is throughout the night like it’s a murder mystery? Hardly, I can easily roll or arsepull to see who the players encounter when they finally make their way there.

[King of Nowhere]

i use them when it's reasonable to encounter multiple hostiles, when the party is in highly dangerous areas. in my campaign, those are generally magical in nature, and getting constantly hit with encounters is a specific part of the difficulty; you can't go anywhere without fighting multiple times.
outside of those magically dangerous areas, i normally don't run them. people manage to travel around the world and die in their bed, it means the chance of being attacked by bandits or owlbears when crossing a forest is not THAT high.

I also run combat encounters only if there are real risks and rewards. If the party is level 10 and they travel the dangerous forest, and they will get to rest at the end (so spent resources is not an issue), i won't bother running a fight with the level 2 bandits or the CR4 owlbear. At most, I'll describe it: "while traveling the forest you have to fight a couple owlbears, but they are not a threat to you guys".
What I'm NOT going to do is increase the difficulty of those encounters to match the party's level. the level 10 party won't encounter level 10 bandits because it makes no sense for level 10 bandits to hide in the forest and attack travelers. If the forest is close to an organized civilization, then that civilization will have already killed the most dangerous monsters, so the party won't find a CR 10 monster. as such, i tend to run random encounters most often at low levels, when stumbling over a pack of hungry wolves may represent an actual danger. as the party grows in power, the random denizens of the world are not a concern to them, not unless they are directly looking for trouble. and when they get teleport, random encounters during travel are no longer an issue.
incidentally, those magically hazardous areas also prevent teleportation and other similar means of travel, and i inserted them in the worldbuilding partially to be able to have that kind of gameing style every once in a while.

so, like everything else, random encounters are good if they are a sensible part of the campaign and they make sense in the worldbuilding context.

Otherwise, I think we can all agree fighting 1d3 dire camels in a swamp is stupid and should feel bad

[Sparky McDibben]

Therefore, no encounter should be random and should instead meet the needs of the game, instead of being random. If an encounter needs to happen, it should be because the GM wants it to happen; not because a dice roll says it should happen.

Your thoughts?

You are "random encountering" wrong. The random part refers to procedural generation, not how it feels in the game. This can be fixed by tying your random encounter tables more tightly to the game world, randomizing elements (reaction roll, mutual surprise check, etc.) to avoid repetition, and avoiding DM fiat in how the encounter manifests (that is, avoid prescribing any given way the PCs will resolve the encounter).

More broadly, I prefer random encounters as a player because the world feels more real, because they're a fun RP/rationalization challenge, and because they keep me on my toes. If I know the DM has everything planned out in advance, then I have one of two reactions:

1) I check out; the DM's got this and I don't need to pay attention

2) I immediately start ****ing with everything and everyone I can reach.

So, yeah. For further reading, check out the Alexandrian. For further viewing, see WEBDM.

[Quertus]

Well, this is complicated. But I think that the simple answer is, every encounter should serve some purpose, and the original list in the OP is woefully inadequate to serve as an exhaustive list of possible purposes.

Encounters - random or otherwise - can help characterize the world / area / time, can allow players the chance to characterize their characters, can provide plot hooks or information, can help with pacing, can help the players view the game in character, can provide experience (literal and figuratively), cab serve as consequences for actions taken, can modify wealth/tools available, and so much more. Random encounters can do all of that.

Encounters - random or otherwise - that do none of that should go home and rethink their lives.

Also, "encounter" <> "combat". I've had things like ferrous flowers, swarms of gnats, tornado in the distance, friendly merchants, rival adventurers, holy pilgrims, dead hunters, dead goblins, and crashed space ships as random encounters.

[Vahnavoi]

You know the plot of Alien? A crew finds wrecked ship and one of them gets infected with malicious parasite, while another is secretly an impostor who wants to take the parasite home? Back in the day, they made it into a computer game. So how to keep it fresh for people who'd already seen the movie? Randomize who gets infected, randomize who is the impostor. Suddenly no-one is safe and the player has to use their wits to figure out what to do.

Adapting this to the tabletop and getting few sessions worth of game out of it is trivial.

[GravityEmblem]

I just hate combat, and will avoid it whenever possible!

I briefly toyed with doing random encounters, and wrote up tables and whatnot, but I soon tired of them. I would pick one of them up and run it if I thought it would be funny or build the world, or just make something up. (For example, a Cthuhlu missionary, or a traveling rug salesman)

[Morty]

I used to be against random encounters, but after playing a hexcrawl Savage Worlds game I've warmed up to them somewhat. If the point of the game is to explore a dangerous area filled with people, creatures and locations, random encounters can make sure the players find something interesting no matter where they go, without the GM having to plan out everything in every direction. Of course, it does still help if the encounters have more flesh to them than "you meet three trolls and one hell hound in the middle of a forest".

[kyoryu]

I think it's usually more interesting to frame things like this as "when is this a useful tool?"

Statements like this are usually closer to "this thing is mandatory/bad for the type of game I like". It's a tool used as a proxy for discussion of what game type is best (spoiler: No game type is best. Just best for some people).

You know the plot of Alien? A crew finds wrecked ship and one of them gets infected with malicious parasite, while another is secretly an impostor who wants to take the parasite home? Back in the day, they made it into a computer game.

The one I'm thinking of is #11 on this list

[Anonymouswizard]

I used to be against random encounters, but after playing a hexcrawl Savage Worlds game I've warmed up to them somewhat. If the point of the game is to explore a dangerous area filled with people, creatures and locations, random encounters can make sure the players find something interesting no matter where they go, without the GM having to plan out everything in every direction. Of course, it does still help if the encounters have more flesh to them than "you meet three trolls and one hell hound in the middle of a forest".

Oh, definitely. When using random encounters the more specific the tables the better. But random encounter tables take time to make, and when your Yankees are more specific you have to spend longer making sure potential encounters fit, as well as potentially making more of them. Plus more detailed encounters airway require more time (although in theory you'd only having to replace the ones the players triggered).

[Easy e]

1) a random encounter could very well be a plot hook. remember that somewhere along the way, Random Encounter got twisted to mean Random Fight. an RE doesn't mean combat. It could very well mean that along your travels, you meet up with a caravan of merchants or travellers and someone tells a ghost story about some spooky tower in a lake. Bam. Random adventure hook.

2) I'm pretty sure "an angry owlbear barrels out of the forest and attacks you" is a physical conflict

3) Random rumour tables are a thing. mix them in with a random city encounter table and there you have it.

4) this is admittingly a bit more specific then what most random encounters try to cover, but who says the GM can't say that yeah, that orcish warband you bumped into? Among the loot they carry are items that have carving or quilting patterns similar to those from Bhaube the Elf 's hometown... and when you arrive at his home, guess what's been recently pillaged and needs help rebuilding?

5) the actual point of random encounter "you're resting 8 hours in this highly dangerous area? i'll roll once each hour to see if something may occur.". You decide to take a shortcut through a dangerous forest? sure, but there's a chance you may bump into the reason folks stay out of the danger woods. It's the consequence of their actions/activities.

I am not saying they do not provide those things, but that it should be by GM intent rather than random.

[HidesHisEyes]

I am not saying they do not provide those things, but that it should be by GM intent rather than random.

But it is by the GM’s intent. They wrote the encounter table, they just don’t know which encounter is going to pop up when.

For me the more important point is that I don’t put drama, conflict, plot points etc in my prep and serve it up to the players. My prep (encounters, random tables and everything else) is one ingredient for making those things. The others are the players’ ideas/actions and the game’s mechanics. We combine them at the table and make the story live.

[kyoryu]

I am not saying they do not provide those things, but that it should be by GM intent rather than random.

I think random encounters can express intent.

"You need to get to Cityville. You can take the safe path through Pleasant Plains, that has maybe some kobolds in it but is mostly friendly folk. That'll take two weeks. Or you can go through the Wicked Woods, where there's all sorts of scary beasts. That'll take four days - if you make it."

Letting players make that choice and know that there's a chance they'll make it through unscathed is a useful tool. It may not be a tool for every game, but I think it's very valuable in some types of games.