Has the Wandering Monster concept died?

[Zhaleskra]

Put me in the "sometimes but it has to make sense" camp.

Adventuring is an inherently dangerous activity. Some adventurers live and become great heroes, others don't quite make it and make a memorable last stand, still others die stupid "pointless" (from the player's point of view) deaths.

 

[Ed_Laprade]

In some of the better-plotted old-school scenarios, many of the wandering monsters were given their point of origin. So if the wandering monster was "1d3 gargoyles from room 20", that's one, two or three less gargoyles when the characters get to room twenty.

This way, balance is kept, both in terms of party resources and party rewards, while still keeping a sense of dynamism.

By the time those showed up I'd pretty much given up on wandering monsters. (In fact, I doubt that I ever used wanderer tables more than a few times, and mostly in wilderness settings.) But I used those, because that's what I was doing anyway, if I used wanderers at all. My biggest peeve with them before that was the way they were written. Basically, they just teleported into the dungeon, which annoyed my suspension of disbelief to no end.

 

[bastrak]

I nearly always use wandering monsters both in the dungeon and in the wilderness for various reasons which have already largely been mentioned.

If a published adventure didn't have them, I would generally create my own wandering monsters, unless there was a good reason why the location didn't have any.

 

[Wicht]

Though the Paizo modules themselves may not have random monster tables, the Bestiary does (pages 324-327). Also, as has been noted, the Paizo APs have them in each book for the particular area featured in the AP.

I'm also running Kingmaker right now and not only am I using wandering monsters (which the rules for the adventure call for, but I'm using the random weather table from the core rulebook as well. It makes the mapping of the hexes much more interesting. Our last game (#2 of 2) the PCs were hit by a terrific rainstorm with lightning, rain, flash-flooding and the like, while out in the wilderness. As fortune had it, I also rolled up a giant whip-tail centipede as a wandering monster for that day. I ruled the centipede was fleeing its flooding lair. As the PCs were level 1 and the monster was CR 3, the ensuing battle, in a storm even, was pretty epic. The PCs incidentally, after getting caught in rain two days in a row with no tents and no shelter, decided to buy tents after heading into the trading post to recuperate from their battle.

 

[The Shaman]

I ran my Traveller campaign entirely off random encounters, and I'm relying heavily on random encounters for my Flashing Blades campaign as well. In my games random encounters represent the 'living' setting, the stuff that's going on around the adventurers as they go about their business.

Like S'mon, I generate those encounters in advance of actual play. I generate an encounter, flesh out the specifics, and compile them into a list for a location. I then only roll one die to determine if an encounter takes place or not, and if it does I move immediately into the next encounter on my pre-gen'd list. In this way the encounters flow seamlessly into play.

An example from our first session: while visiting a fair an adventurer, an off-duty soldier, encountered a man threatening another man at dagger-point; the man with the dagger was accompanied by two men, all dressed as gentlemen, while the man being threatened was accompanied by a beautiful girl, his daughter - it was the daughter's shriek which caught the soldier's attention.

In generating this encounter, I determined who each of the npcs were, their goals and motivations, and how this little tableaux came to be - using this information it was easy for me to improvise the likely consequences of the encounter. I spice up my pre-gen process with the Mythic Game Master Emulator, to take the encounter in directions I might not think of left to my own devices, and to keep me from falling into a rut of sameness.

 

[Mournblade94]

Great Ideas.

What I tend to do is just take monsters from a part of a published adventure and have them bump into the PC's. It does not detract from the ultimate goal.

But if I am in the wilderness with them, I may use my own random table.

The reason I am asking is I am running SHADOWDALE, and my party is currently camped on a ledge (they completed the first third of a dungeon and found a way down further). The next session leads to a temple of Shar, so I was considering whether or not some priests would bump into them during their rest on the way towards or from the temple.

They will have lots of priests to fight so I am deciding from the following:

1) no event
2) group of worshippers not included in the module going to the temple
3) group of worshipers FROM the temple (and hence included in the module) leaving.

My group is great at accomplishing as much as they can before rest, so I rarely run into the 5 minute adventuring day. The total time in game was only 2 hours (Combat, exploration, searching) and now they are resting for 8 hours. They finished a goal (Finding where the cryot under fox ridge leads) and pressed on until they knew, so I really don't know if I want to slap another encounter onto them just yet.

 

[IronWolf]

I am open to using them when I feel it is appropriate. Right now I am running Kingmaker and it is expected in that series to have wandering monsters and a chart is included in the AP to do so.

 

[Steel_Wind]

We have a very lengthy discussion concerning the wisdom of random encounters in the Kingmaker AP in Episode #008 of our podcast during the GM Only Chronicle section of the cast.

It comes down to this: in wilderness adventure campaigns of our youth in 1st Edition days, random encounters were, essentially, the entire POINT of the campaign. You travelled from point A to point B and along the way - the DM rolled encounters from a chart.

You fought the monsters in the wild and then you tried to track them back to their lairs. Sometimes you could and sometimes you could not. If you tracked them back, the DM would roll up their treasure randomly and then we would all find out at the same time what their treasure was. Random items rolled out of the 1st ed DMG charts!! The true source of all Monty Haul campaigns! Sometimes, it was a crappy scroll or potion. Sometimes, it was the Deck of Many Things. Like Gump's box of chocolates, you never knew what you were going to get.

Fast forward thirty years and wandering monsters in a wilderness campaign as are presented in Kingmaker serve a different function. The wilderness hexes are already pre-populated, but the nature of the pre-population is that there is, generally speaking, only one "encounter" in that hex. Without the possibility of a wandering encounter, there is no incentive for the PCs to hold back any power reserve. It's the thirty-second-adventuring-day. Party enters into hex, explores it -- has encounter -- and fights it. They are done and need not worry about any other encounter for the day. They rest, heal up and regain their spells.

Off to the next hex: wash, rinse, repeat.

The role of the wandering encounter in the game design is, therefore, two-fold:

• to set an atmosphere of danger and "anything can happen" in the game; and
• to act as a governor on the power retention of the party.

In my experience, the frequency of wandering monsters in Kingmaker is, in practice, too low to act as a real governor. Moreover, the scroll and potion creation rules of Pathfinder allow even a low lovel Wizard caster to prepare scrolls to act as the wandering encounter "holdout resources". This means, on a net effect basis, that the caster holds almost nothing back in practice from the "main fight", and trusts to luck that there will be no wandering encounter afterwards (at a 1 in 7 chance - a pretty good bet). If the wandering encounter DOES pop-up, then the caster relies upon his holdout resources and cantrips (buffed with spell components from the Adventurer's Armory) to see him through.

It's a strategy that generally works.

I'm not sure what the proper REAL role of a wandering monster really is in the wilderness if those are the actual mechanical effects in game. I guess the intention for them to act as a governor on the use of magical power and to tend to discourage the use of using ALL extraordinary resources in one fight is the only tangible effect -- to the extent it works at all. It barely serves that role.

Beyond that, it's all about atmosphere and, perhaps, most of all, pure nostalgia.

 

[billd91]

Beyond that, it's all about atmosphere and, perhaps, most of all, pure nostalgia.

I think I'd shift the emphasis. Wandering monster tables have uses beyond atmosphere, true. But I believe that's their main and central point. They turn something static and reactionary (a bunch of creatures sitting around in their encounter areas waiting for the PCs to arrive) to something dynamic. That has the effect of also affecting the resource management of PCs, but I suspect that's putting the cart in front of the horse. They'd fulfill the purpose of transforming static to dynamic even if they didn't change the resource management of the PCs.

 

[TheNovaLord]

KM is heavily benefitted by random encounters and random events happening go the land

they have really added to the 20 sessions thus far

dont use them as much in dungeons as i do in wilderness