Points of Light - replacement for random encounters

[Arlough]

Okay, the basis of almost anywhere your PCs end up is that there are pockets of peace and/or prosperity in a vast world of enemy filled awfulness.
This could be a contrast of walled towns and villages in a monster filled land, or this could be the difference between the wealthy parts of town and the other side of the tracks.
Regardless as to where it is, you will run into enemies. This is a vital part of the D&D economy as it eats up resources like healing surges, action points, and daily powers. And that is why we have random encounters.
Now, your PCs are, in most cases, a roaming pack of murderous professional psychopaths who look at enemies as sacks of XP that may also carry loot. As such they specialize in badass and outclass most their enemies, meaning that many of their encounters are not going to be worth pulling out the battle mat for, let alone the time it takes to play out a tactical encounter.
I personally believe that it is only an encounter if it is meaningful, and it is only meaningful if it is part of the story, or a viable threat. So all those other combats that would not fit those criteria should be abstracted out.

So, here is my proposal for a points of light system, and I would appreciate any input.

Any threatening area is rated on a 1 - 20 scale based on how dangerous it of an area it happens to be. A 1 would be the safest, like across the river from Rivendale. A 20 is at the gates of Mordor. (Inside Rivendale would be 0, as in a completely safe haven. And inside Mordor would be epic level, so maybe even up to 30 if you were in Sauron's antechamber. But, I really haven't ever played in Epic tier, so I don't know how to evaluate it.)
While in these areas, the players must roll a d20 for every X hour(s) they are there. (Two seems about right, but I haven't had a chance to test this out yet)

• Roll >= Threat Level; the party passes without incident.
• Roll < Threat Level; some minor skirmishes, but none worth playing out. everyone rolls 1d4 to see how many surges they lost in the last hour. If they wish, they can spend a Daily attack power to prevent the loss of 2 surges.
• Roll <= Threat Level - 5; you have an actual fight on your hands. A quick encounter of L to L+1
• Roll <= Threat Level - 10; Woah, where was that hiding!!! This would be an encounter of L+2 to L+3

The roll would get modifiers for things like taking time to stealth your way across enemy lines, or using the "Create Camp" ritual to when you rest for the night, etc.

Thoughts, ideas, jokes?

EDIT: Here is a write up of the system as it stands so far. There are more changes coming, but I wanted to get something down on paper for early review.
A couple of quick warnings.

1. I was very tired and silly when I finally finished this the other day, so I apologize if any of it is nonsensical.
2. This uses zone levels called Threat Levels. This is not a measure of how dangerous a zone is in relation to monster levels, this is a measure of how dangerous a zone is in relation to monster density. All this is designed to do is determine how often your players will be fighting. It is vital to the system that this does not become conflated with monster level.

Second edit: Forgot to add in surge loss mitigation in v 0.2 of the write up. It has been added in the new document v 0.21.

 

[Pbartender]

Thoughts, ideas, jokes?

Have you read this? Make sure you read all six pages, you might find it handy.

 

[TheClone]

Sounds like a usable simple solution to random encounters. Paired with a random encounter generator you'd be ready to go. Maybe I'll use that when I get to dming my PoL-Campaign in some months.

One thought on the number of rolls per day. 2h seems a bit often to me. Especially considering that those are only random encounters which are kind of "fillers" during the adventure progress. You don't want to spend the evening hacking through 5 random encounters during a single day, I guess. But the usual single random encounter isn't much fun, too. So maybe two roles a day and one per camp or such thing sounds more reasonable to me. Or maybe one per day and if you rolled even you roll again?

Btw, is L+3 the highest encounter level suggested by the DMG for a party?

 

[S'mon]

For random encounters, I'm using 1 check for wandering monsters per 6 hours - making sure there's always a check during an extended rest, although if the PCs have concealed their camp very well the monsters might not spot them - and 1 check for in/near lair monsters per 15-mile hex entered. So if the PCs travel 30 miles in a 12 hour travel day that's 4 checks, then they camp and have 2 more checks overnight.

Frequency is typically 1 in 6 or 1 in 10, it could be 1 in 20 if monsters are rarer.

Not all encounters must be hostile monsters, there may be friendlies/neutrals, extreme weather phenomena (lightning storms), weird magic effects (purple rain), hostile terrain (quicksand), etc.

I have some generic encounter tables; encounter level can be keyed off the terrain's inherent danger level, the party level, or ideally a mix of both - goblins always live in the forest but high level PCs may encounter a larger & more organised group (possibly replacing goblin warrior skirmisher-1s with minion-9s); hill giants live in the mountains but low level PCs may encounter a lone drunken giant, while high level PCs encounter an organised warband.

 

[andy3k]

Ban the random encounter

In my opinion, encounters should never be random. All encounters should be planned. This provides the DM with the opportunity to prepare interesting monsters, terrain, skill checks, etc. ahead of time. Throwing together a last minute group of goblins, in them midst of uninteresting terrain (a few trees), with little thought to monster strategy or whether it will be a challenge for the party, creates an encounter that is pointless to the story and possibly too easy and boring for the party.

Better option:

1. Create an encounter that is likely to occur on the road. It doesn't have to be epic, just logical.

If the characters are heading towards a goblin cave, they might encounter a goblin hunting party. If they are heading towards a dragon lair, maybe a fanatical group of Bahamut worshipers attempts to stop the party.

2. Design a challenging encounter.

This includes adding a variety of challenges such as terrain features (trees for cover, mist for concealment, a water-filled ditch for difficult terrain). Also consider a specific strategy of how the bad guys will attack so as not to make the encounter overly easy e.g. make sure the leader isn't in the front, have a hidden attacker in the back to threaten the controller, etc.

3. Set up a skill challenge and/or trigger set to determine if the encounter goes off.

If the characters travel on the road instead of sneaking through the woods parallel to the road, or if the characters set up camp and do not hide their fire light then they are attacked.

Alternatively, the characters must undergo a difficult skill challenge related to perception, nature, and other skills required to spot and circumvent danger on the road. Failure means the encounter occurs.

Of course, if the party specifically wants to find trouble ("let's see if there are any wandering goblins we can slay on the way") then give them the encounter without pause.

4. Have repercussions for failure.

If any of the bad guys gets away then make another future encounter a little more challenging. Conversely, if the character's show mercy upon their attackers, maybe another encounter will become a little easier. Either way, make sure that it is obvious in the future encounter that the difficulty or ease is due to prior actions. For example, during a fight in the goblin den, if the party granted mercy to some of the attacking goblins then a Level+3 encounter might become Level+2 because 1-2 goblins in the encounter recognize the party and leave the fight because they don't want to kill the people who spared their lives the day before.

5. No prep required.

Yes, there are some people that can roll up a random encounter, make that encounter challenging and interesting, AND weave the encounter into their story and/or into future encounters. If you are that brilliant, go ahead. Personally, I'd rather have everything prepared in advance to save time, save mistakes, and save me the stress of having to do it all on the fly.

 

[Arlough]

Have you read this? Make sure you read all six pages, you might find it handy.

Thanks for the link. That is an excellent article and is going to be easy to integrate into the proposed PoL system. Especially if you consider an area's threat level to be the same as the Zone level.

One thought on the number of rolls per day. 2h seems a bit often to me. Especially considering that those are only random encounters which are kind of "fillers" during the adventure progress. You don't want to spend the evening hacking through 5 random encounters during a single day, I guess. But the usual single random encounter isn't much fun, too. So maybe two roles a day and one per camp or such thing sounds more reasonable to me. Or maybe one per day and if you rolled even you roll again?

Btw, is L+3 the highest encounter level suggested by the DMG for a party?

After talking this over with a few others in my FLGS, we came to the conclusion that the players roll:

1. 2 hours after entering a zone/territory, engaging in battle, or setting up camp
2. every 6 hours after that

This accounts for the aftermath of battle (scent of blood, scouting parties missing, etc.) drawing the attention of the nearby enemy population, and discourages reckless action like wandering around slaughtering everything in sight, camping in enemy territory without taking precautions (a rest must be uninterrupted for the party to gain the benefits of it), or traveling through a dangerous zone without masking the party’s presence.
This would also only really be used in situations where tension was building because of the perils of the area or because of upcoming fights.

As for L+3. Yeah, that is the highest my DMG suggests. This may need tweaking for some parties.

I have found that in general, encounters work best for my parties if the max level of an encounter is equal to the party level plus one per demi-tier starting at level 6.

• Levels 1 – 5, equal level encounters
• Levels 6 – 10, Level + 1
• Levels 11 – 15, Level +2
• Levels 16 – 20, Level +3
• Etc.

Given that, I think I will change the table to:

• Roll > Threat Level; the party passes without incident.
• Roll >= Threat Level; some minor skirmishes, but none worth playing out. Everyone rolls 1d4 and divides that by 2, rounding down (a loss of up to four surges was deemed too punitive), to see how many surges they lost in that time frame. If they wish, they can spend a Daily attack power to prevent the loss of 2 surges.
• Roll >= Threat Level - 5; “We have an actual fight on your hands.” Encounter L to L+1
• Roll >= Threat Level - 10; “Woah, where was that hiding!!!” Encounter L+1 to L+2
• Roll >= Threat level – 15; “I told you this was a bad idea!” Encounter L+2 to L+3.
• Etc

So if your party is traveling through an area that this threat level 5, a roll of a 1 is still higher than “Threat Level – 5” so the worst that could happen is surge loss. If they, instead, traveling through an area that had a threat level of 15, and they don’t take any precautions to give a bonus to the roll (like, for example, using Nature to obscure their tracks could give them a +2) then the roll of a 1 would be equal to Threat Level – 14, meaning it should be between L + 1 and L + 2. The party would still have a 25% chance of no encounter and a 50% of an encounter not worth mentioning.

Now, if a level 5 party is in a Level 15 zone, and happens to get unlucky, then they could have some trouble. But, given how in the last two campaigns I ran, by level 16 I had to throw at least L+1 encounters at them to even really call it a fight, and by level 18 they simply mowed through anything easier than a level 20 encounter. Mind you, this is all before the release of MM3, so I am not sure how it will play out with the new damages.

For random encounters, I'm using 1 check for wandering monsters per 6 hours - making sure there's always a check during an extended rest, although if the PCs have concealed their camp very well the monsters might not spot them - and 1 check for in/near lair monsters per 15-mile hex entered. So if the PCs travel 30 miles in a 12 hour travel day that's 4 checks, then they camp and have 2 more checks overnight.

As mentioned above, we adjusted the frequency to make it hostile but not tedious, but it may need further tweaking. I like all the points you have brought up and will revisit the issue.

Frequency is typically 1 in 6 or 1 in 10, it could be 1 in 20 if monsters are rarer.

The Area Threat Level (I really need to just come up with some standardized terminology for these things) is both how often do you encounter monsters, as well as how much of a threat they are. In a relatively safe area, you will encounter fewer big enemies and fewer organized enemies. The premise being that you are not the only adventurers in the world, and since safe areas tend to be at congregation points (cities and the such) other adventurers have done a pretty good job at cleaning out things that aren’t a waste of their time (level appropriate enemies.) See Schrödinger’s Gun.

Not all encounters must be hostile monsters, there may be friendlies/neutrals, extreme weather phenomena (lightning storms), weird magic effects (purple rain), hostile terrain (quicksand), etc.

Once again, the ATL is an abstraction of threats vs. safety. So a safe area may have many non-threatening encounters, and you won’t be likely to roll up a random encounter.

I have some generic encounter tables; encounter level can be keyed off the terrain's inherent danger level, the party level, or ideally a mix of both - goblins always live in the forest but high level PCs may encounter a larger & more organized group (possibly replacing goblin warrior skirmisher-1s with minion-9s); hill giants live in the mountains but low level PCs may encounter a lone drunken giant, while high level PCs encounter an organized warband.

This actually fits quite well with what I had in mind with regards to the encounter threat level increase. You may encounter goblins when you first go through an area at low levels, but when you return later, all encounters of that level are inconsequential, just as your party was inconsequential to the higher level goblins you are now fighting. (That’s why the task of taking you out was delegated to those lower level goblins a while ago.) More commonly, though, is that adventurers will have to venture further and further away from civilization to encounter things that could credibly hurt them. Otherwise, the level 0 peasants wouldn't have survived living there at all.

By the way, thanks to everyone for input. The way to refine one's ideas is to receive input, or have them challenged.

 

[Arlough]

Re: Ban the random encounter

@andy3k

This idea actually came about in response to someone on another thread asking for advise regarding a party in chapters 4 & 5 (I think) of a WotBS campaign.
The primary problem was that they would rest often, and go nova in nearly every fight. The DM did not want to just throw a bunch of meaningless fights in because that would eat up time that could be used advancing the story, but also didn't want to just make the fights bigger as that made it more "swingy" as in more random damage (not predictable) potentially leading to TPK.

Initally I was thinking of how to deal with that party, but then I realized that my own parties frequently took actions or went places I hadn't anticipated, so I wanted to create a system that still required resource management (hit points, daily powers, etc.) in case there was a fight coming up, but didn't actually take the time of a fight. Because, really, that is the only purpose a random encounter has for me anymore. I've stopped awarding XP based on murder. Now I just announce a level gain as the players reach certain plot points (similar to Assassin's Creed) so if they are wandering the countryside killing things that aren't dead enough, it gains them nothing unless it is somehow forwarding the plot.

I totally agree with you that encounters should have meaning, but I also want to make inaction a costly choice (out of a party of 5, only one of my players takes the initative, with one other finally coming out of his shell, so they need some prodding.)

As for cobbled together encounters, I don't use them either. Usually I would have an encounter ready for an area, with a quick re-skinning occurring if the players went and got in a fight somewhere I never expected.
Now, though, I think I am going to try out the Angry DM's Slaughter System that Pbartender so kindly provided us a link to.
It looks to be a great tool for situations that call for random encounters, and may even help me become more organized.

 

[TheClone]

I first thought the idea of rolling again 2h after a fight was bad, with your explanation it makes absolutely sense. On a meta-gaming level, as well as dramatically and even simulaiton-wise. But I'd suggest using 1d4-1 instead of 1d4/2 rounded down. It's just a little easier to handle, I think.

What I really like about your idea compared to most other random encounter methods is that is tends much more to fight more than once a day or maybe even none at all. the usual method tends to have one or none necounter per day which leads to characters "novaing" in every random encounter and you have to put up L+4 to L+5 to challenge them. And it doesn't make much sense if the randomly strolling goblin group is stronger than the ambush of the goblins they laid because they knew the characters were coming for them.

Concerning the general design of encounters I'm totally with [MENTION=6674918]andy3k[/MENTION]. But there will me often areas in a setting that just contain roaming monster groups. Maybe you don't expect the characters to go there or you really want to have a random experience to prevent the characters from predicting what will happen, to give them the fear of the unexpected. And not planing encounters in certain areas but rolling them may be the more simulationist way.

 

[andy3k]

Random encounters are fine, yet nova can be prevented in other ways

I can understand and appreciate the concept of having the random encounter generator for specific geographic areas in the game world that are unplanned but through which players decide to travel to reach a particular destination. I also understand that players sometimes do the unexpected which, on occasion, requires improvisation.

Having said that, the question of how to manage character resources to prevent nova after nova without greatly increasing the number of encounters or difficulty level of monsters still stands.

I propose a couple of solutions to the problem that don't involve random encounters; solutions that work even if the characters are inside a palace where random encounters of the discussed variety break the verisimilitude.

First solution - back to back encounters. If you run two encounters back to back, without time for a short rest, going nova can be a lifesaver instead of a show stopper.

Second solution - toughen the encounter but not the monsters. You don't want to increase the monster defenses or hit points so that one combat stretches out to 1.5 or 2 hours. Instead, add other aspects to the battle that drain resources.

Examples:

1. The room is filled with noxious gas. Every round, each character rolls an Endurance check and tracks the result. After every two accumulated failed Heal or Endurance checks, they lose a healing surge.

2. The characters/players realize that the monsters' health is regenerating unreasonably and that the magic altar in the middle of the room is the source. Once they roll a successful skill check to determine the nature of the altar, the DM tells them they must attack the altar with encounter or daily powers to destroy the altar. The DM knows, but does not tell the players, that they need 5 successful attacks with encounter or daily powers to destroy the altar. Give the altar defense scores appropriate, or slightly higher than, the other monsters in the encounter.

Those are just a few ideas. I'm sure you can generate more.

 

[Arlough]

Back to back encounters can work very well. It eats up resources and creates a tense feeling.
Another one I have used is up to 7 encounters in one day (never made it past this) as that forces resource budgeting and builds large amounts of tension.
And, as the DM, I can even force those situations.
So, in a way, that can replace random encounters.

What I am trying to do here is abstract out and replace random encounters in a different way that takes less time. Basically, this is a way to consume surges and daily powers that doesn't involve actual encounters most of the time. For example, in zones that are 1 - 5, you can't even get a random encounter. Instead, at worst, you roll to see if you lose surges. And, you only have to make that roll 5% of the time in zones that are ATL 1, going up to 25% of the time in zones that are ATL 5.

If you want to decrease the odds of running into unfriendlies, then do things to avoid them.
The players can gain bounuses to the roll by stealthing or using nature to hide tracks, perception to go scouting, etc.
Basically, if you hit the easy DC for that level, +1, moderate +3, and hard +5

So then, even in areas that are ATL 16 (highly dangerous) you will only have a tactical (battle mat) encounter 50% of the time. And with a little prep (using nature to hide your tracks and scouting for danger) you can reduce that to once again never happening at all.
But, I can understand your stance on getting rid of random encounters, so how about this.

• Roll > Threat Level; the party passes without incident.
• Roll <= Threat Level; some minor skirmishes, but none worth playing out. Everyone loses 1d4-1 surges in that time frame.*
• Roll <= Threat Level - 5; “We have an actual fight on your hands.” Everyone loses 1d4 surges in that time frame.
• Roll <= Threat Level - 10; “Woah, where was that hiding!!!” Everyone loses 1d4+1 surges in that time frame
• Roll <= Threat level – 15; “I told you this was a bad idea!” Everyone loses 1d4+2 surges in that time frame.
• Etc

If they wish, they can spend a Daily attack power to prevent the loss of 2 surges.

This way, it completely eliminates the random tactical encounter while still having the cost of a hostile environment.