Wandering Monsters - yea or nay?

[jonesy]

Wandering NPCs usually turn into some good RPing, while wandering monsters just on a battle grid don't seem to be as fun as NPCs.

That's a good point. It's harder to make wandering monsters work.

You can place wandering NPCs onto a scene practically without any behind the scenes information and players will then assign to them atrributes that just weren't there to begin with. The encounter then grows out of the players imagination, or the DM's response to their response.

With pure monsters that's harder to do as they seem to require more initial setup and backstory, and then they are no longer just wandering monsters.

 

[MerricB]

My main source of wandering NPCs/city encounters in the past has been the Cities book by Chaosium/Midkemia Press.

Cheers!

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Depends on the campaign and the players. About 50/50.

The Auld Grump

 

[Hautamaki]

I don't roll random wandering monsters, but I do give the party seemingly random wandering monster encounters where appropriate.

When I will throw 'random' wandering monsters at a party:

1) The session will have had too much roleplaying to satisfy the more combat-oriented players/characters without a 'random' wandering monster encounter.

2) A player designed his character to counter a particular monster type, not realizing the coming adventure has no monsters of that type--give him something his character was optimized to kill to make him feel better about what was in actuality an unwitting bad choice.

3) One character needs just a little more experience to catch up in levels to the rest of the party.

4) The party in general is about to unwittingly wander into an adventure they do not have the strength/resources to overcome--wandering monsters might either give them the experience boost they need to gain a level, drop some equipment to power them up enough for the adventure, or drain them of enough resources to send them back to town for recuperation and equipment upgrades.


As a DM I usually prepare ahead of time some NPCs with good equipment drops, and at least one wandering monster encounter for every character in the party to shine against. Then I can insert them whenever needed. Right now my party consists of a berserker, a paladin, an assassin, and a ranger. For the next adventure I'm preparing a dire bear for the Ranger to calm/befriend, an orc warband for the berserker and paladin to shine against, and a rival assassin NPC for our assassin to elude/counter-assassinate. I'm not sure when I'll use these encounters exactly but I'm sure that the appropriate opportunity will arise in the course of their adventuring.

 

[Dice4Hire]

Actually, I worry more about wandering PCs than wandering monsters.

Monsters are so much less destructive and random.

 

[avin]

Depends on the environment.

Wandering monster assaulting a camping it's fine. Wandering monsters on a dungeon, unless there's a solid ecology explanation, sounds strange to me.

 

[Jhaelen]

I don't roll random wandering monsters, but I do give the party seemingly random wandering monster encounters where appropriate.

Yup. I'm all for _planned_ wandering 'encounters' that may be encountered randomly or at planned locations or times.

My typical approach is to create about twice the number of encounters I think I'm going to need. So, over time I end up with a pile of interesting encounters I can drop into the game whenever it makes sense or things start to get slow.

Truly random wandering monsters don't serve any useful purpose in my games (since I stopped granting xp).

 

[Barastrondo]

I don't like writing up random encounter tables, but I do like having randomness inform structure. So I'll use tricks like rolling on the 1e DMG for a random "city encounter", then reinterpreting it in the context of the game proper. When I tried that, I got the "Gentlemen" result with a d4 of higher-level fighters or some such; then decided that within the context of the game, that implied that the PC was happening across a duel, and that duel would be relevant because one of the participants was a member of another PC's Great House.

At some point I should probably come up with some sort of basic matrix that gives me the very rudiments of structure (like "1-2: Physical, 3-4: Social, 5-6: Intellectual" + "1: Monstrous, 2: Criminal, 3: Civilian, 4: Noble, 5: Religious, 6: Martial" but that's the sort of thing I'm more likely to ad-lib in my head. Like I said, I don't really enjoy writing up tables.

 

[Mark CMG]

WMs are fun in campaigns but not so much in one-shots and such, IMO.

 

[jonesy]

WMs are fun in campaigns but not so much in one-shots and such, IMO.

Hmm. I wonder if anyone's ever written an adventure where all encounters are technically random, and which still somehow works.