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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Keenath" data-source="post: 4426398" data-attributes="member: 59792">I usually relegate "on the road" encounters to the low-level, easy "bandit squad" sort, with the occasional weak monster.  Random encounters are for boosting the Power Fantasy side of things, where you show how awesome you are -- so I don't care if they only have 1 per day and nova it.  I mean, you wanna Brute Strike the bandit goon with 20 HP, go right ahead, y'know?I'll occasionally put in a more serious road encounter, but only if it advances the plot in some way -- a set piece rather than a random wandering monster.  You'll never just run into a gryphon while walking down a road; you'll get assaulted by a wing of them in the mountain pass on the edge of a cliff in a blizzard, or something.  Something I planned out pretty well.Well, and that's a good argument for just not having random encounters on the road, or very few.  And again, it's always fun to have an occasional mook battle that you can really slaughter without effort.  It's always fun to cleave through a few dozen goblins or something.  Not every battle has to be a serious life-and-death sort of thing.Or just accepting that those two encounters will be novas, and -- as DM -- deciding to allow it. I guess I don't really see the point, though.  Why SHOULD a brawl be a combat challenge?  Do you really see your players getting the crap beat out of them by a drunk with a busted bottle?  Do THEY see themselves that way?If I want to include a tavern brawl, I prefer to throw in something the PCs are trying to accomplish in the midst of it -- like protecting a weak NPC, trying to chase the guy who started it as a distraction, and so on.  (That is to say, the guy they're trying to find -- or who has the item they want -- sees them coming for him and starts a brawl to distract them and give him cover while he makes a getaway.)I only really want to have important fights when it will be, well, important.  If the PCs are going to have challenging combat, it's because that combat naturally comes between them and their goal.  If they're fighting wererats and vampires, it's because there's a demihuman crime syndicate they're fighting and a goal they're trying to complete -- not because I need random encounters to make tonight's brawl a challenge!My favorite changeups are to change the rules of engagement.  The standard assumption of D&D combat is "your mission is to kill the monsters", so I like to throw down additional or replacement goals.  In a brawl, they need to complete a task, not kill everyone in the bar.  It might be more important to stop the trap than kill the monsters, to the point that the monsters stop as soon as the trap is off.  That sort of thing.  The mission is more important than the kills, and that in itself often makes nova-ing kind of irrelevant.</blockquote>

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