Does Your Game Have Random Encounters?

[p_johnston]

For me its an odd mix. I'll typically run a normal adventure/campaign with all the scripted encounters and then throw in a random encounter mechanic when appropriate.

For instance right now my players are in a mega dungeon and so when the first enter an area for a day, stay super long in an area, make loud noises (like thunderwave), etc they tick up a clock (stolen from Blades) and when full get an encounter. For more wilderness travel campaigns ive had players make survival rolls where failure is a random encounter.

 

[Celebrim]

They are an important part of my commitment to not overly rely on my judgement or plans but to allow the world I'm presenting to happen organically. That said, they are more interesting and important to me than in D&D than in most other systems. When we enter into a sandbox in any system though, random things that aren't entirely of my design or arrangement happen and combine with the players unexpected choices to create something that isn't scripted at all.

 

[SkidAce]

The encounters aren't random, but when/if they occur may be.

 

[kronovan]

For me an encounter is akin to a scene within an act, with a number of acts per adventure. I usually like my acts to follow an adventure hook, so it’s difficult to have scenes/encounters that’re completely random. I usually run sandbox campaigns with plot point funnels, where the party achieves a plot point/milestone and then transitions to something new – new location, new discovery, new revelation, etc. So, the randomness is more around random adventures the party comes upon as they adventure, explore or investigate prior to a plot point.

I often exploit a PCs fault (Fate trouble aspect, Savage Worlds hindrance, 5e background flaw, etc.) as an adventure hook. Those tend to be more dynamic adventures and seem better suited to have encounters randomly rolled, which I do for some. Another area I will use a random encounter, is during a chase in which some or all of the party have been overtaken by a pursuer. I do that more with Savage World and Call of Cthulhu, as their chase mechanics are quite structured and feature rich. So, using random encounters for the what-if of being caught, frees me up to focus on other details.

I like to homebrew and what I do that’s at times random, are random adventures. When a creative idea just won’t come to me, I have a number of random adventure generators that will let me rollup a skeleton of an adventure. With the whole adventure being random, the encounters are of course too. They still end up being my own thing, as I have to flesh out bullet points, write narrative blurbs and detail NPCs. I have a number of those for different genres, with most coming from the previous EXplorers and Deluxe edition of Savage Worlds, when such tools were a staple for 1st & 3rd party settings.

I’m a big fan of the Journeying play mechanic for Adventures in Middle Earth and use it with a number of Fantasy TTRPGs. That subsystem is contingent upon random encounters when the journeying party encounters some complication. You can create prewritten encounters for those, but I’ve found it to be well suited to random rolling, with results being humorous almost as often as they’re dangerous.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Yes, but I preplan them.

 

[CleverNickName]

Looks like about a third of us use random encounters fairly regularly, or have some kind of mechanism in place to avoid using scripted encounters. That's fewer than I had imagined; I figured it would be about half of us.

This poll was born from a different thread, where people were discussing the practice of letting the players decide certain aspects of the game and the campaign setting. I wondered how letting the dice make certain decisions (such as the number and type of encounters or combat scenes) would compare.

Turns out: not very much at all. I guess that whenever the DM generates an encounter (or whatever) at random, they still have the ability to ignore or change the result on the fly to shape it to their liking. Player input is a little harder to bend.

 

[Laurefindel]

EDIT: typo in that second-to-last poll option. It should read, "No, we don't use random encounters, I use different mechanics for unscripted encounters."

In your OP, you do bring out the existence of unscripted encounters that are not random. Depending on how you define an encounter as « random », you may have gotten slightly different proportions.

 

[el-remmen]

I wasn’t sure which poll choice best fit my approach.

I create random encounter tables based on terrain and/or locations. They are mostly used when traveling between places or exploring a specific location unless there are specific encounters that make sense to what is going on that are only avoidable via specific PC actions.

Edit to clarify that this was a D&D based answer and I use them a lot less frequently (mostly not at all) on other games depending on the genre, setting and scenario. For example, I do not use random stuff for a supers game but might when exploring a planet surface in some sci-fi games.

 

[TwoSix]

It depends on the game. If I'm running an OSR-style game, where resource attrition is meant to be part of the challenge, I do. Otherwise, I can't think of a gaming style I use where it would be appropriate.

 

[John Dallman]

None of the options fit everything I run, because my practice varies considerably. It's quite rare for me to have creatures or people wandering around that will start fights, or that I haven't thought about in advance.

I will sometimes decide randomly when something happens because prescribing such things offends my sense of verisimilitude in some settings. I knew the Elder Things sent workers round the service tunnel of their circum-Antarctic subway system every few days, just to check that nothing had gone wrong with it. As it happened, they shot past in the night and nobody got a good look at them until the characters used psychometry to look back in time.

One case where I used true random encounters was in my GURPS Cabal in the Infinite Worlds campaign. The characters spent a good deal of time in the Astral Plane, where ideas, imaginings and memories can be alarmingly physical. Trying to write an encounter table for that is impractical. I rolled dice for a page in The Encyclopaedia of Fantasy, and invented something based on its contents. This worked quite well, especially when the star Aldebaran showed up.