Does Your Game Have Random Encounters?

[pemerton]

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.

The use of random encounters as a type-of "clock" is one well-known use case.

The other, though, is as a type of "world simulation". At least as I understand and approach them, this is the role of random encounters in Classic Traveller and of events in Torchbearer 2e. To borrow some language from Apocalypse World, it's a way for the GM to "disown" the framing of a scene.

In practice, I have found the TB2e events pretty fun and effective. The Classic Traveller encounters, on the other hand, tend to serve more as a type of formal constraint on GM creativity: like, now it's time for me to frame a scene, and it has to include <this> - where "<this>" is the result of the encounter roll. That's because (unlike the TB2e tables) the Traveller tables don't bring stakes/motivations with them. So I, as GM, still have to inject those into the scene.

 

[1QD]

I was reading a thread about narrative choices in tabletop games, and it made me curious about a particular type of narrative choice: the random encounter. Do you use them in your game? Are you comfortable letting the dice decide the party's conflicts and challenges for the day? Do you scipt and carefully balance every combat scene? Some mix of the two?

Vote for the option that best fits your table, and add any clarification or nuance in the comments.

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."

Yes, all the time. Luck will play a part when you get an encounter. You can crit fail an encounter and get something terrible, or you can crit succeed and get extra lucky and find a random magic item...There is more but that is the basics. Each person takes turns rolling encounter as well, so depending peoples stats you can have an easy time of things or not..Also with a crit succeed you can normal trade the item for a weeks uninterupted travel.

 

[pemerton]

Yes, all the time. Luck will play a part when you get an encounter. You can crit fail an encounter and get something terrible, or you can crit succeed and get extra lucky and find a random magic item...There is more but that is the basics. Each person takes turns rolling encounter as well, so depending peoples stats you can have an easy time of things or not..Also with a crit succeed you can normal trade the item for a weeks uninterupted travel.

Is this in the context of D&D play (or some similar sort of FRPG?) Can you say a bit more about how your system works: who is rolling? when? modified how (eg what stat)? And do you have a look-up table that you're using, or something else?

 

[Edgar Ironpelt]

It depends on the campaign. My current Brotherhood of Rangers game is heavily scripted and without random encounters. In previous games I've used random encounters a fair bit - especially for encounters in cities and towns.

 

[Piperken]

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.

Often when an adventure or module gives a random encounter table or the like to use, about half the time I rolled dice and used the result. I've feel like I've had more success facilitating play, when I've picked a result that fit best at the time.

I love curated random encounter tables that are integrated well; with those I will roll.