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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DracoSuave" data-source="post: 5444796" data-attributes="member: 71571">Random encounters don't make a wilderness feel teeming with life tho.  They just make the wilderness feel like a chore to be endured... it's a grind.  Worse, the players are simply at the whim of random dice rolls.  They are not agents of their own fates... and that's a BIG no no.  The best games are those that emphasize player agency, and the consequences there of.  You step up an obstacle, and the players choose how they will attempt to overcome it.  So how do you solve the problems of wildernesses needing to show their danger, and players needing to feel their agency?Skill Challenges.You simply present to them that they KNOW wildernesses are dangerous.  Seriously, if the campaign world is designed around very small pockets of civilization with everything else being dangerous and trying to kill you... then that's going to be a part of common knowledge.  Farmers teach their children not to go into the Skull Woods.  Scholars cloister themselves in their universities because outside is The Mountain of Hatred and there are -things- there.  Then, you allow them to figure out HOW they traverse that wilderness.  What preparations do they make?  Do they travel the main road, because it is more likely to be patrolled, or do they travel off the beaten path, because it is less likely to be predated on by bandits?  Do they manage to notice the obvious signs of natural predators?Random encounters are not solvable problems, other than 'OMG A LION KILL'.  Instead, present the wilderness ITSELF as the encounter... where success leads to a minor encounter with bandits (which you don't mind because the next village has a bandit problem) and failure leads to being harrassed by encounters with snarling wolves for a couple days before meeting with the above bandits.That is using the danger of the wilderness to build a narrative... and way more fun than simply watching the DM roll dice behind a DM shield for a few minutes.</blockquote>

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