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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Radiating Gnome" data-source="post: 2486566" data-attributes="member: 150">I used to hate the idea of random encounters, and never used them as a DM in my campaign.  Then I played in another guy's game, and he used random encounters very heavily, and it was a revelation.  He spent a lot of time developing his random encounter table -- it included barriers and obstacles, other travelers and monsters, ands encounters that would advance one or another plot in his campaign.  But given the carefully developed tables, we still had to roll randomly as we traveled, and that added a feeling of tension that you can't get without the random encounters.  That tension, and the periodic rolls for encounters, created a palpable sense of the distance we were traveling.  If we rolled for encounters every 6 hours, and we knew a trip from one location to another would take 5 days, we knew we would have to make 20 encounter rolls . . .  if we didn't roll encounters, the time would pass quickly, but making those rolls gave us a sense of the relative distance between places. I use random encounters now in a very flexible way.  In some cases, I use them for overland travel, but I still often hand-wave that travel.  I've also used random encounters for special circumstances, like an episode when my PCs were trying to escort about 2000 refugees out of a city that was being attacked by an army of men and dragons.  What has always bothered me about random encounters is the simple randomness of them, so I have a system that I use from time to time for characters who want to try to avoid encounters as they travel, rather than just put up with the pure randomness of the encounters.  Again, the system needs to be flexible, allowing for rolling every few minutes, hours, or daily, but the random encounter chance is repaced with a move silently roll (for overland travel) or a hide roll (for times when the party is camped ) and modified for the number of companions traveling with the party and other factors (terrain, presence of camp fires, etc). I require fewer rolls (maybe one skill roll to replace 2-4 random encounter rolls). Traveling to avoid encounters is slower, but safer, in most cases, and allows the PCs to take more active control over whether or not they have encounters while on the road.</blockquote>

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