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Message: <blockquote data-quote="howandwhy99" data-source="post: 5863867" data-attributes="member: 3192">Whether it's in a monster's lair or in another location determined by wandering monster checks my prep includes tallying the difficult of an encounter with all the factors I track. This means encounter challenges include environmental factors, items on hand, as well as monster knowledge and tactics when rating them at the very least. Playtesting some of the more difficult to assess encounters with me playing the PCs prior to game session has also helped iron out obscured nuances missed during design.Why are Monsters and Treasures Randomized?My answer is: it saves times while offering tons of variety. If the results don't make sense to you, then change your tables for rolling this stuff until they do. (the MM treasure tables have some major faults IMO) Maybe you have an "underwater encounters" table for treasure commonly found underwater. The elemental plane of fire doesn't exactly lend itself to paper scrolls or treasure maps. Not that diversity isn't in all the different regions. Only that certain likelihoods changes by what one would expect to find there. Then the rares are more astonishing again.Monsters are randomized similarly, but early editions did a better job of using rolls as relational representations. Sleep cycles were determined by day or night encounter tables. Likelihood of encounters could represent density of creatures in an area. Rare creatures could have only 1-2 percentage points for a result, while common ones could be several more points and therefore more likely to be rolled. The whole of the tables themselves could be seen as population charts for monsters definitely existing within a region (until they leave, are wiped out, etc.) Randomizing these prepared materials meant much of the world was already designed and short term prep between sessions had shortcuts built in.</blockquote>

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