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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5537978" data-attributes="member: 82106">See, back in the OLD OLD days of dungeonhacking I certainly used random encounters, pretty much right out of the back of the 1e DMG (a utility that book provided which at the time was much appreciated). Then I began to notice that you really wanted to fudge the rolls because no encounter table would really always make sense or always produce the most interesting results.This lead me to the conclusion that 'random' isn't really exactly what you want. A 'Wandering Monster' can be good, but then if it is good why just roll for when they appear? So I took to simply noting that within a given area such a monster would exist or not exist, or would appear if the PCs lingered, or would always show up in one of places A, B, or C.Now, given that wilderness exploration in 4e is, like anything, fairly skill focused and often involves extended SCs I've integrated these kinds of things as elements of the overall exploration/travel effort. I'll work up some number of these encounters that I figure will work as elements of the story and for example have them show up as consequences of skill check failures, or sometimes have them show up as a advantages (say a weak encounter that can be overcome to negate a failure that just occurred). So I wouldn't call them random, but from the player's (and certainly the PC's) perspective they are chance encounters, and certainly wandering monsters in many cases. Not really sure where that fits into other people's notions of random encounter tables either. I end up with lists. I do usually make the 4, 6, 8, 10, etc items long and might roll on that table now and then for the heck of it when I am going to pull one out. They are terrain specific in that each area generally has a story and moving through it will trigger things.Maybe at some point I'll write something up...</blockquote>

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