Random Monster Lists

Prozak

First Post
Do any of you people use these? Or make your own? Or when you gm do you always have all the encounters planned?

Also, if any of you know some good ones online, go ahead and put up a link. :) I think I remember hearing that AEG was making a d1000 one that I was interested in seeing, but I can't remember what book it was supposed to be in...

Prozak
 

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One DM I have uses these and personally I don't like it. It slows down the game as she rolls on a table to see if there is an encounter, then rolls on the table to figure out what the encounter is, then she has to find the creature in her notes or look it up in the MM. It wastes so much time.

Personally, when I DM I have encounter that are preplanned that serve the same purpose of the random encounter. I can use it at any time during the session if its needed. If not I can save them for a later date.
 

If you're dead set on randomly generating the encounters, try rolling them before the games begin.

Then, when a random encounter is called for, you already have one (or more) prepared.

It also allows you to reject random encounters that might disrupt your game.
 

it's funny, but my players actually asked me to roll the dice duing our sessions because it meant that the whole situation was more tense!

also: just cos you wait till the game to roll the encounters doesn't mean you can't reject ones you don't think would work... what a wierd idea " i can't not use that... i just rolled it!"
 

When I played, I had random encounters already planned out on index cards. Whenevr I felt the party needed a minor combat, I just pulled out a card from the deck.

I used to like the charts, but now I like to have some sort of reason or plan for introducing a "random" encounter. I like my sessions to run without any DM induced stopages, so the charts are out.

I guess I am just old school in liking some randomness in game sessions. I just prefer to have the foreplanning to have all the info available when I decide the time is right to spring an unplanned encounter.
 

There is no reason a DM cannot have random pre-planned encounters. Basically you design a whole bunch of possible encounters/scenarios ahead of time and then roll randomly to see which ones the players run into. I have seen several adventure modules use this tactic.
 

Try my Encounter Spreadsheet in the downloads section. Great for custom encounter charts, but to be honest I usually use it as a central way to list appropriate encounters - I filter for terrain, CR, etc. and then I have a list of creatures and their sources. Handy.

Anyway, I am sure people have sucked the data for something more functional, being easy to set to tab-delimited data after all, but it works as is.

(And if anyone knows of something similar, post it I wanna use it :)
 

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