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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8701338" data-attributes="member: 4937">It strikes me as an optional combat.  The thing that you've encountered is trying to flee.  Do you want to give chase?  Which is the same sort of encounter as "A white stag with hoofs and antlers of shining gold leaps across the road in front of you."  You don't have to give chase, but if you do it will turn into combat at some point if the magical stag can no longer flee.  Likewise, "As you are travelling on the road, you begin to hear the music of a lyre.  After a little ways, you espy three females of an elvish air, clad only in a wreath of leaves around their hair, lying on a patch of sunny sward a just off the road.  One is playing a lyre," is also an encounter that may or may not be combat depending on whether the party is stupid enough flirt with dryads and someone fails a saving throw.I agree with you to some extent.  I do consider what the life of an average farmer taking a wagon load of hay into town is going to be like when designing random encounter tables for civilized regions.  As the two above encounters show, or haymonger could have an interesting day even if he personally isn't really threatened - he's not dumb enough to get involved in fey things, not skilled enough to chase the hart, and not handsome and charming enough to get himself in trouble with dryads even if he was inclined to.  Even if I have 1% chance of encountering bandits along the way, chances are they'll ignore him as he's clearly not got enough coin to be worthwhile and it's bad policy as a bandit to 'dirty your nest' by attacking locals.It should be pretty obvious that a 1% chance of encountering a random red dragon is far too high.  An active red dragon so near the road would threaten the existence of civilization in the region, and unless the PC's are spectacularly unlucky they probably would not be the first person to encounter such a monster.  The whole region for 40 miles around would be talking about how a large dragon had been spotted in the area.I have made different random encounter tables for civilized roads during the day and during the night so that riding home drunk from the tavern after the sun has gone down is a somewhat riskier proposition.</blockquote>

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