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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8339992" data-attributes="member: 42582">The premise of classic D&amp;D is that players do know the odds (1 in 6 every two or three turns, depending on which version of the rules you're using), do know the stakes (at least in Moldvay Basic, it is assumed that players read the whole book (except the sample dungeon, unless they're GMing it) wich includes the encounter tables; in AD&amp;D the players are not assumed to know the charts but are assumed to know that there are charts corresponding to 10 levels of monsters with a greater chance of higher-leve monsters the deeper in the dungeon you are), and do know the rewards - wandering monsters are notorious for carrying little or no treasure and therefore are largely an obTstacle to successfully exiting the dungeon with the loot already collected.Because the stakes are, in part, a function of dungeon level there are rules for both revealing information about levels (going up and down stairs, etc) and for concealing that (sloping passages, elevator rooms and the like) and for penetrating such concealment (dwarven or gnomish abilities, intelligent sword abilities, etc).Now if you drop all this apparatus, so that the whole regime of random encounters really is opaque to the players, I agree that they become meaningless. I think this happened in a lot of D&amp;D play around the mid-1980s and that, since then, random encounters linger on as a type of relic or fetish divorced from their original rationale. But there are other aspects of D&amp;D - like the continued obsession with map-and-key resolution despite the widespread abandoning of dungeon crawl or hex crawl play - about which the same could easily be said!</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 8339992, member: 42582"] The premise of classic D&D is that players do know the odds (1 in 6 every two or three turns, depending on which version of the rules you're using), do know the stakes (at least in Moldvay Basic, it is assumed that players read the whole book (except the sample dungeon, unless they're GMing it) wich includes the encounter tables; in AD&D the players are not assumed to know the charts but are assumed to know that there are charts corresponding to 10 levels of monsters with a greater chance of higher-leve monsters the deeper in the dungeon you are), and do know the rewards - wandering monsters are notorious for carrying little or no treasure and therefore are largely an obTstacle to successfully exiting the dungeon with the loot already collected. Because the stakes are, in part, a function of dungeon level there are rules for both revealing information about levels (going up and down stairs, etc) and for concealing that (sloping passages, elevator rooms and the like) and for penetrating such concealment (dwarven or gnomish abilities, intelligent sword abilities, etc). Now if you drop all this apparatus, so that the whole regime of random encounters really is opaque to the players, I agree that they become meaningless. I think this happened in a lot of D&D play around the mid-1980s and that, since then, random encounters linger on as a type of relic or fetish divorced from their original rationale. But there are other aspects of D&D - like the continued obsession with map-and-key resolution despite the widespread abandoning of dungeon crawl or hex crawl play - about which the same could easily be said! [/QUOTE]

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