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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8342761" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Yeah, I was imagining a Scooby Doo-style haunted house. That is, when I hear "haunted house," I think of something comparable to a haunted house attraction IRL. Such things are never as simple as an old farmhouse with three simple rooms, because that would be boring. If you meant something like "abandoned shack," then yeah, I'm fine with having abandoned shacks on an encounter table. Those feel reasonably natural as something you could just...find. Especially if they're rough-hewn with minimal foundation work--something a farmer or pioneer might have erected by hand.The game I run is set in an arid-leaning or even desert region, so for me it might be something more like "burial mound that used to be covered by sand," but the principle is similar. I'd be fine with including "forgotten cairn" in an encounter table. In my campaign's context, I would call a "haunted house" the equivalent of (say) a "cursed pyramid," where it would be weird to see that just show up in the path the party happened to take, and to have something of similar magnitude show up more than once would be rather suspicious.For my part, I do three things on this front:1. If the journey itself is "meant" to be meaningful, I use the Undertake a Perilous Journey rules. I have expanded these rules slightly so that the party has more considerations now (getting to places without being seen is now of similar importance to getting there on time, for example, so I added stealth as a role to be filled). This explicitly signals to the players that Stuff May Happen on the journey, and usually does.2. If the journey isn't "meant" to be meaningful, I try to read the room. If the party seems ambivalent, I'll add an encounter if I can impromptu make up something interesting. If they seem bored, I'll definitely try to throw something at them to spice things up. If they're really eager to get where they're going, or if I'm just low on inspiration that day, I may gloss over the journey. Overall...probably about half of the time they run into something, but it may not be a big deal.3. I keep destinations within relatively easy reach. The party lives in a big city, so a lot of plot points are just a camel-ride away. Visiting the elemental otherworld is pricey, but doable. Heading up-river to the central city of the major religion of this region is at most a day trip. Etc. This way, the party can attend to important details relatively quickly without too much trouble, cutting down on any risk of "ugh, ANOTHER encounter? I just want to get where we're going..." stuff.My pleasure.Not exactly. More that I either do my best to establish it in the fiction (even if the players don't check up on it), or leave it as an un-tested hook, waiting for the players to bite, potentially "getting worse" if it makes sense for the situation to do so. As an example, the party has had it foreshadowed that there are secret, invisible temples belonging to the Raven-Shadow assassin-cult hidden in the desert. Divination magic allowed them to see someone visit one of them, a big one. As a result, the party is forewarned of the possibility that they might literally just "randomly" run into an invisible temple if they're out exploring the deep desert--or, if they take matters into their own hands, they may be able to target a search for one.I would very much shy away from "it's a scorching sandstorm, and there's an abandoned caravanserai, you need to take shelter." But I might offer it as an option during a Perilous Journey where the Trailblazer (person charting the path) has rolled poorly (aka gotten a "bad" result), e.g. "you're running low on supplies, particularly water--you could press on, which will put you at a disadvantage when you arrive at your destination. However, [player] on scout duty has found what looks like an abandoned caravanserai, where you could rest and possibly recover some supplies, depending on what's left there." That (1) turns the "abandoned inn" idea into an explicit (and real) choice; (2) gives the players the opportunity to investigate the "abandoned inn" before committing to it, albeit on a short time schedule; and (3) only triggered because things went wrong without my intervention. It also helps that, because of the Scout role for Undertake a Perilous Journey, I as DM am specifically empowered to leverage that role to provide (hopefully!) interesting options and possibilities in terms of "what did you see, what were you looking for" stuff.I generally do not use them myself (though perhaps I should). I would make them semi-dependent on party level, but only to invoke a sense of scale and development. That is, three kobolds in a trenchcoat might be dangerous at level 1, but either boring or merely funny at very high level. Back six or seven levels ago, my players found a pack of basilisks genuinely dangerous for a bit; these days, they'd steamroll them. Since I don't consider it interesting to include curbstomp fights (whether it be the party doing the stomping or being stomped upon), I would probably design tables with level ranges in mind. E.g. a level 1-5 table, a level 6-10 table, etc. Some places, if you outlevel them, there just wouldn't be random encounters at all anymore, because there's nothing in them that would present enough of a threat to count. Others, different threats appear because the party has different concerns and interests now. Like how I added "be stealthy" to the Perilous Journey rules (alongside "get there on time," "don't run out of food/resources on the way," and "don't get surprised by something nasty")--a change of perspective due to the party's new abilities and interests, not simply "oh, they're level 7 now, only level 7 encounters need apply."I just don't think "a hut in the woods with a ghost" is what is meant by "a haunted house." While a person may live in a hut, I don't think of "hut" when I think of "house," and "haunted house" specifically evokes a reasonably-large, at least two-story home with several ghosts and some kind of reason why it's haunted.If all you meant was "a ramshackle shed with a ghosty boi inside," okay, sure. But "haunted house" emphatically did not communicate that...as I made pretty clear with my comparisons.</blockquote>

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