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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8343283" data-attributes="member: 42582">To me, the first, third, fourth and fifth of those dot points looks like invitations to railroading. And the second looks like time-wasting.The way I create urgency is by having the players pursue matters that their PCs care about. For instance, in my Classic Traveller campaign what created urgency for the PCs on Zinion was that they knew, from fiction actually established in the course of play (roughly via PbtA-type soft/hard move techniques), that in due course Imperial agents were likely to come and invesigate the alien site they (the PCs) had uncovered. The response to the urgency wasn't to engage a GM-foisted random encounter with a random ogre. It was to use a grenade to blow up most of the immediate witnesses! Some of the players were shocked by this cold-blooded murder by one of the PCs; but the PCs in a position to do anything went along with it.The way the players obtain assistance is to declare actions that will generate it: in MHRP/Cortex+ this will typically be a Resource (eg when negotiating with the Giant Chieftain in his Steading, one of the players created a Resource in the form of a Giant Shaman who agreed with his PC, which was then instrumental in persuading the Giant Chieftain to support the PCs' efforts); in 4e D&D this might be via a skill challenge; in our Classic Traveller game this is determined by the way the players have their PCs invoke the social resolution rules in dealing with NPCs.As far as establishing atmosphere, adding interest and reinforcing themes, every moment of play should do this. The idea that random encounters would have some special role here is very strange to me.Consistent with what I've posted just above, I don't really understand the point of mediating this through random encounters during a journey.One day taking the train to work I decided to write up an AD&D-style dark (spirit?) naga in Burning Wheel terms. I then decided to incorporate it into my Burning Wheel game. As it happened, a new PC was introduced into the game around the same time, who was a spirit-summoning snake-handler living as a hermit in the hills; and so it was easy to introduce the naga in a way that connected to that PC as well as other PCs' already-established Beliefs. The PCs' actual encounter with the naga took place on a journey through the hills - it was living in the caves not too far from a Keep on the Borderlands east of Hardby and west of the Cairn Hills/Abor-Alz. But it wasn't a random encounter - it was a component of a framed scene.None of this post is to disparage random encounters on journeys. They play an obvious role in hexcrawl play. In my Classic Traveller game I will use random encounters in accordance with the game rules because as a type of content introduction/pacing device - that's part of the distinctive feel of Traveller. Equally, I don't use them in systems in which they have no role - BW, Prince Valiant, MHRP/Cortex+, 4e D&D (when I adapted Night's Dark Terror to 4e, I used the random encounter table to supply the content for a skill challenge used to adjudicate the PCs' search for the goblin cave), in fact most systems!What I'm saying is that I don't understand why meaningful play (in terms of interest, atmosphere and/or theme) would be mediated via this technique, because these are concerns for every moment of play.</blockquote>

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