I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.

- William Blake

Thursday, November 09, 2023

The painful procedure of random encounters

Let's look at the painful procedure of random encounters. 

This is not simply theorizing; it is something that has been bothering me in my current campaign - to the point of aggravation in some sessions.

I'll use B/X here, as it is an universal language.


Let's say the PCs are traveling the wilderness for one week.

First you have to check for encounters, once or more times per day. More often than not, the result will be that "nothing happens". So we are rolling over and over, with little input from the PCs actions (or even stats) to get nothing.

Second, if you get an encounter, you have to find the appropriate table (and sub-table) for the creature encountered, which requires two more rolls.

[And you have to decide - or roll - to see if the encounter happens during day or night, etc.]

Third, roll for surprise - for both the PCs and the creature encountered.

Fourth, you have to roll to find how many creatures appear (if you're playing AD&D, also roll to see if they are in their lair).

Fifth, roll for encounter distance.

Sixth, you roll reaction (let's assume you don't have to roll HP for each creature or I'll go crazy) - which is a bit of a challenge by itself.

That is half a dozen rolls for every single encounter.

Even if you memorize all of these, you still have to flip back and forth to find the monsters.

The worst part, however, is that at this point you have no guarantees that the encounter will be interesting or coherent. It falls on the shoulders off there GM to make it so.

The reaction part, for example, will often tell you the creature is confused - and it is up to the GM to interpret that. 

There is no easy way to skip that - deciding every beast attacks, for example, is both implausible and repetitive.

[Dragon Quest suggests chaotic creatures are more likely to attack, which is a nice touch, but might not be the case if the PCs are chaotic themselves].

In addition, if you get an unlikely result (lawful NPCs attack on sight? why???) you have to either come up with an explanation or roll again.

Some creatures have predetermined reactions (e.g., goblins attacking dwarves on sight), but these are rare - more often than not, you're on your own.

Everything works well in theory but lately I'm finding it too burdensome for the GM.

That would be very easy to solve with automation. Unfortunately,  my programming skills are slim to inexistent.

Fortunately, however, there are people out there who created awesome stuff such as this. Perfect!

Now we need an old school version. This one is incredibly helpful, as it replaces many rolls (rolling a random NPC party would be a nightmare without it!).

A perfect tool would not only replace ALL rolls but also add suggestions for the "creative" bits: why is the wolf so friendly? How does the indifferent dragon behaves if it sees the PCs before they can act? 

These are things that a computer would have a harder time writing, unlike dice rolls.

All these things could be decided in advance (with a few "ifs" and "buts"), leaving the GM free to add details as necessary. 

And, while we are at it, add some brief descriptions from days without encounters (or simple non-NPC encounters: items, droppings, tracks, corpses, etc.).

Put the whole thing together, fix some results so that wolf tracks are near wolves and brunt corpses near red dragons, and you'd have an awesome resource.

I have to say I'm very tempted to create such a tool - it would both solve my problems and possibly help other GMs. 

Let me know if this would be useful to you - and SPECIALLY if you can provide me some feedback on a few related ideas. Leave a comment or, even better, join my Discord channel. I promise it is EXTREMELY low maintenance.

9 comments:

  1. Yes! This stuff is awesome. I think I could definitely make a B/X random encounter generator with that...

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  2. I think I'd still prefer a 1d100 table, however, so the players can still make some of the rolls.

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  3. I saw a thing one time (and I don't know if I could find it again, sorry) where someone had worked up the probabilities from the 1E DMG wilderness encounter tables, and instead of rolling X number of times per day to see if an encounter occurs, you would roll on the table (don't remember if it was d20 or d%) and it would tell you how long until the next encounter. Roll low, and the encounter might just be a few hours later, roll high, and it might be days; the important detail was that the probabilities worked out the same.

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    1. Well, I found where I had it saved, but there's no watermark or URL on the PDF that I can see, so its ultimate source is a big ?

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    2. Here's a Dropbox link for it. If anyone knows where the original source is, let me know and I'll be happy to redirect to there.

      https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/krlwenro74gi8pru7dafr/encountertimes.pdf?rlkey=1p49qu5bbyl1pn3wkyqqow8lc&dl=0

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    3. Thanks! I like that, I've tried a similar approach myself (for example, rolling 1d6 to see how many days without encounters).
      I think I might get back to that.

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    4. In B/X, it is an easy fix: you have six, three and two days per encounters, depending on the terrain.

      So you could just roll 1d12/1d6/1d4 to see how many days until next encounter.

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  4. ive never used all those steps
    for a resource hexcrawl maybe id do some
    you can pre makes some or just pick an interesting one
    in a campagn id just make up some encounters to show passage of time and the wilds are danger - in civilisation probably id not bother as much

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    1. I had never used them before my current hexcrawl either... now I'm preparing some encounters in advance.

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