Turtle's Random Encounters

Random encounters are a pretty common trapping of traditional fantasy gaming. I believe that they can be valuable for a game, but it’s necessary to review what they are doing for your game and why before including them as a feature. This is an attempt to break down why encounters are good, what purpose they should serve, and when to cut them out of the picture.

Guiding Rules

Encounters Must Reinforce Theme

Random encounters are an opportunity to reinforce the themes that the group is already exploring during play. If the players are dealing with a necromancer exploiting the dead to further their selfish plans, this could be an opportunity to encounter refugees fleeing the necromancer or the necromancer’s corpse-herders gathering the fresh dead. Ask yourself how the random results of your table can serve your larger goals.

Encounters Must Portray a Larger World

Random encounters are one of the ways that you can make the game world feel complex, interconnected and like a place that exists outside the limited scope of your players. You can use just a few words on a random table to tell so very much about your world. Is what you encountered normal? Is it remarkable? What are these people or creatures doing and why? Are there large forces at work? Don’t just think of the results of the table as a lone event. The random encounter is part of a web or an aspect of a larger tale.

Combat Must Not Be Inevitable

Player choice is one of the major appeals tabletop games. While it’s often true that our favorite tabletop games default to combat as the main method of providing danger, tension and challenge, honoring player choice involves letting players not fight things. There are numerous ways you can make encounters not be combat encounters:

• Opportunities to spot possible opponents at range
• Encounter subjects being busy with other activities
• Encounter subjects having reasons to work with or be friendly to the players
• Encounters can be tracks, evidence or implication of the encounter subjects

Encounters May Just Be Window Dressing

Even further beyond combat being an optional state, the entire encounter could be just optional beyond a passing narration. To draw on a stereotypical combat encounter, the typical pack of wolves encounter depends on ignoring how wolves work, where they largely avoid humans. Seeing wolves on the horizon, or growling at your approach to ensure that they have time to eat their prey can provide a quick moment of narration, which improves your game without having to use it as combat or even something that the players need to interact with.

Encounters Can Be Experiments

Encounters shouldn’t be something that you have a preconceived notion about the direction they take. Don’t be afraid to use the potential fleeting moments to see what your players will do far beyond what you would expect. Play to discover what will happen. Go encounter situations with the same amount of curiosity, whimsy and wonder that your players do. Nothing is sacred.

The Opportunity Cost of Random Encounters

Opportunity cost is a term in economics that speaks to the idea that if you’re doing one thing, you’re not able to do another. Random encounters can take a lot of mental space from the game master, time to populate and implement tables, player time to interact with them and character resources.

When you use random encounters as a game master, make sure it’s not crowding out valuable time that you could be using to explore the themes, plot and topics your players care more about.

More Dynamic or Valuable Random Encounters

• Use extra tables to determine additional information beyond “who” or “what.” Find out why the encounter is here. What does it actually want?
• Roll multiple times on encounter tables and have the subjects interact to convey a living world
• Explore, codify and leverage your players’ interests for their tables. This can come in the form of implied interests (Wizards care about learning about magic, rogues care about loot or treasure and druids care about the health of nature) or specific requests for topics, active party goes or tie-ins to previous adventures.
• Summarize, skim past and replace random encounters that don’t serve the goals of your table
• Populate random tables with scenery, flora, setting history and more
• Include individuals and factions that matter to your world in random encounters