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Chris Bissette on cohost
cohost.orgI recently had a conversation with someone in which they claimed that random encounters/wandering monsters are functionally the same as quantum ogres. This is patiently absurd but I'm going to address it anyway because I'm bored and that's what blogs are for.
The first and most obvious way in which a random encounter is not the same as a quantum ogre, and the way that I'm going to skip over really fast, is that players have no control in a quantum ogre situation. Whatever they do, whatever decisions they make, they're going to meet that ogre. This is not true if random encounters. Checks are random anyway - it's in the name, it's usually a 1-in-6 chance of an encounter, nobody knows it's going to happen - but players can take steps to reduce the frequency of checks being rolled in the first place, thereby reducing their chances of having an encounter. Players know that making noise, lingering in one place for too long, and shedding too much light are all things they might trigger checks. You have the option to simply not do those things.
But let's get to the real meat of it. Let's assume that, whatever happens, an encounter is going to take place. In the event of a quantum ogre, we have just the one encounter thats going to happen no matter what - the titular ogre.
What about with random encounters? At its most basic, we're rolling on a table of encounters with multiple results. The smallest functional encounter table you can write - and honestly, the only size you need to bother writing in most situations - has three encounters on it. We have a common encounter, an uncommon encounter, and a rare encounter. It looks something like this:
1d6Encounter1-3.2d6 goblins hunting bears.4-5.An injured bear.6.Roland, King of the Bears, with 1d6 armoured bear retainers, hunting goblins.
At its most basic level, that's three potential encounters versus the quantum ogre's single encounter. But even that isn't the whole story. 2d6 goblins is a very different encounter when there are twelve goblins versus just two. We could make the argument there that this single entry provides eleven different potential encounters. I'm not going to go that far, because two goblins is largely the same as three goblins, but I'll say that it gives us at least three encounters: a few goblins, a handful of goblins, and many goblins.
Similarly, the final encounter gives us "some bears" or "lots of bears". I think we can comfortably say that just this encounter table can provide six very different encounters at a minimum.
But we're not done. When we roll an encounter we also roll for encounter distance. Let's simplify this and just say that we either encounter these creatures immediately, encounter them at a close distance where we see each other, or we simply hear them passing beyond the range of our lights. That's three options to combine with our previous six options, turning six encounters into eighteen potential encounters.
Then we layer surprise on top of things. Our options:
* We surprise the encountered creatures
* The encountered creatures surprise us
* Nobody is surprised
Our eighteen potential encounters become fifty four encounters.
Then we layer reaction rolls on top of things. An immediately hostile band of six armoured bears and their king is very different to a friendly bear king and his sole retainer. There are many different reaction tables, with varying granularity of results. For ease of maths I'm going to use my personal favourite and the one that I see used the most often, which is the Holmes reaction table:
2d6Reaction2.Immediate attack3-5.Hostile, potential attack6-8.Uncertain9-11.No attack, monster leaves or considers offers12.Enthusiastic friendship
We've got five potential results here. Layer them onto our fifty four potential encounters and we suddenly have two hundred and seventy potential encounters coming out of a simple three entry encounter table.
I won't labour the point beyond that. A simple encounter table combined with Surprise/Reactions/Distance is an incredibly powerful tool, and any argument that it's functionally the same as placing a monster in front of the group and saying "fight" no matter what they do is frankly ridiculous.
It’s interesting seeing “random encounter” coming back in grace, I have the impression that they were universally considered as a “bad practice” for at least 2 decades, and now i see people defending them again. Is it an effect of both the OSR and Rule-light zero-prep ? Or is it that I spend more time on english speaking communities dominated by more “classical D&D perspective”
My issue, and why I (quickly in my GM career) stopped putting “random combat” is that, as a “low combat GM” random combats end-up interrupting the game for no reasons, and end-up being either “clay shooting practice” (So a few easy ennemies to roll some dices without bringing anything to the story) or a “catastrophic event” throwing all the PC plan away as they walked injured out of that fight and will need a lot of in game time to recover which basically breaks the game. If there is a combat, the PC called for it, either by their action or their non action, but not just by “simply existing in the game world”
However, I can totally see how for games with more focus on combat, it can still be interesting, just “not my cup of tea”
@Ziggurat @mozz I also have very little combat in my games, but I use random encounters all the time because they make the setting dynamic.
I don’t equate random encounter with random combat, an encounter can be something to interact with, talk to, run from, or plenty of other things.
I also don’t equate “random” with “unrelated to the rest of the adventure”, part of the fun of random encounters is figuring out why and how an ogre ended up on top of the ruined tower, and building on that.
@Whidou @Ziggurat @mozz Absolutely this. A “random encounter” can be finding a magical spring, a traveling merchant, a lost child, faeries who invite you to a riddle-game, or any number of other things that don’t involve combat.
Yeah. This is why I like his table. I get what @Ziggurat@sh.itjust.works is saying in that random encounters can feel kind of same-y and pointless – but if there’s a little subplot that the encounter is looping the players into, where they can decide for themselves how to react to what happens and how much to involve themselves in it – then it can form instead a good way to add some grist to the let’s-have-fun mill.
I’d imagine it’s the OSR influence, especially with the more old-school notion that the random encounters are the story.
That is, instead of random encounters being an interruption of the narrative, they’re just as much a part of it as the time your PCs sat in a bar for two hours trying to convince the barmaid to go dungeon-crawling with them.
Especially if random encounters include variation in distance and attitude. Encountering a knight could involve stumbling into a questing hedge knight‘s campsite, or it could involve hiding from the Black Knight after spotting them from a nearby hillside.
And there is also a narrative purpose in having combat start from “just existing in the game world.” Parts of the world are dangerous and deadly to be in, and random encounters are a good way to portray that without elaborately plotting out a sequence of “dangerous events” on a travel timetable.