I liked the Earthbound way of random encounters.

Man…this question would have SO much more gravity if it weren’t about gaming.

Like if you’re thinking back on your life. You met your wife at a coffee shop, but what would your life be today if they got a bagel instead? Where would your life be, 20 years later?

Or what if you’re single? Did you make the wrong arbitrary choice? Did you walk left instead of right? Did you miss out on meeting your special someone because of a choice you didn’t realize had ramifications?

And how should we feel about that today, knowing nothing in the past can be changed?

I think that random encounters can be done well, but they’re often not done well.

I like that they can be a way to give feelings of attrition when travelling through long areas.

FF style? Hate 'em. I’m not a fan of the turn-based combat in those types of games either. Outside of boss fights/special enemies, you’re usually just spamming A to select the first option (attack) until you win. It gets hella old, hella fast and the random encounters happen every so many steps you take.

Fallout style, on the other hand, is awesome. More like Fallout 3 and beyond than 1 or 2 which are still a bit like FF in that you can’t see shit, you just walk the map and then FF battle music fade to black and pop into the encounter.

The Yakuza series does them well. They’re visible when wandering around, but they’ll also just appear at random all over the city walking down streets or chilling in alleys. You can’t always tell exactly what you’ll fight but you’ll know how to get around them if you don’t want to fight.

Of course I also like roguelikes. The entire game is a random encounter.

They’re not the worst thing ever, but I’m happy when a game finds another way to challenge the player that isn’t “throw an enemy encounter at the player every ten steps”.

Nowadays I particularly enjoy games where the encounter is fought on the map itself instead of having a transition screen and a separate map. Games like Sea of Stars, or Yakuza Kiwami for example. I find that removing the transition screen also removes much of the tedium I feel with enemy encounters in video games.

I’m in the “if I can’t avoid them, I’m not playing the game long” camp.

I don’t hate them, and they can be fun. But most of the games that do them make them impossible to bypass. Like others have already said, when you’re questing, they just derail the gameplay experience. There’s times that’s okay, but if a game has them often enough, it ends up making me hate the game and quit.

It’s why I don’t go back an replay the final fantasy stuff.

There’s nothing more annoying than chilling in ff 8 doing your own thing, then the loudest fucking music ever interrupts your fun time, ff 10 was awful about it too.

But other games it’s no problamo, I think the best way to do it is how the mother series went about it, with them being semi random and dodgable if you were good and didn’t want to do them.

I think, it works kind of well in games where you’re able to enslave/recruit the random encouters (Pokémon, Shin Megami Tensei and such), as it’s then a surprise what you’ll find, somewhat like a slot machine.
But the way the more recent entries work in these series, that you find out what creatures roam the world by exploring, that kind of works, too.

More generally, I don’t particularly like the problem that random encounters solve. Which is that you’ve got sections of gameplay where nothing happens, so you throw enemy encounters into there. That also goes for non-random encounters.

RPGs do this and I used to enjoy RPGs as a form of escapism. But now that I’m doing more stuff in real-life, I want it condensed down in roguelike form, or I’ll just play other genres…

my favorites were in the fallout series, if you were good, bad guys came, if you were bad, good guys came. nice random fights in new places.

even in BOTW the ninjas showed up periodically

Most of the time I don’t mind them, they only get annoying when the battles take longer to finish.

I’ve come around to really liking them. In short, they vastly improve dungeons in my opinion.

Most RPGs don’t manage to create interesting battles outside of boss fights. Heck, an increasing amount of RPGs fails to create any kind of challange. However, random encounter can add another layer to dungeons: resource management. You have to plan out how to tackle fights in order to get through the dungeons with your limited items/MP - do you sacrifice more HP or do you go for your strongest attacks? How much exploration can you get in? Do you need to be extra careful and plan for stronger rare encounters? Maybe even plan around lvl up healing.

Sadly, this layer is easily removed. Overworld encounters? Just dodge everything. Adjustable encounters? Grind just enough, go heal and disable encounters. Non-challanging fights? Just use basic attacks. Healing stations? No need to plan anymore. Ideally, the dungeons provides no healing at all - especially not before encountering the boss.

If you’re interested in a game with great dungeons, I’d recommend every single Etrian Odyssey.

Old Mother/Earthbound games would just let you insta-win battles if you were way stronger than the area you happened to be in. Made backtracking much smoother.

If what’s supposed to be the core gameplay feels like an unwanted interruption, I don’t think the random enounters themselves are the problem. I think the reason random encounters get a bad rap is because some games don’t make basic fights feel engaging enough. But when done right, they should be the fun part!

I personally don’t mind them, but I personally think the best kinds of random encounters are ones like pokemon randomizers where you step in the grass in a modded gen 3 game with every single pokemon in existence in it and it randomly pulls from the list of 1000+ mons in order to give you a feeling of true randomness in team building. Especially since you aren’t able to predict which creatures you will get.

Having a random table containing only a few different encounters isn’t anywhere near as fun and exciting as randomly having gods spawn as your enemy as a beginner in a randomized game followed by the weakest creatures in the game a moment later.

Not every mechanic fits every game (obviously). With that in mind, rarely is any specific design choice always 100% good or bad.

I think rather than just taking a vote, it is more useful to think about what makes a good random encounter, and what kinds of game designs work well with them.

I enjoy CRPG styled games. Often in these random encounters happen when moving through an overworld. This kind of design doesn’t disrupt exploration, since once it is over, you continue on your way. It does disrupt when you are going between known points and just trying to tie something up. That can be annoying. Ways that I think can make random encounters enjoyable for CRPG styled games:

1. Not every random encounter has to be combat. Some can be combat, some can be social, some can be vendors, and some can just be flavor. Non-combat encounters can be used as sort of optional bonus content for players to learn about the lore or explore, and they might even feel special since it is a random occurrence the player gets.

2. The ability to put points into some kind of skill that gives the player the option to avoid a random encounter and/or start a combat encounter with a bonus.

3. Encounters should be tied with regions of the overworld in a way that makes sense. Put tougher encounters in endgame areas to discourage players from poking around too early. Make encounters in certain areas tied to the main faction or location in that area.

4. Ease up on certain kinds of encounters as the game goes on, so they don’t outstay their welcome. For example, in the early game if there are lots of low level bandits attacking in random encounters, it can be fun, but it gets old once you are powerful enough to rip through them and are just trying to get bigger things done. Solve this by, for example saying that routes between major hubs are secured thanks to player actions. Now the player can travel between main routes without getting hassled.

5. Be very thoughtful about combat random encounters triggered by NPCs after the player due to player actions. These tend to be more annoying since these are usually higher level NPCs that pack more punch. Making their appearance totally random can be very annoying. It also often feels like a grind if the encounter happens repeatedly. I would prefer the consequences of player actions to firstly always be telegraphed so they know a certain action means a revenge squad is after them. Second, I would prefer this encounter to be scripted- either concretely in a specific location where the game knows the player hasn’t yet been, or in a floating fashion where one of various possibilities is chosen by the game based on whatever triggers first. Once the player defeats whoever is after them, they should never be chased by an identical kind of threat.