Wandering Monsters: Wandering Monster-ception

Rather than talk about monsters, this week’s Wandering Monsters column talks about the qualities of a good encounter, the purpose of random encounters, and asks how—or even if—you use either in your games.

The article states that a great encounter has history, a clear objective, and a meaningful outcome. I guess I can agree with these standards; I do not think that every great encounter has to have all of them, but it probably does not hurt. I would add that a great encounter should also be interesting and fun, which due to varied gamer tastes are harder standards to quantify but likely benefit from the previous factors.

An interesting encounter, to me, is one that goes above and beyond a handful of orcs in a corridor or a goblin ambush on a road. In a lot of earlier-edition combat encounters you pretty much just stood next to a monster and rolled dice until someone fell over. That is not really interesting, especially if the only “consequences” are you having to take a minute to tell the Dungeon Master that you are going back to town for the night.

4th Edition combat encounters are almost always more dynamic than in previous editions, and while I do not think that the game necessarily needs that level of tactical intricacy for every fight—especially not with “trash fights”, which I will get to in a bit—having some way to mix things up would go a long way to making them more engaging. Like, fighting an orc should not be fundamentally the same as an ogre; the ogre should be able to knock the characters around, or even throw them at each other.

Both Dungeon World and Numenera (and other games) solve this pretty easily with moves and complications respectively. In Dungeon World if a character rolls within a certain range the GM can just respond with a narratively appropriate move. No back and forth, no hard mechanics, it just happens. In Numenera the GM can impose a complication in exchange for a few points of XP, or at any time a character rolls a natural 1.

These sorts of complications can also be derived from the environment; a character or enemy could get knocked into a fire pit, trampled by a horse, slip on some rubble, stuck in a bog, entangled in vines, have their axe get stuck in a door, thrown through a window, blasted by steam, and so on. The point is that these elements can really liven up an encounter, and they do not need to be incredibly complicated or require numerous dice rolls.

Another thing that makes for a great encounter is purpose. I cannot think of a book or movie where the characters go into a room, beat up some henchmen, go into another room, beat up some more, then go into yet another room and beat up even more because that sounds incredibly boring. I have played a lot of action games and some of the worse parts are when you just fight waves of faceless, unnamed enemies. Yeah, it can be fun now and then, but eventually it gets to a point where I just want it to end.

In Dungeons & Dragons these are trash fights. They are just there to pad out the adventure or get the characters some more XP, because for some reason Dungeons & Dragons is using a XP system analogous to console games and extra lives. Seriously, 4th Edition became so, so much more fun when I stopped tracking XP and leveled up the characters when I felt it was appropriate. It also made it a lot easier to plan and pace the game when I did not have to worry about cramming 10+ encounters into a single adventure.

I am not saying to ditch XP altogether—though that is perfectly viable and should at least be a supported option—but there are plenty of games out there with far, far better systems for tracking character advancement.

Speaking of things that could stand to be ditched, how about random encounters? Some argue that they convey a sense of “realism” or emphasize how the game does not just revolve around the characters and their actions (though it can and often does). I disagree with this because there are other, better ways to demonstrate that an imaginary world featuring dragons, elves, and a nonsensical magic system keeps turning when you are not paying attention:

• A history, even a brief or implied one.
• A world map, or even mentioning locations that exist beyond the confines of a local map.
• NPCs with personalities, motivations, and goals.
• Actions with far-reaching rewards and/or consequences.
• Events that occur outside their immediate sphere of influence.

To me any one of these adds more realism to a fantasy world than running into a brown bear in a forest ever could.

A more baffling claim is that without them you might as well just be pushing your players through a script. Like, if you decide ahead of time that your players run into 2d6 + 1 wolves instead of 10d10 bats (or worse, decide the number of wolves and bats ahead of time) instead of deferring to a table that they have no capacity for choice, and that you might as well just back up your books and go write a novel.

By that logic why have a Dungeon Master determine anything? WotC could just make a big book with thousands of tables for you to work through in order to generate a world, history, dominant races, cosmology, gods, etc. You could even take it a step further and just have players roll on tables to determine their race, class, skill selection, and, why not, actions taken during the game.

I think that random encounters are largely a waste of time. In some cases they might be useful, but most of the time like older-edition traps they end up being a cheap way to try and shoehorn tension and urgency into the game. If the characters are trekking through a forest trying to find a ruin, unless I think of something interesting for them to deal with on the way I am probably just going to tell them that they get to their destination after x days.

I might have them make skill checks to reduce the time if I think that supplies are even an issue (which thanks to magic in some editions it is usually not), but I do not see a point in rolling to see if they run into something, especially when there is only about a 15% chance of that happening at all, the encounter is not even relevant, and any hit to resources can just be slept off. I actually did use random encounters for about the first half of my Epiro campaign, but they so rarely came up that I decided to just start pre-planning encounters.

That is actually the closest I get to random encounters; I write encounter “cliff notes” that I keep on tap as a fall back in case the players do something expected, I think of a good spot to add them, or if there is just enough time to include them. My group only gets a handful of hours each week to get together and game, so I try to make sure that they are getting the most bang for their time, and random encounters-as-written just have a horrible return on investment.

In the end I think that great encounters should be entertaining, have a meaningful outcome (by which I mean contribute to more than the XP grind or exist just to pad out an adventure’s length), and do not always have to be immediately related to the adventure, though it certainly helps. I get that not every encounter is going to be great, but most should at least be good, and making them random is probably not going to contribute to the fun-factor. I also think that both the older XP and random encounter conventions should be thrown out.

So, what do you think makes a great encounter? Do you think that the game still needs random encounters, or players to track thousands of XP for character advancement?