Scott, the creator of Venger's Decks, was a pleasure to work with and I was happy to show off the cards! How do you use random encounters at the table?
Thank you so much Bob. The pleasure was all mine, and this video turned out wonderfully. I particularly loved your tips on breaking down the encounter generation element. Thanks again so much for showing off my little encounter decks, and I hope your subscribers find your video helpful in their rpg sessions! :-)
I agree with your points but I also think random encounters can be unrelated to the current quest. I am old schooler who picked up D&D in 1980 as a 12 year old. One of the problems with them from the beginning was how published materials have largely treated them which is a very unflavored list of monster combat encounters. No context, no purpose, no description, no motivation, no interesting NPCs and no role playing opportunities just you are viscously attacked by an Owlbear. Yawn.... I think people rightly criticize this approach as an unwanted delay in precious game time that is more distraction than enjoyment. However if you sit down and put some effort into fleshing our your random encounter list it can be a real game changer on how your table play goes and how you feel about random encounters. I won’t lie to you.... this is real effort (no small amount of time went into mine) and we as a group often don’t have the luxury of heaps of prep time but if you want to elevate your game you will never regret the work you put in this category. Simple things add a lot. Take our Owlbear, how about an Elk presents itself to your party. This is a Ration opportunity. Your party elects to take it down and perform a survival check to determine how successful they are at preserving the meat into rations. While processing their quarry, the fresh kill attracts an Owlbear. Does the party offer the Owlbear meat? Animal handling check or is it combat. It’s simple but now we have context, motivation, and roll playing. This is a simple example. The really fun ones are the more thought out creatively complex ones where you create NPCs that Dickens would be proud of and a mini plot that runs like a popular scene from your favorite action movie. The point is that if you treat the substance of the random encounters with as much thought as what went into the main plot you will get their full potential and find out they really bring something fun to the game. Make a commitment to yourself to write out two random encounters before each game. You’ll play five sessions use three and have seven on standby. Before you know it you’ll be wondering if you should be publishing all your creative genius on Drivethrurpg as a list of 100 random encounters....Have Fun Everyone.
Agreed. I've been in the game for about as long as you, and this is my approach. I've tried to recreate this with my little decks, which cuts down the prep work for fleshed out random encounters, and lay out in the free guide on my site how to run this effectively.
I completely agree. While I framed this video from a story perspective, I ended up presenting more about connecting them to the setting to make them part of an immersive experience for your players
One thing I enjoy doing, is having a "questboard" at the heroes guild, a guild of adventurers that the parties in my campaigns belongs to. I have jobs posted, and have the players pick the quest for the next session, and prep accordingly. I will make up the encounters, even the enemy encounters. In those cases, I prep for the encounter, but leave it as an open encounter. Meaning I will roll for the time I choose to star the encounter, or just throw it in when it feels right. Either way, it's not a random encounter, but it's randomly timed
Thanks for the great advice, had only planned out combat random encounters, did have appropriate opponents. But describing weather creates a great vivid immersion for the group, and encounters could be non combat descriptors.
For me random encounters are not random in the sense of 'when' but random in the sense of 'what', as I roll/determine my 'random encounters' during my prep. During the game, even if I know there's not going to a random encounter I like to roll dice behind the screen to keep the players on edge during travel and rests.
I love your videos. I just started DMing a few months ago and thanks to videos like these, I'm always very prepared yet flexible and my players LOVING the campaign we are running :)
My answer to random encounters is for the dm to host a couple separate games with the group that make your world a living world. For example you can play a diplomacy group where the players run into various armies from different countries for encounters.
When I roll random encounters in the wild, I always create a bit of the encounter's history. The why of their presence here. And I always do so using random oracles to create something I couldn't have forseen. If the encounter is going to be random, it's very random. For humans, brigands and bandits or merchants and hunters, this gives some opportunity for role-playing interactions. For beasts of some sort, it gives a chance for some investigation after the fact. If they fled, track down where they fled to if the party wants, or follow the trail from where they came if those are different directions. Loot or story or sympathy, be it what it may. It all creates a sense of a world that exists beyond the PCs. A world that moves and acts without consideration for what the party is doing, and it's good to have things like that on hand even if the party ignores it. It can become a little plot point that comes back later, even if it's just something that shows up in local rumours or the like.
I'm replying to myself because that comment is long enough. I ran an entire side-quest that lasted several sessions originating solely from a random encounter with a pair of large predatory birds. The party recognized them as a fairly rare species and a couple unscrupulous party members wanted to kill them for their alchemically significant feathers. Some of the party attacked and both birds fled after some combat, one by wing and the other by foot due to an injured wing. The two who wanted to hunt and the druid started tracking the injured one for very different reasons, dragging the party along with. They found the bird trying to get up a tree without flight to get into its nest just a few feet away from the dead body of an older bird who had clearly been hunted for its feathers. One of the hunters had a bit of a change of heart and the other had the party collectively threaten to break bones if he killed that bird. The druid healed the bird and that one enounter led to the party tracking down the hunter responsible, a man whose only souce of a life-saving medicine for his wife was a particular noble who was using the hunter to add rare animal goods to his collection. This resulted in the party going to a totally different city, meeting this noble who was a despicable little man of arrogance. He was so sure of his immunity to the law. His forged paperwork was airtight, so he believed. The party spent three sessions gathering evidence on the lord's wrongdoings and presented them to the duke who promptly stripped the lord of all titles, seized the illegitimate assets, and essentially ruined the name of the noble house. As reward, the party took as much of the medicine as they could and gave it to the hunter. The party loved that little arc.
personally pre-session i prep 1 major encounter for the session for something i expect the players to do, a couple traveling encounters where i think they may go and then just kind of go with the flow. Downside of my homebrew campaign is it's about 2 years old now and the PC's are 16 going on 17... so they can basically go anywhere in my world by just deciding to teleport somewhere random. I unfortunately can't do a lot of actual "prep" besides having a general idea of what's going on in all the areas they have access to teleportation circles and knowing what my bbeg and his lieutenants are doing. best example of this i can think of... once early in my campaign at level 6 i had them face off against an adult green dragon as a mini boss encounter going into level 7, i hadnt put much thought into the dragon besides plopping him in the jungle/swamp area they were exploring on a newly discovered continent.... i expected them to kill the dragon and find a small map in his cache of treasure showing the surrounding area..and i hadnt planned much for that map beisdes a few ruins marked that they could explore.. and then the pc's walk up to the dragon and start talking to it instead of attacking lol. on the fly i made up a chromatic dragon empire, this was the southern tip of the green empire with a blue empire to the northwest(the PC party had two blue dragonborn...) this has lead the party to making friends with that green dragon and travel to the blue dragon empire, who is now... multiple years and 10 levels later... one of their biggest allies. point is nothing ever goes as planned lol
Random encounters start off as a punishment for malingering. 2d4 Orc was consider a 1st-level random encounter in basic. They didn't carry much treasure, and you got most of you xp from killing monsters, but from treasure. Get in, kill the keyed encounters, take their treasure hoards, get out. Of course, moving fast means you might miss a trap...
I learned early on that the "random" in "random encounter" is only related to timing! I build my own table with 6-8 encounters, replacing them after they are used. They are all related to the campaign or just something I know my players will like.
I've gotta be honest I've never done a random encounter I just make a story and we do it haha. But I'm trying a sandbox now so I'm having to learn a lot
I take it you don't like random encounters that aren't connected to the main story. The thing is that random encounters have never really been random, even in the early days.
Just wanna say, i was also a kid that grew up on pokemon blue. I would go into the fields around my community and make-pretend that i was on a pokemon journey. If only i could go back in time and give my 12 year old self my smart phone with Pokemon Go loaded. I am sure i could hatch more eggs when i was younger
Funny thing about random encounters is they are MEANT TO BE AVOIDED! (I’m not yelling at you, Bob. Just the new players that say they don’t like random encounters.) We, as players, should want to avoid these encounters. Rangers in the woods, rogues in the dungeon, not wearing “loud armor”, prioritizing stealth and perception to both gain surprise and avoid encounters when possible. All random encounters should either provide information, be VERY dangerous, or be interesting to interact with.
