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- One Fire Ant; Four Owlbears; A Green Dragon; = Boring... - A travelling bard who sells magic items; A strange little girl singing alone in the woods; A crying ogre who lost his beloved club = Fun!
Solutions 1. don't roll random encounters, plan them. Solves the wasted game time, the unrealistic portion, and can be planned to be less numerous. 2.tie them into the overall story so they AREN'T pointless 3. make sure you throw an ancient red dragon at a party of level 5s. It will really LIVEN up the place.
I actually did #3 but it wasn't a random. The fighter was acting like a dumbass and the bard rolled a nat 20 to convince the dragon not to kill all of them. So close to a party wipe lol.
@@prestonjones1653 One of my group would insist on taking one to be a pet in the future, another one would take the rest to sell and the other would steal them all later and make a big-ass omelette.
Nah. The pool isn't a healing pool. It just trades secrets. You give it a secret. Then it gives you a secret. No one else can get the secret you got. It is gone from the pool. But someone else can come and get the secret you left, or perhaps some other secret. The pool eats up a secret once every month. That secret is removed from the pool. The pool dies if it has no more secrets. You can donate it a secret without getting a secret in return. This gives you a random small, single-use effect. It also puts you in better favour with the pool, increasing the chances that the pool's not gonna give you a secret that leads you to some trap or whatever. It's also known as the pool of blood because your wife fucked your neighbour and you're chaotic evil. That wife never donated secrets. Don't be like Bob's wife.
Encounters can also be environmental. Crossing a river where a bridge has broken, or having to detour around a rock or mud slide. Perhaps they stumble across a shortcut, but it's through a mountain that has higher risk of encounters. Choices.
As the Story progresses, some ideas are not used. Often my players just level past an adventure or did not bother to explore that part of the world at all. I let that other NPC adventuring parties done that and now my players have random encounters with others that speak of these events.
Not all Ideas will be used. Often my players just level past an adventure, or do not explore that part of the world at all. Other adventures live in thi world too and that those were doing that thing. The players might then encounter NPCs who speak of these events that happened elsewhere.
- the "my child fell down the well" - the "the mother who called for your help turns out to be ghost, you find skeleton in well" - the "our cart broke down" - the "you need to pay taxes to cross this bridge" - the "tree fell on the road" - the "strange person passes by" - the "hey boys you wanna check out our brothel" - the "we're burning a witch" - the "we think one of you is a witch" - the "have you seen this strange person?" - the "we're looking for bandits" - the "stranger(s) want to hitch a ride / tag along" - the "hitchhikers try to rob you", or - the "rowdy people are looking for hitchhikers who're hiding in your wagon right now" - the "please deliver letter/item to..." - the "caravan of traders," - the "clerics on pilgrimage" - the "people who just got mugged, claim to be a caravan of traders / clerics" - the "traveling circus" - the "refugees fleeing from plague" - the "naked man with amnesia" - the "UFO encounter" - the "someone hired not so competent assassins" - the "group of adventurers with shitty gear want to be like you" - the "group of adventurers with much better gear mock your little group" - the "pack of wolves with a feral child thinks she's also a wolf"
One I'm really excited to try out is "Widower asks you to seek out his young daughter who'se gone missing. The weird catch is recently she's been talking about a friend she made in the woods"
Party's traveling from one town to the next so to fill the gap I pick a forest random encounter table in the DMG around the parties level and make my roll. I roll a vampire...it's about midday. Vampire's a bit over level for this group right now so I go for it; "you hear rustling in a nearby hedge as you walk down the road. Erupting from hedge comes a bloodthirsty vampire! Who promptly vaporizes into ash." Party laughs and we're on our way. On the way back from that town I roll off the same table and low and behold I get it again. We were in a lazy mood so I throw another vampire at them in broad daylight to the same effect. Someone asks why there's so many stupid vampires in the area, we laugh. A few games later they're headed down that same road, I roll the same table, comedy's rule of threes is in effect so I set the scene; "down the road you see a loan pale figure standing in the shade of the nearby trees." The party knows it's a vampire, "he takes a step towards you into the light, his skin sparkling like diamonds in the suns rays. He attacks!" They roll initiative to fight the Twilight vampire, he begins to passive-aggressively attack the women in the party. Thing is, he's kicking their asses, the fight drags on and he is really taking it out of them they need to do something or someone is gonna die. The new girl in the party, it's her first game has spent the last two rounds frantically pouring Player's Handbook looking up her sorcerers spells, it comes to her turn and she looks directly into my eyes, a stern look on her face she says "I cast Erase!" "I don't think that spell works against..." She cuts me off; "erases mundane writing..." and turns the book to me pointing at the spell description. "Okay...he vanishes in a puff of literature." I was too impressed to say no.
I have a tip for designing encounters: pull inspiration from movies and books. I was running a campaign a while ago that was filled with gags and many jokes, it was a very lax campaign. My answer for story elements and random encounters? Monty python and the quest for the holy grail. They're traveling through the molten crags and they've only had fights for a while? Bridge of doom. Passing through the mountains and nothing's happened in a while? Tim the sorcerer is here and he has warned you of the worlds deadliest rabbit. Can't think of something to keep the players from entering a city without starting a fight? The French are mocking them. I need something to liven up this trip through the forest? The undying black knight guards the path. Monty Python itself is really just a comedic session of DnD made into film.
Monty Python's The Holy Grail is literally just a 1:1 DnD session. That alone should be inspiration for a few sessions of humorous encounters. The Knights that go Neep!, "Bring out your dead!", The Black Knight, The Holy Hand Grenade, The French mockery, "She's a Witch!", the lust of lancelot, etc. Even skit in any Python special can easily be extended into a 30min situation in the right hands.
I think my only problem with this is : copying it 1:1 makes it kinda boring/bad, reminds me of all those bad implemanted pop culture movies. But I guess this isn't what you had in mind that one should straight out copy the encounter of the movies but referencing them in a a funny and clever/dumb way.
@@anblueboot5364 Reskin the rabbit into an artificer terrified of a platypus in his workshop, who rewards you for killing/relocating it with some item or another.
Another thing you could do to improve random encounters is to coin flip to determine if they are hostile or not and then maybe a d4 or d6 for motivation (food, respect, direction, money, shelter, companionship).
My process is that I roll to see if something is going to happen. If yes, I roll to see where it is on the spectrum of auto-threat to best thing since sliced bread. Then I roll for strength/quality/size of the encounter. I already have a small list of possible encounters in my head based on terrain and level of civilization and tables of monster/people stats ready and at hand. I combine that all into a quick encounter that looks like I had it prepared in advance. - - - I have been running games for about 30 (or more?) years, so I have all of that experience to work with, and I have a group of long-experienced players at the table.
“Why is it that in dnd, Pokémon, and most rpg’s every living thing wants to test your might” Yep that made me laugh, right there under piles and piles of zubat corpses
Another pro: they can create adventures on their own. When You roll for a "Polar bear" in a desert becuase You mixed the tables. Don't reroll. Put it there. You Will get more out of it than giant scorpion n 87
When I run sessions that involve a lot of travel, I try to stay light on the encounters. However, when I do give encounters, most of the time they are non-combat, and often involve RP with an NPC. I find that this kind of encounter helps describe and immerse the players in the world, much more effectively than a fight with the odd owlbear or wolf pack.
One idea, ask your party if they are "looking for trouble". Would they rather pay a nominal fee and carry sufficient rations so that they use reputable roads, follow a map, don't have to get off the beaten path to hunt, etc. or would they rather investigate every abandoned cart in the ditch or potentially distressed shouts in the woods etc. For an interesting twist, say that it only takes one "trouble-seeker" for the entire group to roll the "looking for trouble" table. For a more nuanced approach, use an encounter table (a mix of good neutral and bad, social, puzzle and combat) and every time you roll, ask yourself if you can reasonably justify the encounter within the setting and the "looking for trouble" of your party. If you cannot justify that this is likely to happen in the scenario, say they had a peaceful journey. Example: you roll an encounter about guards doing stop-and-frisk because [insert existing side quest e.g. poisoned food traffic or slave trade]. If the party isn't looking for trouble, they won't even ask the guards what they are looking for and you will only mention in passing "after a few hours you encounter a few guards that ask to check the content of your cart but they barely give a glance and let you on your way; the sun is beaming hard and you need to stop every few hours for your horses to rest". If the party is "looking for trouble" or if one of the characters has a bounty, then you actually role play the encounter knowing that the players might get themselves in trouble or gather some quest information.
Perhaps the party hears of a time where the roads are particularly clear from local tribal bandits and such. However, that's because these tribes have a legend or superstition associated with the road at that time of the month or year. The players risk encountering the objects of these superstitions, and their CR is higher, but the possibility of running into them is much smaller because it's only one or two things as opposed to droves of bandits.
They don't have to be a waste of time, but at least in my group the DM threw so many encounters at us during his one shot and then kept asking how we weren't already almost done with the dungeon like 2 hours in. His pacing is horrible and he kept taking too many breaks for too long, but he also kept throwing unnecessary encounters at us consisting of enemies with super high HP and above 20 AC as the generic enemy soldiers, and only our Paladin was able to hit them reliably. I had a +11 to my attack rolls and still couldn't hit reliably WITH ADVANTAGE. That should tell you how badly he needs to tone down his generic enemies.
A possible RNG is also literally nothing, "The party continues through the forest, but suddenly comes out to a clearing, lacking any trees, grass, foliage nor animal life; not a sound is heard, it is dead quiet and disturbingly still...".
My favorite "nothing"/wtf random encounter is a 10 foot wide trail of dissolved plantlife. Meta gaming, the trail us caused by a gelatinous cube, so one way leads to a cube the other leads to a dungeon it was fleeing from.
reminds me of the "Devils tramping ground" , a ring shaped patch of earth devoid of plant growth 10 miles from Siler City, where supposedly the devil comes at night to walk in circles while thinking of new evil plans, which now that I think of it also sounds like a random DnD enounter.
A nice random encounter which might even serve the story line in a way is the “crying girl”: The heros are traveling from own town to another, they arrive at a small river. One of them starts noticing some weird crying sounds which seem to come from a couple feet away behind a tree. When the look they find a young girl in a dirtied white dress standing at the river crying. (This alone could be funny when the players thing it is a trap) when they talk to her she is so surprised that she falls into the water, the heros will probably save her (the water is only three feet deep but the girl can’t swim like it seems). After they saved her she tells them that her doll fell into the water and she ran Stream downwards to get it back but she lost sight and don’t know how long she ran and felt lost. Now the players are either getting the doll back, Which might hang on a twinge a bit down the stream or someone fished it out (good way to introduce an important NPC) Or the players bring her home. She is the daughter of a wealthy man who is incredibly lucky that the players brought her home (it might got dark while bringing her back). The father gives them a small reward and he might give them the next quest!
Pop-up markets, sometimes with a pickpocket or two, are my favourite random encounters. Telling my players that they see smoke in the distance, only for them to find out its just some guy living off from the road with a fireplace lit are pretty good as well, they make a good way of relaxing tension players may have built up from previous battles, give them an opportunity to buy some handmade goods, or simply make a friend. Random encounters can sometimes be the bane of a campaign or sometimes they can be one of the minor things that makes the world feel truly alive. edit: Completely forgot about the fun you can have with Bandits. Should your players spare some bandits they encounter on their travels, its always fun to maybe have them meet one of their 'friends' in a later bandit encounter. It's usually best to have the returning bandit npc not be a big evil 'i have no feelings' bandit boss, but rather an ex-farmhand struggling to make ends meet. Most players will show at least a bit of sympathy and send the surrendering bandits on their way, perhaps minus a few items of clothing and weapons.
Great advice create an encounter then another. I have a number of tables for rolling encounters but this time I did so in advance. The encounter "you meet 5 labourers walking through the street" turned into an encounter with 5 labourers off to a pawn shop to sell a jade dagger they found smuggled in a sack of grain. This dagger could be to summon a minor demon and was due to be sold to a local lord who would use it to deal with a rival. Suddenly the players were knee deep in the local politics plus a merchant who traded forbidden items. A whole sub plot unfolded from one random encounter that I took some time over!
Nonsense like this requires an actual reason, not tales from the far side. If that were possible then humanity's millennia long war against wolves would have produced some smart wolves in real life. As is this would break my immersion and make the whole thing rather unenjoyable. But to give contructive criticism...isn't there rats that are smart because of mages or something. Cranium rats? Why not use them as a template and have this be a side quest. Thrash the evil wizard or what not that is making the mutant wolves!
@@jacobfreeman5444 Honestly some groups are more into the comedy but you could pretty easily adapt wolves to be smarter. Have them be corrupted by dark magic which increases their intelligence and links them telepathically so that they work more effectively as a pack and can more easily ambush prey.
I've found some solid success rolling on Xanathar's tables and then figuring out what that creature's presence would entail using improv. Most of the time the encounters don't necessarily need to be solved through combat and solid roleplaying can overcome them. I've had a random mage offer to cast a spell for the party in exchange for coin, a swarm of bats that, at the end of an initial attack, were adopted by the party, a vampire spawn hiding in a dark alley protected by swarms of rats that the party gathered the local guard and used the pipes of the sewers to overcome, etc. I've found that encounter tables are great for involving your players in the world and giving them exp through roleplay as long as you can keep up on the improv and take the time to figure out potential consequences. Some great quests happen that I never even have to write.
A specific thing I like doing is having the party see another group of adventurers going to do the same quest. The two parties probably have a chat and the random adventurers head off to the dungeon before our party. Once our party gets there, they immediately see a head of one of the other party members. As they go through the dungeon they find more of the bloody scene. Have maybe one or two members survive so they can tell what happened
I typically use the excuse of “the BBEG told us to attack you”, I also make sure the enemies follow the same theme as the BBEG. And all my encounters can potentially have information.
I like random encounters, because I'll typically spin them into a detour plot line that the players can engage with. Say for example, they are in a forest, and they come across a giant elk and kill it. That Elk will be mentioned again, and differently depending on what cultures they are near. The druid tribes may pray and protect the elk, seeing it as a divine gift, and the revelation that it has died angers them. Or, if they bring the dead elk to a Local city to be traded, they might have angered a king appointed and egotistical hunter who believes the party have stolen his kill. Even a passing reference to a random encounter and the creatures/settings/objects involved helps to make them feel more connected to the game world.
My group's monk 1/warlock 2 has a giant elk for a patron. They fought him in the first session, then he multiclassed into warlock and declared that "The Moose" was his patron. I now have a quest giver NPC to move things along with, and I'm developing a backstory and personality for his patron. All hail the Moose King!
A thing I would like to add is that random encounters can be story based. Say that there is a very large bandit clan that has control over a region. When traveling in that region, there could be a higher chance of random bandit attacks. If, in the story, you start to dismantle the clan, as the clan gets continually weaker, there is a drop in bandit attacks. Very good video and as an average skill DM for my group I agree with every topic you bring up. Great vid as always!
What came to mind as the wolves popped up, was that you notice scat along the trail, now how fresh is a wilderness perception roll. Were they passing thru, are they going to stalk the group. Certainly can worry the group. The high perception characters roll to see if they notice the 2 dragons on the horizon, and if the dragons perceive lunch. Etc, an encounter doesn’t have to result in anything.
Maybe instead of having a wolf encounter in broad daylight, you could start it by saying that the players hear some snuffling noises outside their tent at night, close to the tree they stashed their food and supplies in.
I work as a paramedic and I have spent 2 years on night shift and, boy howdy, I have seen some RANDOM encounters! I once witnessed 3 druggies collectively wearing animal print jammies March up the center of a 5 lane road riding a clown tricycle, pushing a shopping cart, and riding an electric scooter
I limit my random encounters, and usually whenever I do introduce a random encounter, it ties into particular story elements. Before the party goes out on a trek, I write out a list of the potential encounters the party might come across in that location. These moments can be world-building opportunities and/or a chance to learn more about the plot.
A random encounter always has a possibility of being more interesting beyond combat and could even have potential for future subplot, side quests, and/or even add a twist to the main plot. eg: A highwayman who begs for their life and is spared could later provide valuable information or service.
Been DMing for about 20 years and these videos still help me. Much of this stuff one will figure out with trial and error but never put into words, it feels good to be validated that I'm a decent DM.
Random encounters don't always have to be a battle encounter. My favorite encounter I've given my players was this chest that was on a carriage. The players soon realized it was a mimic holding the reigns. They talked to it and it wanted food in exchange for the items it had collected over it's journey. The amount of meat the players gave would determine the rarity of the magic item. A little broken, sure, but it gave the players a chance to have a unique moment that wasn't just a "fight these animals because they're in your way." event.
I've been doing the "Unspoken Stories" thing for years, and they add depth to the world and new plot points. I've never heard of them be called that and I love it
Random encounters are great. They add to the world and make it feel more alive. They don't have to be fights either. You can bring NPCs that survive back later and that gives the players some attachment and may even be an opportunity for a new quest or hook that you want to use later (i.e. oh I want an NPC to give this quest wouldn't it be cool if it was a bandit they let go ten sessions ago who is getting his act together in a tavern and needs help with something?). You can also have large scale in game events, perhaps even that your players were responsible for if it's that kind of game, directly cause some of these random encounters. Even though it isn't relevant overall, it adds to the fun, the world, and the characters. You're basically just describing bad random encounters. I keep a list of relevant self-written random encounters for each region that could happen and only use them if context allows. I also try vary them and ensure they can be solved in some way other than combat. All the cons you give are things that just mean you're doing random encounters badly rather than things that mean random encounters are bad.
My favorites are noncombat encounters that add flavor to a region, like a late night dance with Fey or the ghosts of an ancient battle still marching to their positions
How to speed up fights; use 4e minion rules (minions have 1hp), split the monsters into small groups (maybe by type) that share initiative, have Monsters flee when low on health or numbers, and/or use monster pool or unit hp (instead of tracking all the monsters' hp separately, add it into a pool and every time enough damage is done to the pool to account for 1 monster, remove the one most recently hit.
I really like the idea of people being able to choose which random encounters to follow. One idea I have is the an adventure in the Grey Waste, there's the city called "The Death of Innocence." Your party can come across a crying child and try to help only to find she's an insane hag who tries to kill them. After her defeat, you get some needed supplies and a map. Or (at random) she can be an actual little girl who needs help, and after helping her she gives you the supplies and a map.
If I am on the plains of Africa, I am food. Ya see the danger is the adventure party is actually FOOD for 100's of other creatures. Kids now days are scared of danger in RPGs. Even your tiny villages are simply FOOD sources.
I was playing Out of the Abyss with sone friends, and a random Umber Hulk appears. My level 2 bard has a nat 20 rolled on him which ends up instakilling him. The DM says that the Umber Hulk straight up yeets me off the side of the cliff we were next to. I was pissed. Not only had a character i had been thinking of for 2 weeks been instakilled, but it wasn't even story related. I straight up felt like yeeting *MYSELF* off a cliff afterwards.
Dms who do that are terrible let’s face it as a dm myself players can ruin what you have planned but thats what makes d&d fun as a dm you have to think up the story as it goes on meaning if a player kills something on the first action or first few actions of the fight then you don’t make it kill them or another player right as it dies
Nice work man, I'm digging your content. For my games, I try to foreshadow my encounters, even the random ones. I also try to make them as organic to the environment as I can. If my party is travelling through a forest, they often hear at a local outpost about the dangerous wildlife that lives there. If they decide to make camp for the night in a swamp, they might be attacked by a gator or large snake that thinks the sleeping folks would be an easy meal. It's just the little things that make them seem less boring, less contrived, and more engaging for the party; we all enjoy it more when they hear an area is dangerous or treacherous, and then they see or experience it firsthand. Anything to make the world that much more immersive.
This is pretty good advice! I'd like to add in one more tip that has always helped me. I generally like to throw in one or two random encounters on lengthy travelling segments to give the players an idea of the types of creatures in the area, some of the dangers the locals may face, and to have a visual representation (via the battle map) of the surrounding area. Plus, as mentioned, it gives the players a chance to use their abilities and can also help to wear the party down as part of a dungeon crawl before they ever even reach the dungeon. However, my tip is, if you're planning on including random encounters in a segment of your game: roll/determine them in advance. That way you can take a little time to make the encounter more interesting than "four bears in some randomly placed trees that all rush you at once the end". There is a segment in a book by Rich Burlew, "Dungeonscape", that has some pretty good advice on creating interesting encounters which is applicable to any edition of the game.
I actually really like the random encounter tables from STK. They almost all have a good tie in with the main story, so it isn't just running into travelers at sea. You're running into survivors of a shipwreck from a frost giant long ship. You're encountering farmers trying to herd sheep away from Hill giants. There are still some orcs and goblins at random, but they tie into other giant related story lines.
My favorite random encounter iv ever done was "a cow in the field". Its exactly as it sounds just a lone cow in the middle of a field. My players spent 30+ minutes just trying to figure out wtf they should do about it and when they decided to approach i made them make a wis saving throw (they all failed) this knocked them unconscious and when they woke up the cow was gone. I troll my players a lot with stupid stuff that doesn't always have major plot importance and they seem to love it.
Another option that I feel didn't get coveted is flavoring your random encounters with some of the backstory or a moral dilemma for a specific character. While not singling them out and putting on a pedestal obviously. You'll want them to feel as though their character has a place in your world but be careful that they dont let that go to their heads.
Very late, but I've recently started running a "Greed or Glory" random encounter set up based on some of the ideas here. In short, at the end of a session, players write down a reward(greed) or encounter(glory) that will be the center of a random event. Then, depending on what they chose, they either get an unknown challenge, worthy of the reward... or a reward worthy of their conquest.
when you roll 2 dragons the DM should interpret that sensibly. The two dragons aren't attacking the party, they're attack each other and the party may have to deal with the fallout or be perfectly fine and see a wonderful "encounter"
Your videos have been super helpful to me as a DM and my friends who get to enjoy a much more in depth and thoughtful game. We've been playing the same campaign for just over a year and a half now but when we started, we were all newbs lol. Thankfully, with help of your videos and others like them and of course our lord and saviors at Critical Role, we have all become much more seasoned players. Keep doing what you do man 👍I genuinely appreciate it.
I actually had the opposite problem with one of the problems you said you had... Instead of having monsters/bandits/animals/ect. attack all the time, I rarely ever had an encounter based on dice rolls, and when I did, it was almost always insect type creatures or badgers, mainly badgers But we got something funny out of it, a inside joke turned canon character based on one of my player's brother... Lord Jub-Jub the Badger King
I remember me and my friends were traveling to another town and it was clear that there was nothing planned for along the way. I did the DM a favor ( I think) I pulled out my phone and played meme songs, we danced around and stuff and then went back to the game.
1:58 I used to play with a wizard who'd do this EVERYTIME. Never used magic middle or fireball, tried to do weird shit. He had to think it through on his turn
Fun fact, in the early editions of D&D random encounters also had randomly determined dispositions, so you were equally likely to have monsters you encounter be friendly or neutral rather than hostile, just fellow travelers on the road.
I hope this helps the channel. Thank you!! I have had so many frustrating games before I became a dungeon master of just power campaigns where it was just fight after fight and No Story. Because of this I did research into Where and Why monsters act they way they act to improve this ROLEPLAY game. This video I love it so much cause it's everything I've wanted to tell my old Dungeon dudes(not masters) in the most polite way. Keep it up man
As an old-timey roleplayer from the early days I see another element to this. I know and understand that back then, random encounters were meant to add to the feeling of being part of a living, breathing world. The whole gaming experience wasn't nearly as well developed and thought through. We were often making shit up and adjusting official material as we went out of pure necessity. There were pretty much 'holes' between adventures to be filled with something other than shopping and having a night out at the local tavern. What I'm taking from decades of experience with it is that not everything has to be pre-planned. Nor should it be. I'm not arguing for random encounters themselves, but for an element of randomness, because that's part of a plausible world and thus a more authentic experience. It CAN be completely unnecessary, if you have one or more players who create wantom randomness at a reasonable pace. I've met many of those and learned to make use of their 'gifts' extensively. But sometimes it's just important to actually have something remarkable happen that has nothing to do with the main story. Otherwise you might as well write a book instead of playing a game.
I like the way Savage Worlds handles random encounters. You draw from a deck of cards and if you get a face card something happens depending on the suit of the card. Spades are enemies, hearts are strangers, diamonds are treasure, and clubs are obstacles. It makes travel interesting without having players get attacked every time they move. You might get attacked if you're unlucky, but more often than not you're going to find treasure or some random people traveling the same path.
Couple of thoughts: Remember in 1st Ed., you got experience at 1 per gp earned, so your best bet was almost always to avoid combat. Wandering monsters made this difficult. It's right there on the cover of the Player's Manual: guys prying the jewels from a statues eyes. It subverted the whole murder hobo thing.
How about you use reasonable random encounters and reroll or rebalance them to make sense? Just saying. Also use sub types and templates on stuff. Also you can tie them to the plot loosely. Like having the villain have something to do with it in indirect way.
I have had random encounters turn into the main focus of the party over a dozen or more sessions. I have used weather against them (once, the were stuck on a eroding hill in a flash flood, and had to use spells to shore up the dirt and divert the force of the water to survive). I have brought back random non-hostile encounters from sessions ago and they have roleplay and a source of information. I have had them find a locked chest of Cram unaccountably left on the side of a rarely used road (they didn't follow that thread). - - - Random encounters don't need to be random, they don't need to be fights, and they don't even need to be other beings.
One of my favorite random encounter ideas is a mimic tavern. Just a tavern or in the middle of nowhere, have an npc join the party for a bit only to have him go into the tavern ahead of the players only to have him eaten, and the tavern get up and walk off. No real point, just entertaining, and players are guaranteed to recount the story of "that one time a tavern ate someone. "
By far this has been the most usefull video for me. And extremely relevant. I'm still a new DM and what I did so far was create a list of random encounters for my worlds various locations and some Dungeons quest etc for each session that tied in with what the players wanted and could do. The way this would play out is that if they would be unsure what to do or travel a bunch i would throw out 1 2 or sometimes more random encounters (some where really short ones like a burnt down village) until they eventually (mostly after just 2 encounters) entered my dungeons where all the fun crazy but a bit more planned stuff happened. This system has worked well for me up until the final session where the party accidentally ignored every single hook to planned story things or dungeon and just proceeded to do their own thing and travel ridiculous amounts. Since I did not want to break immersion by telling the players that this was not the way so instead my only option was (atleast i thought at the time) to keep throwing random encounters at them. This lead to some crazy stuff but eventually got boring and the players aswell as I got really unsure what to do. Thanks to this video I now know that it was the large amount of encounters that did this. I think I will still keep my system but leave out the set number of encounters per distance which i came up with because I feel like that spawned the copious amounts of forced encounters. If you read this entire thing thanks for reading my rambling! XD and thank you Logan for these great videos :D keep it up
Revisiting this question. I think that the trick to 'design' a great random encounter tables is to view it as an inspirational tool instead of filler - the randomness and unpreparedness throws a wrench in your normal DM routine and it can lead to intersting situations and plot devices that you can use. Players don't need to know that the encounter was "random" - they will assume that it's planned and act accordingly.
I usually take the "unspoken stories" approach. One time, my players were traveling across a wasteland that had been scorched by a great dragon hundreds of years ago. I had them come across a small, ruined hut with a couple charred corpses outside. I THOUGHT they would like the little bit of mystery, and I was planning on showing that there WAS at least one child who lived here, but they vanished. The intense and dark scene was shattered when one of my friends jumped up and shouted, "Holy shit! Luke Skywalker!" They still make jokes and Star Wars quotes most of the time whenever I throw in a random encounter.
Me and my friends are new to DnD, I'm the GM. So far, I've run one homebrewed campaign which I wrote myself as a one-shot, which was actually well received. During the traveling period, the players rolled for five total random encounters out of 15 possible encounters, all of which I wrote, and only 6 were purely combat. I found that making my own random encounters brought a spark of creativity to the game, making the world more flavorful and enjoyable in the end. I plan to get some official adventures so I can run a more entertaining plot, but I'll make my own random encounters
If I can remember one random encounter, I would say that it was the time me and my friends were doing a Homebrew campaign as a group of peasants who accidentally killed the hero and had to take their place only to have the adventure almost end with a tpk. We were level 2 and carrying the hero's body to a secluded monk that lived deep in the woods who was said to have the power to bring the souls of lost heroes back to life if their body was intact. Before any of us knew it, the DM rolled the dice and what he said next made me realize that time was not on our side: " As you're walking through the woods, you start to hear strange noises coming from bushes and strange ravenous grunting ahead of you. You then see a figure in the distance shrouded in fog. But as the figure gets closer, you start to see blood on them and that's when you realize in horror that you encountered a cannibal but not just any cannibal: you made the mistake of running into Shia LaBeouf! Roll initiative." By the time the battle was over we ended with as follows: my pitchfork wielding farmer had lost a left hand, a right leg and his family-owned hat that hid his bald spot, the cook lost all of his cooking supplies in the battle due to making a bomb out of his sharp knife collection, the Scribe was dead after Shia LaBeouf broke both of his arms and ripped them out after the Scribe failed to get a sneak attack with his sharp quill, the blacksmith lost both of his legs from a bear trap and was able to stitch one leg back in place before Shia LaBeouf grabbed the other one and knocked him unconscious, and the messenger sacrificed himself using the knife bomb to kill off Shia LaBeouf. Despite losing two of our best planners, it was a great random encounter despite the weirder stuff we encountered later on.
Had my party encounter Shia they killed him I said congrats you killed Shia Leboufe then one player burned the body kept his skull and had it made into a cup lol
This was awesome! I've always picked encounters that suit the situation best, like if the players are feeling like there's not enough combat I'll throw in a combat encounter during travel, and if the players are bored of combat I'll write up a roleplaying or problem-solving one. I'll also scale the difficulty depending on my players' liking.
For every campaign I have some backup random encounters setup. They always have to do with the story and theme of the campaign. Usually there’s are ways the players could interact with them without just killing them too. (But let’s be honest, they usually just try to kill them.)
I mean I've always had a solution to "they don't advance the plot" Make them a part of the plot, either a result of a job they didn't do earlier in the game, or agents of the big bad. Also, I always roll what the encounter is before the session, so I can prep my tactics beforehand
I play in a group of rotating GMs and there are two schools of thought: 1) tons of random encounters 2) no ransom encounters I think you provide a good middle ground and i love the idea of having the players decide a good encounter to your two bad ones and I'll definitely incorporate that in my campaign when i DM
The way I see it, encounters are like gas stations and those family-golf course/bowling alley/attraction pit stops. They happen on road trips, regardless
Random encounter are also necessary for game balance in D&D, since combat encounters are balanced around players having to manage their resources. Without them it's easy to end up with days with only one combat and make magic users too powerful
@Manek Iridius powerful until you can't long or even short rest and suddenly have the usefulness of a level 2 character in a level 16 dungeon, alone, as a second edition bard
If you want to make magic users less powerful in random encounters use the gritty realism variant rule during travel (short rest takes 8 hours, long rest is a week), that makes wizard arcane ability more useful and warlocks better. It then also keeps resource management while not having a stupid amount of encounters a day
This is definitely one I will replay over and over whenever I have free time to prep encounters. The game Pathfinder-Kingmaker has lots of these “don’t change the game, but have deep meaning to the environment” type encounters and I want to have a deck of those to choose from.
I'm glad you bring up the fact that not every random encounter needs to be a combat encounter. It ties in with the fact that combat isn't the only way to gain XP. I still need to figure out some random encounters to use in my games.
I personally love the simple way the Wilderness Kit made them work. I also love the deep and complex methods of provided in Adventures in Middle Earth.
I Roll encounters for ideas then re-calibrate and adjust the encounters as necessary, and let the logical repercussions of that encounter be followed as far as is reasonable. Works decently well when I am low on ideas and can even lead to semi-organic side quests.
one thing i did with a sandbox style camping was use random encounters as ways to start a storyline that the pcs could follow that may link to one pc's backstory.
I agree with this wholeheartedly! When I DM I don't like using random encounters, I have the time to make fully fleshed tactics and encounters. I try to keep it to one or less a session, for the next session I have a new one I made this week, a group of 5 blindfolded bandits. They hole up in an alcove by the road, the alcove is 10 feet off the path at the end of an ingrown path, they listen for footsteps inside their alcove, when they hear something, the single wizard in their group casts a spell that takes all exterior (the sun, moon, or stars. This makes it so light items the party has are actually useful as heck for once) light from the area (a 200-foot radius around the caster) that is a concentration level 2 spell and the bandits slip off their blindfolds, their eyes already adjusted to pitch black. The bandits have a monk (with level 3 abilities) three fighters, one with a shortsword and shortbow with 20 arrows, the other two with longswords and hand crossbows with 8 bolts each. Then the wizard whose only real purpose is for that spell, but can also cast some basic cantrips. Upon killing the bandits they can choose to search the area, and if they find the alcove they will stumble upon a cart full of combustibles and a note on a small table that talks about a plan to use the cover of the darkness spell to roll the cart up to a nearby city's watchtower at night and blow the tower up, allowing for a secondary raid during the confusion from the east. I added that little bit of story so the party will feel like they actually did something good for the world, even if it doesn't pertain to the story. I created this encounter because I felt that this fight fully plays into the theme of bandits, looking for absolutely any advantage they can for raids and looting travellers and exploiting it for unfair fighting grounds.
The way I work random encounters, is make them not all be fights. Prep your understanding of all of them so when you roll it, know what you’re going to do or have notes to use when you roll it, and keep your random combats keep within story. Which you basically said and I’m happy to hear
Your suggestions reminded me of something Zee Bashew from the Animated Spellbook mentioned. Take a bowl and write on four slips of paper (I changed that to one per player, minimum four) "nothing happens" and four bad or combat encounters. You then have each player write one good encounter and one bad encounter. They all go into the bowl and then while travelling you just draw one at random.
Awesome vid. Something I started using a while ago was a "designated leader". They might not actually lead the party but when ever I feel like it (at the time I am the dm) I will force them to roll a d20. Different groups of numbers will either be good (to a degree), bad (to a degree) or nothing at all
I generally only have random encounters as part of an adventure, to be something that either creates tension, or a way to make areas that has been clear never feel safe. I don't use the premade rules for this, but another system. Really for me, an encounter is there to take away resources, to create a sense of danger. The more time you spend not moving towards your goal, the more chances of having your resources taken away you have. But usually it ends up as maybe one random encounter per session. In one adventure I gave the players a haunted helmet, it was a great item so the player wanted to use it, but it also meant that a ghost started talking to the party. This gave them a sense of unease and a great way to help give the dungeon character. (This ghost voice would also tell them when monsters were coming to attack them, promting the random encounter)
This video makes me feel a bit better about how I've run "random encounters" as a DM. I wrote/am writing my own campaign and haven't had many chances to play (most of the same players are in another group, our "main" campaign) and so far they've had the intro (a big siege of highly valuable fort in the war effort by either side they were all tossed into for different reasons) before traveling to the nearest big city for their first main quest. To get from the fort in the north to the city in the mid-west, however, they had to ride a flatboat down the river a couple hundred miles. I divided the river journey into four sections (mainly based on biome: plains, swamp, forest, plains) and wrote up around three encounters for each section. For the plains, there was a bulette or some elephants (the latter they could avoid fighting if they managed to see and avoid the baby swimming across the river after it's herd), the swamp had an ambushing troll, some giant frogs, a giant crocodile, and maybe a hag or two (it was supposed to be the hardest section and they were to be given chances to avoid fighting by strategically planning their route (the river split around the swamp a bit), etc. Each fight added a new unique feature to the previous; the bulette would leap onto the boat and cause it to shake, which could cause disadvantage on dexterity checks and ranged attacks if left unattended; the swamp would have vines hanging over the boat they'd have to move around every couple rounds, that kind of thing. In each section, they'd do their group Perception check and I'd roll a D6, with 1 being the hardest, 2-3 being second hardest, 4-5 being easiest, and 6 being no encounter (something like that, anyways). There were plenty of ways around the fights and many could be resolved easily (animal handling checks, scaring away certain creatures, giving them what they really wanted). . . . Then we missed so many sessions that we only ended up doing one half-session with the one bulette encounter (which did go very well) before I said "You look at the captain's station at the back of the boat and find detailed logs, maps, and journals about previous trips up and down the river, where certain types of monsters live, and what the easiest paths are. With these, you make it the rest of the way to the city with ease." TL;DR: Preparation is great and fun and good but is easily wasted ;-;
i’m running an aquatic/pirate themed campaign and have mostly left random encounters out of it, but my players just recently did something that will affect a protection spell being amplified across the ocean. so i’m gonna be introducing more random encounters as a way to sort of motivate them to restore the spells.
Really informative! You know, I've ran into this problem during my last session where the DM was constantly trying to make us go off track even though he gave us a clear mission and kept throwing random encounters in our faces. One of the group got extremely bored and annoyed and made it his life goal to circumvent everything the DM did that wasn't in ljne with the plot. A very awkward session, i can tell you that much..
Hey guys, sorry about the gap between uploads. I was overloaded with holiday family, and then a monstrous flu kept me in bed for a week. But I’m back!
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It be fine
How DARE you?! /s
Please don't say savant like that, it makes me sad
Just in case u see this, im Dming and your content has been super inspiring to me, so thanks!
HOW nice?
- One Fire Ant; Four Owlbears; A Green Dragon; = Boring...
- A travelling bard who sells magic items; A strange little girl singing alone in the woods; A crying ogre who lost his beloved club = Fun!
A travelling ogre who sells little girls who sing? Hmm...
Story!
A strange girl singing alone in the woods? *grins*
A ork who lost his favorite axe
@@EradWir An Ork with a sword shoved up his ***
Solutions
1. don't roll random encounters, plan them. Solves the wasted game time, the unrealistic portion, and can be planned to be less numerous.
2.tie them into the overall story so they AREN'T pointless
3. make sure you throw an ancient red dragon at a party of level 5s. It will really LIVEN up the place.
I actually did #3 but it wasn't a random. The fighter was acting like a dumbass and the bard rolled a nat 20 to convince the dragon not to kill all of them. So close to a party wipe lol.
(3.5e) A "Very Young" Red Dragon is CR 5 lol. XD
I have been thinking about adding a random encounter to find/fall into a dragon nest with about a dozen eggs for my players to do as they wish.
@@prestonjones1653 One of my group would insist on taking one to be a pet in the future, another one would take the rest to sell and the other would steal them all later and make a big-ass omelette.
@@bitingapotato3277 about what I'm expecting.
Now I want a Healing Pond that shouts obscenities at my players. It'd be like the gargoyles from Fable II.
"Get that disgusting mitt away from me, you filthy maggot-ridden cretin!"
yeah definitely stealing this lol
I actually stole the door idea from fable as random quest gives in my campaigns! They look like gargoyles and act like the doors and they are a hoot!
The pool of secrets. It heals you, but you have to tell it secret about yourself.
The CN rogue: "I actually planned to burn down that orphanage from the start."
@@bakefire9138 *Paladin overhears and backstabs rogue*
Nah. The pool isn't a healing pool. It just trades secrets. You give it a secret. Then it gives you a secret. No one else can get the secret you got. It is gone from the pool. But someone else can come and get the secret you left, or perhaps some other secret.
The pool eats up a secret once every month. That secret is removed from the pool. The pool dies if it has no more secrets.
You can donate it a secret without getting a secret in return. This gives you a random small, single-use effect. It also puts you in better favour with the pool, increasing the chances that the pool's not gonna give you a secret that leads you to some trap or whatever.
It's also known as the pool of blood because your wife fucked your neighbour and you're chaotic evil.
That wife never donated secrets. Don't be like Bob's wife.
Damn. I didn't expect this many likes for the idea. 😝
Or what if the pool is gaurded by a Nothic?
Encounters can also be environmental. Crossing a river where a bridge has broken, or having to detour around a rock or mud slide. Perhaps they stumble across a shortcut, but it's through a mountain that has higher risk of encounters. Choices.
As the Story progresses, some ideas are not used. Often my players just level past an adventure or did not bother to explore that part of the world at all. I let that other NPC adventuring parties done that and now my players have random encounters with others that speak of these events.
Not all Ideas will be used. Often my players just level past an adventure, or do not explore that part of the world at all. Other adventures live in thi world too and that those were doing that thing. The players might then encounter NPCs who speak of these events that happened elsewhere.
I would much prefer that then 12 fights to travel 30 days (with like 5 night time attacks as well)
@@speedy01247 throw a random night time dragon appearance in there and that was basically the last campaign I was in
Oh, thank you thank you boatswain xd
- the "my child fell down the well"
- the "the mother who called for your help turns out to be ghost, you find skeleton in well"
- the "our cart broke down"
- the "you need to pay taxes to cross this bridge"
- the "tree fell on the road"
- the "strange person passes by"
- the "hey boys you wanna check out our brothel"
- the "we're burning a witch"
- the "we think one of you is a witch"
- the "have you seen this strange person?"
- the "we're looking for bandits"
- the "stranger(s) want to hitch a ride / tag along"
- the "hitchhikers try to rob you", or
- the "rowdy people are looking for hitchhikers who're hiding in your wagon right now"
- the "please deliver letter/item to..."
- the "caravan of traders,"
- the "clerics on pilgrimage"
- the "people who just got mugged, claim to be a caravan of traders / clerics"
- the "traveling circus"
- the "refugees fleeing from plague"
- the "naked man with amnesia"
- the "UFO encounter"
- the "someone hired not so competent assassins"
- the "group of adventurers with shitty gear want to be like you"
- the "group of adventurers with much better gear mock your little group"
- the "pack of wolves with a feral child thinks she's also a wolf"
These are great
One I'm really excited to try out is "Widower asks you to seek out his young daughter who'se gone missing. The weird catch is recently she's been talking about a friend she made in the woods"
"Have you seen this missing man?!" shouts the Imperial soldier, holding a sketch that looks exactly like him
Party's traveling from one town to the next so to fill the gap I pick a forest random encounter table in the DMG around the parties level and make my roll. I roll a vampire...it's about midday. Vampire's a bit over level for this group right now so I go for it; "you hear rustling in a nearby hedge as you walk down the road. Erupting from hedge comes a bloodthirsty vampire! Who promptly vaporizes into ash." Party laughs and we're on our way. On the way back from that town I roll off the same table and low and behold I get it again. We were in a lazy mood so I throw another vampire at them in broad daylight to the same effect. Someone asks why there's so many stupid vampires in the area, we laugh. A few games later they're headed down that same road, I roll the same table, comedy's rule of threes is in effect so I set the scene; "down the road you see a loan pale figure standing in the shade of the nearby trees." The party knows it's a vampire, "he takes a step towards you into the light, his skin sparkling like diamonds in the suns rays. He attacks!" They roll initiative to fight the Twilight vampire, he begins to passive-aggressively attack the women in the party. Thing is, he's kicking their asses, the fight drags on and he is really taking it out of them they need to do something or someone is gonna die. The new girl in the party, it's her first game has spent the last two rounds frantically pouring Player's Handbook looking up her sorcerers spells, it comes to her turn and she looks directly into my eyes, a stern look on her face she says "I cast Erase!"
"I don't think that spell works against..."
She cuts me off; "erases mundane writing..." and turns the book to me pointing at the spell description.
"Okay...he vanishes in a puff of literature."
I was too impressed to say no.
That is pure awesome.
I am using that gag.
It took me a minute to get it but I love the joke.
Did you give the player Inspiration? That's when you give her Inspiration.
I hope she said it with her best RBF......
I have a tip for designing encounters: pull inspiration from movies and books. I was running a campaign a while ago that was filled with gags and many jokes, it was a very lax campaign. My answer for story elements and random encounters? Monty python and the quest for the holy grail. They're traveling through the molten crags and they've only had fights for a while? Bridge of doom. Passing through the mountains and nothing's happened in a while? Tim the sorcerer is here and he has warned you of the worlds deadliest rabbit. Can't think of something to keep the players from entering a city without starting a fight? The French are mocking them. I need something to liven up this trip through the forest? The undying black knight guards the path. Monty Python itself is really just a comedic session of DnD made into film.
Monty Python's The Holy Grail is literally just a 1:1 DnD session. That alone should be inspiration for a few sessions of humorous encounters. The Knights that go Neep!, "Bring out your dead!", The Black Knight, The Holy Hand Grenade, The French mockery, "She's a Witch!", the lust of lancelot, etc. Even skit in any Python special can easily be extended into a 30min situation in the right hands.
Just crossed the bridge of doom? Throw in a police officer who arrests you for murdering a historian
I think my only problem with this is : copying it 1:1 makes it kinda boring/bad, reminds me of all those bad implemanted pop culture movies.
But I guess this isn't what you had in mind that one should straight out copy the encounter of the movies but referencing them in a a funny and clever/dumb way.
A man of culture, I see
@@anblueboot5364
Reskin the rabbit into an artificer terrified of a platypus in his workshop, who rewards you for killing/relocating it with some item or another.
Favorite random encounters: Critcal Role. More specifically, the bandits that keep showing up in campaign 2 and instantly regretting it.
"The No-Pants Bandits" are my favorite random encounter I've seen
TheMemester439 EXTREME SYPHILIS
Another thing you could do to improve random encounters is to coin flip to determine if they are hostile or not and then maybe a d4 or d6 for motivation (food, respect, direction, money, shelter, companionship).
Or even 2/3 or 3/4 are friendlies. Like you might actually see
That's pretty good or a hat with radom encounters
My process is that I roll to see if something is going to happen. If yes, I roll to see where it is on the spectrum of auto-threat to best thing since sliced bread. Then I roll for strength/quality/size of the encounter. I already have a small list of possible encounters in my head based on terrain and level of civilization and tables of monster/people stats ready and at hand. I combine that all into a quick encounter that looks like I had it prepared in advance. - - - I have been running games for about 30 (or more?) years, so I have all of that experience to work with, and I have a group of long-experienced players at the table.
I use random encounters as inspiration. Most of my random encounters are not random at all. I just let my players role some dice once in a while.
You forgot another motivation. Though you should REALLY clear that one with the players before.
“Why is it that in dnd, Pokémon, and most rpg’s every living thing wants to test your might”
Yep that made me laugh, right there under piles and piles of zubat corpses
Ikr its so hilarious seeing like level 1 bandits trying to take on the *probably* god of their world
Another pro: they can create adventures on their own.
When You roll for a "Polar bear" in a desert becuase You mixed the tables. Don't reroll. Put it there. You Will get more out of it than giant scorpion n 87
When I run sessions that involve a lot of travel, I try to stay light on the encounters. However, when I do give encounters, most of the time they are non-combat, and often involve RP with an NPC. I find that this kind of encounter helps describe and immerse the players in the world, much more effectively than a fight with the odd owlbear or wolf pack.
One idea, ask your party if they are "looking for trouble".
Would they rather pay a nominal fee and carry sufficient rations so that they use reputable roads, follow a map, don't have to get off the beaten path to hunt, etc. or would they rather investigate every abandoned cart in the ditch or potentially distressed shouts in the woods etc.
For an interesting twist, say that it only takes one "trouble-seeker" for the entire group to roll the "looking for trouble" table.
For a more nuanced approach, use an encounter table (a mix of good neutral and bad, social, puzzle and combat) and every time you roll, ask yourself if you can reasonably justify the encounter within the setting and the "looking for trouble" of your party. If you cannot justify that this is likely to happen in the scenario, say they had a peaceful journey.
Example: you roll an encounter about guards doing stop-and-frisk because [insert existing side quest e.g. poisoned food traffic or slave trade]. If the party isn't looking for trouble, they won't even ask the guards what they are looking for and you will only mention in passing "after a few hours you encounter a few guards that ask to check the content of your cart but they barely give a glance and let you on your way; the sun is beaming hard and you need to stop every few hours for your horses to rest". If the party is "looking for trouble" or if one of the characters has a bounty, then you actually role play the encounter knowing that the players might get themselves in trouble or gather some quest information.
Perhaps the party hears of a time where the roads are particularly clear from local tribal bandits and such. However, that's because these tribes have a legend or superstition associated with the road at that time of the month or year. The players risk encountering the objects of these superstitions, and their CR is higher, but the possibility of running into them is much smaller because it's only one or two things as opposed to droves of bandits.
They don't have to be a waste of time, but at least in my group the DM threw so many encounters at us during his one shot and then kept asking how we weren't already almost done with the dungeon like 2 hours in. His pacing is horrible and he kept taking too many breaks for too long, but he also kept throwing unnecessary encounters at us consisting of enemies with super high HP and above 20 AC as the generic enemy soldiers, and only our Paladin was able to hit them reliably. I had a +11 to my attack rolls and still couldn't hit reliably WITH ADVANTAGE. That should tell you how badly he needs to tone down his generic enemies.
Metabates I hope you told him all that instead of just bitching about it online
Finding this channel was a random encounter, so i think not...
A possible RNG is also literally nothing, "The party continues through the forest, but suddenly comes out to a clearing, lacking any trees, grass, foliage nor animal life; not a sound is heard, it is dead quiet and disturbingly still...".
My favorite "nothing"/wtf random encounter is a 10 foot wide trail of dissolved plantlife. Meta gaming, the trail us caused by a gelatinous cube, so one way leads to a cube the other leads to a dungeon it was fleeing from.
@@Pistonrager
Then you start to wonder wtf a gelatinous cube was fleeing from.
@@PistonragerWtf makes a gelatinous cube flee? o_0
@MayHugger now aint that a great question!
reminds me of the "Devils tramping ground" , a ring shaped patch of earth devoid of plant growth 10 miles from Siler City, where supposedly the devil comes at night to walk in circles while thinking of new evil plans, which now that I think of it also sounds like a random DnD enounter.
A nice random encounter which might even serve the story line in a way is the “crying girl”: The heros are traveling from own town to another, they arrive at a small river. One of them starts noticing some weird crying sounds which seem to come from a couple feet away behind a tree. When the look they find a young girl in a dirtied white dress standing at the river crying. (This alone could be funny when the players thing it is a trap) when they talk to her she is so surprised that she falls into the water, the heros will probably save her (the water is only three feet deep but the girl can’t swim like it seems). After they saved her she tells them that her doll fell into the water and she ran Stream downwards to get it back but she lost sight and don’t know how long she ran and felt lost.
Now the players are either getting the doll back, Which might hang on a twinge a bit down the stream or someone fished it out (good way to introduce an important NPC)
Or the players bring her home. She is the daughter of a wealthy man who is incredibly lucky that the players brought her home (it might got dark while bringing her back). The father gives them a small reward and he might give them the next quest!
Pop-up markets, sometimes with a pickpocket or two, are my favourite random encounters. Telling my players that they see smoke in the distance, only for them to find out its just some guy living off from the road with a fireplace lit are pretty good as well, they make a good way of relaxing tension players may have built up from previous battles, give them an opportunity to buy some handmade goods, or simply make a friend. Random encounters can sometimes be the bane of a campaign or sometimes they can be one of the minor things that makes the world feel truly alive.
edit: Completely forgot about the fun you can have with Bandits. Should your players spare some bandits they encounter on their travels, its always fun to maybe have them meet one of their 'friends' in a later bandit encounter. It's usually best to have the returning bandit npc not be a big evil 'i have no feelings' bandit boss, but rather an ex-farmhand struggling to make ends meet. Most players will show at least a bit of sympathy and send the surrendering bandits on their way, perhaps minus a few items of clothing and weapons.
Great advice create an encounter then another. I have a number of tables for rolling encounters but this time I did so in advance. The encounter "you meet 5 labourers walking through the street" turned into an encounter with 5 labourers off to a pawn shop to sell a jade dagger they found smuggled in a sack of grain. This dagger could be to summon a minor demon and was due to be sold to a local lord who would use it to deal with a rival. Suddenly the players were knee deep in the local politics plus a merchant who traded forbidden items. A whole sub plot unfolded from one random encounter that I took some time over!
here is an encounter: you find a burned down caravan that was carrying bread. If the players examine it, they realize wolves burned it down.
How‽‽‽ Did they knock over an oil lamp???
@@zrspangle They brought Kerosene. After decades of being slaughtered by low level adventurers, wolves have become ruthless and smart to survive.
I thought you were gonna say you find toast..
Nonsense like this requires an actual reason, not tales from the far side. If that were possible then humanity's millennia long war against wolves would have produced some smart wolves in real life. As is this would break my immersion and make the whole thing rather unenjoyable. But to give contructive criticism...isn't there rats that are smart because of mages or something. Cranium rats? Why not use them as a template and have this be a side quest. Thrash the evil wizard or what not that is making the mutant wolves!
@@jacobfreeman5444 Honestly some groups are more into the comedy but you could pretty easily adapt wolves to be smarter. Have them be corrupted by dark magic which increases their intelligence and links them telepathically so that they work more effectively as a pack and can more easily ambush prey.
I've found some solid success rolling on Xanathar's tables and then figuring out what that creature's presence would entail using improv. Most of the time the encounters don't necessarily need to be solved through combat and solid roleplaying can overcome them. I've had a random mage offer to cast a spell for the party in exchange for coin, a swarm of bats that, at the end of an initial attack, were adopted by the party, a vampire spawn hiding in a dark alley protected by swarms of rats that the party gathered the local guard and used the pipes of the sewers to overcome, etc. I've found that encounter tables are great for involving your players in the world and giving them exp through roleplay as long as you can keep up on the improv and take the time to figure out potential consequences. Some great quests happen that I never even have to write.
A specific thing I like doing is having the party see another group of adventurers going to do the same quest. The two parties probably have a chat and the random adventurers head off to the dungeon before our party. Once our party gets there, they immediately see a head of one of the other party members. As they go through the dungeon they find more of the bloody scene. Have maybe one or two members survive so they can tell what happened
Hell yeah, Big Hat Logan's back!
I typically use the excuse of “the BBEG told us to attack you”, I also make sure the enemies follow the same theme as the BBEG. And all my encounters can potentially have information.
Keep in mind it's only "leveling Up" if you don't go by milestone leveling.
This is how I have the leveling for my group I DM with. We're all first timers so keeping track of experience can get messy. They'll be level 3 soon.
@@dizzydial8081 So you are giving them XP to Level 3?
@@magical_mage0 are you proud of yourself?
Milestone stinky though. Never get levels fast enough.
Okay, but "XP to level 3" is great. Go check how channel out.
I like random encounters, because I'll typically spin them into a detour plot line that the players can engage with.
Say for example, they are in a forest, and they come across a giant elk and kill it. That Elk will be mentioned again, and differently depending on what cultures they are near. The druid tribes may pray and protect the elk, seeing it as a divine gift, and the revelation that it has died angers them. Or, if they bring the dead elk to a Local city to be traded, they might have angered a king appointed and egotistical hunter who believes the party have stolen his kill.
Even a passing reference to a random encounter and the creatures/settings/objects involved helps to make them feel more connected to the game world.
My group's monk 1/warlock 2 has a giant elk for a patron. They fought him in the first session, then he multiclassed into warlock and declared that "The Moose" was his patron. I now have a quest giver NPC to move things along with, and I'm developing a backstory and personality for his patron. All hail the Moose King!
A thing I would like to add is that random encounters can be story based. Say that there is a very large bandit clan that has control over a region. When traveling in that region, there could be a higher chance of random bandit attacks. If, in the story, you start to dismantle the clan, as the clan gets continually weaker, there is a drop in bandit attacks.
Very good video and as an average skill DM for my group I agree with every topic you bring up. Great vid as always!
What came to mind as the wolves popped up, was that you notice scat along the trail, now how fresh is a wilderness perception roll. Were they passing thru, are they going to stalk the group. Certainly can worry the group. The high perception characters roll to see if they notice the 2 dragons on the horizon, and if the dragons perceive lunch. Etc, an encounter doesn’t have to result in anything.
Maybe instead of having a wolf encounter in broad daylight, you could start it by saying that the players hear some snuffling noises outside their tent at night, close to the tree they stashed their food and supplies in.
I work as a paramedic and I have spent 2 years on night shift and, boy howdy, I have seen some RANDOM encounters! I once witnessed 3 druggies collectively wearing animal print jammies March up the center of a 5 lane road riding a clown tricycle, pushing a shopping cart, and riding an electric scooter
I limit my random encounters, and usually whenever I do introduce a random encounter, it ties into particular story elements. Before the party goes out on a trek, I write out a list of the potential encounters the party might come across in that location. These moments can be world-building opportunities and/or a chance to learn more about the plot.
A random encounter always has a possibility of being more interesting beyond combat and could even have potential for future subplot, side quests, and/or even add a twist to the main plot. eg: A highwayman who begs for their life and is spared could later provide valuable information or service.
Been DMing for about 20 years and these videos still help me. Much of this stuff one will figure out with trial and error but never put into words, it feels good to be validated that I'm a decent DM.
"I'm sure there is no such thing as Frequent Overworld Mindflayer Attacks"
*cries in mindflayer apocolyps game im in.
Random encounters don't always have to be a battle encounter. My favorite encounter I've given my players was this chest that was on a carriage. The players soon realized it was a mimic holding the reigns. They talked to it and it wanted food in exchange for the items it had collected over it's journey. The amount of meat the players gave would determine the rarity of the magic item. A little broken, sure, but it gave the players a chance to have a unique moment that wasn't just a "fight these animals because they're in your way." event.
I've been doing the "Unspoken Stories" thing for years, and they add depth to the world and new plot points. I've never heard of them be called that and I love it
In a campaign Im in we fished up a gold dragon statue as a random encounter. After we fished up a sea hag
Them damn bats and cats and banditoes and mosquitoes
Random encounters are great. They add to the world and make it feel more alive. They don't have to be fights either. You can bring NPCs that survive back later and that gives the players some attachment and may even be an opportunity for a new quest or hook that you want to use later (i.e. oh I want an NPC to give this quest wouldn't it be cool if it was a bandit they let go ten sessions ago who is getting his act together in a tavern and needs help with something?). You can also have large scale in game events, perhaps even that your players were responsible for if it's that kind of game, directly cause some of these random encounters. Even though it isn't relevant overall, it adds to the fun, the world, and the characters.
You're basically just describing bad random encounters. I keep a list of relevant self-written random encounters for each region that could happen and only use them if context allows. I also try vary them and ensure they can be solved in some way other than combat. All the cons you give are things that just mean you're doing random encounters badly rather than things that mean random encounters are bad.
My favorites are noncombat encounters that add flavor to a region, like a late night dance with Fey or the ghosts of an ancient battle still marching to their positions
How to speed up fights; use 4e minion rules (minions have 1hp), split the monsters into small groups (maybe by type) that share initiative, have Monsters flee when low on health or numbers, and/or use monster pool or unit hp (instead of tracking all the monsters' hp separately, add it into a pool and every time enough damage is done to the pool to account for 1 monster, remove the one most recently hit.
I only use minion rules for massive combat, essentially military battles.
I really like the idea of people being able to choose which random encounters to follow. One idea I have is the an adventure in the Grey Waste, there's the city called "The Death of Innocence." Your party can come across a crying child and try to help only to find she's an insane hag who tries to kill them. After her defeat, you get some needed supplies and a map. Or (at random) she can be an actual little girl who needs help, and after helping her she gives you the supplies and a map.
Random encounter dice chart:
1-a battle
2-some story/worldbuilding thing
3-a puzzle
4-a social encounter
5-a treasure/trap
6-*LARRY THE ALLMIGHTY*
Suddenly a dragon attacks you on the road
Players: stop taking notes from Skyrim
If I am on the plains of Africa, I am food. Ya see the danger is the adventure party is actually FOOD for 100's of other creatures. Kids now days are scared of danger in RPGs. Even your tiny villages are simply FOOD sources.
I was playing Out of the Abyss with sone friends, and a random Umber Hulk appears. My level 2 bard has a nat 20 rolled on him which ends up instakilling him. The DM says that the Umber Hulk straight up yeets me off the side of the cliff we were next to. I was pissed. Not only had a character i had been thinking of for 2 weeks been instakilled, but it wasn't even story related. I straight up felt like yeeting *MYSELF* off a cliff afterwards.
jeez what a bad dm why did they do that
Dms who do that are terrible let’s face it as a dm myself players can ruin what you have planned but thats what makes d&d fun as a dm you have to think up the story as it goes on meaning if a player kills something on the first action or first few actions of the fight then you don’t make it kill them or another player right as it dies
😅
Dafuq? A level 2 party fought an UMBER HULK!? Vox Machina had trouble with two of them when they were all level 10.
Nice work man, I'm digging your content. For my games, I try to foreshadow my encounters, even the random ones. I also try to make them as organic to the environment as I can. If my party is travelling through a forest, they often hear at a local outpost about the dangerous wildlife that lives there. If they decide to make camp for the night in a swamp, they might be attacked by a gator or large snake that thinks the sleeping folks would be an easy meal. It's just the little things that make them seem less boring, less contrived, and more engaging for the party; we all enjoy it more when they hear an area is dangerous or treacherous, and then they see or experience it firsthand. Anything to make the world that much more immersive.
This is pretty good advice! I'd like to add in one more tip that has always helped me. I generally like to throw in one or two random encounters on lengthy travelling segments to give the players an idea of the types of creatures in the area, some of the dangers the locals may face, and to have a visual representation (via the battle map) of the surrounding area. Plus, as mentioned, it gives the players a chance to use their abilities and can also help to wear the party down as part of a dungeon crawl before they ever even reach the dungeon. However, my tip is, if you're planning on including random encounters in a segment of your game: roll/determine them in advance. That way you can take a little time to make the encounter more interesting than "four bears in some randomly placed trees that all rush you at once the end". There is a segment in a book by Rich Burlew, "Dungeonscape", that has some pretty good advice on creating interesting encounters which is applicable to any edition of the game.
I actually really like the random encounter tables from STK. They almost all have a good tie in with the main story, so it isn't just running into travelers at sea. You're running into survivors of a shipwreck from a frost giant long ship. You're encountering farmers trying to herd sheep away from Hill giants. There are still some orcs and goblins at random, but they tie into other giant related story lines.
My favorite random encounter iv ever done was "a cow in the field". Its exactly as it sounds just a lone cow in the middle of a field. My players spent 30+ minutes just trying to figure out wtf they should do about it and when they decided to approach i made them make a wis saving throw (they all failed) this knocked them unconscious and when they woke up the cow was gone. I troll my players a lot with stupid stuff that doesn't always have major plot importance and they seem to love it.
I love these types of videos. Your channel is quickly becoming one of my favorites!
Another option that I feel didn't get coveted is flavoring your random encounters with some of the backstory or a moral dilemma for a specific character. While not singling them out and putting on a pedestal obviously. You'll want them to feel as though their character has a place in your world but be careful that they dont let that go to their heads.
Very late, but I've recently started running a "Greed or Glory" random encounter set up based on some of the ideas here.
In short, at the end of a session, players write down a reward(greed) or encounter(glory) that will be the center of a random event. Then, depending on what they chose, they either get an unknown challenge, worthy of the reward... or a reward worthy of their conquest.
when you roll 2 dragons the DM should interpret that sensibly. The two dragons aren't attacking the party, they're attack each other and the party may have to deal with the fallout or be perfectly fine and see a wonderful "encounter"
Your videos have been super helpful to me as a DM and my friends who get to enjoy a much more in depth and thoughtful game. We've been playing the same campaign for just over a year and a half now but when we started, we were all newbs lol. Thankfully, with help of your videos and others like them and of course our lord and saviors at Critical Role, we have all become much more seasoned players. Keep doing what you do man 👍I genuinely appreciate it.
I actually had the opposite problem with one of the problems you said you had... Instead of having monsters/bandits/animals/ect. attack all the time, I rarely ever had an encounter based on dice rolls, and when I did, it was almost always insect type creatures or badgers, mainly badgers
But we got something funny out of it, a inside joke turned canon character based on one of my player's brother... Lord Jub-Jub the Badger King
I remember me and my friends were traveling to another town and it was clear that there was nothing planned for along the way. I did the DM a favor ( I think) I pulled out my phone and played meme songs, we danced around and stuff and then went back to the game.
1:58 I used to play with a wizard who'd do this EVERYTIME. Never used magic middle or fireball, tried to do weird shit. He had to think it through on his turn
Fun fact, in the early editions of D&D random encounters also had randomly determined dispositions, so you were equally likely to have monsters you encounter be friendly or neutral rather than hostile, just fellow travelers on the road.
Random encounters < planned encounters
Why not both?
Randomly selected planned encounters?
@@icspps That's how I do my encounters in Symbaroum.
I hope this helps the channel.
Thank you!! I have had so many frustrating games before I became a dungeon master of just power campaigns where it was just fight after fight and No Story.
Because of this I did research into Where and Why monsters act they way they act to improve this ROLEPLAY game. This video I love it so much cause it's everything I've wanted to tell my old Dungeon dudes(not masters) in the most polite way. Keep it up man
As an old-timey roleplayer from the early days I see another element to this. I know and understand that back then, random encounters were meant to add to the feeling of being part of a living, breathing world. The whole gaming experience wasn't nearly as well developed and thought through. We were often making shit up and adjusting official material as we went out of pure necessity. There were pretty much 'holes' between adventures to be filled with something other than shopping and having a night out at the local tavern.
What I'm taking from decades of experience with it is that not everything has to be pre-planned. Nor should it be. I'm not arguing for random encounters themselves, but for an element of randomness, because that's part of a plausible world and thus a more authentic experience. It CAN be completely unnecessary, if you have one or more players who create wantom randomness at a reasonable pace. I've met many of those and learned to make use of their 'gifts' extensively. But sometimes it's just important to actually have something remarkable happen that has nothing to do with the main story. Otherwise you might as well write a book instead of playing a game.
I like the way Savage Worlds handles random encounters. You draw from a deck of cards and if you get a face card something happens depending on the suit of the card. Spades are enemies, hearts are strangers, diamonds are treasure, and clubs are obstacles. It makes travel interesting without having players get attacked every time they move. You might get attacked if you're unlucky, but more often than not you're going to find treasure or some random people traveling the same path.
i like how random encounters are handled in elder scrolls games, they're various travelers on the road that usually don't even bother you
And a lot of times they have relevance to your previous actions. It’s really awesome.
Couple of thoughts: Remember in 1st Ed., you got experience at 1 per gp earned, so your best bet was almost always to avoid combat. Wandering monsters made this difficult. It's right there on the cover of the Player's Manual: guys prying the jewels from a statues eyes. It subverted the whole murder hobo thing.
How about you use reasonable random encounters and reroll or rebalance them to make sense? Just saying. Also use sub types and templates on stuff.
Also you can tie them to the plot loosely. Like having the villain have something to do with it in indirect way.
Anon ymus right- I think the idea is that they spark your imagination and you fit them into what’s going on with the scene
I have had random encounters turn into the main focus of the party over a dozen or more sessions. I have used weather against them (once, the were stuck on a eroding hill in a flash flood, and had to use spells to shore up the dirt and divert the force of the water to survive). I have brought back random non-hostile encounters from sessions ago and they have roleplay and a source of information. I have had them find a locked chest of Cram unaccountably left on the side of a rarely used road (they didn't follow that thread). - - - Random encounters don't need to be random, they don't need to be fights, and they don't even need to be other beings.
One of my favorite random encounter ideas is a mimic tavern. Just a tavern or in the middle of nowhere, have an npc join the party for a bit only to have him go into the tavern ahead of the players only to have him eaten, and the tavern get up and walk off.
No real point, just entertaining, and players are guaranteed to recount the story of "that one time a tavern ate someone. "
By far this has been the most usefull video for me. And extremely relevant. I'm still a new DM and what I did so far was create a list of random encounters for my worlds various locations and some Dungeons quest etc for each session that tied in with what the players wanted and could do. The way this would play out is that if they would be unsure what to do or travel a bunch i would throw out 1 2 or sometimes more random encounters (some where really short ones like a burnt down village) until they eventually (mostly after just 2 encounters) entered my dungeons where all the fun crazy but a bit more planned stuff happened. This system has worked well for me up until the final session where the party accidentally ignored every single hook to planned story things or dungeon and just proceeded to do their own thing and travel ridiculous amounts. Since I did not want to break immersion by telling the players that this was not the way so instead my only option was (atleast i thought at the time) to keep throwing random encounters at them. This lead to some crazy stuff but eventually got boring and the players aswell as I got really unsure what to do. Thanks to this video I now know that it was the large amount of encounters that did this. I think I will still keep my system but leave out the set number of encounters per distance which i came up with because I feel like that spawned the copious amounts of forced encounters. If you read this entire thing thanks for reading my rambling! XD and thank you Logan for these great videos :D keep it up
Revisiting this question. I think that the trick to 'design' a great random encounter tables is to view it as an inspirational tool instead of filler - the randomness and unpreparedness throws a wrench in your normal DM routine and it can lead to intersting situations and plot devices that you can use. Players don't need to know that the encounter was "random" - they will assume that it's planned and act accordingly.
Really glad you decided to make your own channel, the info is clear and undilluted. You also have a good voice for these kind of videos.
I usually take the "unspoken stories" approach. One time, my players were traveling across a wasteland that had been scorched by a great dragon hundreds of years ago. I had them come across a small, ruined hut with a couple charred corpses outside. I THOUGHT they would like the little bit of mystery, and I was planning on showing that there WAS at least one child who lived here, but they vanished. The intense and dark scene was shattered when one of my friends jumped up and shouted, "Holy shit! Luke Skywalker!" They still make jokes and Star Wars quotes most of the time whenever I throw in a random encounter.
Me and my friends are new to DnD, I'm the GM. So far, I've run one homebrewed campaign which I wrote myself as a one-shot, which was actually well received. During the traveling period, the players rolled for five total random encounters out of 15 possible encounters, all of which I wrote, and only 6 were purely combat. I found that making my own random encounters brought a spark of creativity to the game, making the world more flavorful and enjoyable in the end. I plan to get some official adventures so I can run a more entertaining plot, but I'll make my own random encounters
If I can remember one random encounter, I would say that it was the time me and my friends were doing a Homebrew campaign as a group of peasants who accidentally killed the hero and had to take their place only to have the adventure almost end with a tpk. We were level 2 and carrying the hero's body to a secluded monk that lived deep in the woods who was said to have the power to bring the souls of lost heroes back to life if their body was intact. Before any of us knew it, the DM rolled the dice and what he said next made me realize that time was not on our side: " As you're walking through the woods, you start to hear strange noises coming from bushes and strange ravenous grunting ahead of you. You then see a figure in the distance shrouded in fog. But as the figure gets closer, you start to see blood on them and that's when you realize in horror that you encountered a cannibal but not just any cannibal: you made the mistake of running into Shia LaBeouf! Roll initiative." By the time the battle was over we ended with as follows: my pitchfork wielding farmer had lost a left hand, a right leg and his family-owned hat that hid his bald spot, the cook lost all of his cooking supplies in the battle due to making a bomb out of his sharp knife collection, the Scribe was dead after Shia LaBeouf broke both of his arms and ripped them out after the Scribe failed to get a sneak attack with his sharp quill, the blacksmith lost both of his legs from a bear trap and was able to stitch one leg back in place before Shia LaBeouf grabbed the other one and knocked him unconscious, and the messenger sacrificed himself using the knife bomb to kill off Shia LaBeouf. Despite losing two of our best planners, it was a great random encounter despite the weirder stuff we encountered later on.
Shia LeBeouf. Because why the fuck not? 😂
Had my party encounter Shia they killed him I said congrats you killed Shia Leboufe then one player burned the body kept his skull and had it made into a cup lol
as soon as i read the "as you're walking through the woods" my mind immediately went to the shia labeouf song...
This was awesome!
I've always picked encounters that suit the situation best, like if the players are feeling like there's not enough combat I'll throw in a combat encounter during travel, and if the players are bored of combat I'll write up a roleplaying or problem-solving one. I'll also scale the difficulty depending on my players' liking.
For every campaign I have some backup random encounters setup. They always have to do with the story and theme of the campaign.
Usually there’s are ways the players could interact with them without just killing them too. (But let’s be honest, they usually just try to kill them.)
I mean I've always had a solution to "they don't advance the plot"
Make them a part of the plot, either a result of a job they didn't do earlier in the game, or agents of the big bad. Also, I always roll what the encounter is before the session, so I can prep my tactics beforehand
I play in a group of rotating GMs and there are two schools of thought:
1) tons of random encounters
2) no ransom encounters
I think you provide a good middle ground and i love the idea of having the players decide a good encounter to your two bad ones and I'll definitely incorporate that in my campaign when i DM
All combat to the death and all encounters turning into combat are two pet peeves of mine. Thanks for addressing it.
This is great advice, congratulations I screenshotted your d6 random encounter generator so that I could run them more often.
The way I see it, encounters are like gas stations and those family-golf course/bowling alley/attraction pit stops. They happen on road trips, regardless
Random encounter are also necessary for game balance in D&D, since combat encounters are balanced around players having to manage their resources. Without them it's easy to end up with days with only one combat and make magic users too powerful
@Manek Iridius powerful until you can't long or even short rest and suddenly have the usefulness of a level 2 character in a level 16 dungeon, alone, as a second edition bard
If you want to make magic users less powerful in random encounters use the gritty realism variant rule during travel (short rest takes 8 hours, long rest is a week), that makes wizard arcane ability more useful and warlocks better. It then also keeps resource management while not having a stupid amount of encounters a day
@Manek Iridius Powerful until you run out of meat shields and a barbarian grapples you.
@@andrewpenn1145 We would just banish the barbarian
@@harperthegoblin Then the barbarian's paladin buddy smites you and snaps your concentration in half, and then steals your left hand.
I'm still fairly new when it comes to world making, especially random encounters. This helps alot. I love your videos.
This is definitely one I will replay over and over whenever I have free time to prep encounters. The game Pathfinder-Kingmaker has lots of these “don’t change the game, but have deep meaning to the environment” type encounters and I want to have a deck of those to choose from.
I'm glad you bring up the fact that not every random encounter needs to be a combat encounter. It ties in with the fact that combat isn't the only way to gain XP. I still need to figure out some random encounters to use in my games.
I personally love the simple way the Wilderness Kit made them work. I also love the deep and complex methods of provided in Adventures in Middle Earth.
I Roll encounters for ideas then re-calibrate and adjust the encounters as necessary, and let the logical repercussions of that encounter be followed as far as is reasonable. Works decently well when I am low on ideas and can even lead to semi-organic side quests.
one thing i did with a sandbox style camping was use random encounters as ways to start a storyline that the pcs could follow that may link to one pc's backstory.
I agree with this wholeheartedly! When I DM I don't like using random encounters, I have the time to make fully fleshed tactics and encounters. I try to keep it to one or less a session, for the next session I have a new one I made this week, a group of 5 blindfolded bandits. They hole up in an alcove by the road, the alcove is 10 feet off the path at the end of an ingrown path, they listen for footsteps inside their alcove, when they hear something, the single wizard in their group casts a spell that takes all exterior (the sun, moon, or stars. This makes it so light items the party has are actually useful as heck for once) light from the area (a 200-foot radius around the caster) that is a concentration level 2 spell and the bandits slip off their blindfolds, their eyes already adjusted to pitch black. The bandits have a monk (with level 3 abilities) three fighters, one with a shortsword and shortbow with 20 arrows, the other two with longswords and hand crossbows with 8 bolts each. Then the wizard whose only real purpose is for that spell, but can also cast some basic cantrips.
Upon killing the bandits they can choose to search the area, and if they find the alcove they will stumble upon a cart full of combustibles and a note on a small table that talks about a plan to use the cover of the darkness spell to roll the cart up to a nearby city's watchtower at night and blow the tower up, allowing for a secondary raid during the confusion from the east.
I added that little bit of story so the party will feel like they actually did something good for the world, even if it doesn't pertain to the story.
I created this encounter because I felt that this fight fully plays into the theme of bandits, looking for absolutely any advantage they can for raids and looting travellers and exploiting it for unfair fighting grounds.
The way I work random encounters, is make them not all be fights. Prep your understanding of all of them so when you roll it, know what you’re going to do or have notes to use when you roll it, and keep your random combats keep within story. Which you basically said and I’m happy to hear
Great video Logan! Really helps me out with tinkering these random encounters :)
Keep it up man!!
Your suggestions reminded me of something Zee Bashew from the Animated Spellbook mentioned. Take a bowl and write on four slips of paper (I changed that to one per player, minimum four) "nothing happens" and four bad or combat encounters. You then have each player write one good encounter and one bad encounter. They all go into the bowl and then while travelling you just draw one at random.
The combination of humor and helpfulness earned you another subscriber. I love it; keep it up!
Awesome vid. Something I started using a while ago was a "designated leader". They might not actually lead the party but when ever I feel like it (at the time I am the dm) I will force them to roll a d20. Different groups of numbers will either be good (to a degree), bad (to a degree) or nothing at all
This has given me more confidence to keep in my weird little encounters!
I generally only have random encounters as part of an adventure, to be something that either creates tension, or a way to make areas that has been clear never feel safe.
I don't use the premade rules for this, but another system.
Really for me, an encounter is there to take away resources, to create a sense of danger. The more time you spend not moving towards your goal, the more chances of having your resources taken away you have. But usually it ends up as maybe one random encounter per session.
In one adventure I gave the players a haunted helmet, it was a great item so the player wanted to use it, but it also meant that a ghost started talking to the party. This gave them a sense of unease and a great way to help give the dungeon character. (This ghost voice would also tell them when monsters were coming to attack them, promting the random encounter)
This video makes me feel a bit better about how I've run "random encounters" as a DM. I wrote/am writing my own campaign and haven't had many chances to play (most of the same players are in another group, our "main" campaign) and so far they've had the intro (a big siege of highly valuable fort in the war effort by either side they were all tossed into for different reasons) before traveling to the nearest big city for their first main quest. To get from the fort in the north to the city in the mid-west, however, they had to ride a flatboat down the river a couple hundred miles.
I divided the river journey into four sections (mainly based on biome: plains, swamp, forest, plains) and wrote up around three encounters for each section. For the plains, there was a bulette or some elephants (the latter they could avoid fighting if they managed to see and avoid the baby swimming across the river after it's herd), the swamp had an ambushing troll, some giant frogs, a giant crocodile, and maybe a hag or two (it was supposed to be the hardest section and they were to be given chances to avoid fighting by strategically planning their route (the river split around the swamp a bit), etc. Each fight added a new unique feature to the previous; the bulette would leap onto the boat and cause it to shake, which could cause disadvantage on dexterity checks and ranged attacks if left unattended; the swamp would have vines hanging over the boat they'd have to move around every couple rounds, that kind of thing. In each section, they'd do their group Perception check and I'd roll a D6, with 1 being the hardest, 2-3 being second hardest, 4-5 being easiest, and 6 being no encounter (something like that, anyways). There were plenty of ways around the fights and many could be resolved easily (animal handling checks, scaring away certain creatures, giving them what they really wanted).
. . . Then we missed so many sessions that we only ended up doing one half-session with the one bulette encounter (which did go very well) before I said "You look at the captain's station at the back of the boat and find detailed logs, maps, and journals about previous trips up and down the river, where certain types of monsters live, and what the easiest paths are. With these, you make it the rest of the way to the city with ease."
TL;DR: Preparation is great and fun and good but is easily wasted ;-;
i’m running an aquatic/pirate themed campaign and have mostly left random encounters out of it, but my players just recently did something that will affect a protection spell being amplified across the ocean. so i’m gonna be introducing more random encounters as a way to sort of motivate them to restore the spells.
Really informative! You know, I've ran into this problem during my last session where the DM was constantly trying to make us go off track even though he gave us a clear mission and kept throwing random encounters in our faces. One of the group got extremely bored and annoyed and made it his life goal to circumvent everything the DM did that wasn't in ljne with the plot. A very awkward session, i can tell you that much..