What Is the Right Chance Of Random Encounters?

Sometimes I see people ask this question. In many cases, it's an indicator that the person asking is inexperienced or maybe even just stupid--because of course "the" right chance of random encounters depends entirely on the scenario you're running. You need to know a lot more before you answer the question.

Let's run down how this can be decided:

First: The Realism/"Realism"/"Simulation" Problem

Some people have less fun when their implausibility meter goes off. Some game mechanics are designed to quiet this particular species of the mind's many monkeys.

 AD&D had frequency attributes for creatures--that is, some creatures were "Common", some were "Uncommon", "Rare", or "Very Rare". You're more likely to run into a wolf than a greater demon--so far so good. The problem with building random encounter tables entirely around this logic is that, for the rest of the game, every time the players cross a week's worth of hexes they are just going to be fighting wolves or standard bandits over and over and over. After a while, this is just grinding--especially when the players are leveled to the point where a fight with a bunch of wolves is a one-round affair. At a certain point, the simulational logic starts to work against the fun.

I am not the first person to point this out. The last time I remember it being pointed out a clever commenter pointed out that one could run encounters on the simulational logic not of rarity but of aggressiveness--so there are lots more wolves than demons, but a demon is more likely to see five people wandering through the snow and want to mess with them than d4 wolves are.

This is better than frequency alone, but by most simulational logic* a wolf pack is exactly as likely to attack a first level wizard and two fighters as Gandalf, Conan and the guy from Gladiator out for a morning stroll. So the grinding problem still remains because wolves don't know what level you are.

How To Actually Decide On Random Encounters

The truth is that even the "in-game logic" that player characters would be constantly running into creatures is underwritten by the GM and game designer's unavoidably totally made-up ideas about how many total creatures run around this forest, dungeon, castle or whatever. 

The actual most important question when deciding on random encounter frequency is what role random encounters are supposed to be playing in the part of the game you are running. 

In some scenarios, random encounters are nearly the whole game. 

For example: the DM creates a hexcrawl full of places. Ruins, lakes, swamps, cities etc--its like a whole land. The players are on an adventure where the idea is to explore this land. The DM then creates a random encounter chart whose basic purpose is to randomize which creature appears in what conflict-characterizing landscape. Without that random encounter table, there may be no enounters with NPCs or creatures at all.

In these cases, you want to think about:

-How big is the total area to be explored? A single dungeon? An island? A kingdom? A continent?

-Given that, roughly how much of it do you expect PCs to cover in a session? Is this exploration a one shot? A few sessions' work? The whole campaign?

Then, given those answers, stock the tables such that the PCs are running into some of your ideas about what constitutes a good creature encounter a handful of times per session and perhaps all of them by the time the expected exploration period ends. If the table has 100 entries each weighted at one each, estimate a frequency that gets you to 100 rolls on that table by the end of the time you spend in that place.

In some scenarios, random encounters just exist to keep the players honest.

For example: the DM creates a dungeon where each room will work just fine without any additional challenge--they already have creatures and traps and what-have-you. Another example: The DM creates a hexmap that is mostly just to flesh out the space between interesting adventure areas (dungeons, cities, ports, ruins overrun with gnolls, etc).

In this case, the only time you're even rolling encounters is if the players waste a lot of time--like checking for traps over and over after a failed roll in a dungeon, or building a massive dam to cut off water to an enemy fort. The encounters do not have to be there for the scenario to be interesting, they just have to be a natural (and fun) barrier to certain attempts to game the system.

You basically want the random encounters to make the players think "We dare not tarry here!"

When this kind of situation arises, the main thing is to decide how much time would constitute dawdling and have a meaningfully threatening thing show up about a third of the time (2 in 6) when and only when the dawdling happens ("every ten minutes in-game" is a common definition in dungeons, an extra day would be a common one in the wilderness).

In some scenarios, random encounters are supposed to be half the game.

This is fairly common in both wilderness and dungeon situations--the location's stocked with (a) interesting places, (b) interesting places with creatures, and (c) places that may be meh but suddenly become more interesting when there are creatures (like a rope bridge over deep water).

This kind of location makes (in-game) sense especially if its a place that is going to be traversed and re-traversed many times by PCs. One time they come through and there's a nymph in the treehouse, next thing they know there isn't one, but there's always a crocodile in the moat, it all feels more "lived in" that way. It's also way easier to make a really big hexmap this way.

In this case, when devising the chance of encounters consider:

-How much of the area do you expect the PCs to traverse during a session? (Let's call this amount of area a "stretch".)

-What percentage of a typical stretch needs to be "activated" by a creature to be interesting?

Then just make the encounter percentage match that.

Alright, carry on.

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*One objection I can imagine: If all creatures can read "aura" one could argue that they can sense weakness so are less likely to attack high-level PCs than low-level ones, but at that point the logic of simulation is so close to magic and magic is so close to "what makes the game fun" that you've basically made the idea of simulation entirely subservient to other priorities.

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Some Notes on Stokely's Birthday Game, Demon City and (mostly) Nebulith Now That Its Out

Good morning. 

Stokely's LOTR Birthday Party

Stokely wanted to have a Lord of the Rings costume party for her birthday so I put together a party game for it: Basically I used miniatures and other D&D stuff to make a Candyland-style game board with two pieces (goblin, hobbit) and the way each team/piece advances is do what's on a series of index cards. They had things like: 

-Arm wrestle The Balrog (Lisa)—if you win go ahead 2, if you lose go back 1.

-Describe in detail how you would slay a dragon. For each guest who says your plan is good, move forward 1 point, maximum 3 points.

-Get a snack. Share it with other guests at the party without using your hands (or theirs). You have two minutes. You move forward 1 space +1 per guest who shares with you, maximum 3 spaces.

Etc.

This was a simple game but easy for guests to tune into and out of, so it worked. Stokely was really happy how the party turned out so feel free to adapt the basic idea for any porn-star-birthday/LOTR cosplay parties you run.

Weapons and Demon City

 

Saw Weapons the horror movie by Zach Cregger, the former sketch comedy guy who also directed Barbarian. 

I liked it and it's a very Demon City movie in that it has a whole ensemble cast, different kinds of normal people with different kinds of normal skills, participating in investigating the Horror each in their own way--and not in a typical "there's four of us on this camping trip, oh no now we're getting chopped up!" way. And the way it ends is awesome and totally something a PC would do.

The Party in The Peacock Isles

In our home campaign, the party landed in The Peacock Isles (fake India) and took on Nassim's Sleepless Army--a convoy of drug addicts on elephants. The party was clever and (after a lot of arguing) trapped 150 bad guys and their elephants and took them out with no casualties without even a tense moment EXCEPT when one of the party members started looking for some of the mind-control crystal meth on the ground and immediately, mid-fight, snorted it just out of sheer role-playery. Despite everything he seemed surprised that it immediately meant he was mind-controlled by the bad guy. Luckily/unfortunately somebody else had a Remove Curse right there.

Nebulith Notes

Now that people actually can get their hands on Nebulith I'm seeing the first impressions (they seem to like it) and so I know there's an actual audience for behind-the-scenes notes on it. So here goes:

-There's a really good Samurai Film Festival right now at Alamo Drafthouse theatres, and there's like 20 of those in the US so if you live near one, enjoy! Three or four of the movies on Nebulith's recommended reading/watching list are playing between now and early September--I just got to see Lady Snowblood on the big screen last night and it was like drinking angel blood straight from the vein.

-Obviously the name of the book isn't Japanese. Alex came up with the idea of the volcanic cloud that froze into stone as the main Crazy Idea in the setting and I came up with the name for it (nebula latin for mist/cloud and lith being stone). He liked the new word so much he wanted the book to be named that. I wanted something more Japanese-sounding because I wanted people who might get it to, like, know that was the idea--it was Japanese. I knew agreeing on some other name would take forever so I gave in.

-James Raggi, the publisher, says this is his favorite of my books because in addition to everything else, it gives a sense of how ordinary people really live there. For the record, I hate the (two-page) section on ordinary life in Awa Nikko because I do not care. The last thing I want to hear about is what ordinary village life is like and all the research revealed it is exactly as boring as every samurai movie makes it out to be. Any GM who can't make up a regular village and any player who is mad that the details of a regular village aren't correct are people I want nowhere near me. But, its only two pages.

-I am also aware that there's a contingent of gamers (Prince, for instance) who seem almost hell-bent on being a caricature of conservatives in an '80s movie who not only get mad when things are creative in RPGs but will actually say it like that. Not "this isn't creative its just bad" but "I literally don't want creative things" Here is one example:

A fantasy idea in a fantasy game? This must mean its gonzo, yikes! How do I even run this?

They like the old TSR products that take 30 pages to tell you that in the Eastern-Europe-based setting people dress like Eastern Europe and eat things you might find in Eastern Europe. It is God's own mystery why any of these people are near this hobby but ok.

They may really like those two pages.

-A lot of what we did here was me looking at the old Oriental Adventures and going "Ok, what didn't work here?". Zeb Cook, the author, was on the committee that gave me a Three Castles Award and I loved his book for introducing me to the kappa and the hengeyokai and all that jazz but in terms of gameplay it wasn't an epic leap forward from what we already had. I looked at each part that was supposed to feel different in a chanbara, martial arts epic or Asian myth than it did in my conception of a Western dungeon crawl and tried to tweak and shove until it got there.  The martial arts were problem one: in OA they just feel like more numbers without much more flavor added.

-Lots of people have right away said the book looks good. Thank you thank you it took three years. Most people haven't gotten a chance to play yet but once you dig in, I think the main exciting part, which won't be obvious until you play, is the classes and martial arts.

Inexperienced gamers might be looking at them and going "Ok, I see a ninja, I see a flying kick, so far so expected..." but if you actually know your way around an Old School game you'll notice how they work differently than both standard OSR characters and 5e-style ones.

PCs get some martial arts abilities. A few come with your class, but the majority are random depending on your class and/or the martial arts school you choose. As explained in the text, they're mechanically not much different than finding a magic item--you have a special thing that you can do in a fight. 

The abilities are intentionally not mathy and tend to involve a lot of either-/or- mechanics: Ascending Technique lets you extra-fuck-with anyone nearby that an ally has already hit, for instance.

At first or second level, they're just nice to have but whatever. At higher levels however, they begin to stack, like, now you're hitting people more than once per round, now you do an additional effect each time you hit them, now your ally has an effect that they can trigger because you knocked over the bad guy, etc.

Add to this the Yuta (local medicine woman) class which has ritual abilities like the Yuta's curse (anyone who attacks you gets a form of open-ended but limited curse of your own design) and the combats in this game go absolutely nuts.

In playtests, they consistently feel like they give a level of dynamism (you're up, you're down, you're grappled, you're inside-out, you lost your sword) and surprise that goes beyond the usual old school while avoiding the bean-counting of 4e-style tactical combat and the winner-is-the-one-who-talks-most style some indie games fall into. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised, but you may have to roll some dice to do it.

Alright bye.

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You Can Now Order Nebulith & Red & Pleasant Land

Here's a flip-thru of Nebulith, my new Far Eastern book.

The books are available here. The Nebulith seems to disappear at about a rate of one an hour so at the current rate they'll be gone long before Halloween, much less Christmas, so if you're thinking "I'm eventually gonna get one no matter what" probably sooner's better than later.

Everyone who has seen it (including at least three people who hate nerd stuff and don't know what it is) is like "God damn that's a nice book". Judging from the fate of all my previous RPG books, it would probably win some Ennies if it wasn't now against the rules for me to win one.

Red & Pleasant Land is also being reprinted now, available here, thanks to Molly Scanlon at Fierce Ponies.

Frostbitten & Mutilated, is still available here.

Also, some people do not know Maze of the Blue Medusa is still available here.

And Demon City, the best horror game ever written, is here. Here is a long review of it.

The 500-page Compendium is no longer available and never will be, unless you go to some extraordinary lengths. Email me--zakzsmith AT hawtmayle dawt clam--if you want to be assigned an epic quest.

Life here still completely sucks as a result of the ongoing smear campaign. The best thing to do to help is, instead of buying any of these books, get on the internet, go places you don't want to go, and fact-check a bunch of shitty people you don't want to talk to. But most people would rather spend money than do that, so ok.

Bye.