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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