Today's installment is about Random Encounter Tables (also called Wandering Monster Tables). These tables have been around since the dawn of the hobby, you can find them both in Dave Arneson's First Fantasy Campaign and in the original D&D rules.
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Use a map and encounter table to concisely describe an area
There is great benefit to random encounter tables, in that they present concisely what is going on in an area and who the adventurers can run into. They show how dangerous it is: a peaceful forest has songbirds, foxes and the occasional boar, a sinister one teems with stirges, worgs and the terrible wyvern. Peasants might brave the first, but will not willingly enter the second. When these encounters happen, they help set the atmosphere. You can put literally anything on such a table, from weather phenomena to wildlife, to adventure sites like woodsman huts or monster lairs in the outdoors that have no defined location, or weird sounds, furnishings, messages scrawled on walls in dungeons. But most commonly, stationary items are defined on the map, and encounter tables list monsters wandering around.
Random encounters can concisely define how common various creatures are: assigning a wider range of outcomes to one encounter makes is more common. Here is the start of the General Island Wandering Monsters table from The Isle of Dread (X1):
%Roll Monster Number Appearing
01-02 Bee, Giant 2-8
03-05 Dryad 1-6
06-29 Ghoul 1-6
...
It is immediately clear that the island is infested with undead - nearly a quarter of all encounters are ghouls. Giant Bees are relatively rare. Providing a number appearing also gives quick insight into the social nature of these creatures -- the bees always fly in groups, whereas ghouls can scavenge in packs or solitary. The Alexandrian calls this kind of encounter "procedural".
Enrich encounters with surprise, distance and reaction rolls
With a naked encounter as described above, the simple choice for the DM is that it is going to be a fight at close range. OD&D was smarter about this, and provided randomization about which side might be surprised, how far from each other they are, and if intelligent creatures encountered are initially friendly, neutral, or hostile. This could turn the same encounter with 50 goblins into quite different ones: they might be far away and you hear them coming and are able to run away, they might be rather friendly and more interested in trading than fighting, or you might be surprised by them in a deadly ambush at close range.
Invent context for your encounters
Encounter entries are just a trigger to invent and ad-lib detail and provide context: what are the creatures doing (cooking, hunting, fighting some other beast, playing dice...), what are their goals, what does their camp look like, how does it smell, how do they look, are they wounded, do they have equipment, and so on. Incorporate what you know about the environment. For your own dungeons, "naked" encounter tables can be reused, and enriched with different detail to create very different encounters each time.
Provide brief goals or situations to bring the encounters to life
If you write an adventure for others, provide brief goals or detail to help build a story and provide clues to the players and DM. An example is this table from Steading of the Hill Giant Chief (G1), where there is a big, raucous feast going on at night in the great hall.
Western Sections (West of Great Hall): encounter 1 in 10
1. 4-12 orcs rushing to get shields for platters.
2. 2 hill giants from great hall going to sleep off a drunk
3. 3 ogres from great hall going to get one of the guards
4. 1 hill giant from great hall taking a stroll
Compare this to "1. 4-12 orcs, 2. 2 hill giants, 3. 3 ogres, 4. 1 hill giant". Gone is the palpable feel of a wild party going on.
Random encounters to encourage swifter play
Especially in OD&D which was much more a resource management game, the purpose of these encountes was as a tool to keep things moving and prevent players from dilly-dallying too long in the dungeon. If you made noise, or hung around too long doing nothing of consequence, the DM would roll for a random encounter to create action and deplete resources.
There are interesting and insightful discussions about the use of wandering monsters to put time pressure on the party and keep the challenge of resource management meaningful.
In my experience, if there is no external time limit like a looming invasion or a dying princess, this does not work well on a mechanical level in 5e, not the way it did in old school with slow natural healing and few spell slots. You have total healing overnight. Instead of creating a resource challenge, the main reason random encounters still work in 5e is because they waste valuable play time on meaningless, random fights that yield little treasure, insight or magic -- at least our party hates that, and likes to avoid it.
Avoid fights if they do not contribute to the fun
If there is an encounter table with regular checks, random encounters will happen and can lead to boring battles rather than progress in exploration, even if the party is not playing slow. Gygax wisely recommended skipping random encounters in such cases:
For example, the rules call for wandering monsters, but these can be not only irritating - if not deadly - but the appearance of such can actually spoil a game by interfering with an orderly expedition. You have set up an area full of clever tricks and traps, populated it with well- thought-out creature complexes, given clues about it to pique players’ interest, and the group has worked hard to supply themselves with every- thing by way of information and equipment they will need to face and overcome the imagined perils. They are gathered together and eager to spend an enjoyable evening playing their favorite game, with the expec- tation of going to a new, strange area and doing their best to triumph. [...] But lo!, everytime you throw the ”monster die” a wandering nasty is indicated, and the party’s strength is spent trying to fight their way into the area. Spells expended, battered and wounded, the characters trek back to their base. Expectations have been dashed, and probably interest too, by random chance. Rather than spoil such an otherwise enjoyable time, omit the wandering monsters indicated by the die. [DMG, p9]
Another twist is to adjust the encounter, so that the worgs do not attack, you only hear them howling eerily in the distance, the wyvern is just seen cycling high on the sky above, you only foodsteps echoing in the darkness down the dungeon corridor, but they pass another direction. That way, you can have the encounter contribute to the scene without wasting play time, and you can create tension.
In our game, the giant rats were a random encounter near a pile of corpses. Since their goal is to scavenge for food, and they had plenty of that, they did not attack the players as long as the players would not threaten them. The players also saw nothing to be gained in a treasure-free fight against potentially diseased vermin, and inched past them carefully with a couple of animal handling checks. That was a much more satisfying encounter than a boring fight would have been.
Combine several encounters into a more meaningful one
Another alternative is to collect random encounters. You do not want to disrupt the game all the time with small, inconsequential fights. So hold them back, take a note, and turn them into a more dangerous, single encounter later on, if that is possible and makes sense.
For example, to recover over night in the dungeon, the PCs locked themselves in and spiked the door shut. This worked to turn away the unintelligent creatures that scurried by, but the kobolds took note of the blocked door. Every additional encounter I rolled over the course of the night for kobolds or centipedes contributed to reinforce an ambush the little monsters prepared, with baskets of poisonous centipedes to launch, sticky, acidic plant sap in front of the door to slow movement, and a barricade made from a table for cover. Erecting the barricade made enough noise with hammering to warn the PCs something was up. When they opened the door, a big battle for survival and freedom was on.
In another example, while we were traveling through the hills in Mines of Phandelver, our DM rolled an encounter with a pack of wolves. These would not have been a challenge at all, we had shot down the last pack before they even reached melee range. Rather than attack, they now trailed us silently from a distance. Over time, and I imagine as he rolled additional encounters, the pack grew and grew, until, towards dusk when we were making camp, they were a large enough number that they felt save to attack us again.
Put the encounter table on the floor plan
I write the table directly on the border of the floor plan. That way, I do not need to search around in the text where it is described. I can go right from the map.
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