I love random encounter tables, as a concise way to describe an area and its inhabitants.
"Monster Lair" is licensed under CC-BY 4.0.
The creatures encountered will normally have a base of operations nearby, commonly called their lair. Often in that lair, a larger number of them will be encountered, with surplus treasure, far more than what the wandering creatures carry.
For beasts, vermin, or oozes, this may be a lair proper, where they are sleeping or nesting, with treasure from carcasses of their victims. For undead it may be a crypt, grave or sepulchre, where treasure has been laid to rest with them. For intelligent creatures like bandits or orcs, there will be a hideout, den or fort.
When the wanderers are patrols, scouts, scavenging parties or on some errand from that lair, by talking with them or capturing and questioning them, the characters can learn about the environment, about factions in the area, and -- if they can charm, pressure or trick them, or secretly track them -- about the location of their lair and treasure. All this is good.
Do you remove encounters from the list, once encountered and killed?
Normally, the answer is no. There are three situations.
Most commonly, encounters are from a large enough pool of creatures, to be not affected by losing a couple of individuals, even repeatedly. Say, wolves in the forest: in the real world, a pack of wolves needs about 14 square miles to hunt, a bit under 4x4 miles. It is quite conceivable that in a small forest that is only a days March in each direction (24 miles), there might be three dozen wolf packs. While you could eliminate them all, encounters tend to be rare and varied enough that you will not kill more than a couple, so it is a fair enough approximation to ignore that.
On the other end of the sprecturm, sometimes, the tables list unique creatures, for example a dragon living in that forest. For those, the practice is of course to ingnore the encounter if it is rolled again, treating it as either a non-encounter (most commonly), or replace it with a more common encounter result, e.g. by rerolling. If these unique cratures are killed, their lair will be found empty.
Both of these cases are simple, and straightforward.
But what to do when the encounters come from a limited number of creatures? Do you remove creatures from the lair, and stop encounters when they all are removed?
For example, assume in your dungeon contains a lair of troglodytes, six total. And on your random encounter table you have this line:
1-2 troglodytes -- renewing sacred wall drawings to ward off spirits
What happens if the PCs encounter and defeat two troglodytes? Will there be only four left in the lair, or all six? How to explain a neverending stream of troglodyte encounters, when the lair can house only six, and has pallets for only six? If the PCs over the course of their explorations run into multiple trog encounters and kill more than six of them, will still be six in the lair? (Mathematician's joke: there will be negative troglodytes in the lair.)
What speaks for removing the killed monsters from the lair? It increases verisimilitude.
(1) It forces you to respect the game world as a real place with inhabitants, not just a generative procedure for staging fights. It makes it more believable.
(2) It encourages you to think about how the monsters would react. For example, the trog patrols try to escape from the PCs to alert their tribe, instead of fighting to the death; once alerted, the tribe goes after the PCs en masse or stops patrols to lay an ambush.
What speaks against removing the killed monsters from the lair? Its more work.
(1) Tracking the losses poses a slight administrative overhead for the DM. I think it would not be that hard to cross out the total on the map or key and scribble in a lower number after such an encounter, but is is just one more thing you have to keep track of.
(2) You need to adjust the encounter tables. Otherwise, if there is no response and random encounters continue unchanged, then the characters can use this tactic to bleed out the lairs in a controlled manner. This is even more work.
I confess I often use random encounters as an unending source of monsters. Convenience first. Maybe add a few more pallets to the lair, to make up for it.
One interesting idea could be to allot a pool of wandering monsters to each encounter in the table. These represent the share of each faction that is typically out and about and thus not reflected in the lair, although they should have some living space there. One would still be able to plan organized responses with the monsters from the lair, but could continue to run the encounters unchanged, until the pool has been used up. Just put the wanderer pool behing the line in the table, like so
1-2 troglodytes -- renewing sacred wall drawings to ward off spirits [total 4]
In cases like wolves in the forest ignore the pool. In our example, 3 trogs were already killed in two earlier encounters. The last encounter would either be with a single trog, or you would remove one trog from the cave, if two were indicated. And after that, ignore the trog encounter when you roll it, as the rest of the group is huddling up in their cave and not sending more patrols to die.
This also conserves special characters in the lair (e.g. shaman, seargeants, concubines), that would not appear in a random encounter group normally, and ensure they will be encountered. Although, it might be more intersting to include one of them in the wandering group as leader, especially if the groups of wanderers are larger.
PS In OD&D, the number of creatures encountered in a random wilderness encounter could be huge, especially for bandits or humanoids, and if rolled from a general table would act to define what lairs were nearby, on the fly. The number encountered in a pre-designed dungeon or cave is much smaller, typically 1-6, maybe more if they are especially weak individually.
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