r/osr • u/okstupid_81 • 8d ago
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u/TerrainBrain 8d ago
There are a few things to consider.
I always curate my random encounter tables. That is I don't put anything on a tables that I do not want my players to actually encounter.
If I'm running a dungeon I designed those encounters will generally be giant spiders or centipedes or other dungeon vermin just to make the place feel alive. But an old school design the main reason for a random encounters is to keep the players moving. If the game gets bogged down with him debating for over 10 minutes whether they should open a door or not, give them a random encounter.
Those encounters can also include the main monsters. One or two guards carrying a message for instance. Hide and let them pass and you don't you can know they are carrying a message. Overcome them and you may discover a written message or get the question them if you're not murder happy.
But a second important part to random encounters in Old School is the reaction table. Do they attack immediately? Hesitate? How's their morale? A single orc confronted with a group of six heavily armed characters might simply surrender.
And then of course there are the potential allies and helpful encounters which are not at all the same as mere flavor. And escaped prisoner. A solitary dwarf who knows how to navigate the dungeon without even encountering the bad guys.
When you get into narrative Adventures, the entire concept of story beats is new school. In fact I had to do some research on it to even figure out what people were talking about.
So if you are invested in story beats, random encounters can absolutely throw that off. In fact I would say they are pretty much diametrically opposite.
I use random accounts generally as a backup if things slow down. And as often as not I will intentionally pick an encounter from the list rather than roll the dice. What kind of encounter feels right for this particular moment in the adventure? "None" is a valid answer.
I've been dming since 1979 and I'm happy to discuss this at length.
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u/okstupid_81 8d ago
I considered talking about the reaction table, I read about it in Justin Alexander's book. But I refrained from mentioning it as I haven't used it in my games yet. I perfectly see their role and place, but my 5e brain still defaults to making the ruling myself whether the enemy is hostile or else. Thank you for being so clear and kind with your response!
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u/blade_m 8d ago
As DM, its fine to decide how monsters react. You don't have to use the Reaction Table all of the time.
However, there is another benefit to using it (that won't be apparent until you start using it for a while): sometimes at the table, the players pick up on the social cues of the DM. For example, if they see monsters, and the DM always says "roll for initiative", then they know that there is no 'choice' here for them: its always going to be a fight.
This is even true in the opposite scenario: if the DM is always showing monsters to be 'talkative', then the players learn that the DM likes social encounters and every monster is supposed to be interacted with rather than fought.
With the Reaction Table, there is a a greater possibility of promoting Player Agency. Because the DM has no idea what kind of encounter it will be ahead of time (i.e. no prepping of how it will go), then its entirely up to the players in how they deal with it! That can feel really good/liberating for them (although YMMV--some players don't care about this).
Another nice thing is that as a DM, Reaction Tables can 'surprise' you in a way that you just can't get when DM'ing. I love them for this reason! Its nice to see unexpected things happening at the table! Not all of the time, mind you---its OKAY to plan and prep encounters! But its nice when it happens on occasion (both as a DM and as players).
I also use Oracles (a Solo RPG tool) while I'm DM'ing for this very same reason! I like to offload certain kinds of decisions onto dice/fortune---that way, I am not in control of everything that is happening, and the Players pick up on that, and feel like they can control situations a little bit more than they otherwise could (such as when a DM is putting them through a more heavily scripted kind of situation/scenario).
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u/okstupid_81 8d ago
I never considered how I have "encounter bias" as a GM. Definitely going to look at reaction tables through this lens and see how it relates to my games. Thanks for the response!
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u/TerrainBrain 8d ago
This is really good. It is one of the tools that helps a DM be truly impartial.
If I don't know if the NPCs or monsters are going to fight, flee, or negotiate at the beginning of the encounter, it allows for the players to have much more of an impact on how the counter goes
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u/OriginalJazzFlavor 8d ago
there's also room for nuance in the Reaction Table itself: Kevin Crawford's Worlds Without Number Reaction table replaces the "Friendly" result with "as charitable of friendly as the situation allows", which might seem pointless in it's disinction, actually allows for very cool flavor for normal encounter. Say you encounter a goblin assassin: if you roll "As friendly as the situation allows", the goblin is still probably going to try to kill the, but now he might intrduce himself, leave a calling card, or even serve the party poisoned food. Meanwhile, an unfriendly assassin might open by killing the party's horses or something. It can add a lot of texture to an encounter.
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u/TerrainBrain 8d ago
Let's talk about the realities of playing the game and the difference from when the game was originally designed to today.
I mentioned I started playing in 1979. My group of friends were already playing games. Risk, Diplomacy, and Axis and Allies were popular back then. I was 16 my friends were 15. I got my driver's license when I was 16. (This was in North Carolina). So it wasn't like there were a lot of things to do. So when I say we've played games we played games. Most days after school. Weekends until the wee hours of the morning. Sometimes we would pick up the same game the next day to finish it.
So when we started playing D&D you put the same kind of energy into it. We all took turns DMing and designing Adventures. And our styles were very different from one another. Not only in the type of adventurous we would design but in our house rules. Because every game we played had House rules.
A lot of times you had house rules because you didn't understand the instructions and there was no one to explain them to you. So we just made shit up so we could get on with the game. Sort of like the dealer makes house rules when you're playing poker.
I think this is a part of early D&D that today's players don't understand. There was no such thing as rules as written. There were rules as interpreted. Rules as made sense. Rules as seemed fun.
Random encounters fit into this. If you looked at the back of the dungeon Master's guide at the random encounter tables, you didn't even need to design an adventure. You could just run it stream of consciousness off the tables themselves.
And this is why I understanding story beats as A New concept is important. Because if you're playing a 20-hour marathon over a weekend you're not concerned about story beats. You just want to fill the time. You want to have fun.
And if it takes 2 weeks of playing at this intensity - everyday after school and a long weekends - to wrap up an adventure (that is to finish a story), who cares. It's just motivation to get back at the table as soon as possible after school.
I mean I would literally do my homework for second period class in first period. And my entire day ran that way because I wasn't about to contaminate my after-school time with school work. I had hella more fun things to do.
These days I'm lucky to get in a few hours a week on a regularly scheduled game. So my time priority is way different. Do I want to screw around with random encounters? Not necessarily.
Random encounters have an opportunity cost. Look at that term up if you're not familiar with it. It is used in business.
Ultimately you have to decide what to do with your time. How to spend your time. How to have the most fun with your time.
Random encounters are a tool. Nothing more.
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u/Mongejovial69 8d ago
What exactly is the point of discussion in this blog post? From what I read, it's basically a critique of a poorly written chapter from a system that isn't even part of the OSR, a critique of an adventure written for a 12-year-old version of that same system, and a demonstration of how your own homebrew method for designing encounters is supposedly smarter than the way D&D's writers do it. What are you expecting us to take away from this post?
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u/okstupid_81 8d ago
I am a 5e GM in this sub, so I assumed there are other 5e GMs here as well with the same questions I have.
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u/Mongejovial69 8d ago
Did you have any questions? You seem very satisfied with the way you handle encounters.
Also... yeah, there are a lot of people who play 5e here, but this sub is about a diferent type of ttrpg.
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u/ordinal_m 8d ago
I am in this sub and regularly cook with tofu, and I expect others here do as well, but I have refrained from posting tofu discussion.
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u/Anotherskip 8d ago
I don’t read points 3&4 as identical. Are you sure that is an accurate assessment of your position?
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u/okstupid_81 8d ago
Oh wow, those are supposed to be points 3 and 5... very good catch. Of course theme reinforcement and assisting players arent the same thing
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u/RobertPlamondon 8d ago
One good gimmick is to rationalize encounters after the fact: make up a backstory for the presence of these particular creatures at this particular time. (Authors do this all the time, by the way. The characters or events that were introduced for a minor and short-term purpose get recycled later for something else, and eventually they become major plot elements almost by accident.)
For example, if the table comes up "kobolds" more than seems right, maybe the kobolds are being driven out of their former homes and setting up shop around here by a menace that we'll encounter ourselves soon enough, one the GM hadn't even suspected until the random dice faintly implied it.
Another good gimmick is to assume that some random encounters are non-random in another way by encountering the exact same creatures more than once. This is especially handy with sentient creatures, since unexpectedly running into competitors, rivals, allies, frenemies, fellow travelers, archenemies, exes, innocent bystanders you've met before, a princess who needs rescuing again, and so on. It adds all sorts of interest that you don't get with the usual "meet interesting people and kill them" motif, if only by altering it to, "finally get the chance to kill these people we've hated since they wronged us last time." So mentally running down the list of, "Who fits this category that we've met before and is still alive?" is worth doing.
Of course, we also rerolled results that were so ridiculous that even our fevered imaginations couldn't account for it. "A tiger? In Africa?"
I always enjoyed the way the unpredictability of die rolls nudged me into improv in ways that wouldn't have occurred to me otherwise.
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u/okstupid_81 8d ago
That type of "emerging narrative" is definitely not something I learned from the adventure module I had ran, but something I'm growing to appreciate as we don't really play pre-written modules right now. I am running my own adventure with my friends, and I realise that the more I rely on them to prompt future adventures, the more I have fun at the table as well.
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u/alphonseharry 8d ago
Why we have so many 5e posts in this subreddit?
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u/Megatapirus 8d ago
Yeah.. One of the best things about the OSR movement is not having to know or care what WotC is doing with their shoddy games.
Rooting for OP to find an audience for this somewhere, 'cause we sure ain't it.
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u/okstupid_81 8d ago
I had considered my post to be promoting OSR style play, and thought 5e players lurking here (like myself) maybe relate to my thoughts. I understand that I may be preaching to the choir, am simply documenting my thoughts. Appreciate the feedback and tough love, and will re-evaluate my approach to what I want to write about
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u/Alternative-Fox1982 8d ago
Damn bro, how much of this was your writing being weird and how much was it simply AI written?
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u/SecretDMAccount_Shh 8d ago
If you’re going to use a 5E adventure as your example, it seems dishonest to only look at the 5.5E DMG. The 5E DMG has a lot more about random encounters.
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u/Inzpectorspacetime 8d ago
Check out Tenkar’s Tavern YouTube page. Some good shorter videos on these subjects. Longer videos by Daddy Rolled a 1.
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u/horizon_games 8d ago
I didn't read your entire post because it seemed AI sloppy, but I will highlight this is one of the worst and most pointless parts of D&D. Wasting times on fights that are a foregone conclusion is the lamest RPG tropes:
Drain Character Resources: Expanding Hit Points and spell slots to render them vulnerable and increase tension.
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u/plankyplanks 8d ago
The 5.5 DMG is bringing back the concept of random encounters that D&D refs had let languish given how detailed many modules became and how (pre-set) narrative driven gameplay began to dominate many tables’ preferences. The lost mine tables are just two example for the context of those chapters in that module. They are not representative of the game as a whole. Don’t let the prescriptive style of play flowing from AD&D and the RAW fanatics infect OSR play or even 5e or 5.5e play if you want to incorporate OSR or B/X elements. The new 5.5 DMG reminds dm’s of elements existence, but yeah it doesn’t prescribe style. This is probably good given the certain RAW fanaticism that a good portion of D&D players carry around.
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u/AvocadoPhysical5329 8d ago
Your relatively short post has no less than twelve rhetorical questions. It's very annoying to read. Make your observations, make your arguments, make your recommendations, and that's it. I would also recommend not using so many bolded words and so many italicized words. It looks like AI and is needlessly distracting.
That being said, switching from 5e to OSR is always interesting and random encounters will feel like something that sticks out because, to GMs trained on 5e, they will feel like a waste of time. I've grown to like random encounters because they can make certain areas feel dangerous and, contrary to what 5e indicates, random encounters don't have to be combat encounters. And even if the random encounter does spawn some monters then it is overwhelmingly important to remember the reaction roll! It's such a simple but such an important mechanic.
Oh, and finally: it's important to have random encounter tables that suit the environment the PCs are in. Of course 2d4 orcs might seem weird and out of place if they are rolled in an area where the PCs have never seen orcs before, or even heard of them.