Comments on: Keep Randomness Out of Your Encounters!

By: Big McStrongmuscle

Big McStrongmuscle — Mon, 11 May 2009 12:42:34 +0000

Well, dragonblix, I think that’s not quite the whole story. A good random encounter table is usually made from monsters that actually have lairs somewhere nearby that the PCs can look into, which usually satisfies the “But why?” crowd.

The reason they were invented is not just to fill in gaps in creativity, either (although they certainly do that well). The older editions of D&D mostly award XP for getting treasure. Wandering monsters don’t have any, and the DM rolls for them every half-hour or so of game time. There was not much benefit to the players for fighting them.

You ever have your players go, fight one encounter, blow all their entire arsenal of big spells and X/day magic item powers, then sleeping in the dungeon and regaining everything before moving on? Random encounters are designed to discourage them from doing that. When you have on average three encounters a night interrupting your sleep, you practically have to retreat and regroup in order to get any sleep.

By: What is D&D, Anyway? | A Butterfly Dreaming

What is D&D, Anyway? | A Butterfly Dreaming — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 21:52:14 +0000

[...] between old-school and new-school. All of this was founded, mind you, on a misinterpretation of a single post by Trask of Living Dice. (Later he added a second post based on an editorial by someone at [...]

By: dragonblix

dragonblix — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 20:03:37 +0000

lets take this issue at both perspectives… randomness is good because it will keep the players (and sometimes you) on their toes. if your were to keep a linear encounter string the players would be prepared for almost every battle, randomness makes the players think, “will it be goblins or golems?”. it also helps those people (like me) who just cant make up their minds on an encounter, you dont want to make it to repeditive but you still need the series of battles to amke sense of why the monsters are there in the first place. random encounters are also good for parties that arent much in for the role playing and the “but why…” questions and are more there for the “hack-slash-kill-take treasure” style of gameplay.
BUT… random encounters are bad because it makes the roleplaying a bit shaky and insane. if you tell them that their entering a goblin controlled dungeon and you throw in an owlbear, thats makes a good questionable encounter mabey once, but more than that the players get tuned out of the game and starts asking unanswerable questions (unless your a clever DM and you write down the reasons for the weard stuff).
anyway i think randomness is a personal taste and it can be good if the players wander away from the dungeon and out into wilderness, but thats both veiws on random encounters so give me some replys on it.

By: Samuel Van Der Wall

Samuel Van Der Wall — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 13:35:59 +0000

I can’t decide if I want to agree with you, or disagree with you. I guess it depends on the party and if you put them in that situation, or they put themselves in that situation. I know that I’ve encountered some other creatures in D&D 4e that were ridiculously powered for their level. The problem when you make a system so numerical like D&D, is that you have to make choices as a dungeon master on whether or not to fudge rolls when the math of the designers fail. For some, fudging rolls and situations is not a big deal. For others, it is heresy.

By: Justin Alexander

Justin Alexander — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 07:53:17 +0000

Your position is, I’m afraid, completely incoherent. You claim that:

(1) \I am NOT advocating removing randomness from the game…\

But then you say:

(2) \Which leads me to my point; never allow a dice roll determine how difficult an encounter becomes.\

But, of course, the only way to prevent randomness from determining the difficulty of an encounter is to remove randomness from the game.

Yeah, the rat summoner got some lucky recharge rolls. But that luck of the dice could have just as easily been him rolling a string of hits while you guys rolled poorly and got a string of misses.

You also say:

(3) (in the comments) \My main issue is that the encounter designer created a situation where it becomes mathematically impossible to defeat the encounter.\

Actually, randomness in combat is specifically one of the ways in which the outcome of a combat doesn’t become mathematically impossible. (Improbable, maybe. Impossible? Never.)

If there is, in fact, a problem with the encounter design (and not just a string of unlucky rolls), then that problem lies not in the mere existence of randomness, but in the specific probability of that randomness.

By: Stu

Stu — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 19:02:18 +0000

are you kidding me? There are times when you simply have to run from combat. And if you remove the random chance generation from your game, why are you playing a dice-based game at all? The odds are against said wererat summoning every turn at 1 in 3. But odds are reset every time it happens. Sometimes you should be challeged by a fight you can never win. It teaches a player not to think that everything thrown at them is defeatable You couldn’t win a fight. deal with it.

By: Oddysey

Oddysey — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 16:41:30 +0000

I’m with the “randomness is part of the game” folks. If this kind of thing happened every time, sure, that’d be a problem, but the occasional unexpectedly difficult encounter is “well within parameters” for D&D.

By: noisms

noisms — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:17:00 +0000

This may come off the wrong way, but I’ll say it anyway: if you’re that opposed to randomness, it may be a good idea to stop playing D&D and check out Nobilis or Amber Diceless instead.

Randomness is inherent in D&D, from whether attacks hit or not to whether or not saves are made. Chaos is integral. There’s nothing wrong with being annoyed by that – different strokes for different folks – but why play a game if it’s going to annoy you?

By: Syrsuro

Syrsuro — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 12:37:03 +0000

My question is:

What is the difference between a creature that ‘gets lucky’ and wins the encounter becuase it happens to rolls a couple of key criticals and a creature that ‘gets lucky’ and happens to win the encoutner because it happens to recharge a key ability a couple of times?

In both cases, the dice are influencing the outcome and generating a statistically less-likely outcome. And in both cases, DMs who are inclined to fudge the dice might be expected to do so and DMs who are inclined to let them fall as they may would be expected to do so.

And any DM who is in the second camp is likely, imho, to see this as the natural order of things (i.e. the players don’t always get to win).

This is, imho, no more ‘bad design’ than using dice in the first place is bad design.

But what I mostly disagree with is the assertion:

the encounter designer created a situation where it becomes mathematically impossible to defeat the encounter. I do not mind tough encounters, even unwinnable ones if there is a good story reason.

As I see it, the designer did not create a mathematically unwinnable encounter. He created a situation where if a statistically unlikely occurance happens the encounter might become unwinnable. Or, arguably, retreating became preferable to staying – since you didn’t stick around you don’t know if you would have won or not. Perhaps it would have stopped recharging and you would have won the day. Perhaps not. And that uncertainty is, imho, a huge part of the game.

Isn’t the possibility of the statistically unlikely the reason we use dice in the first place? If you wanted the outcome to always fall into the most likely possible outcome – or if you only want to lose when “there is a good story reason”, why bother roll at all?

And does this mean that you discount the possibility of emergent story – the story arising from the outcome (“the players learn that they are capable of failure”) as opposed to the outcome arising out of the story (“the players defeat their enemies”)?

Carl

By: LiquidWeird

LiquidWeird — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 18:38:58 +0000

This is why I will never play a living game.
The idea of ‘parameters’ is anathema to me. I’d be thrown out because I’d basically ignore the module and do whatever I damn well pleased as a GM. GMs have infinite power and designers make suggestions. The idea that I as a GM should follow someone’s railroad plot and not run the game however I damn well please is galling and I won’t bloody do it.

The same goes for playing as a player. If I’m not allowed to play my character in a reasonable way because the ‘game parameters’ don’t permit it, I’d fling my dice at the GM, call the module designer a nazi ass-hat and storm off.

Grr. The idea of having to conform to Living campaign rules pisses me off from the get-go. If you like doing it, fine, but I just can’t play that way.