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Chris Bissette: "Wrote a little blog post about why you should be using surprise/reactions/distance with your encounter tables. It contains the best encounter table I've ever written." Agree (cohost.org)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

I’d imagine it’s the OSR influence, especially with the more old-school notion that the random encounters are the story.

That is, instead of random encounters being an interruption of the narrative, they’re just as much a part of it as the time your PCs sat in a bar for two hours trying to convince the barmaid to go dungeon-crawling with them.

Especially if random encounters include variation in distance and attitude. Encountering a knight could involve stumbling into a questing hedge knight‘s campsite, or it could involve hiding from the Black Knight after spotting them from a nearby hillside.

And there is also a narrative purpose in having combat start from “just existing in the game world.” Parts of the world are dangerous and deadly to be in, and random encounters are a good way to portray that without elaborately plotting out a sequence of “dangerous events” on a travel timetable.