Quote Originally Posted by Koo Rehtorb View Post
Again... there's nothing forcing a GM to use random encounter tables at all except maybe when you're playing 1st edition? I think they're a useful tool for portraying the wildlife of a particular region and representing the danger of travel, but they rapidly stop being relevant when the party is strong enough that travel isn't really dangerous to them any more. If you're a party of level 15s and you roll "some goblins" on a table there's nothing wrong with the GM saying "Some goblins attack and you kill them"
They're a useful tool in dungeon crawls as they put a cost on time-intensive operations.

The use in hexcrawls and the like is similar.

But, again, "encounter" doesn't have to mean "roll initiative". And if the results of the encounter are obvious... why not just say that and move on with it?