Quote Originally Posted by Doug Lampert View Post
That makes sense. The owlbear was on the way from Azure City to the Oracle IIRC. There have been a lot of minor encounters to keep straight.

There were the ogres and dirt farmers while travelling with Miko toward Azure City, and orc island could be considered a random encounter while looking for a place to take in the Azure city refugees (Banjulu becoming the orcs' god and settling things with a pie eating contest was certainly random enough for me).

They thought that the scags were a random encounter, but it turns out they were part of the Kubuto plot, the paladins thought Oona was a random encounter, but it turns out she's part of TE latest set of minions.

Most of their encounters advance the plot in one way or another, but even so, they have lots of more or less random encounters and plenty of their foes are defeated and never seen again. Do we really expect great significance and a dramatic return for the Furkini menace, or Curly the vampire, or the spiked chain wielding half-ogre; on the other hand, Trigak will of course be back. He got dramatic musical cues and all.
From my time DMing, if you're doing it right almost* every random encounter should have the ability to be part of the story like this. D&D combat is often slow and not inherently interesting, especially in random encounters where there's nothing special on the map. IMO That's a waste of everyone's time. I'd rather engage them with clues to the main story or run a subplot of some sort as part of it all, so nothing is truly random.

*most exceptions are local wildlife.