Quote Originally Posted by QuickLyRaiNbow View Post
5E published adventures are absolutely loaded with 'it takes 10 days to walk from here to there, roll three times on this chart every day, everything on the chart is a battle against 1-3 goblins in an open field' and I hate it.
Yikkes! If that's the way the encounters are done, then that would generate lots of hate for them. I get the whole need to make travel feel like it took time, was risky, etc, but IMO there are better ways to do that. I think I stated in the last thread on random encounters that we had that I have a strong dislike for rolling encounters. Especially on a table. And triply so if it's some sort of generic "encounters in X terrain" type tables.


Quote Originally Posted by Anonymouswizard View Post
I think part of the issue is that random encounters existed for a different type of module than today's adventure paths. If the point is to explore an area than these random encounters are the primary things stopping you from getting to the reward, and I believe tended to be both quite varied and avoidable ('the bandits are at longbow range and may not have spotted you, what do you do?').

Then you get to the dungeon and random encounters exist to discourage resting and novaing.

The modern D&D adventure path really needs to be closer to '3 combat encounters per long rest, we tell you when the PCs have the opportunity to rest'.
Right. I think the problem is that on the one hand, the module writers want the players to feel that there is an accomplishment in just "getting there". But where the really annoying encounters come in, I suspect, is out of a desire to be "more realistic". If every encounter is level appropriate and a challenge, then that seems too contrived, right? So let's mix it up with a bunch of random small nuisance encounteres instead! Yeah... that's not annoying at all.

I do think that a lot of these problems (especially in D&D) stem from the encounter math in the game itself. There's a significant gap between what characters can do while using zero "per rest" abilities, versus using them. Encounters that don't require the use of these resources are viewed as nuisance encounters and waste everyone's time. But there are only a certain number of "non nuisance" encounters you can run per rest period before the party becomes tapped out. And that number tends to be "more than you're reasonably going to run into randomly while travelling" but "less than what you would reasonably expect to be sufficient to clear an entire area in a dungeon/fort/lair/etc".

Which, historically, leads us to "find places to rest" as the solution. But, if they can do that, then they can go full force on the next 2-5 encounters, and then rinse/repeat. But if they can't, then hard math creates a wall in front of them, success wise. Which... is where the whole "There are places to rest, but the DM will have random encounters occur if you overuse them, so as to push you closer to your resource limits". But if those random encounters are actually random, then you run the risk of TPW by total accident and more or less unavoidable by the players. But if you don't, then the DM is basically gaming the system for/against the players. So... depending on the philosopy of running the game, these factors can result in some pretty strange/ugly outcomes IMO.

It's one of the reasons I tend to really enjoy RuneQuest as a game system. The game technically has "per day" resources (magic points), but those are very very flexible, and rarely actually come into play much (aside from very beginning level characters maybe). What magic/buffs you have going when in an encounter has almost nothing to do with resources available, but how much prep time you had before the encounter. Characters can sustain an almost unreasonable number of encounters this way before worrying about running out of actual resources to continue fighting (it's more or less just "what we can do all the time" sort of stuff). The real resources are Runespells, which are pre-defined and limited in number. but those are very slow to recover resources. You are typically using those in small bits, perioidically, through the course of the entire adventure. It takes a day of prayer to get a single point of those spells back, so barring sitting somewhere for like a month or more, those aren't just going to be usable again.

So in RQ it tends to be less about "how many level appropriate encounters per day", and more "how many really really tough fights are in the entire adventure?". You can run as many other encounters as you want, pretty much as often as you want, and not have a lot of problems. So GMs don't feel any pressure at all to "make more random encounters to challenge the party", or "have them encounter random stuff while resting to reduce their resources". That's just not a thing. If I put a random encounter in, it's because I decided that this encounter fits into wherever they are, and that it's a fun and interesting encounter, and I want to play it out. There is pretty much zero resource math pushing me one way or the other.