Over the past couple decades, a design concept that has become fairly entrenched in D&D culture is that the PCs need to face X encounters of Y difficulty per day. The general idea being that the game is balanced (either intentionally or unintentionally) around their resources being chewed up across multiple encounters: If they face fewer encounters, there’s no challenge because (a) they will still have lots of resources left at the end of the day (thus suffering no risk) and/or (b) they burn up LOTS of resources per encounter (making those encounters too easy).
There is obviously a kernel of truth here, but there are also, frankly speaking, A LOT of problems with this design ideology. But that’s somewhat beyond the scope of this article. What I’m mostly interested in focusing on today is one specific element of game play that becomes a really problematic dilemma when combined with this design ideology:
Wilderness encounters.
See, the basic assumption is that the design of Dungeons & Dragons should be finetuned around X encounters of Y difficulty per day in which the value of X reflects the number of encounters in a typical dungeon. There are some problems with this idea that dungeons should be designed as a one day excursion, but laying that aside, this makes a lot of sense: The dungeon is the assumed primary mode of D&D play; therefore the game should be balanced around dungeon adventures.
But, of course, the density of encounters in a dungeon is inherently much higher than the density of encounters in a vast wilderness. Furthermore, even if you increased the density of wilderness encounters, the result would be to turn every wilderness journey into an interminable slog. If you assume that
X = a dungeon’s worth of encounters = one day’s worth of encounters
then a wilderness journey that took ten days would “logically” have ten times the number of encounters in a typical dungeon.
You don’t want to do that, so you make one wandering monster check per day in the wilderness: The players know that they’ll have at most one “dangerous” encounter per day, so they just nova all of their most powerful abilities and render the encounter pointlessly easy.
So what do you do?
Do you just strip wilderness encounters out of the game entirely? They’re pointless, right? But to delete an entire aspect of game play (and something that routinely crops up in the fantasy fiction that inspires D&D) feels unsatisfactory.
Perhaps you could artificially pack one particular day of wilderness travel with X encounters, turning that one day into a challenging gauntlet for the PCs. But that’s really hard to justify on a regular basis AND it still has a tendency to turn wilderness travel into a slog.
For awhile there was a vogue for trying to solve the problem mechanically, primarily by treating rest in the dungeon differently from rest in the wilderness. In other words, you just sort of mechanically treat one day in the dungeon as being mechanically equivalent to ten days (or whatever) in the wilderness. The massive dissociation of such mechanics, however, could obviously never be resolved.
Long story short, the dynamic which has generally emerged is for wilderness encounters to be REALLY TOUGH: Since the PCs can nova their most powerful abilities when facing them and there is no long-term depletion of party resources (including hit points), it follows that you need to really ramp up the difficulty of the encounter to provide a meaningful challenge.
In other words, dungeons are built on attrition while wilderness encounters are deadly one-offs.
There are several problems with this, however.
First, it creates a really weird dynamic: Instead of being seen as dangerous pits in the earth, dungeons are where you go to take a breather from all the terrible things wandering the world above. That doesn’t seem right, does it?
Second, the risk posed by these deadly one-off wilderness encounters is unsatisfying. In a properly designed dungeon, players can strategically mitigate risk (by scouting, retreating, gathering intel, etc.). This is usually not true of wilderness encounters due to them being placed either randomly (i.e., roll on a table) and/or arbitrarily (“on the way to Cairwoth, the PCs will encounter Y”).
(A robustly designed hexcrawl can mitigate this, but only to some extent.)
Finally, this methodology – like any “one true way” – results in a very flat design: Every wilderness encounter needs to push the PCs to their limits and thus every wilderness encounter ends up feeling the same.
So what’s the solution?
THE FALSE DILEMMA
The unexamined premise in these attrition vs. big deadly encounters vs. skip overland travel debates is often the idea that challenging combat is the only way to create interesting gameplay.
Partly this is the assumption that all random encounters have to be fights (and that’s a big assumption all by itself). But it’s also the assumption that if the players easily dispatch a group of foes that means nothing interesting has happened because the fight wasn’t challenging.
Neither of these assumptions is true.
Let’s back up for a second.
You’ll often hear people say that they don’t like running random encounters because they’re just distractions from the campaign.
Those people are doing random encounters wrong.
The “random” in “random encounter” refers to the fact that they’re procedurally generated. It doesn’t mean that they’re capricious or disconnected from their environment. I talk about this in greater detail in Breathing Life Into the Wandering Monster, but when you roll a random encounter you need to contextualize that content; you need to connect it to the environment.
And because the encounter is connected to the environment, it’s meaningful to the PCs: Creatures can be tracked. They can be questioned. They can be recruited. They can be deceived. The mere existence of the encounter may actually provide crucial information about what’s happening in the region.
Random encounters — particularly in exploration scenarios — are often more important as CLUES than they are as fisticuffs.
They can also be roleplaying opportunities, exposition, dramatic cruxes, and basically any other type of interesting scene you can have in a roleplaying game. As such, when you roll a random encounter, you should frame it the same you would any other scene: Understand the agenda. Create a strong bang. Fill the frame.
Once you recognize the false dilemma here, the problem basically just disappears. If the PCs have camped for the night and a group of orcs approaches and asks if they can share their campfire… do I even care what their challenge rating is?
If I roll up the same encounter and:
- The PCs subdue and enslave the orcs.
- The PCs rescue the slaves the orcs were transporting.
- The PCs discover the orcs were carrying ancient dwarven coins from the Greatfall Armories, raising the question of how they got them.
- The PCs follow the orcs’ tracks back to the Caverns of Thraka Doom.
Does it matter that the PCs steamrolled the orcs in combat?
I’m not saying that combat encounters should never be challenging. I’m just saying that mechanically challenging combat isn’t the be-all and end-all of what happens at a D&D table. And once you let go of the false need to make every encounter a mechanically challenging combat, I think you will find the result incredibly liberating in what it makes possible in your game.
In my old days, I am really feeling more convinced that all the mechanics of D&D are based on a couple of fundamental assumptions that all no longer exist in the game that D&D wants to be in modern age. XP for treasure are gone. Wandering monsters are gone. Reaction rolls are gone. Morale checks are gone. PCs are much less vulnerable. Survival is much easier. The amount of spell slots has exploded. Non-magic exploration supplies are replaced by unlimited magic. Magic items can be bought in stores.
Dungeons & Dragons is designed from the ground up as a dungeon crawler and nothing else. People who already known the D&D rules and want to run or play a different type of fantasy campaign tend to just stick with the D&D rules and try to make it work, but it’s always been trying to force a square peg into a round hole.
This is really eye-opening to think about; I often find myself falling into the trap of “must keep draining resources to keep things interesting” as though combat is the end-all, be-all of D&D. The idea of difficulty and engagement was something that I was even thinking about this morning as I start to turn my initial planning thoughts towards an Avernian hexcrawl, as I’ve never really run a exploration scenario before–but this has given me a lot to chew on and think about!
This harkens back to the idea in OD&D and tie it all to other stuff you’ve written: when you roll a random wilderness encounter, you roll a full adventure. The % In Lair stat determines if you stumble on the whole adventure; you likely don’t, and just run into a squad of orcs. PCs can beat the squad of orcs easily, but what do they do next? Do they go on their merry way to the dungeon, or do they track the orcs back to their lair and try to get their loot? And plus, a squad of orcs would roll reaction, and not necessarily attack on sight. And might flee if they’re getting whupped.
Yora seems to be onto something. A lot of fundamental assumptions have changed.
I think that there is a disconnect between your approached to wilderness/random encounters and what many GM do. You assume that they generate their wilderness encounters ahead of time and include them in the prep, whereas many of the GM I have played with tend to roll for these encounters during play. Obviously, this is a bad idea if you want to make the encounter interesting, but I suspect this disconnect is at the root of many of the issues people have with random encounters. I suspect it’s also a result of the disfunctional approach to prep and encounter design many GMs have, which is something you have talked about before. If the assumption is that spending time building a plot around a wilderness encounter is going to be wasted if the players don’t engage with it, it seems reasonable to just throw a lumps of HP at them between the actually interesting stuff.
@Michael You are suggesting that Justin plans his wilderness encounters in advance and I’m not sure that’s true at all. If you look at his Hex Crawl procedures you can see Justin rolls all the encounters at the start of each adventuring day, but there is likely multiple of these in each session so it’s not likely they are rolled prior to the session.
The table in the comments of “Breathing Life into the Wandering Monster” is literally a 2d6 table of prompts as to what the wandering monsters are doing. Rolling that table alongside your wandering encounter roll, then contextualising it shouldn’t take too long at all to improvise.
Very good points both in the post and the answers above.
In our DnD 5e game initially we solved it saying that you can only rest in safe locations. Th open wilds are not such. When in dungeons the party’s first activity was to find a room they could secure in order to be able to long rest. Then we started using the variant 1 night’s sleep is a short rest, one weeks sleep is a long rest. We added you can “power through” and long rest in a nights sleep time but the day after the next you gain a level of exhaustion. This had the added benefit of making spellcasters think double before casting and giving the game an OSR feel.
I still have to introduce reaction rolls, I think it is a very big paradigm shift and it would enstrange a lot of modern players, but would totally worth it. I have to some of these days
Under the original rules and the first couple versions of the game the wilderness was hideously dangerous with equal probability of bumping into a dragon or a tribe of orcs. A long trip in the wilderness was very dangerous as parties didn’t necessarily completely recover resources on a daily basis. Getting lost didn’t just mean a delay it meant another chance of a Roc snatching a PC, a chance to encounter friendly locals, or an entire army of hostile goblins. The 1st level of a dungeon is safer than a long trip in the wilderness.
If your players want a gritty realism game and you switch to 8 hour short rests and 24 hour long rests this issue fixes itself, but that’s not how most people play. A low or 0 level campaign also fixes this issue. A monster hunting campaign designed around high level encounters also changes the paradigm as does a game where the wilds are tamed and the threats lie elsewhere (politics, existential, disease, etc). All of these rely on fundamentally changing the world or the mechanics though, and hardly fits with the default Faerunesque world that so many prefer. Faerun is not greyhawk, and we no longer really let players lead armies, as fun as that can be.
@Matt: “as though combat is the end-all, be-all of D&D.”
Well, it kind of is. I’ve played and watched D&D 5E enough to know there is a weight in the mechanics and incentives to push for combat. No matter how you start the game being open to other options and roleplaying, by about session 5 combat is the main thing players are doing.
This is because when players level up they get combat abilities, by the book xp gets given through combat, and also you have much more resources and rolls in combat to affect your will.
@Charles
“. . . when you roll a random wilderness encounter, you roll a full adventure. The % In Lair stat determines if you stumble on the whole adventure; you likely don’t, and just run into a squad of orcs.”
Did old adventures also include tools for procedural generating lairs, or were GMs just expected to sketch them out on the fly?
Grabbing some stat blocks from the Monster Manual seems pretty easy to do off the cuff, but full environments seem pretty demanding as far as improv goes, at least if we’re using prepped dungeons as the standard.
I ran a 5th edition campaign from spring to fall, and found this to be my biggest problem with the game. I aim to have PCs gain new levels every 4 play sessions or so, which is somewhere between 12 to 16 hours of play, and I am under the impression that this is considered pretty slow advancement for modern D&D. But I still found myself cramming many more combat encounters into the campaign than I wanted to because it just didn’t seem right to not give the player’s opportunities to actually use all the new combat abilities they got. The group included a fighter, and it just would be bad to not let the player get something out of his maneuvers. The warlocks could make good use of near unlimited charm person and invisibility all the time, but fighter maneuvers are only relevant in big fights.
Back when 3rd edition came first out, there were complaints about classes having useless dead levels in which they gain no new abilities. Correcting for this was a major mistake. Since then, all classes are overloaded with special combat abilities and the GM is expected to provide plenty of opportunities to use them. When there were no skills and magic users only had four or five spells, most non-combat situations could be taken on equally well by fighters, thieves, clerics, and magic-users. But with the glut of special attack abilities, everyone is getting pushed further and further into their niches, which are more and more about combat. Which requires putting a lot of combat into the game.
I’d actually rather run pre-revision 3rd edition than 5th edition now. (But really don’t want to run either.)
I am reminded of a random encounter I rolled up in an AD&D (that’s 1E to you younguns) campaign lo these many years ago. The party was fairly powerful IIRC (I’m guessing like 6th or 7th level but don’t really know any more) and I happened to roll an encounter with two werewolves.
So I had to invent this encounter. Instead of just having a couple of werewolves attack the party as they were traveling or camping or whatever, instead I had the party come across an isolated cabin. I decided that a human settler couple had been bitten by werewolves years back and become lycanthropes, and had kept living in their cabin in the middle of nowhere, glad of the isolation. After that it was improv, reacting to what the players did.
It was winter and snow was on the ground. The party did the “hail and well-met” thing and greeted these poor peasant farmers, who offered them shelter for the night. The party gladly agreed. There wasn’t room in the small cabin for everyone, so a few of them slept inside and some of the tougher/more outdoorsy types set up camp just outside.
Now, it happened that the party had been attacked by a pack of hungry wolves not too long before. And there was one player who was committed to the “no potential treasure left behind” ethos. “They might have swallowed something valuable” was basically a catchphrase uttered after every combat. So of course this character was carrying several wolf-pelts (uncured and untreated) around as “treasure”. He thought “hey, here’s a way I can dump these smelly pelts and probably get some goodwill benefit out of them at the same time” and gifted them to the werewolf couple in gratitude. They accepted the skins with what I described as an odd look.
Provoked by that perceived transgression, of course, that night the couple transformed and attacked, and a pretty interesting battle developed. Those who slept inside were trying to get outside, and vice-versa (especially since most of the fighter-types ended up outside). The wolf-pelt guy was one who had insisted on being INSIDE the cabin, and things did not go well for him. He contracted lycanthropy and it became a whole side-adventure getting that dealt with. “Wolf-pelts” became a new catch-phrase, and it even got mentioned at my wedding reception several years later.
So this is an example of a random encounter that, in the end, did become a combat — but it didn’t have to be that way. And while the battle itself did happen to be interesting, it was the events and decisions that led up to the battle that stuck with us so that players from those days still reference it. And there needn’t have been a battle at all; maybe if not triggered by the gift the couple would have remained friendly or at least non-hostile. And by encountering them, their existence there was established as canon. These would be new inhabitants of the region that they could seek out or encounter again later, or that I could fold into future adventures or plot threads.
[Unrelated side-note: the auto-correct/spellcheck suggests “philanthropy” for “lycanthropy” which amuses me.]
This is something Pathfinder 2nd edition performs much better at than 1st edition. Casters got more powerful cantrips that they can use all day, and focus spells are basically per-encounter powers. Post-combat healing is predictable and relatively easy. Attrition mostly happens if you need to rush from one encounter into another, burning per-day spells and healing. A party that can space out encounters can keep going for a very long time.
Meanwhile the encounter design system is also based more on encounters in isolation. You can easily say “I want only one encounter today and I want it to feel Severe” and build the encounter. And usually it does feel severe for the players.
By removing so much of the attrition component, it also lets you rethink what the point was of the combat. If the combat isn’t to wear down the PCs, then what is it for? The freakishly obvious answer of course is: to be an interesting and fun encounter all on its own!
This on the one hand allows you to ruthlessly prune boring combats that were only there to achieve a required amount of attrition. On the other hand, with an encounter building system that does a good job with standalone encounters, the dilemma of the wilderness encounter just stops being a dilemma. You can have zero, one, or multiple wilderness encounters, no problem.
Also if attrition is no longer a goal, it’s also okay if some encounters are just easy. They no longer “fail” to wear down the party. The only question is if the encounter was fun and interesting. So if it allows you to showcase a local monster and thus set up a story bit for later, that’s perfectly fine.
[…] The Alexandrian put together a useful GM tip on Why Wilderness Encounters? […]
While I tend to agree with the post – we need to make wilderness encounters interesting by making them meaningful, not just “balanced” encounters – there is a fairly neat fix for the one-encounter-nova that was put forward in the 5th Ed -based Adventures In Middle Earth RPG: You don’t get “long rests” in the Wilderness.
Personally, this feels logical and gritty to me – you’re living hard, keeping lots of watches. Your reserves are being whittled away.
Of course, is hypermagical D&D, this approach won’t work when characters get access to magical shelters and the like – but I love how it lines up with Middle Earth’s flavour.
@That Alastair. There’s a nice optional rule in the DMG that achieve similar results. The rest variant “Gritty Realism” makes a short rest lasts 8 hours and a long rest lasts 1 week. I used it in a short greyhawk campaign that I ran before covid and it solved this problem.
As an adjunct to the Gritty Realism approach, you could provide alternative sources of “rejuvenation” and include random encounters for those as well. For example, magical springs with healing waters, a forest grove that sings you into a deep restful sleep, and or any number of forgotten shrines to the gods. Say a prayer, get a long rest.
Put an obstacle in front of them (enemy, trap, puzzle) and a historical linkage to the wider setting, and you breathe life into those encounters too.
Then if you want to speed healing in settled areas, you could just say that these have a greater density of known ones. If going to church helps you heal and regain your spell slots, it might actually solve the usual D&D problem of clerics being the only ones that ever talk about the gods.
[…] (The Alexandrian): Over the past couple decades, a design concept that has become fairly entrenched in D&D […]
I find this really interesting! But as I read your conclusion to how to make them relevant, I also look at the content I run for the most part: Published modules/APs. Suffice to say, these don’t often include meaningful wilderness random encounters, and when you try to spice them up there is a risk that it could have a huge impact on how the adventure was “meant to be played”. It requires some good mastery of the module/good prep to be able to adapt it to some of the circumstances that could result from these random encounters, which are, by their nature, not possible to account for.
Using your Orc band example could result in the players going on completely tangential adventures to the dungeon you had setup. This could stretch out a lot with them gaining levels and powerful items that it can seriously mess up the original adventure.