Notice: This post contains affiliate links. This means I receive a commission if a purchase takes place during your link journey.

Thumbnail modified from an image by Monika from Pixabay.

Greetings friends,

I realize one of the biggest hurdles to entering the TTRPG thought-space is that different people want different things out of their games. I’m a lover of story, plots thickening, improvisation, and things that (I realize) some theorists put into discrete boxes that seem claustrophobic for my sensibilities.

One topic is the matter of random encounters, their tables, and what it means to run them. In some OSR spaces, repeatable encounter tables with bare-bones info are favored over those that hint at deeper mystery. This may make me not a great proponent but… I always felt these were lackluster. … In my take, if there is a mystery being provided, rather than pruning the mystery, it’s better to embrace the mystery and demand that whats on the page is not enough information.

Encounters are a much larger opportunity for something fun to take place, and there’s a way to write and build encounters so they transcend the page, and add to the saga taking place at the physical table!

Of course, this is not without some bias. I’ve previously build my own table for d100 City Encounters and Urban Sidequests. This was a compilation of a number of ideas I developed over the course of running some Twitch-streamed campaigns, and I realized that I could flesh each of them out with added details. This is not a table built for base game development; it’s a “storified” supplement. Its also wordy.

I will admit that while I’m proud of my work here, and have run this table multiple times with some great results, not every entry grants all of the things needed for a GM to manage heavy improvisation. … Improvising is not an open sea; it’s about the ships and the sailors.

The way I see it, the most inspired random encounter tables function as a nano-fiction version of a nano-sized adventure. An encounter is not just a couple of disparate variables thrown together; its a scene! … It is an event within a campaign which, realistically, assumes a level of time and resources from the players, and should be treated as both challenging and engaging. Every encounter is an opportunity for PC’s to be PC’s, and make meaningful decisions. … and by meaningful, I mean something more grounded than just sword slashes or goofy NPCs from left field and no context.

If I were to inject a quip of my own creation:

A good encounter entry has grounded context, openness, and a sense of direction, in as few words as possible.

I’d like to present a few things to consider as a GM running an encounter when left with bare-bones information, or … when deliberating and putting together a table with meat on the bones.

This is not a mandatory list, nor should every factor need tackling, but encounters entries need to answer at least a few of these as to present the situation and give GMs things to play with without forcing them to come up with everything from scratch.

What circumstance allows this encounter to happen? Mostly, encounters happen during travel. Its in the name; the party encounters a point-of-interest.

However, is it triggered with a yell for help? An argument? A hidden trap? A visible object or feature thats stands out? Something ominous? A stirring of activity while approaching the scene? What marks as the official start of the scene, and brings the PCs out of stasis?

It may seem obvious. You’d be surprised how not obvious it is when you’re running encounters live. … Some clues to what is around the corner provides agency to the PC’s to make decisions on their approach, and kicks off the actual encounter.

It’s not enough to just say Bugbear x2. It’s equally not enough to say “A drunken monk with a foam clown nose stumbles out of the woods looking for their lost caravan.” … Okay? So what?

Dont get me wrong. The GM may be in the mood to throw goofball things at the players with little context, and might be down to throw some ideas together on the spot. … But what does this actually add to the journey? Is this coming from the top of our creativity? Or the bottom?

The GM and PCs are deserving of a meaningful encounter. Quirky, sure! … but the situation needs more to go off of. A problem worthy of engagement, and a solution that is more than just the PCs pointing and saying “that way”. … Why are they lost? What sort of mess did this monk get into? Whats the puzzle that needs solving? What can the PCs assist with that makes for a full scene worthy of engagement? Is there a conflict?

It’s a lot for a GM to deliver. … Which is why an encounter needs to be written in a way that presents a few of these elements upfront. Whatever the encounter can provide in the text is one less thing for the GM to have to make up on the spot.

Give some indication of how the subject of the encounter might react to adventurers approaching it, or how those adventurers might be affected by it on first contact.

This can be as blatant as an IF statement, or can be implied by clever use of adjectives to convey the subjects demeanor or visible intent. Taking our above example; is the monk surly and agitated? They’ll likely argue and be combative on first approach. Are they in a pit of depression? They’ll likely come up to one of the PC’s and start randomly crying on their shoulder.

True; the GM can come up with the tone on their own. But there’s so much more direction that comes from using simple adjectives.

Most encounter entries I see toss some elements at the players and nothing more. Again, a good party can make something unique from very few words, but really… a good encounter should live in the space between an “adventure” and “a thing happens”.

If it’s just a cause for battle, what about the environment makes the battle a puzzle? If it’s a social or story encounter, what is the plot, and what can go wrong?

Taking our example from #2, was there a dispute between the monk and the leader of the caravan? What did the monk do to anger the leader? Is it a hostile/weapons drawn situation that needs mediation? … This is a point of discovery if the PC’s decide to humor the monk. The plot thickens, and provides the PC’s something definitive to do.

In a different situation, let’s say the PCs encounter bandits. The easy thing would be to step in front of the party, demand coin, and kick off combat if they say no. Simple stakes; fight or die.

… but sometimes, the stakes are too simple. Which means the encounter is too simple. Even if the base idea has been run 100x, creating more stakes makes for a more interesting scene.

Are the bandits in the middle of shaking down travelers when the party arrives? Now there are others in danger. … Is one of those travelers a noble? Now there are geo-political consequences if something goes wrong. … Is the shakedown meant to grab a specific item from the noble at the behest of someone else? Now there’s a deeper mystery to unfold.

The stakes are wide and varied; lives to be saved, enemies to be made, a bigger mess to fall into.

In conclusion, random encounter tables have so many uses depending on the kind of game being run. Perhaps an OSR game requires a vastly open sea without definition. Perhaps a modern game benefits from multiple sentences of information. Perhaps this is all reflective in a talent for adventure-writing over theory and game design.

In any of those cases, there is opportunity to add impact to an encounter, whether you are a GM, a supplement writer, or whoelse. Multiple directions to go, where one direction is in the form of a scene rather than a couple words and a monster.

Thanks for reading CWs Dungeon Delve! … Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. … Check our last post here: