Typology of Random Encounters: In the Dungeon

Most of my games this past weekend were driven by the random encounter. And, despite the image above, none of them were with bears. Although one was with a crocodile. That, along with general considerations about dungeon design, has me thinking about the types of random encounters you'll find in a large dungeon or megadungeon.

Type I: Faction Members. When you have a faction in the dungeon, it should be represented on the random encounter table, unless there's a good reason that its members stay put. So if there is a goblin tribe, a gang of bandits, or a cross-species evil cult, you should be able to run into them. This allows for PCs to figure out what else might be in the dungeon without knocking down every door, and provides opportunities for faction members who leave an encounter alive to tell their allies about the PCs' activities.

Type Ia: Factions without a Base. It's possible for there to be a faction in the dungeon that is an itinerant group. This should be a temporary condition; perhaps you have a group of cavemen who've wandered into the dungeon for shelter, or maybe a half-dozen goblins got away when the PCs beat their king. They will initially be "homeless" within the dungeon, but within a session or two, they may take over a cleared room.

Type II: Predatory Monsters. There are "big" monsters that have their own room in the dungeon, but logically will be wandering about looking for things to eat. It could be a pack of hell-hounds or the minotaur; whatever it is, it's not home. If the PCs kill a significant monster outside of its lair, of course, now they have to find its treasure before anyone else does.

Type III: Animals and Unintelligent Creatures. These are your Rodents Of Unusual Size, your skeletons and zombies, your oversized bugs and so forth. They are here on little more than instinct, and most are optional encounters one way or another. The PCs can throw some rations to distract the R.O.U.S., or have the cleric turn the skeletons, or just go around them and hope the reaction roll isn't an instant attack. (These encounters should always involve reaction rolls.) They don't have the same impact as faction monsters, although they may also come from another room. I particularly enjoy relatively innocuous animals like dungeon chickens (there is a coop in my dungeon).

Type IIIa: The Clean-Up Crew. Jellies, slimes, oozes, globs, glops, puddings, molds, blobs, and various other unwholesome growing things come along and eat dead stuff. Sometimes they convert the PCs into new dead stuff to eat. These come in particularly handy if the PCs are in an out-of-the-way corner and you roll a random encounter.

Type IV: Non-Player Characters. In the encounter tables for older editions of D&D, NPCs with classes and levels were regular entries. (OD&D used the level titles for this, which is great if you remember the level titles.) They are distinct from faction members; generally once somebody has at least 2 hit dice, you should think up a name and a background rather than leaving it at "bandit #479". Fighters and thieves may have hirelings; wizards may also have familiars; clerics are more likely to have acolytes. They may have a relationship to one or more factions, and in time may constitute a faction in themselves. It's also entirely possible that they will join the PCs, and if they do so, they could also betray the PCs. Sure it's possible for bandits to do that, but in my experience PCs get stabby once someone says "stand and deliver."

Type V: Wandering Oddities. Perhaps the most neglected category, strange and wondrous effects can sit on the random encounter table along with all kinds of monsters. This can be as simple as an unknown sound, seeing a figure disappear around a corner or down a hallway, optical illusions, or even minor magical effects. This is a good way to reinforce a theme throughout a dungeon or dungeon level without necessarily dedicating a room to it or hammering it home constantly. It could be a detail like a particular fungus that is growing in this level, or mini-features like having carvings left behind by the cult that is operating nearby. This makes the dungeon a richer and stranger place.

Each of these types feeds back into solid dungeon design, and helps tie together a living environment that has strange and wondrous features. Featuring multiple examples of each type should help fill out that encounter list without the exploration feeling like a slog.

Actual Play x2: Moon Men and Peasant Rebels

Both of my A/D&D campaigns ran within two days of each other, so this is a double dose of actual play.

In my AD&D game, the PCs finished exploring a map that we had started way back in September. The dwarf got turned into green slime, but the cleric and paladin did nicely. The magic-user that the dwarf's player rolled up came with a fresh rumor (I'm as subtle as a brick, right?) of a dungeon to the northwest with orichalcum. The characters went in and saw a lot of statues, some of which caused intense delusions, but mostly didn't interact with them. The PCs had their first encounter with a dungeon chicken. Then there was a room with beastmen which prompted the comment: "Far be it from me to make presumptive comments about the tastes of wolf-headed men."

A non-encounter encounter with the dungeon cat preceded a pair of Selenites. I played them up as hostile, and they had a paralysis ray that zapped both the cleric and the paladin before the men-at-arms made short work of the moon men. This got the PCs the paralysis ray as their haul for the dungeon so far.

This morning I ran Sunday AM D&D, and prepared two potential adventure sites; of course the PCs didn't reach either. There was a non-encounter encounter with giant ferrets before they ran into a lot of difficulty getting across the river. I rolled up a troll on the encounter list, so of course it was living under an old bridge. The PCs wound up in a war of words with the troll but they were mounted and it didn't pursue them out of range of its bridge.

They went upriver and found a hillbilly named Bartto willing to row them across, but he couldn't take their mounts. They went further up and found a ferry, but it had been taken over by militant peasants (or bandits depending on who you listen to) who were immediately hostile and suspected them of being royalist spies. They went back to Bartto's crossing and overnighted, when I rolled another encounter - a giant crocodile - and rolled that it surprised them. This turned into a nasty shock when Bartto was rolling across the river, and the dwarf managed to get the boat across the river, but Bartto and the party's Magic-User, Treb, did not make it. They made their way down to the river town and found that this part of the world had a lot of tension related to the uprising upriver.

But these posts are about the lessons learned from running games, so here they are.

1. Encumbrance is a pain, but it generally works. AD&D 1e has a particularly brutal encumbrance system in terms of its requirements, but it makes players very conscious of what their characters are carrying and wearing around. My players look for ways to lighten their loads actively, including it as a factor in choosing armor and so on. I know it's a pain in the ass to track, but in an exploration game - which is what I'm running at its core - it really makes it feel more like you're making meaningful decisions.

2. It was a coincidence that both a chicken and the cat from the encounter list came up (and yes, it's a chicken and the cat) but both had good interesting effects. The players were freaked out properly. (There's a good reason for the chickens; the cat is special.)

3. The encounter charts in the Rules Cyclopedia are great. They encapsulate a lot of the ideas of the B/X / BECMI line, and feature some really neat animal encounters. They're a very good tool for wilderness hexcrawling. They've really fleshed out the world of the Sunday AM D&D game in a way that is fun to run.

4. So much of what actually happened in these games was driven by random encounter tables and reaction tables. For instance, the ferret non-encounter was a sequence of rolling "neutral" on the encounter charts, and played out with both sides avoiding each other. The insurgents, on the other hand, immediately rolled a "hostile" result toward the PCs. When I don't have a particular answer to a player question, I assign a percent chance to it, roll percentile dice, and improvise something from the result. I'm very happy where I am with this in exploration games.

5. It was fun to have both the full dungeon experience (which the AD&D game went into) and the full hexcrawl experience (as we hit it in the Sunday AM game).

The last thing to note is how good it is to be gaming regularly. And regular games, of course, mean more frequent blog entries. I'm not exactly at a regular clip but this January has been pretty good for a recent month, and I hope to keep the current pace up.

The Joy of Random Encounters

I ran a game this evening - first actual play I've had since November. I just wanted to share a couple of tidbits here while events are still fresh.

Probably the stand-out for me this evening was a random encounter. The players were going through a corridor, and reasoned it would have a secret door; they sent enough characters down it that I actually rolled a 1 on the square with the door and it was revealed. The door went into a pocket, and the players failed their surprise roll. The kobolds on the other side didn't fail theirs, so they took a round of dagger-throwing. The kobolds were evenly numbered but the players, with much better AC, managed to take them down without fatalities. The characters looted the kobold room (I think it was actually the only keyed piece of treasure in the session) and were searching for secret doors when I rolled a 1 on my random monster check.

Now, as a referee I always prepare my listing of random encounters. I wanted something icky, worm-shaped and Cthulhoid, but not too high in hit points, so I rolled up a quick, squishy Spawn of Shub-Niggurath using the charts from Carcosa, and it came out to pretty much exactly the kind of beast I needed: ugly, a bit frightening, totally new and unknown to the players. They thought quickly and used a button on the inside of the secret door room to shut themselves in. Then they got one of those moments of ingenuity that you just can't fabricate: they realized that the door seemed to be able to open or close by pressing a panel, and that they might be able to use this against the Spawn. I rolled a quick check, giving it about a 35% chance that the secret door would work like they expected (not have to recess all the way before it began to close) and it came up in favor of their idea, so they managed to neatly bisect the Spawn. I assigned 2 dice of damage for this; it would've been a save or die if the enemy had been less....thing that should not be-ish. Taking down the remaining half - what, you expected it to just die? - didn't take long, and they discovered that the blood was acidic, which they managed to bottle and sell for a bit of a profit.

Of course, I probably could've come up with a suitably Cthulhoid encounter without the charts in Carcosa, but it was fun to have a whole bunch of different options to stat up the kind of creature I needed for a very particular niche. I was also very pleased with the lateral thinking to get around the fight, which turned the whole thing from a "you see something weird" "we run / kill it" into a memorable encounter.