Making it Happen – Or Not?

First things first, this post is NOT a knock on other play styles. Play how you like and how your table likes, what I do at my table is what works for us, and I will be talking about that, but I don’t want to give the impression that people who don’t play this way are “doing it wrong”, because they are not, they are “doing it differently”, and that’s just fine.

OK, so today on Twitter one of my favorite posters, @Blackmoor_Film, posted about an encounter he planned (with Baba Yaga's Hut) but the players did not engage with. It was set as a possible random encounter, and it did not come up. He asked if anyone else did this, e.g., design elaborate encounters that don’t get used because they are attached to random encounter rolls. The responses varied, some said yes, some said no, but a few of the responses interested me.

It was suggested that random encounters “break the flow” of the game, and that you should ensure that your players have the encounter if you have taken the time to work it up.

I don’t do this, and I thought it would be interesting to share why.

It is not because I’m a “slave to the dice”, I decide when the dice are to be rolled, and choose to accept the results. I also use weighted tables when I roll, so I have some input (or the game designers have some input) into the results.

Instead, I want to suggest something different, that using random encounters and sticking to the results makes the game world more immersive and impactful.

If I had a dime for every time someone suggested that the players “don’t know” when you make an encounter happen I would be retired by now. People focus on the individual event in question (e.g., the party’s potential encounter with Baba Yaga’s Hut) and argue that the players could not possibly know that you “made” that encounter happen. And indeed, you may not know when it happens that it was planned and not random.

But D&D is a marathon, not a sprint, in an extended campaign your players will eventually notice things, notice that PCs “just barely make it” almost every session, notice that the party always seems to be at the right place at the right time for important encounters to happen, notice that there always seems to be at least one person in the party that has the skill/ability/item/spell needed to achieve a goal, notice that party members always seem to be running into important people from their past, etc., etc.

Why does this matter?

Well, technically it doesn’t matter unless your players care. And I know for a fact that many players do not care, they will happily go along with whatever the DM has planned, knowing that they are being subtly and sometimes overtly steered towards a particular encounter/event, and knowing that the DM will ensure that they win in the end, even if it’s a challenging process to get there.

I’m not suggesting that they should change.

What I am suggesting is that playing the game differently has its rewards.

In games where the players know that the DM is tweaking things behind the curtain, they are really playing the DM’s game, participants in the DM’s story, not their own. You can see it by the language being used, “random encounters break the flow of the game.” What flow is that? The players can’t know the proper “flow” of the game as they don’t know all the details and the game world. Only the DM knows this, so it must be a “flow” in the DM’s mind that is enforced at the table.

It constantly boggles my mind the trust and power that people give to their DMs in this model. They trust the DM to fudge and fiddle with the game to ensure the results that the DM thinks are appropriate. The potential for abuse here is off the scale, something that I am surprised I don’t see people complaining about.

If you buy into this sort of gaming style, you are ultimately pawns in the story the DM is telling. This can be fun, exciting and rewarding for some players, some people LIKE to be the characters in a story someone else is telling, as they know it will “work out in the end” and hit all of the dramatic “story beats” that make a session exciting.

Letting the dice decide does something else entirely, it gives you the feeling of participating in a process that is, in a fundamental and fascinating way, outside of the control of BOTH the players and the DM. That creates a different kind of excitement. It heightens your anticipation and dread as you know that the DM can’t save you. It makes things unexpected, there is nothing quite like watching EVERYONE at the table be surprised by a dice roll result. It heightens your sense of accomplishment, as you know that things are not “given” to you, you have to EARN them. It increases your sense of agency as you know that your decisions have impacts that will not be mitigated or dismissed by the DM to “serve the story”.

It makes the game world feel real.

And that’s why you don’t mess with the random encounter rolls.

Now, an anecdote.

A few months ago my Friday game group went to sea to find an island where an important artifact was rumored to be hidden. The trip there was 5 days at sea. In our game we roll for random encounter when travelling, four per day, morning (1 in 12 odds), afternoon (1 in 10 odds), evening (1 in 8 odds) and night (1 in 6 odds). On the trip there they had three random encounters (pirates, sharks and perytons), and they found the artifact on the island after several days of exploration.

Then they headed back to the city, another 5 day journey. As it happens, they rolled NO encounters for the trip back. The first day’s encounter rolls were normal, when nothing came up on day 2 they started to snicker and whisper, when day 3 came up empty they started to shift in their seats and hiss, when day 4 came up empty they were looking at each other, jumping up and down and hitting the table, when the day 5 rolls happened they LOST THE PLOT and started to SCREAM.

Massive excitement.

All because we use random rolls and stick to the results they produce. They KNEW the odds of them making it 5 days without an encounter were long, and they KNEW that I wasn’t going to make it happen (or not happen) for them. That’s what made it exciting. When you know a process is beyond your control, and beyond the DM’s control, then it takes on a life of it’s own. It makes the game world into a living, breathing thing.

It's not a game style for everyone, some DM’s HATE this approach as THEY can’t control what happens, it means that sometimes they will “waste” encounters that don’t occur, and sometimes they will have to come up with things on the fly, which can be difficult. The very fact that many DMs see encounters that don’t happen as “wasted” tells you volumes. Nothing is wasted in D&D, if you don’t use it today you can use it tomorrow. It’s only wasted because the DM WANTED it to happen as part of the story they wanted to tell.

I think that being a “story focused” DM who insists on ensuring that encounters happen no matter what often appeals to people who like to have control over everything, as in life, so too in the game.

But the rewards of letting the dice decide is that the game world is BEYOND THE CONTROL of everyone at the table, the players can control the actions of their PCs, and the DM makes the game world respond, but in the end BOTH are unable to determine what the dice will do.

That’s where the excitement lies.

The thing that made the 5 days without an encounter so exciting is that normally, the dice would produce an encounter in that time, you can’t get that expectation if you force results. It may seem to be no big deal, but in the end tinkering with the results messes with the independence of the system and makes the game feel controlled and curated, not immersive and real.

Different playstyles, different experiences, choose yours wisely.