Procedure: Overloaded Wilderness Encounters

To participate in this months blog carnival - hosted by Plastic Polyhedra on the topic of Procedures I want to share the procedure for exploration I have bolted together.

A little background - of campaigns I have run recently - one was a series of one-shots, one was a book campaign and one was a very high social/politicking game with little travel - none of which were great for frequent use of encounter tables from being out and about. A new campaign I have launched (see here, here and here) has a lot more exploration and hex-crawling to it which has given me the opportunity to improve my approach to encounter tables by picking up some of the best practice out there.

I wrote before about the core encounter table getting built - an unlockable table which could stay random but shift the probabilities around depending on whether you roll 2d12, 3d8, 3d6 or 6d4. I have combined this with an overloaded encounter die for what specifically is encountered during a given hour for traversing the wilderness.

The version of the overloaded encounter die I use is from Hexploring by Meandering Banter as I like the inclusion of weather:
1. Encounter: live, moving entities off the encounter table
2. Setback/hazard: a passive encounter, trap or hazard associated with the roll from the main table
3. Expiration/Fatigue: consumption of resource/delay/end of effects
4. Weather (outdoors) / Locality aspect (weather shielded)
5. Percept: Spoor, traces or clues to the thing rolled
6. Advantage: some boon or hidden feature is revealed

So together we get the below - a flat chance of it being the type of encounter from the d6 and the probability curve of it being whatever is out there wandering about.

Overload Wilderness die vs Unlockable Wildnerness Encounter Table

I love the principle of the overloaded encounter die - no dud rolls; every time the dice hits the table something is going to happen - good, bad or curious. I also like the creative discipline it forces on me as a GM by making me declare what is out there (the encounter table) then having to find out with the rest of the table do they find dragon tracks or some hint of its presence before they are confronted with the beast itself.

The wrinkle for this that has come out during play is that for any given encounter roll there is another variable at play - the hex that the group is in at the time; the encounter table is for wandering entities but for rolls of 2, 5 or 6 it could be something to do with the hex itself, not something wandering about within the hex.

Map done with Hex Kit with the few things visible from their base marked in.

Altogether I have found this works pretty well as a tool for heavy use - previously I had my encounter table, it would get rolled on then once any given encounter was run it was scratched off as done. This way I am getting much more mileage out of continuous rolls as the party trots about over and back in the bayous beyond their base town.

Note, as per a commenter on my previous post about the original encounter table, you could get much of the same bang for buck with a 1-12 table where 1-6 is daytime, 7-12 is nighttime if you are only spending a small amount of time in a location. I am using this probabilistic table because I anticipate a lot of traipsing about over the same general terrain, enough that even the rarer rolls will start to turn up.

I have also folded in some sub-tables to keep things interesting for me and to force me out of my usual behaviours.

For an example of keeping things interesting for me one of the encounter entries is 'Rich foragings' which is allowing me to bring in interesting and evocative strangeness from other blogs - Foragings from Haruspex Hovel, Fantastic Feasts and Where to Forage Them from The Tome of Lost Lore and Coins and Scrolls Monster Menu-All Part 1: Eating the AD&D Monster Manual and Part 2: Veins of the Earth.

For an example of forcing myself to be more creative I am going to be more rigorous about using the Nature terrain generator from Frog Factory's "Three d100 Battlemap Generators". Enough of people stumbling over each other on flat terrain, I need to switch things up and make combats interesting by making the terrain more than just a flat stage for people to act upon. Some of the best combat encounters I have had recently had strange and challenging terrain - I need to do this more for my players.

Two meta elements of this procedure set up is to a) use more of the fantastic stuff out there on blogs at my table and b) to be more disciplined about saving my sources so I can find them again and more importantly credit them as above when I write about it.