Wandering Monsters and Random Encounters
There's a blog post on Game Crush called "Random Battles Equals Random Annoyance." Scorpia has followed up with her own commentary called "Random Encounters."

This has actually been a design issue I've been struggling with on my own, one which I still don't have a perfectly satisfactory answer for. But I thought I'd share my musings. And of course, I can't resist the opportunity to run off at the mouth (or the fingers) about one of my favorite subjects, RPG design.

Why Wandering Monsters
First off, the wayback machine. The whole concept of random encounters began in dice & paper games of old. The first edition Dungeon Masters Guide for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, printed in 1979, devoted several pages in Appendix C to "Random Monster Encounters." They served a great purpose in dice & paper games. They were a simulational abstraction, a tool for a DM who couldn't keep track of everything going on in his brain.

They were also referred to in modules by another term: "wandering monsters."

And that's what they were supposed to be. Not every monster sat contendedly in its room, guarding its treasure, oblivious to the sound of battle right outside its bedroom door. Players were not supposed to feel perfectly safe standing around in corridors or in rooms they'd already bathed in the blood of their opponents. The threat of the wandering monster was supposed to keep them pushing forward, and keep them from spending hours and hours cobalt testing the doors before opening them, and taking naps to restore spells in the middle of the troll's lair.

Even then, however, the modules and adventures usually indicated that the monsters came from SOMEWHERE. This was even illustrated in the sample adventure included in the 1979 Dungeon Master's Guide, where the wandering monster table stated exactly where those monsters came from. If you killed the 3-12 goblins encountered as a wandering monster check out in the hall, they were explicitly on patrol from rooms 7 & 8 on the map, which means they WOULDN'T be there to do battle against you when you kicked open the door to room 7 an hour later.

From this perspective, random encounters / wandering monsters are a good thing. Battles shouldn't only occur on the player's terms and on the player's timetable. Otherwise, it gets boring (as it does in some PC CRPGs, when encounters occur almost exclusively when the player moves into a particular trigger area).

It can easily go too far in the other direction, too. Jessie Decker and David Noonan mention this in their excellent article, "Let's Get Small: Adventure Design Part I." I'll just borrow a quote:

"In real life, if you attack a site full of armed, dangerous people, the entirety of them will respond—probably overwhelmingly, and probably right at the entrance. But that rarely makes for a satisfying D&D game. First, PCs don’t feel a sense of progression when they’re fighting battle after battle in room A1, not exploring the entire adventure site. Second, the PCs don’t get to make interesting noncombat decisions—the “left door or right door” sorts of questions. Third, a dungeon that empties out in response to a PC attack starts to feel like a random monster generator."

Wandering monsters resolve two issues at once. They help meet the demands of "realism" - such as it is. And, if used conservatively, they add to the game balance and fun factor (players may whine, but that feeling of risk makes them enjoy it all the more). It's rare you can kill both of those birds with one stone.

Wandering Monsters To The Rescue!
When I started running Neverwinter Nights games online, I implemented a limitation on how often someone could rest - part of a whole "Table Top Variant" set of lightweight rules I created to make the online experience somewhat closer to that of live "dice and paper" gaming. Otherwise, players would enter every single encounter fully rested, and the concept of "resource management" (or even bothering to use scrolls, potions, or wands) never entered into the strategy - it was always a straight-out brawl with the best spells at max hitpoints. Not much strategy at all. And, I thought, boring.

So I implemented the delay between rest periods. That helped a little. But what it really did was slow down the games. The players were still "safe" and knew they were safe, and would simply delay fights until they had a chance to rest. They might skip a rest break if they didn't think the upcoming fight was going to be too challenging, so it helped a little. But mainly, it just made the game slower, which was even more boring.

I started manually adding random encounters. THIS shook things up. Then I added some code to automate this process. They tended to appear when someone took a rest break (hey, you are taking a nap in the middle of a hostile dungeon, what do you expect?). That shook things up even more.

Well, I don't think the players liked it very much. They complained. However, it seemed to me that while the wandering monster encounters were frustrating (as they tended to disrupt the best-laid plans, usually hatched while milling about just outside the door to the Big Bad's Throne Room), I think they made the overall adventures better and more fun for the players. The risk, the sense of urgency, the drive to push forward in spite of not being at full resources, and the sense of danger heightened the overall experience and made it better.

It's kinda like losing a game. Most people don't like to lose. That's not the fun part of playing a game. But it's no fun to win if there's significant risk of losing either. The random encounters weren't anybody's favorite part of the game. But the threat of random encounters - and the encounters themselves which threw a wrench into otherwise straightforward plans - really did heighten the interest of the whole game.

Well, so I believe, both as a player and a designer / game master. My players might have a whole 'nother story to tell you, but if they do, don't believe them! It was all for their own good! :)

A Series of Irritating Random Encounters
But I know of what ItalianBreadMan is talking about in his rant. Too much of this, and you get exactly what Noonan and Decker were talking about - the dungeon becoming a random monster generator (with some boss encounters at the end). Literally. Console CRPGs (and some older PC RPGs) are among the worst. The web-based Massively Multiplayer RPG, Kingdom of Loathing, even lampoons this mechanic in the "Penultimate Fantasy Airship" level with the "A Series of Irritating Random Encounters" monster.

Too much of a good thing? A little bit of salt adds to the flavor. A swig of pure salt will make you vomit. Some console RPGs, where save points may be separated by tunnels filled with little but random battle possibilities, might not make you vomit, but they sure can trigger the gag reflex.

And you can't help but wonder, when playing these games, "Where the heck are these monsters coming from?" You've gone through the whole dungeon three times, killing everything in sight, yet they still keep coming. It makes you wonder where the "Monster Generators" from the Gauntlet arcade games are hidden, so you can destroy them. In fact, wandering about aimlessly waiting for random encounters to happen even becomes a key activity in these games, as you attempt to level up a couple times before facing the end-quest boss.

It begins to feel like the "Really Really Random RPG".

Realistic, Goal-Driven, Simulated Aimless Random Wandering
Now, in modern CRPGs, this thole thing has been rendered a moot point by the computer's ability to do away with this abstraction. Instead of simulating monsters going on patrol and surprising the player, this can simulated explicitly. Done properly, the whole concept of random encounters can be done away with entirely, yet still retain the excitement that comes from the monsters taking the initiative.

In fact, we could have the AI keep schedules, behave believably throughout. The player could even do the whole rogue thing and wait for the monsters to go to dinner or hunting or something, and walk off with their treasure later. Or the monsters could mount a full defense, setting off all the alarms and coordinate attacks against the player, and...

Aw, crud. Now we're back to having gameplay ruined by too much realism, aren't we? The older console games did it with a single dice roll routine. We've had to devote months to dealing with pathfinding, animation, and general AI to do do the exact same thing. AND we had to worry about polygon counts with all the monsters ending up in the same room... (Ugh! Cue flashback of Permafrost pathing bugs in EverQuest causing my framerate to drop into the low-single-digits.... Those were some spectacular deaths....)

The trick is finding the happy medium. I think Oblivion managed to do that pretty well. It seemed like there was a good mix of roamers vs. static monsters. It's not a perfect solution, but I don't think there really is one. Game design is much more art than science. And so far, conceeding art to the computer's CPU has rarely resulted in a rich experience.

So what it all comes down to me is: Wandering Monsters Good, Truly Random Encounters Bad.

With shades of gray in-between.

Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:00 AM (Permalink)