Advocating for Planned Encounters

So you've strained your wrist rolling on random tables, for random encounters, random contents in a chest, random villagers a villaging, random names of said villagers, random monsters and provide random treasure for them. It makes my wrist sore writing about it. I am not against random tables at all. They can provide an unexpected twist for the players and GM and let's face it, they are fun.

My soapbox rant today is about doing the work ahead of time. There are blogs after articles and comments about random tables and short cuts. I will admit I do not use random tables too often, especially during a game. Where I use random tables is during the creation of the session ,to get inspiration and creating a quirky juxtaposition of two items I would have never thought of combining.

In my games, if I feel the players are having an easy row during the adventure than I select an encounter from a list, not random ones, created ahead of time to help kick the challenge level up a notch. The only time I will use random tables during a game is if the players are camped in a certain area for a time. This allows me to give each encounter a depth a normal random encounter would not have. These encounters can become significant to the adventure.

Since random encounters have a wide following I thought I would be the advocate for planned encounters.