Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Random Encounters

On my first skim read-through of Edge of Anarchy, I noticed that there are a few places in the adventure that call for random encounters. This seems like it will play havoc with the amount of XP that the PCs will get over the course of the adventure, and mess up the balancing of encounters and the pacing of what level the PCs are at any given point in the adventure/AP.

My initial thought is to stat up each option in the random encounter table as a combat or skill challenge encounter, and give them all the same XP value. I'll then suggest that DMs either randomly roll or choose two of the options for their PCs to encounter. This will allow me to keep a handle on how much XP the party should have at any given time in the adventure, but still allow for some variance in the plot.

I'll have to give this some more thought as I continue my detailed reading of the adventure.

2 comments:

  1. My thoughts were to design the encounters that I thought would be fun and/or add something to the story. Then I rolled some dice and as luck would have it, I rolled the correct number for the encounters I had already created.

    Seriously, save yourself the work. If you are dead set on rolling on a random chart, then roll before game and stat the encounter that you rolled.

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  2. Yeah, I had already decided that random encounters were not going to work. I just picked the ones I want to include and will insert them as appropriate. They include a skill challenge (Grau), a fight (imps), and a skill challenge that may turn into a fight (mob). I'll also keep the mad prophet, but just for color (not an actual encounter in the 4E sense).

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