On the Wandering Monster, Part 1: My God, What Have I Done?

It’s no secret that wandering monsters and
random encounters have gotten increasingly unpopular in recent years. I vaguely
recall playing a bit of AD&D with a babysitter when I was really young, but in practice, I started
playing “for real” in the early 2000s with the launch of 3rd
edition D&D, and it was maybe fifteen years before I even considered using a random encounter as a
GM. I’m not convinced any GM I’ve played with has ever used one. But I’m starting to realize that, in doing so, we’ve created a series of problems for ourselves, and that maybe Wandering Monsters deserve another look.

Most of the time, as a GM, I simply decided
when it was appropriate for the players to fight an enemy, and when that
decision was made, I would open the monster manual to the index of Monsters by
CR, then pick a couple monsters with a CR equal to the party. This was the
technique I taught to new players who wanted to GM for the first time. I have
near-photographic recall of every skill and feat in dozens of 3.5-era D&D
splatbooks, I know the stat modifiers of every PC race, I can tell you the BAB
and save progression of (probably) every
class, but I’m actually not even sure if the 3.0/3.5 Dungeon Master’s Guide even
has Wandering Monster tables, much
less whether they’re any good.

I remember seeing such a table at some
point—I think it was in the Planar
Handbook but I’m not sure—and scoffing. The table had something like a Pitfiendat
one end of it and an Imp at the other, which struck me (at the time) as
completely ludicrous. If a tenth-level party fought a Pitfiend, they would die.
If they fought an Imp, they would win in the first action, and we’d all be
wasting our time. I imagined the ages
it would take to pull out the dry erase board, draw the scenery, roll for
initiative, determine turn order, and see the Imp die instantly (in exchange
for no XP) and imagine precious hours of my life simply sliding away from me.
Likewise, (I reasoned) if some fool of a GM actually rolled a Pitfiend and went
through with it, their campaign was effectively over. The party would be
slaughtered, everyone would be upset and unhappy, and it would be the GM’s fault
for using level-inappropriate encounters.

“Hellish” is right. (Manual of the Planes, 2001. p. 151)

I only realize this in hindsight, but it is
deeply ironic to me that my least favourite Elder Scrolls game is Oblivion. I
hated it (by Elder Scrolls standards, which is to say that I consider it one of
the best games ever made, just not as
much as Morrowind) as soon as I left the tutorial area. In Oblivion, every
single monster is scaled to provide a perfectly adequate, but overcomeable,
challenge based on your character’s current level. If you optimize your
character at all, the game is easy from start to finish, as everything from
mudcrabs to daedra are, and will always be, slightly weaker than you. If you make
bad skill choices, the game is a merciless slog as you obtain meaningless levels
and never catch up to the world around you.

In contrast, Morrowind, the lesser-known
and substantially-uglier earlier instalment, makes very light use of level
scaling. At the start of the game, you can walk right into the ash wastes and
scale Red Mountain, where you are certain to die. The monsters there are
appropriate for high-level play. Likewise, at high levels, very little in the
Bitter Coast, which is a lower-level area, will provide a challenge. If you’re
playing at low levels and run into a Dremora (an Elder Scrolls demon-equivalent),
you run. You run like your life depends on it. This is a level of
fear and suspense that I’ve rarely felt in a tabletop game. The Morrowind AI is
pretty dumb, so the enemies don’t chase you very far or effectively, meaning
running away is relatively straightforward. If you’re lucky and a little
clever, you can take down such an enemy at low levels and grab some very not level-appropriate loot. Sure, it
“unbalances” the game, but Morrowind doesn’t really have any balance
to begin with—and you’ll feel pleased as plum with your shiny new Daedric
Tanto. Besides, if you end up too powerful for the area you’re in, you can just
gravitate to somewhere that provides a little more challenge.

It was a dark day for me when I realized that the D&D worlds I was
running were more like Oblivion (which, in my mind, can do no right) and less
like Morrowind (which can do no wrong). I floundered for a while looking for a
solution, house-ruling things that didn’t need house-rules, devouring every
alternate game system I could come across, until I stumbled across some light
in the darkness: the Wandering Monster. Justin Alexander, the genius behind the
Alexandrian, wrote an absolutely brilliant analysis of the decline and fall
of Wandering Monsters, which you can find here.
Read it. It ties into the history of
D&D, the rise of the 15-minute adventuring day, the decline of the Fighter,
and the advent of CoDzilla. Then follow that up with this,
which discusses the fallacy that I—among others—made with respect to CR and encounter
balancing, which is to say, we didn’t read the damn rules.

Being a known rules lawyer, with all the
good and bad that comes with this, is very close to my identity, so please
appreciate that, for me, this is a deeply shameful admission.

All of this happened to me about a year
ago, and honestly, I’m still reeling from the shock of it. I think that
mastering the use of the Wandering Monster is the difference between the style
of game I’m used to running—which is to say, Oblivion, and therefore, lame—and the style of game I want to run—Morrowind. It was during the initial period of shock that I wrote Into
the Living Library, an adventure that, both narratively and
mechanically, hinges almost entirely on Wandering Monsters. I borrowed and
stole a bunch of innovative ways of handling wandering monsters to pull that
off, but I think I can go further. We
can go further. We can perfect the
Wandering Monster, slay CoDzilla, reduce GM prep time, and do it all without
wasting precious gaming time.

Next up: Wandering Monsters and the
Narrative