On the Wandering Monster, Part 2: Narrative and Foreshadowing
In part 1 of this series, I admitted to having
feared and misunderstood Wandering Monsters in D&D for years, and resolved
to find a way to make the system work.
Now, I’ll examine a few ways of looking at Wandering
Monsters that aren’t a waste of time.
One of the major criticisms with Random Encounters
(which are closely related to, but not quite the same as, Wandering Monsters)
is that they feel, well, random. You’re
walking along, minding your own business, and suddenly a lone owlbear attacks.
You’d never heard that owlbears lived in this forest, and you’ve seen no sign
to hint at their presence thus far. Once you kill it (of course you will),
nobody will ever mention them again. They are battles devoid of narrative or
stakes, and thus, they are a waste of time.
Does it have
to be this way?
These terms are used
almost interchangeably, and are very similar. In lots of ways, if we can fix
one, we can fix the other, so I’ll be mentioning both. Wandering Monsters
specifically refer to encounters found in
a dungeon, while Random Encounters seem to be encounters found in the wilderness. Wandering Monsters,
as the name suggests, usually result in a battle, while Random Encounters
(which are more neutrally-named) can just as easily be a run-in with a
travelling peddler or caravan.
Over at The
Alexandrian, Justin Alexander notes that he suspects, waaaaay back in OD&D,
that Random Encounters were intended not as a single battle, but as an entire
adventure hook. He points out that a Random Encounter could potentially
generate hundreds of bandits, complete with their own officer hierarchy and
magic items, which was obviously out of the scope of a single battle.
Potentially the army
of bandits could be a backdrop to a role-playing or stealth challenge, wherein
the party sneaks by or negotiates their way through the bandits. Similarly, the
GM could map out an entire bandit base as a dungeon, wherein the party fights
or sneaks their way in, kills the leader, takes her magic gear, and gets out.
That’s all great in theory, but to me, in practice, this
sounds like a hell of a lot of work. Is the GM seriously expected to create an
entire adventure because she rolled a 1 on a D6 for a Random Encounter roll?
What about all the Random Encounter rolls made as the party heads back to base
to sell their “liberated” bandit loot? The goal here is to reduce the GM’s cognitive load during
play, not massively escalate it.
This method of looking
at wandering monsters—that each roll potentially generates an entire new
subplot—is especially problematic if the party is already working their way
through some kind of narrative.
Except in the most
extreme sandbox-mode playstyles, most GMs don’t want a die roll to
spontaneously generate entire narratives, so D&D as a whole seems to have
mostly abandoned this idea entirely, stripping the narrative out of Random Encounters
to reduce distractions, resulting in wilderness and dungeon run-ins completely
devoid of story. However, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater—what
if we use the Wandering Monster roll to deliberately
hook the players into existing narratives, rather than create new ones?
Lantzberg, the setting
of City of Eternal Rain, uses this approach, though it’s possible to go further with it. In City of Eternal Rain, Random Encounter
tables can result in run-ins, or clues to the identities of, a monster and a
murderer. Additionally, some of Random ‘Encounters’ are job postings that launch
pre-written minor sub-adventures. Instead of thinking of Random Encounters as a
distraction from the adventure, why
not tailor them directly into the
adventure? Populate your Wandering Monster tables with clues, hooks, and named NPCs
or monsters and try to get the best of both worlds.
Unlike the OD&D
style of having Wandering Monsters dominate the current adventure, we want a
solution in which the wandering monster table assists the GM, rather than taking
over entirely. Think more like Google Maps—which barks directions at the
driver as she needs them—and less like a self-driving car, which obsoletes the driver
entirely.
We want a solution in
which the GM can seamlessly integrate the procedurally-generated content of a Wandering
Monster table with their own hand-made narrative content. The Wandering Monster
table handles the gruntwork of believably populating a forest or dungeon,
letting the GM focus on bigger, better things. This only works if the Wandering
Monster table is effortless (which is to say, it doesn’t require dozens of subsequent rolls to describe an entire
bandit army) and the results are difficult to separate from the GM’s
hand-crafted content. This is hard to do as long as Wandering Monsters remain completely
devoid of narrative or foreshadowing, which brings up the question: how do we foreshadow
a random roll without causing more
work for the GM?
I mentioned above the
problem of the 'Random’ Encounter, that is, that it is meaningless violence
entirely devoid of context, drama, or warning. This can
seem an inevitable result of using random tables as content generation during
play, but what if I told you it didn’t have
to be like that?
The best solution I’ve
found online can be found over at the Retired Adventurer. I shamelessly cribbed this system, with a few
modifications, for use in Into the Living Library.
In classic D&D,
when a Wandering Monster roll is called for, the GM rolls a D6. On a 1 (or 6, there’s
some controversy there), they roll again on a table of monsters. This system
replaces that entirely, but maintains a 1 in 6 chance of actually bumping into
a monster.
With this system, the
GM rolls one die for the row, and another for the column. The row determines
what kind of monster is discovered, and the column determines what information
or threat that monster reveals. For instance, a row of 7 (“Stirges”)
and a column of 3 (“Tracks”) provides a trail the party can follow,
if they choose, to find some Stirges. Column 2 (“Nearby”) means that the
next time you roll on this table, skip the monster roll and use the previous
result. This means that the party is much more likely to encounter the monster
that just spooked them, simulating it being just around the corner. The odds
are low (only 1 in 6) that the party will encounter a given monster before
seeing some kind of hint as to their existence, meaning that they don’t often feel
“random.” For potentially several sessions, the party have been
seeing bits of torn paper here and there, so someone is bound to say
“ah-HAH!” when they finally encounter the animated clouds of paper
that are responsible, creating a simple narrative for each battle.
Each monster has an
accompanying key with a paragraph or so more information describing their
nature and tactics. For example:
The Shepherd of
Spiders. A single shepherd of spiders—an ancient ettercap—makes this
level of the library its home. An ettercap is a very powerful creature to
attack a first-level party, which is fortunate, because this one won’t. The
ettercap in the library is very stealthy and has no interest in a stand-up
fight. If it is encountered, it can only be spotted on a WISDOM (PERCEPTION)
roll of 18 as it hides among the shadows in the ceiling. It will try to use its
webs to disarm the players, picking off their weapons one at a time. If the
party fails their perception check, the ettercap will steal a weapon, wand,
staff, scroll, etc. from a random character, starting with their biggest weapon
and working its way down. On a DEXTERITY SAVE of 14, a character can snatch the
weapon as it leaves its sheath/strap/etc., and discover the ettercap in the
process. Otherwise, they only notice 1d6 minutes later that their weapon is
missing. Once a weapon has been stolen, or if it has been discovered, the
shepherd of spiders will flee back to its lair in area 11. The shepherd has
been doing this trick for a long time, and is very fast. The shepherd’s goal is
to render the party sufficiently helpless that they will be killed by the other
denizens of the library, and then feast on their corpses. There is only one
shepherd of spiders; if it has been slain, then ignore further wandering
monster rolls of 2. The shepherd is devious; it will create snares with its
webs for the party while they aren’t looking.
That table and this
paragraph is all that is needed for an Ettercap to wage a one-spider Die Hard-style guerilla campaign against
the party, all without requiring one iota of brainpower from the GM. The table tells the GM when the Ettercap lays a trap, and the
paragraph tells it how it attacks (it doesn’t). Note also that the Ettercap is
a full 2 CR higher than the party’s level, meaning that it could dismember the
lot of them without breaking a sweat. This would normally rule it out of a 1st-level
adventure (greatly reducing the array of monsters available to the GM, and letting
the players get complacent as they move from one level-appropriate encounter to
the next). Elsewhere in the adventure, rules on the spider’s snare traps are
provided. If the party manages to corner and kill the Ettercap, they will feel enormously self-satisfied, as they finally
bagged the bug that had been laying traps for them.
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