Random Encounters!

[xzar_monty]

It would be nice to hear why random encounters should be left in the past or why they are garbage. Nobody has said anything as to the reasons.

[Tigranes]

It would be nice to hear why random encounters should be left in the past or why they are garbage. Nobody has said anything as to the reasons.

 

I agree that just saying "it's a relic of the past" means absolutely nothing, and persuades nobody.

 

For me it's part of my dislike of trash mobs or trashmob-like gameplay - excessive grinding, for example. Random encounters in, say, the overworld JRPG model, become a pretty integral part of the gameplay, meaning everything you do is padded by hours of fighting that usually ceases to have meaningful tactical variation.

 

BG1/2-style random encs is obviously a little bit different. It's not as integral, and not really that annoying. I wouldn't hate it. That said, it never seemed to do a lot, either. It is very rare that a random enc would ever give you a battle worth remembering, and it wasn't really effective at making resting in dungeons or traveling feel dangerous. While a p&p DM can make such an encounter dangerous enough to be exciting, then give players creative ways to make it through, that's not really the case in CRPGs - it was just a chore to be woken up by 20 goblins.

 

I know some people just want a game that never ends, so that they can level up to infinity and beyond fighting randomly spawning mobs over and over again. No problem, but I personally see zero attraction in that, and would much prefer that the game was built around custom-built encounters. Having five Adra Dragon fights is generally more likely to provide interesting and memorable challenges than fifty random encounters.

[xzar_monty]

Good post, that. I also dislike grinding, and I have no interest in leveling up to infinity (having said that, PoE was very, very deeply flawed in the sense that you reached the level cap way too early).

 

I think BG2 style random encounters were excellent, especially because some of them also carried the story forward. Sure, they were not completely random, but they had enough qualifiers to make them appear fairly unpredictable: you had to have certain members in your party, you had to sleep outdoors after a particular thing had happened, and so on.

 

Had I been a game developer, I would have carried this theme forward and made it even more interesting, probably to an extent where not everybody's game was the same. With PoE, everything is completely predictable, and everything in the game world just stands still in its place until you go there and meet it.

 

Back in the day, there was a game called Ultima V, and the world of that game was alive. The resistance met near a well at midnight (you had to go there at that time to meet them), a certain bloke hid skeleton keys near a tree for a certain purpose at certain times, and so on. It baffles me somewhat that this line of aliveness has not been pursued by game developers with an awful lot more power at their disposal.

[Zoso der Goldene]

Random encounters are dead. And they should stay dead

Especially random encounters/auto-generated quests like in Skyrim that break immersion or even the game by accidentally coinciding with other random encounters/quests and story quests. The should stay extra dead. *Sharpens stake*

[PizzaSHARK]

It would be nice to hear why random encounters should be left in the past or why they are garbage. Nobody has said anything as to the reasons.

 

The reasons are pretty self-evident, I'd think.

 

Random encounters are incapable of being tactically interesting or complex.  Instead of hand-picking monsters to suit the terrain, and then placing them in that terrain in order to craft a specific flow and concept for the encounter, you just grab a handful of minis out of a bag and plop them down on the board and go "let's you and them fight!"  It's boring, it's uninspired, and it doesn't have any sort of connection to any kind of narrative.  The BEST you can hope is that the encounter is at least rational - starving wolves may decide to risk attacking the party, oozes and the like are mindless and are incapable of differentiating a threat from prey, and so on.

 

Add to that, in a game with quicksave, ****ing NO ONE is going to do random encounters.  They will just quicksave compulsively and revert to a save every time a random encounter comes up.

 

Finally, random encounters DESTROY your game's economy and XP curve - or they don't reward anything and then you're DEFINITELY going to see everyone just ****ing reverting to a save every time one comes up because then there's literally no ****ing REASON to fight them in the first place.

 

Random encounters are garbage.

[xzar_monty]

Well, that was poor, I have to say!

 

For example, you write: "Add to that, in a game with quicksave, ****ing NO ONE is going to do random encounters.  They will just quicksave compulsively and revert to a save every time a random encounter comes up."

 

This may be what you do. But please, don't presume that you know what others do.

[PizzaSHARK]

Well, that was poor, I have to say!

 

For example, you write: "Add to that, in a game with quicksave, ****ing NO ONE is going to do random encounters.  They will just quicksave compulsively and revert to a save every time a random encounter comes up."

 

This may be what you do. But please, don't presume that you know what others do.

 

I know what others do because it was something that was CONSTANTLY mentioned in BG2 discussion forums back in the day, hell the scene in Jaheira's romance was quite literally the only time I actually had a "random encounter" after taking a nap.  I know what others do if they are playing to win, and you balance around players that are playing to win because balance changes nearly always have a trickle-down effect - you balance around the very best players and the changes trickle down to the players that are less skilled or are simply less interested in playing to win.

 

You're the one making presumptions to what players will and won't do.  If you don't prevent people from just reloading a save if you get woken up by monsters, and there is nothing meaningful gained by fighting those random monsters... PEOPLE WON'T FIGHT THOSE RANDOM MONSTERS so they have no point being in the game at all.  Just like, because there's nothing preventing people from blowing everything on a single encounter and then immediately taking a nap afterwards, people do exactly that.  The idea that players will self-limit themselves in order to preserve challenge in a game doesn't bear out in the real world - most players are interested in winning and if they discover something that helps them win, they'll use it as needed to win.  These players may not specifically look for such things in the way that power gamers invariably do, but it doesn't take much to cotton on to there being absolutely no penalty to quicksaving or any penalty to resting 20 times in a single dungeon.

 

You COULD just seed things so that you can't get around random encounters with quicksaves, but then you're just forcing the player to grind through tedious, uninspired battles that have no connection to the region's mini-narrative or the overall narrative and you're then also left to confront the problem of whether or not you reward players for these battles.  If you do, some players will grind them (because they aren't challenging) to gain an XP/economic advantage.  Other players won't grind them, but may have cleared more of these encounters than others and will end up ahead of the designed XP/gold curve (or, if they had very few encounters and you balanced around players having at least an average amount, they're now under the curve.)  Or you can make them give minimal rewards, or no rewards at all, in which case everyone hates you for wasting their time.

 

So, for a third time - random encounters are garbage.

[xzar_monty]

Where, exactly, did I presume?

[PizzaSHARK]

Where, exactly, did I presume?

 

Cut the bull****, dude.  Your statement unequivocally implies that your position is the one that "most people" would follow, which is why you accuse mine of being presumptuous.

[Kian]

In my second full pt and trying to get the Griffin sword, locked behind a random encounter. As far as I could find online it seems random encounters in Neketaka are bugged and don't trigger at all for some people. I've been traveling between Neketaka locations for about half an hour. Is there a point to keep trying or is this completely bugged?

 

Is this adressed? As in is there a fix coming?

 

Thanks.