Making Wandering Monsters Meaningful
Now that I'm playing D&D again* I feel not-foolish about writing about D&D and similar role-playing games.
One of the blogs I follow is Gnome Stew. It's about roleplaying games, specifically with advice for game masters (GMs). I subscribe, and sometimes I even respond there.
A recent article by one of their veteran writers was about how old habits die hard. It was kind of a grab-bag of thoughts about how things that were common styles of play decades ago and frankly sucked have thankfully changed with the times. One topic the writer mentioned that jumped out at me was wandering monsters.
Wandering monsters are a trope from D&D type games in the 1980s. More than just a trope, they were literally diagrammed in tables in the rulebooks and written into the adventure in numerous prepackaged adventure modules.
What's wrong with wandering monsters? Well, there were just too random. I mean, you're crawling around a dungeon, looking for some kind of goal, and there's all these vagrants who are aimless until they see you and immediately want to kill you. Frankly they were always just there to keep the story moving and the players on their toes. Any lull in the action, anyone not paying attention at the gaming table, and WHAM! random monster walks around the corner and tries to kill you. A thing you might wonder in between such encounters, aside from whether this is a dystopian underground vision of San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood, is who painstaking builds all these dungeons and abandons them to be filled with vagrant monsters, anyway. 😂
The Gnome Stew article doesn't really present a solution to the problem of the wandering monster trope, other than author seemingly learning how to stop worrying and love the bomb. And that's why that part of the article resonated with me- because I have made wandering monsters actually relevant to my games.
The main thing I do is make wandering monsters not totally random. The monsters are part of the setting or the story. "Setting" monsters are those that come with the territory. You're on a road through a forest miles from a town? There could be a wild dire boar on the road staring you down, or a bear that raids your campsite for food late at night. I plan these encounters to help set the mood for the setting the players are adventuring in. It reminds them there are risks, and consequences of choices, even when they're between Point A and Point B in the story.
"Story" wandering monsters are not-quite-random monsters whose presence is part of the plot. You're hunting for the villain's hideout where a captive is held hostage? Well, the villain isn't just sitting there waiting for you to kick in the door. The villain has guards and scouts. The pair of gnolls and a hyena that try to ambush you on the road? When you gain the upper hand in the fight and they turn to run away, it's not because they're scared. They're in cahoots with the villain and they're running to let him/her/it know you're coming.
The reason I regard these types of encounters as "wandering" monsters is that they're not nailed down in place. I don't mark it on my map as "The bear raids the players' camp here" or "The gnolls' ambush is there." These encounters are wherever they need to be to keep the game engaging for everyone.
One of the blogs I follow is Gnome Stew. It's about roleplaying games, specifically with advice for game masters (GMs). I subscribe, and sometimes I even respond there.
A recent article by one of their veteran writers was about how old habits die hard. It was kind of a grab-bag of thoughts about how things that were common styles of play decades ago and frankly sucked have thankfully changed with the times. One topic the writer mentioned that jumped out at me was wandering monsters.
Wandering monsters are a trope from D&D type games in the 1980s. More than just a trope, they were literally diagrammed in tables in the rulebooks and written into the adventure in numerous prepackaged adventure modules.
What's wrong with wandering monsters? Well, there were just too random. I mean, you're crawling around a dungeon, looking for some kind of goal, and there's all these vagrants who are aimless until they see you and immediately want to kill you. Frankly they were always just there to keep the story moving and the players on their toes. Any lull in the action, anyone not paying attention at the gaming table, and WHAM! random monster walks around the corner and tries to kill you. A thing you might wonder in between such encounters, aside from whether this is a dystopian underground vision of San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood, is who painstaking builds all these dungeons and abandons them to be filled with vagrant monsters, anyway. 😂
The Gnome Stew article doesn't really present a solution to the problem of the wandering monster trope, other than author seemingly learning how to stop worrying and love the bomb. And that's why that part of the article resonated with me- because I have made wandering monsters actually relevant to my games.
The main thing I do is make wandering monsters not totally random. The monsters are part of the setting or the story. "Setting" monsters are those that come with the territory. You're on a road through a forest miles from a town? There could be a wild dire boar on the road staring you down, or a bear that raids your campsite for food late at night. I plan these encounters to help set the mood for the setting the players are adventuring in. It reminds them there are risks, and consequences of choices, even when they're between Point A and Point B in the story.
"Story" wandering monsters are not-quite-random monsters whose presence is part of the plot. You're hunting for the villain's hideout where a captive is held hostage? Well, the villain isn't just sitting there waiting for you to kick in the door. The villain has guards and scouts. The pair of gnolls and a hyena that try to ambush you on the road? When you gain the upper hand in the fight and they turn to run away, it's not because they're scared. They're in cahoots with the villain and they're running to let him/her/it know you're coming.
The reason I regard these types of encounters as "wandering" monsters is that they're not nailed down in place. I don't mark it on my map as "The bear raids the players' camp here" or "The gnolls' ambush is there." These encounters are wherever they need to be to keep the game engaging for everyone.