A Calamitous Random Encounter Alternative
Why Random Encounters?
In the first post on this blog about random encounter systems, I feel it's worth broaching why I include them at all. Lots of games don’t include them, and random encounters have a bit of a reputation for being boring. It is not a given that games must have them. You can skip this section if you aren’t a random encounter skeptic.
There are a few reasons I wanted them for Revolver, particularly during dungeon crawls. The main one is that they create a sense of urgency to push through the dungeon. Time wasted means more opportunities for random encounters, which means greater risk of death or injury. This makes mundane decisions more interesting. Something like choosing whether or not to rest or take the time to sneak around a dangerous room is more interesting when you have to weigh the benefit vs the risk of incurring an encounter.
Random encounters are not the only way to get this outcome. Dungeons can have all sorts of things that create urgency for the party (stress and sanity systems, resource depletion, narrative consequences, etc). Random encounters are just an easy system that can be applied to almost any dungeon with no extra work beyond making an encounter table.
When to Use Random Encounters
I think random encounters work best in systems with quick, dangerous combat. In games where individual combats aren’t dangerous, random encounters feel mechanically low stakes, and players won’t worry about them when making decisions. In games where combat takes an hour, there’s no room for narratively low-stakes encounters. Nobody wants to spend half a session fighting a random encounter.
Fortunately, combat in Revolver is quick, and health totals are low, so it works here. If your game isn’t like that, or if you don’t care about adding these extra decision points for players in your dungeons, you don’t need random encounters. There’s a lot more detail one could go into about random encounters, but that’s the high-level view.
Oh, one more thing. Making good random encounter tables is important. If you put boring monsters on your encounter table, your random encounters will be boring. If you put fun monsters that are mechanically interesting and narratively appropriate for the dungeon they are in, you will have better random encounters! Boring table -> Boring encounters.
Despite all the stuff I just said I liked about random encounters, it took me a bit to figure out how I wanted to include them in my game, and I ended up replacing them in my major dungeons. Here’s how I arrived at my current encounter system, the Calamity Timer.
Random Encounters at My Table
When I started playtesting Revolver, I used an encounter system based on Goblin Punch’s Underclock. Basically, a timer that ticks down as the party roams through a dungeon, and when it hits 0, an event occurs.
I represent the timer with a big d20 in the middle of the table that I call the Calamity Timer, so that players can always see how close they are to a calamity. It’s fun, dramatic, and eventually I’ll invest in a meaner looking d20 with a skull for a 1 or something.
I noticed two small problems with this for my game.
First, my world has a lot of small dungeons (7 rooms or fewer). It also has a lot of medium dungeons, and my big dungeons are usually around 20 rooms.
The timer worked pretty well for medium and large dungeons. Encounters were rare in medium dungeons, but it was because the party made efficient use of their time. A primary goal of the timer is to give the party motivation to pick up the pace and make resting in a dungeon a decision point, so to me, that’s the system doing its job. In larger dungeons, you pretty much always get an encounter or 2.
This is a very solvable issue. I just don’t do random encounters for my small dungeons now. The point of random encounters is to keep the party moving and discourage constant resting, but I find players usually rest exactly zero times in a 5-room dungeon, and even if they thoroughly search every room, it doesn’t take that long. So I just don’t bother with random encounters there.
The second issue was something a player pointed out to me after playtesting an adventure that took place in a mine. The calamity timer didn’t get down to zero in this dungeon, and the player asked me what would have happened if it did. I told her I would have rolled a random encounter, and she pointed out that a random encounter isn’t exactly much of a calamity.
She wanted the outcome of something called the calamity timer to be much more impactful. To her, the term “calamity timer” conjured imagery of escaping the dungeon by the skin of one’s teeth before the calamity strikes. This could look something like the mine crumbling as the party enters, and at the end of the calamity timer, it begins to cave in.
A simple solution would have been to just change the name of the calamity timer to something like “the encounter timer” to better match the name of the timer to what it does. I like the name, though, and I like the idea of the end of the timer representing a truly disastrous situation. So, I rewrote my encounter timer with the following design goals:
The System Should…
- Give players a sense of urgency when traveling through dungeons.
- Create a sense of suspense, players should feel stressed as the timer gets lower.
- Ensure players feel like their choices matter, they should have some idea what the danger is, and feel like they can avoid it with good choices.
- Have randomness (to a point). Players should feel confident they will be able to explore a good amount of dungeon without experiencing a calamity, but they shouldn’t know exactly how many.
So, here’s my calamity system:
Calamity Rules
Calamitous Dungeons
The most dangerous dungeons in Revolver are Calamitous Dungeons. Calamitous Dungeons are larger in size than typical dungeons and contain a potential disaster for characters that spend too long in the dungeon.
For example: A dungeon set in an active volcano where the characters want to get in and out before the next eruption is a Calamitous Dungeon. A dungeon involving stopping a ritual or saving hostages could be a Calamitous Dungeon.
The Calamity Timer
When a dungeon's Calamity is triggered, the GM starts the Calamity Timer, a countdown that begins at 20. When the Calamity Timer hits 0, the Calamity occurs, complicating the adventure.
The Calamity Timer should be triggered whenever it is logical, depending on what the Calamity is. An erupting volcano's Calamity Timer might start as soon as the players enter the dungeon. A hostage situation's Calamity Timer might start only once the dungeon's occupants have become aware of the adventurer's presence.
The Calamity Timer ticks down by 1d6 as adventurers spend more time in the dungeon or do anything to exacerbate the dangerous situation.
The GM should always tick down the Calamity Timer for every 30 minutes the adventurers spend in a dungeon. At a normal pace, this means every 3 rooms, or every time the adventurers take a siesta.
Depending on the Calamity, the GM may also tick down the Calamity Timer if the adventurers draw attention to themselves by making loud noises or destroying rooms frequently used by dungeon occupants.
Each time the Calamity Timer ticks down, the GM should describe an omen of the coming Calamity. The omens should get gradually more severe as the timer approaches zero.
When the Calamity Timer hits zero, the Calamity occurs. Try to choose Calamities that add severe complications to a dungeon instead of Calamities that outright kill the characters. A volcanic eruption spewing magma into rooms and destroying pathways in the dungeon is more interesting than the eruption killing all characters in the dungeon.
The Calamity Timer is removed if the source of the Calamity is addressed.
How it Plays
I’m pretty happy with this iteration of the calamity timer. It works very well for the larger, more dramatic dungeons, and it has the effect I want. Players don’t want to waste time and will consider taking rests less frequently to avoid the timer going off. It replaces random encounters, so if a dungeon has a calamity, that’s the only thing players need to worry about.
The math behind the timer is that it takes about 6 rolls on average for the calamity timer to tick down to 0, but it can happen in as few as 4. If a party is moving carefully, they will get to explore a minimum of 12 rooms and an average of 18 before the calamity occurs.
Most of the time, a Calamity Timer starts once the denizens of the dungeon become aware of the party, which often takes a few rooms, more if the party is careful not to raise an alarm. With any luck, a party can explore most of a 20 room dungeon before the Calamity Timer goes off. Each rest the party takes, or any time they perform a time-consuming task, the Calamity Timer ticks down, reducing the number of rooms they get to explore before the calamity starts by about 3.
Most of my dungeons have a way for players to end the Calamity Timer or delay it. In a dungeon where the Calamity is that hostage takers will kill their hostages, killing the bad guys ends the timer. In a dungeon where the Calamity is a spreading fire, blocking areas off from the spread might increase the timer by a d6.
The omens are my favorite part of the system, and they add a lot of drama to a dungeon crawl. For a dungeon I wrote where the Calamity is ninjas pumping poison into a dungeon when they become aware of intruders, the omens look like this:
| Calamity Timer | Omen |
|---|---|
| 20 | You hear a faint hissing sound from beneath the floor |
| 15 | The hissing sound grows louder, the air smells slightly sweet |
| 10 | A wispy pink fog creeps in through small holes in the floor, rising to your ankles |
| 5 | The fog is up to your chest now, the sweet smell is overwhelming |
| 0 | The fog fills the entire room, stinging your eyes and burning your lungs with every breath |
For the most part, I try to write Calamities that don’t just immediately kill the party, but that do put them in a difficult position. In the dungeon with the poison, each round in the poison adds a miss chance to each character’s attacks and forces them to make Mind checks to remain conscious. In a cave, I might have characters take damage for every room they go through as rocks fall. A lich completing a ritual might not even have an immediate effect, but when the party goes back to town, they find everyone has been afflicted with a plague.
If the Calamity is just going to kill the characters, that should be very very clear to the party going in, or at least by the first or second omen, but I think there are usually more interesting options.
What About Other Dungeons?
Not every dungeon needs to have a Calamity. My players are probably going to explore the abandoned (read: full of zombies) hideout of a bank robber soon, and while it could have a Calamity (maybe a rival adventuring group finding the treasure before them), it probably just won’t have one. It’s still a decently sized dungeon at about 15 rooms, though, so I still want some sort of random encounter system to add a little bit of pressure and uncertainty to a dungeon crawl.
So, for those dungeons, I just use a simple random encounter roll. Every 3 rooms, at the same pace you would tick down the Calamity Timer in a Calamitous Dungeon, I roll a d6. On a one there’s an encounter, on a 2, there’s an omen for a random encounter that I drop in the nearest creatureless room.
This is simpler and lighter than the Calamity Timer. Most of my large dungeons are Calamitous, so this is usually for medium or smaller dungeons, where I find the timer hasn’t worked as well. You could just make the timer smaller, but I like the timer being associated with Calamities, that way when I slam a d20 on the table, the players think “oh shit, I’m in danger”.
This also lets me trick my players a bit. When they enter a dungeon they don’t know is calamitous, I’ll roll fake encounter rolls until they trigger the Calamity Timer. That way, they don’t know until the Calamity Timer triggers.
Dividing my dungeons up like this also gives me a clean way to distribute exp to players. Every iteration of Revolver has had level-ups based on completing dungeons, but an issue with that was that not all dungeons are equally hard. I use the categories of minor, major, and calamitous dungeons to define how much experience a dungeon is worth.
So I have:
| Dungeon | Description |
|---|---|
| Minor Dungeons | <7 rooms, no encounters or calamities, 1 exp |
| Major Dungeons | >7 rooms, encounters but no calamities, 2 exp |
| Calamitous Dungeons | > 15 rooms, no encounters, yes calamities, 5 exp |
And then the level-up table looks like so:
| Level | Requirement |
|---|---|
| Adventurer | Start Here |
| Professional | 2 exp |
| Top-Hand | 7 exp and you have completed a Major Dungeon since becoming a Professional |
| Master | 17 exp and you have completed a Calamitous dungeon since becoming a Top-Hand |
| Legend and Beyond | You have completed 3 Calamitous dungeons since your previous level |
This is all a little gamey, but I like how this iteration has played out in a couple rounds of playtesting. I’ll be testing it more in the coming weeks, but I’m hoping that I’m zeroing in on the right fit for Revolver’s encounter system.