If your party is "fast traveling" somewhere, how frequently should you interrupt the narrative with random events?

If it's a short journey, or a part of the game where an encounter would break the flow (or just be inconvenient time-wise), I usually let them "teleport" without difficulties. Of course, I do try to account for the time spent traveling whenever it's appropriate. When it's a longer journey, what I usually do is roll a d10.

>0-2 : Nothing happens, destination reached with no delays.
>3-5 : Friendly/positive encounter along the way.
>6-8 : Minor obstacle encountered, doesn't take too much time/effort to solve and depending on what it is it might be ignored by the players.
>9 :Major obstacle encountered, can't be ignored and might even turn into a subplot depending on how the players handle it.

For everything except 0-2, I'll usually make something appropriate up on the fly, depending on the terrain etc. Unless the journey IS the adventure, there's really no point in rolling multiple times for one journey, even if it's supposed to take a really long time. That's just dragging things out unnecessarily. As always, it pays to remain flexible and try to estimate what the campaign and the players need.

If the party is going from town to town, there's normally no roll; you stay on the roads that are safe unless plot says otherwise (as my game is not set in Skyrim, bandits are not going to attack a group of heavily armed people like idiots). However, they can choose to roll for shortcuts and the like. On a success/crit success, they get there early/really early. On a failure, they get a bit lost and had to use up more of their rations and/or they take a penalty on social skills once they hit town because they look like shit and smell worse. Only on a critical failure do they fuck up so bad they wander into a monster den or bandit camp or whatever.

If the party is going into the wilderness to get to the dungeon or whatever, but roll has to be made unless a guide is found/hired.

Either way, it's one optional roll per journey. Any more and you start running into pacing problems a'la OotS where a minuscule side plot that has only taken a few in-game days takes WEEKS of real time to play through.

It's really hard to portray a "goblin infested countryside" if you're walking from city to city and never so much as see green skin. Random encounters have their place

That's not a random encounter though. If your setting has goblins infesting the countryside, you should purposefully include encounters with goblins when the party passes through the countryside.

Random encounters have their place (for when PCs fuck up hard or run off in an unexpected direction, or to keep them on their toes), but establishing the setting is not one of them.

I tend to design my wilderness/overland maps not as vastnesses with "points" on but as irregular hexmap type affairs. Not exact hexes, but messy shapes bordering one another. To get to the next town, you have to go through several shapes. The shapes are named, and I will try to have material for many or all of them.
That makes PCs think about travelling and when to do it. It also allows me to put together a mad-libs sentence for any journey by including flavour text for each shape.

You have already stated the issue with random encounters. Lets cut away parts of your question to leave us with the answer

>should you interupt the narrative with random events?

In which the answer should be an obvious no; do you wish for the party no not just teleport around from location to location, fine but it should serve the narrative of the story and be enjoyable.
Does the encounter tell the characters anything?
Does the encounter resolve anything?
Does the encounter introduce anything? Or does the encounter reinforce anything?
These are questions that should be asked for encounter design. Are there bandits on the road because you want a random encounter or are they their on the orders of the big bad or some other group; are they a symptom of the effects of the plot or a way to suggest further adventure at their base (where they may have some helpful NPC held captive).

An example from one of my games was in Curse of Strahd (5e d&d). The party had chosen to ignore a possible encounter in the starting town with one of the witches of the Old Bonegrimder Mill and where now on route to the next village. Instead of a random encounter with d6+1 monster or whatever; they came across the disguised witch heading back to the mill, out numbered and unprepared the witch fled after only a bit of questioning from the party palidin but not before laying the palidin low with a powerful spell. This introduced the witches as a threat; reinforced the dangers of the road; and told the party that the witches where strong spell casters with a high spell DC.

Hope this helps

>goblin infested countryside
This came out of nowhere. What the fuck are you talking about?

I think that's an example, but the general idea that a dangerous or war-torn area should be demonstrably full of the local fauna/militia/what-have-you is pretty clear.

Completely irrelevant though.

Not really.
>It's annoying to interrupt the story with random encounters, but there would logically be encounters in a dangerous area. Wat do?
Legit question.

But that wasn't the question. Are you stupid?

It's relevant to the original discussion, because some people advocate eliminating random encounters or minimising them. It's a valid reading of the initial question "how often should random encounters occur" for someone who is torn between eliminating an inconvenience and reinforcing the danger by attrition of a dangerous region.

dice+1d100

Rolled 46 (1d100)

>purposefully include encounters
which is exactly what putting goblins on a random encounter table is

There's nothing random in this case though.

>If your setting has goblins infesting the countryside, you should purposefully include encounters with goblins when the party passes through the countryside.
Then put more encounters with goblins on the table. Have the roll to encounter something be more likely than not encountering something and make more than half the table kinds of goblins. The whole point of random encounters is to make the world feel alive by allowing you to customize the table based on what you feel is around the locations.

These are interesting comments. Lots of well-reasoned conclusions and suggestions being made here. Interesting.

If you populate the tables youre rolling on well, random encounters can be a fun way to show the color of the setting and reinforce the idea that the world is a dangerous place where man is not the apex predator. Which is sort of the underlying fantasy behind games with monsters.

I would argue that, unless you are in an area of the setting where the roads are totally safe and uninteresting (in which case why are the PCs even here?) random encounter tables, resource management and other things are an excellent way in which to make travel more, not less, interesting. The adventure should not stop when you leave the Tomb of Doomking MacGuffin, and some really inventive stuff can be done with hostile outdoor enviroments.

I would check out Better Than Any Man. Edgy art aside, it has a really unique sandbox area which serves as an excellent example of this, with an army of protestants slowly moving across it and a timeline of events that change what kind of encounters you will find (I think, I dont have it on hand). Its free too.

For a dungeon crawling murder hobo game, random encounters are fine. All the players really care about is kill monsters and get loot, so no need to put any more thought into it than that.couple it with some random loot tables and you are set.

For a game with any sort of narrative, you don't need any random tables or encounters. Just plan out locations and events to happen between cities. Merchant caravans, brigand ambushes, ghostly encounters while camping, lost item on the side of the road, whatever fits into your world and story. You don't need any element of randomness to make traveling interesting.

Or you could just put some thought in beforehand instead of stringing along a bunch of unrelated encounters. Like, who thinks "man, this area's full of roving goblins, how should I show that" and then thinks "I'll fill more slots on a table that I'll roll on 1d6 times per hour of travel" instead "I'll write in a number of goblin-related combat encounters."

Forcing your single special important railroad-strapped event in the players, IMO, is as bad as random rolling something unrelated and flavorless. The latter ignores context, the former forces the player into your spesshul context regardless of input, agency or chance.

Some degree of agency and/or randomness - a roll - suits travelling fine. The randomness, however, shouldn't be of the random encounter sort, but a variable about which kind of encounter happens (how bad/difficult or nice/helpful, for example), all of which should be related, with context and with purpose, no matter if bad or good.

And it would be nice if this kind of encounter happens every time feasible:
On a narrative perspective, teleporting from A to B can be super jarring, even after long and boring GM exposition. Going A -> Transition Scene -> B flows much better, and you can have details flow through the scene instead of dumping them at B.

Story wise, the encounter is a GREAT opportunity to set up the plot/subplot that is going on in B, confirming/reinforcing/referencing things that went on in A, advancing characters through different situations and, probably most fun, foreshadowing future plots and events.

You godda decide on either or, not both. If you have a wilderness that's dangerous and shit happens, roll out that table. If they're using the regular road with the regular caravan, don't whip out the table.

Also, pacing (or game type). If it's old D&D where getting the loot back is very dangerous, be it wildlife, bandits, undead seeking magical items or whatever, you have to use random tables to provide difficulty.
If it's a storybased campaign, don't do this, maybe make a real optional quest that the players can choose to do. If they're on a hot-ass pursuit of a villain or a quick getaway with a hostage, don't do the random wyvern flies above your heads shit, just have their enemies come closer.

Don't do meaningless padded out bullshit some video games do unless you're emulating a very dangerous traversal.

This is a good idea because 70% of the time this is rolled nothing bad (extremely time consuming like bogged down combat) will happen.

>For a dungeon crawling murder hobo game, random encounters are fine
Is there no place in complex campaigns for random material?

One every few hours.
Make random event tables.
Make those tables regional.
Make the random events have a meaningful impact on the current events of the campaign.

OP here, here's what I'm planning on doing after this whole discussion. I welcome your comments:

First, I am going to develop a list of random events themed for the area they are in. This will be subdivided into events tailored to each player, with an equal number for each.

For short trips they will just teleport, with a brief narrative describing the terrain and journey

For moderate trips there will be one event in the middle that automatically happens. I will decide which player's list it will draw from based on how engaged they are, what they did recently, etc.

For longer trips there will be two or more, with narrative description of the trip in between events. They will be handled like the moderate trips.

Thoughts?