In researching and writing last month’s column, I realized how little I knew about the real origins of our hobby. Old School Renaissance games are one thing, but there was so much I didn’t know about OD&D, things that Swords & Wizardry White Box wouldn’t teach me.

So I bit the bullet and bought OD&D (the commemorative reprint WOTC did, the one with the carved wooden box and the fancy dice). It came with the three original books, plus supplements I through IV (Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Eldritch Wizardry, and Gods, Demigods, and Heroes). I also bought an old and musty-smelling copy of Avalon Hill’s Outdoor Survival. I couldn’t quite bring myself to pay $50 for an old copy of Chainmail on top of that. Maybe next month.

As I read, I learned that the OSR game writers made (by necessity, perhaps?) a lot of choices with regard to the source material, choices that eliminated some of the ambiguity and interesting interpretational possibilities in OD&D.

And I want to look at one of those roads not taken this month.

A blogger known as The Alexandrian has written extensively about OD&D, and I specifically want to address one such post.

One of the roads not taken is the trip to the dungeon and the original nature of wilderness encounters. To sum up for those who didn’t follow the link, OD&D wilderness random encounters typically weren’t like random encounters in the dungeons. They didn’t happen every other turn, but once per day. And they weren’t small groups that could be fought or negotiated with from a position of strength. They were large groups, even armies, that defined their region.

The encounter tables are on pages 18-19 of Book III, but you have to look at Book II at the number encountered to understand the situation. 30-300 men. 40-400 goblins. If you have a party that can roast a couple of hundred goblins easily, then they’re probably on their way to the Tomb of Horrors.

There are rules for evading these groups, and from escaping them if the PC’s are detected (Book III, page 20), but if the PC’s flee, they’ll have to rest. And when they’re resting, the random encounters are rolled twice as often. The PC’s can easily find themselves chased, captured, or conscripted by armies of elves or goblins or bandits, or simply eaten by unbeatable monsters.

It certainly does make things eventful, and it adds unexpected elements to the world between towns and dungeons. So why has this type of thing fallen out of favor, replaced by wilderness encounters that are generally more on the scale of dungeon encounters ... or by handwaving the trip to the dungeon? I have a few theories.

1) Many players don’t share the “founders’” view of the game world.

While OD&D clearly encourages DMs to put a lot of time and thought into creating dungeons, it also encourages random elements to be added. And the game’s wilderness encounters amount to a strongly random element of creating the very game world. Who dominates this region? Who lives in this castle? What are they like? Let’s let the dice tell us.

This element keeps things “real,” so to speak, and keeps things from feeling all the same. But it isn’t to everyone’s taste.

2) It’s an interruption.

Before random dungeon generators on the web, people spent a lot of time carefully creating dungeons to challenge their players, and to fit their characters. How annoying might it be to have a randomly-encountered army completely derail the experience, sending them fleeing away from the dungeon, capturing them or conscripting them and leading them in a completely different direction, forcing the DM to improvise all along.

Sure, the DM can improvise and get things back on track, but it can kill an entire session. For some people, this is fun. If it take six sessions to finally escape and get to the dungeon, then let’s have fun playing that out. But for some people, it’s frustrating. It’s not what they signed up for.

Some players may even consider it a bait and switch. If they signed up to play a dungeon crawl, and they spend their time trying to blend in with some wanna-be Robin Hood’s merry men, they’ll feel a little bit deceived.

3) Sometimes the dice say die.

Sure, if you roll an encounter with intelligent opponents, they can just roll the PC’s along with their agenda, creating opportunities for adventure and roleplaying. But what if you’ve got first and second level PC’s, and you roll up a half-dozen wyverns?

How do you negotiate with animals? How do you outrun something that can fly? What happens when a party of first-level PC’s is cornered by six wyverns?

Total. Party. Kill.

Without even seeing the dungeon.

4) Too Little Information, Too Little Time.

While the basic info rolled out can give you the group’s stats (how many people of what level are there), there’s no real information about motivations or plans. Now, I know this is the DM’s job, and the dice rolls may spur the DM’s imagination (as it did in The Alexandrian’s article), but here’s the problem:

This is rolled as a random encounter. In the middle of a game session.

You have to stop and roll all the details of the encountered group while your players wait. This took a while for the 30-300 bandits, since you also had to roll to determine which and how many magical items each leveled character had. Once that’s done, you’ve got to figure out what they’re up to. And all while your players wait.

Final Thoughts

Now, don’t get me wrong, I actually think this approach is great, and I wish it hadn’t been abandoned in later editions (I can’t find anything like this in the 1983 Beginner’s red box). I think it could have been polished and built upon much as other aspects of OD&D had been.

In my next column, I think I will apply my limited mental resources to attempting to create a faster-moving, more information-rich, user-friendly version of this mechanic that can be more easily used in the midst of a game session, without inordinately interrupting the session.

Wish me luck.