Random Encounters in GURPS

Random Encounters in GURPS

You all certainly are familiar with the random encounter tables. These could be wandering monsters in the dungeon, or random wilderness encounters. Do we have such tables and rules in GURPS? We actually do, but they are pretty well hidden.

Such rules first appear in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 2: Dungeons on page 20. The same rules can be found on page 85 of DFRPG Exploits, but formatted better. Each area has an encounter rating. For a relatively safe place, this is a 6 or less on a 3d roll, but for a monster-infested area this may be 15 or less on a 3d roll. Modifiers may apply if the characters are doing something to attract attention or making precautions to avoid encounters.

Frequency of these rolls is up to the GM. The book suggests rolling every hour when in a dungeon and every day outdoors, plus an additional roll every night when the party camps or stops for a long task.

Who do the characters encounter is entirely up to the GM. The book says that old-school GMs may want to create random tables, but does not provide an example.

But we actually have examples in other books! GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Adventure 1: Mirror of the Fire Demon and Adventure 2: Tomb of the Dragon King have random encounter tables that, of course, are only appropriate for these adventures. GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 14: Psi also has an encounter table that is used when a psi attracts some otherworldly beings by using psionic abilities. Finally, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Setting: Cold Shard Mountains has a set of hexcrawl tables that is full of non-monster encounters, which is nice.

The adventure encounter tables also introduce the concept of N. Instead of having a set or random number of monsters in an encounter, the table scales the encounter with N – the number of characters in the party. I find this abhorrent.

The tables are actually somewhat different. Some of the tables from the two adventures that I mentioned require the GM to roll 2d. The tables from Dungeon Fantasy 14: Psi and Dungeon Fantasy Setting: Cold Shard Mountains and other tables from the adventures require the GM to roll 1d and 1d.

What’s the difference? 2d produces something close to a bell curve, even though it’s not a proper normal distribution. 1d and 1d produce a uniform distribution, like a d20. It may be a hot take coming from a GURPS simp, but I believe that bell curves are a bad fit for random encounters. If your random encounter table has a bell curve, it would be very unlikely that the characters would encounter anyone on the low or high end of the table, and they’d be stuck encountering the same monsters that sit within 10-12 range over and over again. I’ve actually experienced this first-hand, when other players and I just kept fighting bears again and again, even though the table was much larger and diverse. It even became a running joke. In a way, bell curves make random encounter tables much less random. If you do not want to roll 1d over and over again, just make a d20 table or a d44 table or whatever. This roll is something the GM makes in secret, and who cares how many sides the die has or whether this is a physical die at all?

Random encounter rules is something very system-agnostic, so if you are not content with the random encounter rules in GURPS, just use the rules from a different system. For example, the AD&D 2e rules would work very well, and they even tell you that it may be a good idea to use a d100 table instead of a d20 table, because d100 allows you to adjust monster rarity in a more granular way. AD&D monsters also have their rarity in their statblocks. If you’d like some examples, I highly recommend Elminster’s Ecologies. World Builder’s Guidebook also has guidelines for creating your own random encounter tables.

While the AD&D 2e rules are fine, I find the random encounter rules from ACKS II even better. The gist of them is the following: there are four classes of wilderness – civilized, borderlands, outlands, and unsettled. Each of these area classes has different encounter frequencies. Kind of like what GURPS does.

There even are guidelines for random encounter time determination.

When you know that you’ll have an encounter, you have to roll on the encounter type table. There are the following encounter types: no encounter, civilized encounter, monster encounter, dangerous terrain encounter, valuable terrain encounter, and unique terrain encounter. Every area class has different chances for each of these encounter classes. In addition, if you roll a 1 on this table, you roll again, shifting the area class one step towards the more dangerous one. I like this a lot – not only it incorporates different danger classes of areas, different encounter types, but it also gives you a chance to encounter something that comes from another area class. So, even if you are traveling in a civilized region that is relatively well settled, you have a chance to encounter monsters from the wilderness. This can make stories and adventure hooks write themselves. What is this goblin band doing so deep into the civilized lands?

Then, if you rolled a monster encounter, you roll on the monster rarity table. The rarity yet again is tied to the area class. After that, you make a roll on the actual monster table that has separate columns for common, uncommon, rare, and very rare monsters. I think this is perfect. It does require additional rolls, but produces much better results. What’s also great is that both AD&D 2e and ACKS have rules for determining the encounter distance, which barely exist in GURPS.

So, as you can see, GURPS does have rules for random encounters, but they are very barebones. However, you can use rules from any other system, which is nice, isn’t it?