In the early days of Dungeons & Dragons, you gained XP for treasure acquired. Typically, this made up 80% of your total XP, the rest came from slaying monsters.

One of the fun things is that not everyone liked giving XP for treasure, so there were various attempts to change this. One of the factions (no XP for treasure) managed to make that the base rule of AD&D 2nd Edition, while only half-heartedly providing a replacement for all the XP you’d gain from treasure.

Once D&D 3E came along in 2000, XP for treasure was definitely gone. However, unlike the AD&D 2E rules, the missing treasure XP instead was obtained by overcoming monsters.

Overcoming, for a lot of people, meant killing. It doesn’t matter that you can say, “I give XP for the party sneaking past the monsters and achieving their goal!” Still, for a lot of people, you have to kill the monsters. And take their stuff, though taking their stuff isn’t as necessary as it used to be. We still do it, though!

One thing I didn’t think about with all this is how changing the balance of XP gained from slaying monsters also changes the role of wandering monsters in the game. In AD&D, Gygax made a point of saying that wandering monsters carried no treasure. Thus, already your potential XP gains for slaying monsters were reduced by one-fifth, to say nothing of the potential for expending resources, losing hit points, or even death, to an encounter that wasn’t necessary.

When you make killing the monsters in a random encounter worth the same as killing the monsters in a set encounter, then suddenly it changes things.

Funnily enough, this is how Final Fantasy and other such computer games have been doing things for a long time now. XP is gained for killing monsters, and that alone. And it’s pretty generous, so that it doesn’t take that many encounters to gain a level.

The difference here is an interesting one: For the old Final Fantasy games, having random encounters make up the bulk of the game was a technique to overcome the limitations of computers. The primary limitation was memory – it was very limited on old computers. So, instead of designing a whole set of bespoke encounters with only a few random encounters, instead you got only a few bespoke encounters, and a lot of random encounters.

Which was very different to most D&D adventures. (Although I suspect wilderness adventuring in the old days would have worked similarly; a lot of random details and few set encounters).

These days, for many open world computer RPGs, you’ll find locations where you’ll always find opponents, and the same type every time. They keep restocking after you leave. This is true of Final Fantasy XVI and Horizon Forbidden West. The idea of “random encounters” has been replaced by “restockable encounters”, and if you get too close to them, the creatures attack – unless you run past them very fast. Which is also a feature of this type of game.

Another take on the random encounter is that made by the rogue-like games. The one of these I’m most familiar with is Angband, which I played much of in my university days, but the genre has continued – with various Diablos bringing the concept into the modern day (along with other games). In this sort of set-up, the layout and contents of a dungeon is randomly created whenever you enter. It’s never the same twice.

What’s different to a standard wandering encounter? Well, in your D&D encounter (and in early Final Fantasy games), there’s no monster on the map until the system randomly generates one in play. The typical manner in original D&D was to roll a d6 every ten minutes of game time (an exploration turn); on a 1, a monster encounter occurred. You can see the same in early computer games – there’s no monster coming towards you on the map, the encounter just happens.

But in a rogue-like, the map is created with all the monsters, so while they might “wander” the corridors, they’re all inhabitants of the map – and once all killed, they’ll stay dead – until you leave and return, causing the map to be generated again!

The early wandering monster charts were set according to the level of the dungeon. However, in a couple of recent OSR products – Castle of the Mad Archmage and The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg, I’ve seen something that was unfamiliar. Yes, there were entries on the random monster tables for set monsters. However, another entry instructed the DM to select a monster from a nearby room.

This makes perfect sense, and now that I think about it, there may be other products I’ve read with similar entries. However, it’s exceedingly rare.

Of course, I also found it tremendously difficult to implement when I ran Castle of the Mad Archmage. And the reason was that the levels were 100+ encounter areas each, and I needed to see the room number on the map, then cross reference it with the encounter book – and repeat several times – to see what monsters were in the area.

This is one of those times when writing down on the map itself what’s in each room makes life easier. Obviously, it’s but a brief summary, but it’s easier to see goblins in a room if the map has “6 goblins” scrawled on it.

Of course, a lot of DMs these days don’t use XP at all. For our play of Shadow of the Dragon Queen (of which I’ll write more reports shortly, I promise!), I’ve been entirely using story-based progression. Which means that the random encounters I roll during play don’t contribute to the gains of the characters at all. They’re just a way of providing extra content, and, occasionally, a feeling of a living world.