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Pacing and Random Encounters in the Sandbox

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Summary

A game master shared a story about skipping a random encounter to keep the game moving after a player died. Other game masters said it’s okay to adjust or skip encounters to keep the story fun and paced well. The main idea is that pacing and random encounters should be flexible to fit the players and the game’s style.

Highlights

I was thinking about this decision and to what degree it is acceptable for a GM to put their finger on the scales in order to maintain pacing. This is obviously going to vary a great deal from table to table depending on the game being run and the culture of play of the table. I'm trying to cultivate an old-school style of play in this campaign, but I come from running a more traditional scene-structured playstyle. So I am trying to rely on tools like random encounter tables to help generate emergent narrative and to create time and resource pressure, but I also have a very keen sense of pacing and a desire to see the PCs achieve the goals they have set for themselves.

This creates a bit of a conundrum - the desire to maintain pacing is at odds with the idea of creating a sandbox world that feels and plays blorby.

Monodestroyer sits firmly on the "hands-off" side of the scale. "I think the point of sandboxes is to just embrace the chaos and randomness. Some adventures will be straight forward, some will be derailed by 2d20 elephants immediately followed by 2d4 hill giants."

When is it okay to elide random encounter rolls to maintain pacing?

Mezzie agrees, noting that figuring out how weird random encounters make sense is the fun part for them and creating situations the players will remember and tell stories about later.

Bonafide Dadstep and Lyme both treat random encounter tables as prompts for generation rather than hard systems to be followed, allowing the GM some leeway in interpreting the results.

Ava also pointed out that pacing in a sandbox is more of a player-side issue. "If you wanna hustle, you gotta hustle. The GM can always roll an encounter and the players are like "nope" and fucking book it."

Elmcat takes a slightly different approach, choosing to let random encounters happen, but providing the option for players to opt-in or opt-out, and trying to make the encounters themselves more interesting to encourage players to opt-in.

"In terms of Pacing and Table-Time, that's always going to need to rely on the Referee's Judgement a little bit. As B/X suggests: There's nothing wrong with a Referee deciding "Nope, we only have about 10 minutes left in this Session and I'm not springing 1d4 x 5 Green Dragons on the Party." I'm a little wary of using this kind of Fiat too often though as it does end up injecting that Bias that favors the Players (no Cost was paid for their Exploration, their Decisions to "Explore one more Room" no longer have Consequences, etc.) but a good technique that works for me in this situation is to check anyway and instead of Initiating the Encounter if it shows up, try to use that as an opportunity to telegraph the type of thing that might be in the area.

Ktrey and Elmcat use a more intentional stocking procedure for their random tables to ensure that random encounter results are going to be interesting and relevant to the area.

Murkdice uses sequenced encounters to create a cause and effect structure.

I have a whole host of options I can use to manage pacing rather than just skipping the roll entirely.

With the scenario I started with, instead of skipping the roll, I could have rolled, and if the result suggested an encounter, I could have...

β€’ Shown the PCs signs of a recent struggle between soldiers and the ghoul-like corrupted, or the remains of a local villager torn apart by the corrupted animals
β€’ Indicated the party spotted a pack of roving corrupted in the distance attacking a homestead, giving them the opportunity of whether to engage or hasten past
β€’ Chosen one of the encounter options on the table - a passing villager warning the PCs of some terror they had witnessed and begging for aid - rather than rolling randomly for the result