Pacing and Random Encounters in the Sandbox

Recently, in my homebrew Worlds Without Number sandbox campaign, the party was camping outside of a corrupted keep they've been exploring the last few sessions. The camp was attacked by a wyvern looking for a meal and one of the PCs was killed by wyvern poison in the scuffle. The remaining party members decided to hasten it back to town to meet with a high-level cleric ally who they believed could raise the dead PC. 

I had a custom random encounter table for the region populated with ghoul-like "corrupted," mind-controlled soldiers, and frightened travelers. Given the short distance and the road between the town and the keep, I've been limiting it to a single random encounter roll when traveling back and forth between the two locales. This time, I opted to forego the random encounter roll, because I knew the party urgently wanted to try to get their ally raised and return to the keep, and I felt that having a random encounter with one player out of the action could drag down the pace of the game. 

Afterwards, 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.

I was curious about how other GMs handling pacing and random encounters, and so I brought it up on the Prismatic Wasteland Discord server, sparking a fascinating discussion among a bunch of great bloggers. When is it okay to elide random encounter rolls to maintain pacing?

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." 

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.

Ava agreed with the hands-off approach in principle, but noted that in early OD&D play reports, sometimes encounter rolls were ignored or skipped. And oft-cited tools such as Necropraxis' hazard system even explicitly state to use your judgment and ignore or modify outcomes that don't make sense.

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.

Ktrey provided both historical context as well as providing a range of useful d100 tables to make random encounters not just more diverse but more contextually varied. "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.

Conghal similarly takes an approach similar to Elmcat, rolling the random encounter but then presenting the players an opportunity to resolve or avoid hostile encounters if they choose to do so, particularly in wilderness/outdoor situations. They also noted that increasingly they do ignore hazard die results that cause things to take longer or where the result would be repetitive.

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

And Elmcat kindly reminds us that "nobody is going to say you are doing it wrong for ignoring a result. You will have the best judgement for the situation. If you happen to do this regularly then you can do some reflection in case you think you want to do it differently." And Patchwork Paladin reminds us that there are no "rpg police" to tell you you're doing it wrong. It's a matter of personal preference.

For my table, I will continue factoring pacing into the use of random encounters, but having this discussion made me realize 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...

• 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
• 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
• 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

Huge thanks to the very smart people in the Prismatic Wasteland server for weighing in on this one! I really enjoyed hearing different approaches to this question. I linked your blogs or Bluesky accounts when I knew them!