Random Encounter Frequency

There has been some talk in other threads about random encounters inflating experience points, and I'd like to give my thoughts on the matter. (I do , however, like that many of the random encounters are very interesting and feel like they ARE part of the plot, and not just random monsters.)

I'm noticing a trend that I am getting too many random encounters in comparison to the real adventuring. Survival doesn't really kick in reliably at early levels, so that my adventure at levels 1 - 3 often seem to go like this:

1) I head off on an early quest at full strength, and hit a tough random encounter. One character goes unconscious and one is down to 2 hp. Head back to the Keep, sheathe my weapons, sell the looted items, and rest at the Inn for a few days.

2) repeat 1 above.

3) Finally make it to the encounter area and have a decent foray, but I get another unconscious guy, and a few more a low hp's, with the cleric healing all used up.

4) Risk resting for 8 hours to get the cleric recharged, but run into random sleep encounter skeletons, further depleting resources. Oh crap now what ! ?

5) Cross fingers and head back to the Keep for a full rest, but get another random encounter. Fortunately things go my way and I make it back to the keep, sheathe my weapons, sell the looted items, and rest at the Inn for a few days.

6) Repeat 1) a few more times...

7) Repeat 3) ,4) and 5) again...

8) I then think about the comment that the random adventuring party made from the original game, something to the effect of "at this rate we're never gonna make it to the damn dungeon"

So basically 75% of my XP's and game action are coming from random encounters, which I think is not the intention of the adventure. I know I could just grab another cleric or two, or REALLY make sure someone has survival maxed out with a high wisdom from the very beginning, or I could just save the game before traveling and reload until I get there uneventfully. But I think this situation should be tweaked a little bit.

Long story short (too late, God I ramble on), I think this situation is a result of the number of trail "dots" between worldmap locations. In the original game it was about 10 dots to the first few adventures (Moathouse, Decklo Grove), and 20 to the others (Emridy Meadows, Welkwood Bog). In KOTB, it's roughly 40 dots to most of the first few adventure areas (Hermit area, Lizard Man caves, Spider forest, etc.), and 50 dots to the Caves and between many other locations.

Statistically, assuming a 1 in 20 chance of encounter per dot (if that is still the roll), this results in a random encounter as follows:

Code:

TRAIL LENGTH          CHANCE OF ENCOUNTER
10 dots                       40.1 %
20 dots                       64.1 %
30 dots                       78.5 % 
40 dots                       87.1 %
50 dots                       92.3 %   

So without survival kicking in, you're going to get an encounter almost every trip to and from the Keep. This has resulted in the scenario I described at the start of this post for the first few levels of play.

I want to make it clear I am not complaining about the lethality of some of the encounters, but that I'm spending most of my my time with randoms, getting inflated XP's, and not getting to the real adventure. This has resulted in me being level 6 at the start of the Caves, which was a blowout.

 

Even with the locations the same, the path between any two areas are set differently for KOTB in worldmap_ui_paths.bin. So for example, the path between the Keep and Northern Oak Woods (mad hermit area) is only about 10 dots away by the way the crow flies, but in KOTB the path is set in a big counterclockwise circle which heads south, then east, then finally heads north to the Oak Woods. This makes for a very realistic game environment, but provides for an almost certain encounter based on the 1 in 20 range per dot.

Just for fun, I ran 100 trips between those two places and I got an encounter 84 of the 100 times , which is close to my estimate of 87% above. So I think it is a 1 in 20 per "dot", which I remember reading in a very well presented Random Encounter overview someone wrote up a long time ago. Fourth posting on this thread ----> http://www.co8.org/forum/showthread.php?t=7831&highlight=random_encounter.py

But getting to technical now. I just wanted to point out the paths are much more winding in KOTB and provide for more chances of getting randoms.


EDIT: I forgot to check the time passing aspect you mentioned, and after doing so I learned a lot. The time passing in traveling between the two areas above was about 9.5 hours. And after experimenting between different areas, it seems that about 15 minutes passes for each "dot" traveled. So, encounter chances seem unrelated to the "crow flies" distance, but directly related to the number of dots.

 

Random encounters, in general, are problematic if they're an endless source of XP.

I'd love if we could somehow separate quest/unique encounters from other random encounters.

 

Yep, it does, which is cool. The number of dots seems to be directly proportional to the travel time, resulting in a roughly consistent 15 minutes per dot.

These are the location travel times from the Keep to each other World Map location. The numbers are rounded, as counting the dots as they clicked by was a challenge, heh.

Code:

                             Dots    Travel Time
Keep  to  Northern Woods      40    10 hours
Keep  to  Raider Camp         30     7 hours
Keep  to  Deep Swamp          30     7 hours
Keep  to  Swamp               40    10 hours
Keep  to  Southern Oak Woods  35     8 hours
Keep  to  Lizardman Refuge    40    10 hours
Keep  to  Lord Axer           60    14 hours
Keep  to  Caves of Chaos      60    14 hours

That makes complete sense, and gives it a nice feel.

If it turns out others are concerned about too many randoms, it would be easy to make the random range 1 - 30, or 1 - 40 for each dot instead of 1 - 20 as per the original game.

 

This one was extremely problematic. :dizzy:

 

FYI I tested it back then by incrementing a variable from within encounter_exists and saw the 1:1 correspondence to the dots.

It's possible to cap the number of dots being counted towards the check via some script_daemon management.

 

Seems like the survival skill would be a good short term solution.

 

Okay, I've got a survival skill of 11 on my ranger. In 15 trips to the caves, I had 2 encounters I couldn't avoid. So survival is at least working as intended. Like marc, I get a ton of encounter dings, but with decent survival, I avoid 90%, if I want to. I basically avoid all encounters where the monsters don't have decent loot. If they have loot, then they get to die

 

I would think the keep is on the border of civilization and the wild, so random encounters should be an ever present danger.

I mean, do the cav patrol the forest near the spiders, or the lizardmen areas?

 

I've modified the odds according to this:

- Random encounter check will only happen on 11th dots (i.e. if dot is multiple of 11)
- I have conditioned the probability on the cumulative dot number, with the numbers being:
- 31% chance for dots < 17
- 19% chance for dots < 37
- 7% chance for the rest

Thus the calculated probailities for journeys are:
31% for short trips
54.7% for moderate length journeys (between 23 and 43 dots)
60.8% for long journeys

In practice, what this means for popular destinations (going to/from the Keep):

Code:

Location	new %	old %,     dots

coc		58%	91.90%	49
north woods:	44%	80.60%	32
swamp	        55%	82.50%	34
southern pine	44%	76.20%	28

This has been accomplished using prime numbers only!!!