THESTORYTELLER01'S PROFILE

As a player I hate random encounters, mostly because they make it impossible to actually clean an area - and it always feels odd to ambush the enemy when I am actually surprised by an encounter ^^.

For my own project I use touch encounters with sprites that generally represent the encounter to give the player a hint what to expect when moving over the map. But a simple bat sprite p.e. can represent anything from 1-5 ordinary bats, over vampire bats to a fully-fledged vampire itself - these are the things that keep players on their toes ;)

I set these encounters behaviour to patterns that are "logical" imo:
- Non-predatory animals ignore the player. They can be battled for XP and with the right number and and a narrow enough map they might pose a risk too.
- Predatory animals go after the player but slow enough to be avoided
- human/humanoid enemies chase the player quite fast.
I also avoid using random encounters to keep tight control on the XP the player can earn in a certain area, otherwise players could farm encounters and get too much ahead of the level range their group should have.

But that just represents my personal taste.

EDIT: Thanks for the hint CC - I was looking for something like that : )