Fantastic Frontiers: Encounter Mechanics

So you're wandering along in the forest, and there's a dice check for a random encounter. It tells you to roll on a table. The table coughs out a mature red dragon. You're traveling with two halfling slingers and a spoony bard, and dragons are out of your league. What are your options?

This kind of problem is one of those balance vs verisimilitude issues that has mostly been resolved in favor of downgrading the concern with simulationist ideals. There are a few totally contrived and artificial solutions for dealing with the game-breaking un-fun of getting eaten by the dragon on the first day out of town. You can usually find one of the following in any game that you'll pull of the shelf that involves any kind of random/procedural aspect to encounter generation:

1. Functional Immortality: This amounts to just scaling down the consequences of death. You don't die, you just get knocked unconscious for a turn and maybe lose some recoverable resources. This is the approach taken by MMORPGs and also by casual boardgames like Runebound.
2. Relative Challenge Levels: I discussed this a couple posts ago, and it's most common in pencil and paper RPGs where narrative dominates. In this approach, dragons don't appear until you're strong enough to want them to appear, and the kind of dragons you eventually find will always be a bit above or below your current capabilities.
3. Perfect Information: Or maybe not perfect, but good enough. In this approach, the difficulty of the encounter is generated in advance ("red" vs "yellow" vs "green"), so you can know roughly what's in the room (or wilderness hex) before you enter. Procedural elements like tables or random cards are only used to provide flavor or a small variation of the predicted difficulty.
4. Encounter Repellant: Anything that reduces the chance of finding trouble. The least artificial way to accomplish this is to introduce a skill ("Survival" or whatever) that slowly turns off encounters that aren't wanted, and for a totally procedural game system, turns on the encounters that are. Depending on how important random encounters are, this might become a mandatory skill that everyone needs to take, which just provides a narrative gloss for using the relative CL approach.

I'm trying to avoid all of the above, since it results in an environment that doesn't feel as unforgiving as I think a true wilderness should. I do intend to include some rumors or tavern tales to provide a few informational leads that might generate encounters ("The Aztecs are hiding their gold in a village in the hills 20 miles to the north!"), but this is mostly to create an incentive to start wandering and get into all manner of other trouble. Here's a list of my intended alternative approaches:

1. A Scouting Contingent: In FF, you'll be able to break up your expedition into two mobile groups, a recon group and a main body. There aren't any real restrictions on the groups, except that they need to stay within a certain distance of one another to remain within communication range. The intended use is that the recon group will be light and fast (light cavalry, say), or small and sneaky ("Send our hobbit!"), and scope out anything challenging in advance. This provides information, but at a potential price of putting the group at risk. A larger recon group is less fragile and can handle certain challenges without having to radio back to HQ for the big guns, but is also less stealthy and stakes more lost resources if it does go down. (BTW, the encounter table for entering a brand new hex is rather nastier than the random one while resting, so the main body will usually be able to provide for its own security if it doesn't get lazy or stingy.)
2. The "Three Exit Ramps": Aside from some smoothing out of lumpy mechanics, I've imported the entire machinery of zero-edition encounter resolution from Underworld and Wilderness Adventures. That means that each encounter gets a surprise check, an evasion check (if surprise didn't help), and a reaction check (if evasion didn't help). Surprise determines who notices whom first; spot the dragon first, and you get to withdraw without incident (other way around, and it's trouble!) Evasion determines whether you can slip away even after being noticed, using speed and mobile concealment; if you're on horses, or in a dense forest, you can probably give that dragon the slip. Reaction determines whether something decides to chase you if you run, or else you can talk your way out of it using flattery or wits when caught; in a board game this is abstracted by dice rolls, but you can imagine this amounting to challenging the dragon to the venerable riddle game like Mr Bilbo. Even if each of these options only has (something like) an overall 1-in-2 chance of succeeding, the cumulative effect of getting to try each exit ramp in succession is that a lot of dice need to work against you before the dragon starts chewing off your face. Plus, there's a natural tension that comes from seeing all those attempts sequentially fail!
3. Heroic Sacrifice: This is the last-ditch defense of a desperate leader, and will only be possible if you've configured your leadership party with enough valiant heroes to be willing to cover the escape of the rest of your expedition. The morale box system requires a certain number of expedition members to be committed to the fight (equal to the scale), but the rest can be dropped down into the reserve box, to represent their intentional decision to flee the battle. This works great against that lone balrog on the bridge of Khazad-dum dragon, but would be much harder to pull off against a horde of goblins who presumably can themselves split into groups and follow you. So it's not 100% reliable. Fortunately, evasion and surprise will already tend to work well against those larger groups.

Obviously all of this just adds up to "most of the time you can flee a bad encounter, but every once in a great while it still eats you". But the mechanisms by which this results are (1) strongly motivated by narrative gloss, and (2) likely to enforce various other negative results and complications in the process. Most importantly, you've now established a location where a dragon might live -- most encounters are persistent, though there's a confirmation check when you return to see if they've moved on -- so you can come back later to investigate with a larger team of crack archers and celebrated heroes in the future, to avenge the previous calamity. This makes the game feel less like it's holding your hand, and more like it's trying to kill you.