Random Encounters

Random Encounters remain the primary way in which the player party encounters enemies to fight, outside of boss encounters. However, there are several game design tweaks and additions to modernize random encounters and make them less frustrating.

## Adaptive Encounter Rates

The encounter rate is not simply fixed in MotA, and will adjust itself on the fly depending on various factors:

* If the previous encounters happened unusually close to each other, the next encounter will have a guaranteed cooldown period.
* The longer the player spends in a particular room, the lower the encounter rate will become. A room's lowered encounter rate will even persist if you move to a different room, though a room's encounter rate will slowly regenerate over time back to its base value while you are in a different room.
* Different rooms in dungeons not only have different encounter rates, but different encounter depletion and regeneration rates. This will allow players to potentially "clear out" certain rooms in the dungeon, such as large hub rooms where they must repeatedly return to and traverse through, because the hub would have a fairly high depletion rate but a very tiny regeneration rate. This can also create situations like making it unlikely to encounter enemies while returning from a long hallway with a treasure at the end.

## Chain Encounters

Sometimes, after completing a random encounter, the player will trigger a Chain Encounter, where the party spots another group of monsters and has the option to fight them immediately. The player is prompted, "There's another group of monsters nearby! Fight them now?" and can either choose No, which will end the encounter as normal, or Yes, which will immediately transition into another fight with the next enemy party. Defeating the additional group of enemies will basically count as already having defeated what WOULD be the next random encounter; that is, when the next random encounter would normally occur, it is skipped. This means that players can choose to get several battles out of the way and then explore the dungeon unperturbed for a while.

Chain Encounters have a 30% rate of occurring at the end of a battle; this goes down by 5% for each consecutive Chain Encounter. However, if no Chain Encounters were triggered over the course of the previous 3 battles, a Chain Encounter is guaranteed, preventing long droughts.

Some Psynergy and Items can guarantee Chain Encounters, although a maximum of 10 encounters can be fought in a row (counting the first encounter) - after that, the Psynergy and Items will stop working. Some gear and Abilities may also be able to passively increase the Chain Encounter base rate. The Psynergy and Items which trigger Chain Encounters in battle also have a secondary effect - if used *outside* of battle, they reset the previous Chain's affect on encounters, meaning that encounters will no longer be skipped. When this is performed, the game will tell you "Monsters from other areas seem to be moving closer"; however, if there were no battles queued to be skipped, it will fail and instead say "It appears there are already plenty of monsters around".

As a reward for taking on multiple enemy parties in a row without the chance to heal on the overworld, Chain Encounter battles grant +5% EXP; this effect stacks additively the deeper you are in a Chain. This makes repeatedly forcing Chain Encounters a great strategy for grinding, as it both increases EXP gain and removes the need to trigger another random encounter.

## Psynergy which affect Random Encounters

There are four Psynergy which can affect the behavior of random encounters:

* Avoid - Functions the same as in the GBA games: encounters with enemies weaker than the party are skipped completely, but encounters with stronger enemies occur as normal.
* Whisper - Halves the effective encounter rate, regardless of how powerful the enemies are.
* Lure - Doubles the effective encounter rate, regardless of how powerful the enemies are.
* Entice - Guarantees a Chain Encounter when used in battle (up to 10 battles) and resets future skipped battles when used in dungeons.