Would the player be allowed to flee the random encounter and avoid it altogether?
Yes to both.
Would the enemies disappear after fleeing from them or would they be persistent?
Disappear. It's a random encounter. It represents beings moving around and doing things - living life. You encounter them and then they move on.
Could the player exit and then reenter the area where the roll occurs to force more encounters? If it's based on a timer I can imagine someone who works from home, for example, could just leave the game running throughout the day - as ridiculous as it may sound.
I'm just throwing around ideas as if I were tasked with developing this.
The original concept I had was more like the game rolls the dice to determine if a random encounter occurs every hundred steps your character takes or something along those lines. So you move your character 100 steps and it rolls. If it gets a 96 or higher a random encounter is triggered. Or whatever. It doesn't have to be every hundred steps. It can be every 500 steps.
I'm also just throwing around potential ideas in terms of what would trigger a roll. The main point is that random encounter should be infrequent but they do occur to spice up the game and make the world feel more alive. They are also meant for differentiating between dangerous areas and safe areas. They can also give more value and meaning to different skills because you would maybe have to use certain skills like stealth to hide from Random Encounters. Passive perception would also be more valuable because if your passive perception is higher enemies have a harder time surprising you during Random Encounters. All in all, Random Encounters could add a lot of value to a lot of different elements of the game.
So again, this is not something that should just be trash mobs thrown out there just to annoy players. If done right, Random Encounters can be meaningful and provide value to various elements of the game.
