Huh, I always thought random encounters were sort of built-in to the D&D experience? Nearly of the AD&D adventure modules led off with a section on how to handle random encounters. The old BG games did sort of fall into the cookie-cutter style of random encounters, especially in BG II where you ran into the same exact group every single time. That was not so good. I would have preferred some sort of random group generator, exactly the same way a Dungeon Master would roll up a group for a random encounter depending on the local setting ... mountain, coastline, cave, forest, graveyard, hamlet, hippodrome, etc.
