Yeah it sounds like your "random tables" still hook into the story there. That's not the "random encounter" I was thinking of exactly. I was thinking more of the "You're traveling through the woods when you encounter... four spiders and a dire badger!" Those tend to be kind of shallow.

Personally I prefer to come up with scenarios and not roll on a table at all. Like, instead of thinking about "the bandits came back successfully" and also "they came back injured" I can just pick one and bake it more.

But this is kind of drifting off the topic I was trying to describe. I was objecting to the "Well we need 4-8 medium encounters for the game's assumptions to hold, so I guess you're fighting some random bears now" thing. Doing encounters just to wear down the party's resources is a weird design in my mind.