by Bartheus
I don't have problems with the sometimes harsh encounter mechanic, but it seems that many people do. One way to decrease the difficulty of encounters when exploring could be to draw an encounter as per the normal rules (black arrow), but instead of activating it place the card face down on the tile instead of checking what it is. You only activate the encounter if you choose to enter the tile.You could also incorporate other mechanics (like the torch token) which would allow you to read, but not activate, the encounter card from an adjacent tile.
This would make the game quite a lot easier so, although I haven't playtested it, you would probably need to make the game harder with some other rule change.