Encounters should make sense. They should be relevant to the situation, the locale, and paced to mesh cleanly with the situation at the table. Think plausibility.
Characters wandering though your town should come across something inexplicable to the setting without plot and story explanation on your part. Coming across a menagerie of medusa and gorgons gyrating in the town square at midnight should be explainable, even if only to you as the GM. It should never be from a lack of preparation and where the creature book opened up when you dropped it.
Not that I'm saying you should land something unexpected or even incomprehensible on the players. Absolutely not. Inspiration should be followed if it strikes you. In fact, use it topple your best laid plans if desired. Do not, however, let it destroy the continuity of your plot and story. Lack of consistency, which happens often with intuitive GMs, can lay waste to your game as players do not suffer it well.
Think organically and build your encounters the same way. Leave gaps, huge ones if you are an intuitive type, so you can be spontaneous without disruption.
Encounters should also be plausible in the context of the environment. Gorgons roaming your town at night should be a likely or statistical probability or you are severing your players suspension of belief. Give them context to believe. Build a framework for them to imagine the chance of it occurring. For example, given our same menagerie lets imply, directly or otherwise, that paintings of medusa and gorgons seem to be all over the town, and that they move every night.
You can hint that via observation, information gathering, or hand it to them on a silver platter. Doesn't really matter except in terms of style and skill, how you do it. Its that you give them that ability to suspend belief by given them a frame of reference to believe in what you desire.
Enough of that for now. Keep the other parts of this series in mind when you are thinking about the above. Cheers.
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