Dragon Age - Random Encounters @ Pop Matters

Pop Matters discusses the random encounters in Dragon Age, which aren't actually random, and thus serve more purpose than just another combat. This is potentially spoiler-ish:

Many of these random battles aren’t actually random but quest related. A lot of the quests that we’re given involve meeting someone on the busy countryside roads: A swindler sold mages fake documents, so we have to watch for him on the road. Some soldiers are going to falsely accuse a mage of performing illegal magic, so we have to stop them on the road. After you snoop too close to something secret, you’re ambushed on the road. When the antagonist hires an assassin to kill us, we encounter the killer on the road and so on. All of these encounters serve to further their individual sub-plots. We’re still progressing through the game even when our travels are interrupted by a random battle. We never feel like our time has been wasted with a meaningless fight.

More information.

This reminds me very much of old Baldur's Gate : Things were similar, then.
And there were NEVER offered DIFFERENT ways of solving them.