I Would Like to Hear Your Opinions on a Pending Gameplay Mechanic

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I've never been very convinced by randomness in games in general, (unless it's an "arcadey" game, like a dungeon crawler or something like that of course!) When a player plays your story once, he can't know if the monster that just spawned spawned randomly or if it was "planned". So where's the difference to him?

The only thing it does is create more problems for you, the game designer, since you can't perfectly control what monster appears where and undesired stuff might happen (monsters appearing or dispappearing right in front of the player, monsters appearing in "unfair places" so that the player can't escape or hide and gets killed in a stupid way...stuff like that.)

On the other hand, the only merit randomness has is a certain replay value, but if you ask me, that replay value is a fake one. "Real" replay value comes for example from meaningful decisions that influence the development of the character, from an interesting world that you want to explore again even though you've played through the game already or maybe from different gameplay approaches you can choose.

Randomness often seems to me like a lazy way to create the illusion that the game has more to offer than it seems. (Again, this highly depends on the kind of game of course! I'm mainly talking about the kind of mostly-linear, story driven experience we're discussing here, not about games like Binding of Isaac or sandbox titles where randomness is pretty much the core feature...) That's more my personal opinion of course and many people will probably think different.

Now, if you could instead improve the monster AI, so that more emergent, organic behaviour could arise, making scripted events unneccessary - THAT would of course add a much more valuable kind of randomness to the game! But alas, it is not possible...

Edit: I've thought about it some more, and I think the reason most people are intrigued by ideas of random monster spawns is simply because the monsters in Amnesia spawned very predictably. (Often after picking up an important object ) So what I think you should do instead, is play through Amnesia again and analyze it. Take note of when a monster spawns and find the pattern that makes it so predictable. Then, in your story, play with the players expectations and avoid those patterns to make it feel fresh and unpredictable!