When setting up the "Isles of Dread" campaign, one of the things that I did was set up several key adventure areas, and then add several other small islands that didn't have fixed content - the idea being that as the characters travelled to one of these islands the content would be rolled randomly and then used.
Unfortunately, I've found that this doesn't really work - the randomly generated encounters aren't really interesting enough in their own right to justify their inclusion, and the random generator is largely transparent from the other side of the screen. Which means that from the players' perspective they're mostly seeing a number of fairly dull encounters playing out.
Bottom line: random generators like this are probably not a bad thing in published adventures, especially ones likely to be run more than once (like "Lost Mine of Phandelver"), but for a home campaign they're probably not ideal. (Except, of course, for a big book of random encounters - that has use for a time-starved DM. But don't write your own!)
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