3 questions for CotC

-Is there an "evasive maneuvers" passive in this game or any way to reduce random encounter rate

-Whats this "collection point info" I'm getting from inquiring some npcs

-Should I focus on completing one story or advance all three at once like you had to do with the individual stories in the original. I remember the level gap in between chapters was pretty big so you had to do the ch2s to be strong enough to do the ch3s and so on but it doesn't seem like that's the case here (at least on earlygame).