Randomization tables

[tchntm43]

I'm looking at creating some new randomization tables for the game. The DMG has some decent tables for treasure as well as random dungeon generation, but the ones for random encounters aren't very good. Basically, I'm looking to make it theoretically possible to generate the entire content of the game using random tables. There are several reasons for this. As DM, of course it's best to create content that fits the story I want and which is balanced for where the game is at the moment. However, I have found that I have certain design tendencies and as such I can run out of ideas (or my ideas start to become predictable), whereas using a random table can often produce results I'd never have thought of. The other reason is for solo play.

One table I can pretty much import directly without issue is the random terrain tables from the really old DMG (the one with a big red demon on the cover). These tables complement their random dungeon generation tables, and there's no reason that the edition differences should matter. I remember using these tables years ago, and they do need some tweaking (mainly, it's possible to need to roll to determine a terrain type when there is more than one adjacent terrain type).

I'd like to create better monster encounter tables. For one thing, the best official tables present are the ones in Xanathar's Guide to Everything, but they only break the difficulty down by level groups. Realistically, there is a pretty significant difference between first level and second level as far as what the party can survive, mostly because of hit point gain. It doesn't make sense to apply the same table to levels 1-4. I think it makes more sense to have the tables differentiated by XP thresholds, and you can roll to see if the encounter is easy, hard, or medium, and then roll on the table that best fits the XP threshold for that difficulty. This means a lot more tables. Also a lot of outdoor encounter tables should be separated into night and day. This means a lot more tables.

One of the things I miss badly from older editions is specific treasure types for each type of monster. I don't like that every monster of CR 0-4 rolls on the same tables for individual treasure. It didn't used to be this way, in 2E monster stats included a list of treasure types (both for individual and lair). This was a good way of making it more clear that some monsters regularly carried a lot of coins and others didn't carry any. I don't like that there are no tables to randomly determine that a random bandit might have been very lucky and be carrying a magic weapon instead of a regular one (individual treasure in the DMG only gives coins). So I'm thinking a way of doing this would be to assign low percents to most monsters of rolling on the treasure tables. For example, an Orc might come with a 5% chance of rolling once on table A and a 1% chance of rolling once on table B. If there are a lot of orcs, of course you just roll on the lair treasure instead, and distribute any magic stuff among them.

There are a couple tables that need additional subtables. For example, you can find a generic weapon +1 in table F of the DMG, but what kind of weapon is it? It doesn't say. So I plan to create a table there to be very specific about that. Also, a similar table is needed for spell scrolls, since finding a spell scroll in the existing table only goes as far as determining the spell level. I'll need to make tables for each level to determine exactly which spell is on the scroll.

My reason for making this thread is to get an idea what others have already done, thus potentially saving myself some work. I'm not looking for online generators. I've played around with a few of those (most of them seem to have very little variety when I keep rerolling with the same parameters), but I'm really looking for actual tables to enable rolling of dice on my end.

Ultimately, it would be pretty cool to create tables that go beyond the hack & slash part of the game. I'm thinking about quests with objectives and complications and stuff, all generated randomly. The DMG has some tables for generating adventure objectives, and I think I can probably work with these to create something a bit more robust.

[Bjarkmundur]

A random encounter app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.manzo.encountergenerator&hl=en_US) that I really like, if not mostly for the initiative tracker.


Donjon has a generator for entire dungeons, magic shops, treasure, and random encounters

I created a magic item table in my signature.

In my housrule document I have a table both for lingering injuries and crits-and-fumbles.

I'm also working on an event table based on all the amazing stuff from Waterdeep, which is more in line what you're looking for. It includes sidequests, NPC and the various factions and guilds interacting with the players.

[tchntm43]

I'll bump this thread with tables I've come up with that I find useful. Here's one I made today for overworld map generation. A table like this is essential if you ever want to try solo play with more than one town/dungeon.
https://i.imgur.com/CwykBQU.png
In this one, you look at the explored tile next to the tile you are moving into, roll 1d20, and that's the terrain type of the new tile. In some (many) cases, you have more than one explored tile next to the unexplored tile, and you don't know which to use as reference. In that case, the order I have presented the terrains here is actually relevant. You look at the numbers above the terrain types that are already known, average those numbers, and roll for the column with the number that's the average (on non-integer average, flip a coin to decide which one to roll on). So if you are on a Jungle tile, moving into an unknown space, and there's already a Badlands tile known next to one of the unexplored tile's other sides, then you average the numbers (2 and 7) to get 4.5, flip a coin for either 4 or 5, the result comes up 4, which is the column for Hills, so you roll on that column.

The numbers and terrain positions on the table are carefully set up so that you are most likely to see terrain types covering multiple tiles adjacently, with believable transitions (i.e. jungle to arctic is impossible). This table is inspired by memory of many years ago finding a similar table in a very old DMG.

I haven't included swampland in here (which is important if you want random encounters for things like catoblepas and black dragons), but in this case a tile is too big to generally support being swamp, so I'd say that getting a forest should include a sub-roll afterwards to determine if it has a swamp.

From here, you create a table to determine the tile contents (village/town/city, castle, cave, tomb, etc). I haven't done that yet, but it would be fairly easy. If you end up with some kind of small settlement, you can use another table to determine what kinds of services are available. If it is a dungeon-type content, you can roll on another table to determine what (if any) primary inhabitant is there (i.e. a fortress might have Hobgoblins as their primary inhabitant, and when later rolling on encounter tables the result would be biased toward results of the primary inhabitant, with reduced odds of something else).

This probably sounds like a huge headache but I actually love doing this kind of thing. :)

[tchntm43]

Just updating to say that what was originally going to be just a few tables has turned into a massive project that I now expect to result in a file over 300 pages long, almost entirely of tables. I wanted to create a system where everything can be determined by dice rolls (since there is no DM to adjudicate).

Right now, skills like Persuasion and Deception are pretty useless because there's no role-playing going on. I plan to change that at some point with a brand new system where NPCs are dynamically generated and when interacting with them, you can try and pry out pieces of information regarding quests. The trick is how to do this without me knowing what information they have before successfully convincing them to fork it over. It can be done. It's just going to take a lot of thought to create this.

I've got a dynamic quest system, but I want to redo it, as it's pretty much always "go into the nearest dungeon as far as you can to retrieve something for a reward". At some point in the future I plan to piece together quests from multiple tables, where the quest has a number of sub-stages to it (the closest comparison would be the stages of the Skyrim quest system). I'll do this in parallel with the plans for the new NPC interaction. The DMG has a pretty good set of tables for creating adventures, I just need to adapt them to work with not having a DM to fill in the gaps.

There are several types of dungeons (catacombs under some graveyards and temples, mines deep into mountainsides, wizard towers in remote places) and they all use their own unique generation tables. For example, mines and sewers tend to generate long straight tunnels with few rooms, while catacombs branch frequently and have more rooms than normal (but the rooms have fewer exits than normal).

The encounter tables probably take up the bulk of it. Every terrain type has (well, will have) 20 tables scaled toward the party level, and most of those are split into day-night, and they're also split into Easy/Medium/Hard difficulty according to the XP Thresholds in the DMG.

I've created new, monster-specific Carried Treasure tables. The DMG uses the same table for all CR 1-4 monsters, and it's really inadequate. My new tables recognize that things like Axe Beaks and Giant Rats never carry treasure of any kind, some monsters like gems more than coins, and things like orcs and hobgoblins have a very small chance each of carrying a potion of healing. I've done some other interesting things, like giving Kobold Dragonshields a very slim chance of having a Spear +1 instead of a regular spear, because they're meant to be champions of their species.

Likewise, I've created Lair Treasures for monsters that are likely to hoard it. The rules for lair treasure is that it is only found when facing a primary inhabitant of a dungeon, and only when the encounter is rated Hard in a room that indicates it has room + treasure.

There's a ton of other content. A system of creating random names that tend towards being at least mostly pronounceable (my test party is named Heongezed, Ulua, Sylinb, and Hm - lol at the last one; and the starting town ended up being named Pmitechester, which is admittably pushing it on pronounceability, but that's about as bad as it gets). Random traps that scale for Party level, rules for locked containers, movement variant rules, and more. While this is designed for creating solo play, plenty of these tables can be used in regular campaigns to generate random content if you feel that your own ideas are starting to get repetitive.

Is anyone interested in this when it's done?