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solo_knightRandom tables are not exactly agents of chaos, but they’re related. You use dice (and sometimes playing cards) to select items on random tables. On the other hand, there are few RPGs that make zero use of random tables; they’re extremely useful.
In this post I want to go over different types of random tables and the roles they can play in solo RPGs. Not covered are oracle tables (‘spark tables’) that give you a word or three and make you think about the narrative. What does ‘imprison, success’ mean in the context of your adventure? Only you know. And sometimes you don’t.
As far as I know, the terminology I use is my own (though I may have picked up a thing or two from elsewhere) – I just needed a way to think (and talk) about this.
All tables contain choices that will further limit your narrative. This is not a bad thing; we do this all the time: you don’t at least not without a very good reason, have a bronze age warrior travelling with an astronaut, bouncing on a pogo stick to the fabled cloud city of Oxford. Genres and geographies are limitations in themselves; and often limitations will create interesting stories.
I use both of these kinds of tables to build worlds; I might start with either, or simply look through those tables and pick something that tickles my fancy.
Names
You may encounter Mig or Moog, Ig the Ripper or Kreg the Shamed. Some of these names might suggest story (Bolzogrin the Enforcer? Uh-oh), many may not. When you quickly need to name an NPC, an enemy, a town, an inn, name tables can be useful.
Trait tables
These are descriptive tables. They rarely contain story seeds as such, though the cumulative effect often will give you an idea where this is going. When you meet a character who is often drunk, greedy, and wants to impress the boss, well, that’s different from one who wants to do the same but they’re merciful and always carry things.
Category-specific tables
The ‘category’ here can be anything: towns, inns, factions, NPCs, magic items, spices, song titles, trees. You need an x, here are d66 or d100 x.
Encounter Tables
These come in three flavours: combat, non-combat, and mixed; and are usually divided by habitat, so you have forest encounters and desert encounters and dungeon encounters. Sometimes, it’s nice to go ‘I want a random encounter, and here is one’ but in day-to-day play I find mixed tables more useful; I want to be surprised (or surprise players), which also often means rolling several times or simply picking an interesting encounter. The other problem with these tables is that they rarely scale: meeting 2d6 wolves as a first level character is a Bad Idea, meeting them as a 15th level character is boring.
The best method I’ve seen for rolling your own tables is to keep a rolling balance, so you start with a small table (eg 2d6) every time you roll an event, you strike off the one you’ve had and put a slightly more challenging event on the table. (I’ll have to look for precise instructions); This keeps the table fresh and relevant.
Setting Tables
You roll on these tables to build a setting. Some, like the Dread Laironomicron will take you through creation of [a city, an inn, a battle location] in multiple steps; others just give you a single location (but with multiple buildings/quest hooks/NPCs).
On the one hand, they can provide a quick entry point into a solo session where you don’t have to create everything out of your imagination, but with more freedom and more discovery than if you use a pre-fabricated setting.
On the other hand, this can quickly end up with ‘someone else’s imagination’ where I feel I’m outsourcing my imagination.
Rumour Tables
This is very much a thing for group TTRPGs. The players roll on a table and hear a rumour which may be true (and thus make their life easier) or may be false (thus misleading them). Not everybody uses them or uses them in the same way.
The problem is that while a DM can prepare ‘here’s a true fact about the dangers you’ll face’, as a solo player you’re more likely to not know what exactly you’ll be facing until you roll on a table and meet your enemies, and thus can’t give yourself a hint.
While advantage-through-random-roll might still happen, I can’t see a good way to make it happen through a rumour table.
I wonder whether there are other ways of including rumour tables, maybe in the form of ‘potential questhooks/breadcrumbs for future adventures’, but right now, I can’t think of a good mechanism for that and I’m not actually trying to solve this.
Questhooks
That’s the last cateogory I can think of. In theory, these sound inspiring: if you’re stuck and you don’t know what to do, you just roll on a table, and there is it,
A person from your past, who reaches out by courier asks you to Rescue their family member from A necromancer with their hoard of undeadBecause they saw it in a vision
This one actually works out, kinda, but what if you don’t have a postal system, or there are no undead?
I have tried to roll on tables like this, and every time I’ve ended up rejecting most results: I did not create sewers, I don’t have a king, there’s no army that could come up to the city gates, and, and, and.
I like the idea of questhooks much better than the reality.
In this post I want to go over different types of random tables and the roles they can play in solo RPGs. Not covered are oracle tables (‘spark tables’) that give you a word or three and make you think about the narrative. What does ‘imprison, success’ mean in the context of your adventure? Only you know. And sometimes you don’t.
As far as I know, the terminology I use is my own (though I may have picked up a thing or two from elsewhere) – I just needed a way to think (and talk) about this.
All tables contain choices that will further limit your narrative. This is not a bad thing; we do this all the time: you don’t at least not without a very good reason, have a bronze age warrior travelling with an astronaut, bouncing on a pogo stick to the fabled cloud city of Oxford. Genres and geographies are limitations in themselves; and often limitations will create interesting stories.
I use both of these kinds of tables to build worlds; I might start with either, or simply look through those tables and pick something that tickles my fancy.
Names
You may encounter Mig or Moog, Ig the Ripper or Kreg the Shamed. Some of these names might suggest story (Bolzogrin the Enforcer? Uh-oh), many may not. When you quickly need to name an NPC, an enemy, a town, an inn, name tables can be useful.
Trait tables
These are descriptive tables. They rarely contain story seeds as such, though the cumulative effect often will give you an idea where this is going. When you meet a character who is often drunk, greedy, and wants to impress the boss, well, that’s different from one who wants to do the same but they’re merciful and always carry things.
Category-specific tables
The ‘category’ here can be anything: towns, inns, factions, NPCs, magic items, spices, song titles, trees. You need an x, here are d66 or d100 x.
Encounter Tables
These come in three flavours: combat, non-combat, and mixed; and are usually divided by habitat, so you have forest encounters and desert encounters and dungeon encounters. Sometimes, it’s nice to go ‘I want a random encounter, and here is one’ but in day-to-day play I find mixed tables more useful; I want to be surprised (or surprise players), which also often means rolling several times or simply picking an interesting encounter. The other problem with these tables is that they rarely scale: meeting 2d6 wolves as a first level character is a Bad Idea, meeting them as a 15th level character is boring.
The best method I’ve seen for rolling your own tables is to keep a rolling balance, so you start with a small table (eg 2d6) every time you roll an event, you strike off the one you’ve had and put a slightly more challenging event on the table. (I’ll have to look for precise instructions); This keeps the table fresh and relevant.
Setting Tables
You roll on these tables to build a setting. Some, like the Dread Laironomicron will take you through creation of [a city, an inn, a battle location] in multiple steps; others just give you a single location (but with multiple buildings/quest hooks/NPCs).
On the one hand, they can provide a quick entry point into a solo session where you don’t have to create everything out of your imagination, but with more freedom and more discovery than if you use a pre-fabricated setting.
On the other hand, this can quickly end up with ‘someone else’s imagination’ where I feel I’m outsourcing my imagination.
Rumour Tables
This is very much a thing for group TTRPGs. The players roll on a table and hear a rumour which may be true (and thus make their life easier) or may be false (thus misleading them). Not everybody uses them or uses them in the same way.
The problem is that while a DM can prepare ‘here’s a true fact about the dangers you’ll face’, as a solo player you’re more likely to not know what exactly you’ll be facing until you roll on a table and meet your enemies, and thus can’t give yourself a hint.
While advantage-through-random-roll might still happen, I can’t see a good way to make it happen through a rumour table.
I wonder whether there are other ways of including rumour tables, maybe in the form of ‘potential questhooks/breadcrumbs for future adventures’, but right now, I can’t think of a good mechanism for that and I’m not actually trying to solve this.
Questhooks
That’s the last cateogory I can think of. In theory, these sound inspiring: if you’re stuck and you don’t know what to do, you just roll on a table, and there is it,
A person from your past, who reaches out by courier asks you to Rescue their family member from A necromancer with their hoard of undeadBecause they saw it in a vision
This one actually works out, kinda, but what if you don’t have a postal system, or there are no undead?
I have tried to roll on tables like this, and every time I’ve ended up rejecting most results: I did not create sewers, I don’t have a king, there’s no army that could come up to the city gates, and, and, and.
I like the idea of questhooks much better than the reality.
