Hundreds of years before the dawn of history
Stonehenge, Spinal Tap
Lived a strange race of people… the Druids
No one knows who they were, or… what they were doing
We’re four posts into this series and I’ve not yet managed to elevate the discussion about encounter tables beyond their basic die-roll-encounter-type form.
But I think the extra time was worth it. At the very least, by now you should have enough information to make decisions about when to use a nested table or when to rely on a bell curve vs. an equal-weight distribution. And, hey, I’ve learned some math, too. Win-win.
Dynamic Encounters
My model for dynamic encounter tables is inspired by Noisms over at Monsters And Manuals. It’s a “noun-verb-object” format that notes what you encounter, what they’re doing, and what they’re doing it to. It’s a scant treatment, but that’s rather the point: As Noisms puts it, the format forces the GM to come up with a narrative to connect the pieces together.
Aside from the extra detail this format provides, the “forced” creativity is what makes the table truly useful. In that spirit, I’d like to try another route to the same destination.
Here’s the Insect (Crawler) sub-table from before; roll 1d6 for each column:
Wants (noun)
This is whatever the Subject is after. It’s always a noun, but it could be anything that makes sense in your setting. You can create sub-tables of nouns to drill down from vague (e.g., [Food] or [Treasure]) to specific (e.g., “Carrots” or “The Egg of Mantumbi“).
In all cases, the Subject utilises his most effective tools to get what he wants—cunning, stealth, diplomacy, tricks, magic, or brute force—whatever is most expedient. It does not mean he is unnecessarily rash and incautious. Unless perhaps hindered by a Complication (see below), the Subject works to the best of his ability.
Complication (adjective)
This is something that colours the encounter, and it can apply to the Subject, the thing it Wants, the environment, or the circumstances under which the encounter occurs. It is always an adjective, but again, could be anything that makes sense in your setting, and also again, you can also create sub-tables to whatever level of detail you desire (e.g., general complications like [Wounded] or [Insane] , or specifics like “Bleeding” or “Delusional”) .
At its core, the Complication is simply a way to nuance the encounter and make it more interesting and challenging for the players than just a roll for initiative—that’s why it’s a complication. Feel free to ignore or re-roll as you see fit.
Interpreting Results
This is the fun part: piecing the words together to make up a decent encounter. Just off the top of my head, how about:
5, 4, 5: Hunting Spider wants Shiny Things complicated by Supernatural
There are silvery nuggets woven into the spider’s web, and they have magical properties.
6, 1, 4: Swarm wants Food complicated by Controlled
A locust swarm is sent by a sorcerer to plague the insubordinate villagers he rules.
3, 2, 3: Tiger Beetle wants a Mate complicated by Insanity
Clearly, this bug is cuckoo for copulation—best stay out of its way!
Tips
I recommend you start with the nested encounter tables and drill down normally. Use the format above when you get to the last sub-table. This lets you customise the options to fit the encounter type. In other words, humans and bugs have different Wants and Complications—this is a great way to illustrate those differences.
That said, you can fill in the Wants and Complications columns with any words you want . Naturally, this gives you an excellent opportunity to customise the setting via your choice of things and descriptors.
If you’re stuck for nouns and adjectives, check out the tools at WordGenerator.net. The only drawback is that you get your words one at a time, so you may have to do a lot of clicking before you find something you can use.
Final Words
I like the Wants/Complication approach because it’s very open-ended, though that can sometimes require more brain-effort from the GM. Like Noisms’ format, this approach does let you tweak the possible results as your setting develops. In that respect, these are truly dynamic tables.
So, simple question: what are your thoughts, and how would you improve it?
By the way, I apologise for my posting infrequency lately—while work is busy and interesting, it’s taken up a lot of time. I don’t think the work load will abate anytime soon, but neither is this site going away. Thanks for your patience.
Great idea! I’ll have to add it to my encounter tables.
I rather like this idea Erin. It very much reminds me of the old JG supplements where you’d get a one liner underneath an NPC “One eyed owner of Neptune’s Trident, bores customer with stories of unlikey sea monsters.” These brief descriptions were often a source of inspiration and adventure as it does require you to ad-lib. The Guide to the City State is full of these phrases. One could just as easily exchange the elements of the phase “story” and “sea monsters” with treasure, legends etc. and we often did just that.
I think it does help if monsters have some purpose or they turn into ninepins. Codifying this into a table is a great idea and I particularly like your breaking this down into noun and adjective.
Tinkering with this a little, I think you could get some fairly wild results unless the tables are more specific. I’d be inclined to make a table for insects for example. So I’d have ants, beetles, and so on in one column. The second column could be diversified into subcategories based on likely “insect only” behaviours so you’d get wants/leaves/has and the third column for the adjective which modifies the nouns under the subcategories. Again these would be consistent with what you’d expect insects of this type to behave like.
I suppose one could go so far as to make tables specific to a particular type of creature and add it to their description.
A table of how monsters interact with each other might be interesting as well.
@Greg MacKenzie : That’s the idea – tailor the Wants and Complications to the encounter type. I’ll admit to major JG inspiration here, but with perhaps a bit more encounter-specific behaviours.
Mannish encounters provide a good example. If you read your Moldvay, you’ll note a lot of human-type monsters, but each is interested only in specific things – nobles aren’t the same as berserkers, who are different from acolytes, and NPC parties are a completely different animal.
In some ways, this gets rid of the need for reaction rolls, since each encounter already has a motivation–the response to the PCs is less of a random result than an indication of how the PCs help, hinder, or potentially neutralise the monster’s goals.