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rob
Senior Member
Lone Wolf Staff
 
Join Date: May 2005
Posts: 8,232

Old September 30th, 2016, 05:59 PM
Here's an idea that I've found useful and might work for your needs. I setup a collection of Scene topics for the various different encounters, allowing the list to be extended very easily. Then I have one topic that serves as the "table". Each of the different scenes gets an entry in the "table" topic, and the table provides the list that can be easily randomized from. You can also put all the scenes in a true table within a snippet, associating different probabilities to each of them.

Everything gets linked. The scenes are wholly reusable. It all works pretty smoothly. The only requirement is that you actually need to perform the randomization yourself. But I don't find it hard to roll the dice once to figure out which encounter to use.

There are various ways to adapt this to different usage styles within RW. And this same approach can be readily adapted to more substantive things like NPCs and the like.

I suck at names. For tables of random names, I just have a few topics with long lists that I cribbed from elsewhere. Then I grab from the list when I need one and mark it as used. There's nothing hard about that.

For simpler encounter tables, such as wandering monsters, I use a similar approach to the names. I have tables with the various random sets, and the table itself details what the encounter consists of (e.g. 3 ogres), with the monsters linking to the creature entry on the mechanics side. I can mix-and-match this approach with "important" encounters that can be stumbled across randomly by the PCs. This is achieved by having separate Scene topics for the important encounters that get linked to from the table, while all the non-important encounters are simply spelled out within the table.

The one area where there's no real way to model it in RW is things like generating random villages. This is a much less common need, from what I've seen, since the majority of GMs I've encountered don't rely on randomization for things like that. As such, it's something that we have on the "would be nice" list, as opposed to the "everybody will use this" and "most GMs will use this" lists.

Hope this is helpful!
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