[the_redbeard]

Originally Posted by rob

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.

I kind of do that. Although not all the entries on the table have their own topic... because my mechanical entries are nearly non-existent. Only my homebrew monsters are in RW.

That works for an encounter table, a concise list of known possibilities. But it doesn't at all work for a new random entity, which would have its own snippets of random data, like a new npc, a random table of possible hirelings available, the village that I didn't know was in the forest hex, etc.

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.

Yep, I do this. I grabbed a bunch of names for various cultures from Chris Pounds Random Name Generators and entered them into snippets of the respective culture's topic.
I open the culture's topic, highlight one of the names and create a new content element with control q. Before I leave the culture's entry, I save and do a content link detection and the name is highlighted so that a) I don't pick it again and b) the new npc already has a link to their culture.

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.

Generators like what you're saying are not used by the majority of GMs are being incorporated into the Campaign Logger product. I've already invested time and money into RW so I'm not likely to switch any time soon. But they do seem to be catering more to my DMing style.