Game Mechanic Preferences: Target Numbers & Formula vs. Tables

I was flipping through a fun-but-table-happy game I played fairly recently (Vampyre, by TSR)

It got me thinking about a couple of my game mechanic preferences.

I prefer target numbers to tables.

I'd rather have a result expressed by a die roll with a target number or numbers than a table lookup. Instead of "1-2 nothing, 3-4 something, 5-6 lots of something" I'd rather have "3+ is something, beat the target number by 2 and get lots of something." Then I can freely adjust the target number or the modifiers on the fly without looking anything up.

I'd rather have "6+ does the job, 1 or less is awful bad stuff" for a 1d6 system than a CRT lookup or checking a chart. It just makes it easier for me. This is probably why I like S&W's one "Save" stat vs. the old-style D&D wargame inspired situation-specific saving throw.

I prefer simple formula to tables.

If you can swap a simple formula, like "Divide your Stat by 2 and roll against it" instead of a table of "What is the roll for a given Stat" or "Every 3 points you make it by," for a table, I prefer that.

My own game system of choice, GURPS, has some of these. Damage for your ST requires a table lookup - you can memorize it, but still, it's a lookup on a mental table instead. Something like BL is easier to look up. I played a lot of Rolemaster and it's a fun game and the table lookups are fun . . . but I ran plenty of games using the no-table approach from Rolemaster Companion and it was equally fun.

But "simple formula" is key. Something like, "Combat is based on a roll against your attack strength, modified by situational percentages, divided by the defender's defense strength, giving a damage result" is not actually easier than a CRT.

Tables are Okay, Though

I'm still okay with tables that make sense as tables. Rumor tables, results tables with different results for each digit, hit location charts, etc. They translate poorly to roll-over or formula. I don't mind memorizing them or looking at them. I've played plenty of fun games with tables that had things on them not conducive to other approaches.


But in general, that's how I like mechanics in my game - simple formula or simple target numbers where possible. If you can equally do it without a table, just as easily as a table, you enhance the speed and portability of the game by doing so.

Review: The Dungeon Dozen

I like to take the time to review game material I especially enjoyed. This is one of my favorites.

For more reviews, see my reviews page.



by Jason Sholtis
222 pages
$8.00 PDF, $28 hardcopy

The Dungeon Dozen is a book of tables. All based on the 1d12 (all hail the dodecahedron!) And all of the content - except possible the art - is available for free on Jason Sholtis's The Dungeon Dozen blog.

The tables are pretty much whimsical. They're not, generally, there for on-the-fly rolling to see what sounds the PCs hear or what the orcs are carrying. Or maybe they are, if you're really ready to improvise gonzo weirdness that springs from the results. Generally they are things that would do with some time and development.

But they are incredible inspirational. You'll want to use some of the customs of barbarian tribes, encounter some of the knights best avoided, stumble across the odd clues found in the dungeon, or have your ship hove into view of the city going through hard times. I could go on, but it's easier to just flip around on the blog and see what it's about. If you like what you see there, you'll appreciate having them all on your device . . . or in your hands.

You can also get a hard back from Lulu. In fact, I recommend that, especially when Lulu does a hardcopy sale. This is one of the books that's vastly better in hardcopy than in PDF.

It's extremely flippable. It's ideal for opening randomly and just reading all, some, or most of a 1d12 table. It's eye catching and entertaining. It's the kind of book where you re-read the stuff you come across that you've already read. I got a copy in hardcover and it's one of the best purchases I've made in recent years. I keep opening it back up, I keep it handy, I bring it to game to show my players (and then take away, to avoid distracting them with it). I open it at random and just read. And yes, I've used some of the material - never with an actual 1d12 roll, but still, some results are so inspirational I've just snagged them and used them to color my game.

Highly recommended.

Random Undead Generator

Need an undead monster for GURPS but just can't decide what kind?

Jerander over on the SJG forums came up with a solution:

The Random Undead Generator

You'll need Fantasy, Horror, and of course Basic Set: Characters to get full use out of it, but you can get by with the same traits defined in Undead, if necessary.

It would be pretty trivial to add life-draining attack powers (or any other attack powers) to the critters, too - just add a new table, call it 3F, and add 1-6 cool powers lifted from existing undead.

Nice stuff.

GURPS tools I like: Gemstone and Spice generators

I've been stocking my megadungeon with monsters, and now I'm filling in treasures.

A couple tools have really come in handy:

Collective_Restraint's Spice Generator and Gemstone Generator.

Both are automated versions of the tables from Dungeon Fantasy 8: Treasure Tables.

I've been using them a lot and they really speed up the process of making treasure. I just need ones for, well, everything else in the book. I'd really love a whole series of tools like that based on DF8, or even a giant horde generator. DF8 is chock full of good stuff but you do end up page-flipping a lot making up treasure. That's cool when you're doing a special item or five but not when you're making up bunches and don't actually care much about the basic contents.

My one suggestion (also sent to C_R) is that it would be handy if I could click the sizing buttons afterward, so I could, say, roll up a spice and decide it's not enough, I want 2x as much, without having to hand-figure it. For spices that's easy, but for gemstones (which are valued based on a formula that weights larger stones' values) it's far from trivial.

Review: The Wilderness Alphabet

The Wilderness Alphabet
By James Pacek
64 pages (6" x 9")

The Wilderness Alphabet, written by the author/blogger James Pacek. It's thematically a twin to Michael Curtis's The Dungeon Alphabet (reviewed by me here - it's an alphabetical list of entries, A-Z, all outdoor themes, each at least one table of random entries. Flip to the letter ("G is for Graveyard," for example or "M is for Mountain") and roll on the table for details about this particular graveyard or mountain.

Some of the letter choices are non-obvious, to ensure a 26-entry, one-entry-per-letter theme. Random rivers? Under "Y is for Yangtze." Random trees? Under "K is for Krokus." Others are more obvious ("O is for Obelisk" and "R is for Ruins and Residences.") Most of them are very cool, even if the names are a stretch.

The entries each get at least one table, and some get introductory text. Most do not. Some of the text is pretty campaign specific for the author's own game, while others are pretty generic. Otherwise the tables provide the meat of the information. I found the lack of text a bit unhelpful - I want at least a short discussion of why Hills are inherently interesting, or selling me on why I'd roll on the waterfall table. Sure, I can look at the tables themselves, but intro text really does help me decide if I want to or not.

Some of the table entries are a bit mixed. For example, for lakes, you might get "The lake is a swirly mass of dark water." Okay, so what? That's kind of weak, especially when it's on the same table with an entry that has the lake frozen over year round, regardless of weather, or a filled with magical fish. That I can work with. Dark water? Sure, we purify it magically or just ignore it and move on. If I'm rolling on a table for something, I'm not asking "Is it interesting or not?" but rather "How interesting is this thing?" I've already decided I want it to be unusual, so the more bland entries seem like filler to me. If the entry makes me want to say "This, plus roll again" or just "roll again" it's a bit of a turn-off.

My question with this book is - when do I use these tables? Some of them are really immediate (quick graveyard layouts, coming up on a festival and the activities therein, things flying by) while others require a vast amount of prep (a gate to another world, a flying castle flies by) or would have real impacts on the surrounding area (a river that turns to beer or wine part of the year, that frozen lake). Some of them are "thank goodness I have a table for that" (like the graveyard one) and others are more like idea factories for adventures. While I respect that mix, it's hard to tell which table is which, so by default that means I'll only dig them out when I have plenty of time to prepare, to generate some ideas. I'd contrast it with The Dungeon Alphabet, which has a lot more of "I have this lever, what should it do?" and "I need a book title now!" and "Fill this room, quick!" kind of tables. It seems more useful for filling hexes in a wilderness hexcrawl long before the players get close enough to hear about the contents. I get the impression that it's mainly meant for this kind of stocking of hexes, which makes it a very different tool than The Dungeon Alphabet. Not a bad tool, but because so many entries seem to demand more detail or more thought ahead of time you'll probably want to use it earlier in the process. But then if you do, the mix of fairly mundane and quite exotic stuff means you've really got to be open to a given hex being pretty mundane or a gateway to something exotic. That's going to be fine for some users but not all of them.

I like the book, but I wanted to like it more. It's great idea-factory but I'm not sure how often I'll pull it off my shelf.

How is it for GURPS?

It's system-neutral, so as long as you're running an outdoor fantasy game in a "standard" fantasy world, you're fine. Nothing in here is level specific, although a few things specify classes - you could use Dungeon Fantasy templates, here, or just ignore that. Change the very occasional "Clerics only" to "Only people with Clerical Investment" or "Fighters only" to "Only obvious warriors" and it'll work fine.

Rating:

Content: 3 out of 5. The charts are well written, the pieces are interesting, but the lack of general discussions of the topic and the mix of mundane and very exotic entries makes it a difficult tool to just pick up and use on the fly
Presentation: 3 out of 5. The book is well written, and the art and backgrounds are attractive. But I found the typeface hard to read quickly, especially the italicized Question campaign notes, and the backgrounds and page shading often made reading much harder. This is partly made up for by the quality of the writing but it makes the book harder to use.

Overall: Wilderness Alphabet is pretty good. It's a nice idea factory for a fantasy game, although it's both a bit more gonzo and a bit more campaign specific than The Dungeon Alphabet. It's also a bit more spare in its descriptions. It really feels like it's meant to be coupled with a hex-map of a world full of strangeness, and it's very clearly the result of a long and interesting campaign. That's both good and bad - you'll need to either re-roll, modify, or ignore a lot of results if you've got a different game flavor.
Bits of it - like the graveyard generator sub-tables and most of the bonus tables - are really great - but the title stuff is more idea generator than "I need it now." Still a good tool, but it feels more specialized and yet more generalized than its dungeon equivalent.

Dragon Magazine: The Wandering Damage Table

James Maliszewski doesn't seem to have gotten to this excellent article, so it's up to me to cover it.

From Dragon #96: The Meanest Of Monsters by Craig Kraus.

Mr. Kraus introduced us to two nasty monsters for the April Fools section of Dragon - the Killer Dungeon Master (who kills you dead, unfairly) and the Sleep-Inducing Dungeon Master (who bores you to sleep and then steals your dice).

The Killer Dungeon Master got to use the "Wandering Damage Table," a joke that really had legs for my gaming group and those of my local fellow players in other groups.

"How To Use The Wandering Damage System
First there was the wandering monster. They serve well when
applied in hordes, but why not cut out the middleman and just deal
out damage to the characters directly? It makes for a smoother,
faster-paced game, and if you want to kill off characters quickly, it
can only be beaten by divine intervention by Cthulhoid godlings."

You rolled on up to three tables - one to see what happened, one on the damage table (maybe), and one on the limb loss subtable.

Entries read like these:

"4 Your character cuts himself while shaving; consult Limb Loss
Subtable."

and

"11 Something invisible chews on your character, doing 6-36
points damage."

or

"13-20 Consult the Random Damage Subtable for no reason
whatsoever."

Or the Limb Loss Subtable, which included "Head gone" and "Torso cut in half." Yeah, from shaving perhaps - I had a razor like that once.

Or the damage subtable:

"01-05 Take 10 hit points damage.
06-10 Take 15 hit points damage."

or

"56-60 Take 24 hit points damage and then take 31 more.
61-65 Take 1,000 hit points damage and roll again.
66-70 Roll every die within 30 feet for damage."

I love "and then take 31 more."

"74-75 Take 3 hit points damage and consider yourself very lucky - for the time being."

Part of the humor for me was that I always saw wandering monsters as, pretty much, wandering damage. "You're taking too long, so here's some damage without treasure. Still lollygagging? Here's more!" We still refer to things as a "Wandering Damage Table." I roll for wandering monsters and say "Let's see if any wandering damage, er monsters, show up."

The other was the sheer quotability of "Consult the limb loss table" or "And consider yourself very lucky" in play. We must have busted these out once a session for years, and the elder gamers in my area still use these. A few of the younger guys picked it up without ever having seen Dragon #96. It's the "This one goes to 11" of gaming for us.

DFM1 Random Prefixer

So you say you can't decide what DFM1 prefix to use on a boss monster?

Emily aka Bruno has a solution: the random prefix table!

Thanks for making that, Em. It's awesome.