This is awesome too. I've started to keep a little design to-do list in with my projects called 'Murkdice has Ideas' that captures stuff I want to play with at some point. Thanks for the content,
Rewarding the players or having an evolution of the previous encounter is such a great idea. I've hosted games where I've rolled the same encounter so often that we all just made it a running gag in the rest of the sessions. This way there's more forward momentum in the action and the players have a better story to share afterwards other than, 'what do you get when you open the door? ANOTHER GOBLIN!'.
Solid way to add complexity to random encounters. Might actually be able to use it with story beats by adding another die. Make it a bell curve so you have events you want to hit eventually mixed in with the other content.
You can definitely take it in that direction! I never really have a core plot or such, I’m more of an ‘emergent narrative’ type, but put it on a 2d6 and you can focus on certain sequences for sure!
This is more a table of multiple columns as opposed to a nested table. But it definitely is out of the ordinary compared to the 1 column tables we typically see. Regardless of semantics, I like your ideas you presented here. You could even have the additional columns have conditions besides just # of occurrences. ie #of PCs present, pcs have > X health pool.
Yeah! You can put conditional statements in columns if you like 😁 Of course it’s always tempting to add more complexity, one of the things that comes to my mind is ‘has event X happened?’ So you get the idea of wider cause and effect.
That's funny because Eryk and I were talking about this last week during a Milk Bar dev meeting. The question we discussed was something like, "Should an Omen table and an Encounter table remain separate or conjoined in sequential order?"
In the end, we decided that it made for more tension and variety to keep them separate. If you roll an Omen twice in a row, on the 2nd you get the related encounter. But you could roll an Omen, then a different, surprise encounter. I think this does make more sense in the spatial distortion of "the Zone" like space in Milk Bar than in a dungeon.
I like this. It would be great to generate improv moments and create stories. I wouldn’t use it in a plot heavy game without tailoring it specifically … otherwise they would very much distract the players
It’s absolutely going to take more space! Small dungeons also aren’t going to have the playtime that sees the mixing of all these little threads. I think this is going to be effective for medium and larger adventures!
This is awesome! Very inspired and useful. Great read, as always.
Thanks Eli!
Been thinking about this idea ever since i first read it. I want to try using this for the dolmenwood dungeon im noodling with.
This is awesome too. I've started to keep a little design to-do list in with my projects called 'Murkdice has Ideas' that captures stuff I want to play with at some point. Thanks for the content,
You're welcome!
Rewarding the players or having an evolution of the previous encounter is such a great idea. I've hosted games where I've rolled the same encounter so often that we all just made it a running gag in the rest of the sessions. This way there's more forward momentum in the action and the players have a better story to share afterwards other than, 'what do you get when you open the door? ANOTHER GOBLIN!'.
Exactly!
Solid way to add complexity to random encounters. Might actually be able to use it with story beats by adding another die. Make it a bell curve so you have events you want to hit eventually mixed in with the other content.
You can definitely take it in that direction! I never really have a core plot or such, I’m more of an ‘emergent narrative’ type, but put it on a 2d6 and you can focus on certain sequences for sure!
This is more a table of multiple columns as opposed to a nested table. But it definitely is out of the ordinary compared to the 1 column tables we typically see. Regardless of semantics, I like your ideas you presented here. You could even have the additional columns have conditions besides just # of occurrences. ie #of PCs present, pcs have > X health pool.
Yeah! You can put conditional statements in columns if you like 😁 Of course it’s always tempting to add more complexity, one of the things that comes to my mind is ‘has event X happened?’ So you get the idea of wider cause and effect.
That's funny because Eryk and I were talking about this last week during a Milk Bar dev meeting. The question we discussed was something like, "Should an Omen table and an Encounter table remain separate or conjoined in sequential order?"
In the end, we decided that it made for more tension and variety to keep them separate. If you roll an Omen twice in a row, on the 2nd you get the related encounter. But you could roll an Omen, then a different, surprise encounter. I think this does make more sense in the spatial distortion of "the Zone" like space in Milk Bar than in a dungeon.
I think it's a good point though, to not follow event sequences in too much of a template format. Got to change up the sequences and keep them fresh!
I like this. It would be great to generate improv moments and create stories. I wouldn’t use it in a plot heavy game without tailoring it specifically … otherwise they would very much distract the players
I like it. From a practical perspective, this needs lots of space in a zine, though. Or the use of super small fonts, which is even worse.
Still, I think there is merit in this approach for locations where we expect lots of encounters. It's probably too much for very small dungeons.
It’s absolutely going to take more space! Small dungeons also aren’t going to have the playtime that sees the mixing of all these little threads. I think this is going to be effective for medium and larger adventures!