Encounter table

The oldest tool in the hobby

A random table is two columns and it has been driving stories for fifty years, because it does something a writer cannot: it produces the thing you would not have chosen. The unexpected row is the one the evening is built around, and it only arrives if the table is genuinely being rolled on rather than picked from.

Which is why this page bothers to check the table. A row range that leaves three with nothing on it is a table that silently does nothing once in six, and on paper you would never notice. Here the numbers with no row are named, and so are the ones covered twice, before a single die has been rolled.

One table pointing at another

The trick that makes tables powerful is a row that says roll again somewhere else. A quiet road that occasionally sends you to the strange road is a far better table than one long list, because it keeps the odd results rare while making them properly odd when they land. Write the row as roll again on, then the other table's name, exactly as it is spelled.

It follows four levels and then stops, which is the guard against two tables that point at each other. When it stops, it shows the row it stopped on rather than pretending, and the line under the result says which tables the roll went through on its way.

Rolling and drawing are different

Rolling is the default because it is what a table is. The same result twice in a row is information: this road really is full of wolves. For a list of one-off events, though, a repeat is just a mistake, and drawing without replacement takes each number out as it is used and tells you how many are left in the table.

For rooms combined from three tables at once rather than one row from one, the dungeon room generator is the page, and for the dice themselves with keeps, modifiers and exploding, the dice pool does the arithmetic.

Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for

The tool runs entirely in your browser. There is no account, nothing you make is uploaded, and nothing you type is sent anywhere or put into a link.

The page itself is not silent, though: it carries advertising code and a visit counter that sets no cookie, and the cookie page says exactly what each of those does.

This page remembers your settings in your browser under pph.encounter.tables and pph.encounter.muted, and nowhere else. Clearing your site data for papercarnival.com removes it.