Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 16 - Homebrew 101 - Random Tables and Generators Are Your Friend

Episode Date: April 12, 2020

In this week's episode, Jeremy talks about embracing low-prep or even no-prep game mastering.  He uses offline and online generators to generate a brief sci-fi one-shot idea.   Books: Book of Random Tables Book of Random Tables 2 Book of Random Tables 3 Book of Random Tables 4 Dungeons for the Master The No-Prep Gamemaster The Lazy Dungeon Master The Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master Table Fables Table Fables II Websites: donjon.bin.sh tvtropes.org/pmwiki/storygen.php chaoticshiny.com

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for tuning in to Taking 20, Episode 16, Homebrew 101, Random Tables and Generators Are Your Friend. This episode continues the concept of homebrewing, understanding the skills that you need in order to homebrew, and some of the tips and tricks that I have. Understanding the skills that you need in order to homebrew and some of the tips and tricks that I have. I'd like to thank our sponsor today, Children. Both life's biggest joy and source of some of our biggest frustrations. Please head over to www.taking20podcast.com. There you can listen to old episodes, provide feedback, see our Patreon, and connect to us on Facebook and Twitter. Random tables and generators are things to embrace, and it's a philosophy known as low or no prep game mastering.

The idea is a very simple one. You don't have to know everything down to the gnat's eyelash to provide a good gaming experience for your players. For example, let's just take a village, just a random village that the PCs happen to be outside of. What all would you need to know about it? The name, size, population, and population distribution. Maybe it's major industries, what the sections of town are called and how they differ from one another.

What's the governing body like and how does it rule over the city? What sorts of economic things would you need to know about a village? The major businesses, their owners, their employees that the party would interact with, possible people they may run into on the street, what they have in their pockets, how rich they are. Not to mention the likely places the PCs would visit. The armorer, the weaponsmith, the pawn shop, the junkyard, the sheriff. What sort of inventory do they have? What are they willing to sell? What are they not willing to sell? You'd also need to come up with some PC activities in town, maybe some possible quests, quest rewards, town events, goings on, and so forth. And that's not

to mention the histories, the festivals, description of the town layout, building materials, how the buildings look compared to one another, how many police are present on any given time, and the why of a lot of the festivals and why the name and why the size and so forth. That's a lot. Imagine you take hours to generate this village. You start the session and the PCs get to the edge of town, but they decide, nah, we're not going to go into that town. We're going to head to the tower on down the road. And you feel like all that time you spent prepping is lost. It can be very, very frustrating. But as an aside, that work isn't actually lost. What you could do is stick it in your notebook and save it for the next town that the PCs enter. The point of this episode is that random generators can take the place of a ton of prep work.

And there are all sorts of generators that you can use, both paper-based and online. One of the offline sources that I use, paper-based if you will, is the Book of Random Tables 1-4 by Matt Davids. Matt Davids. It contains everything from random names to contents of a dead adventurer's pack, to items in a dragon's lair, to random encounters in an inn. These books are very thorough in the random tables that they provide. They're fantastic resources that you can pick up and get something on the fly. Some of the online generators that I've used, for example, is TVTropes.org's Story Generator. A word about TVTropes.org. This website is a well with a very deep bottom, and if you go here and lose track of time, and you miss deadlines, and you miss birthdays, and you miss entire kids' lives, it's entirely on you. I have warned you. But if you go to TVTropes.org and click on story generator,

you can one click will generate a story. Let's use this thing to generate a sci-fi adventure. Okay, so the setting is the twilight of the old west. And if you actually go into the description of that, it's a former remote area that's becoming more settled over time. The plot it gives us is Nitro Express. We're transporting something dangerous. There's definitely ripe fruit in those trees. The narrative is fiction isn't fair. The bad guy ignores conventional laws and rules and social conventions. Hero is defends against their own kind, so the heroes are similar to the villain in some way And the villain lusts for money and power Very good

Characterization Everybody smokes An entire town participates in some bad habit So let's translate this into a sci-fi one-shot Let's see Twilight of the Old West That means it's a remote area becoming more settled. Maybe it's a fringe colony on the edge of colonized space

that's becoming more integrated with interstellar society as the rim of the interstellar empire begins to grow. Nitro Express. The colony, ooh, it mines an isotope that's unstable, but it's used in certain ship engines after it's refined. And this colony maybe just came upon some sort of major vein of the isotope, and they need to ship it back to a metropolitan area. So the parties on that transport going to that metropolitan area, hmm, the isotope that's stored away in the shipping containers has a bomb attached to it.

It will go off if the transport lands, or if a receiver attached to the bomb detects the word bomb being uttered by anyone that's on the spaceship. Okay, so, anyone on the transport says the word bomb, and a bomb goes off. Because of the whole hero-similar-to-villains thing, there's a group of adventurers similar to the party whose job it is to ensure that the bomb goes off. But to make sure they're safe, they have some sort of escape pod that they can use just outside the destination planet. So the party has to convince the authorities on board, pilots, security, what have you, that there's a bomb on the transport. The party also has to convince the authorities not to call it in, because if the word bomb is uttered over transmission lines, it causes the bomb to go off.

Maybe the party has to quietly gain access to the cargo hold, find the bomb, defeat the group that's trying to stop them, or maybe find a way to defuse the bomb, or maybe get it off the ship. All this without alerting any other passengers, otherwise they'll make their own calls about the bomb, which would set it off the ship, all this without alerting any other passengers, otherwise they'll make their own calls about the bomb which would set it off. So how do you tie this into a bigger narrative? Maybe one of the colony miners was blackmailed or paid to attach the bomb to the isotope. Maybe the blackmailer owns an alternate fuel source of some kind and wants to show that that's a safer alternative. The blackmailer could be funding

potential resistance groups who will take credit for the bombing. So maybe as part of a larger overall campaign, the party discovers this existence of this blackmailing big bad evil guy. They have to discover and infiltrate the resistance group who have similar designs for bombs to go off in other cities. Could be an interesting adventure, but that's just made from one click off of TVTropes.org's story generator. At a minimum, a lot of times you can use random generators or random tables to help fill in tiny details while you design the big broad strokes. So as far as tips go, what do I do?

I have a notebook of a lot of randomly generated items available to me that I can pull out of at any time. It includes things like names of people and places broken down by gender and race. I have people's descriptions and motivations and some unique features. Like maybe this person has a limp, or this person has a scar over his left eye, or this lady wants to learn about adventuring. This guy has a Scottish accent. This one has a pet space donkey named Ophelia. This Scottish accent is awful. I also have a randomly generated list of taverns, things like names of the taverns and specials they may have, or drinks and some of the common patrons that you would see in there. I have a lot of random generators of shops and market stalls with weapons and armor and potions or technology devices and magic items and maybe what's been pawned recently and what they're willing to sell. I also have some random basic plots set aside. Who's been murdered? What's been stolen? Who are

they trying to kill? What conflict are they trying to resolve? Is there someone they need to protect? And who's behind it? Is it a merchant, a rival, a family member, friend, law enforcement, assassin's guild? Another thing that you can commonly have would be a table of random encounters by general area that the party's in and the party's general level. So what resources do I use to do this? I've mentioned some of the books by Matt Davids, Book of Random Tables 1 through 4. I'm also going to throw in the book Matt Davids' No Prep Game Master. Fantastic book, short, quick read, really helps you to embrace this concept of no prep game mastering.

Another book I want to call attention to is The Lazy Dungeon Master and Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master by Michael Shea. Fantastic resources. Again, getting you used to this idea of being able to run gaming sessions on little or maybe even no prep. There are a series of books called The Table Fables by Madeline Hale. There's a number of websites that I use, donjohn.bin.sh, chaoticshiny.com being just a couple. Over on taking20podcast.com on the description of the podcast, I'll list some of these resources out there for you to peruse. But having these random tables is a great way to handle it when your party unexpectedly says hey we want to stay in town for a few days so now you can use these tables to liven it up a bit and don't have to worry so much that you have nothing prepared low prep or no prep game mastering does

require some improvisational skills you're going to have to make some stuff up on the fly because you never know when the party is going to say i want to talk to the girl that's behind the counter at the weapons shop. What's her name? You may have to glance down at a random table and say, Her name is Orinna. And they may start asking a lot of questions to Orinna. Who is she? Where's she from? Why is she working at a weapons shop? And so forth.

Having these random tables does supplement your improvisational skills, but you will need these skills in order to make it seem like it's not made up on the fly. The other thing you will need besides improvisational skills is knowledge which your table defines as fun. Do they like interacting with NPCs? Do they like dungeon crawls? Do they like big space operas? By knowing that, that will let you know what tables you need to have ready so that you can run the type of game that they would enjoy. The other thing it does require is trust in yourself and trust in your players. You're going to be making a lot of this stuff up on the fly, and believe me, I have done this numerous times where at the end, the plot made no sense.

I'm beating myself up over it horribly, worrying about this that I flubbed, and I feel like this made no sense, and I thought it was a complete disaster, and one of my players says, that was fun. We want to stay here another night. Okay, then. If the party's having fun, if the players are having fun, and if they want their characters to stick around and remain in your campaign, and hint, they do, then it's a win.

It does also require a basic understanding of plot. For more details on that, see the previous episode, episode 15, and the upcoming one, episode 17, The Basics of Plot and Story. Now, I get it. The thought of running even a single session without a pre-built adventure to carry you through is scary the very first time that you do it. It can be really intimidating when you think about having to come up with a reason for the characters to adventure,

a plot hook that they would latch onto, an evil force that they have to combat and work against, a MacGuffin or a magic item or a treasure that the party will seek to make that happen, or a town tragedy that they're trying to write and not having all of that ahead of time. My advice to you is try it with a single fight, one small dungeon, a tiny remote town. Try to go into it with very little prepared. See how it fits and see if you like it. Because low prep and no prep gaming can really save a dungeon master a lot of time,

you may find that the time that you gain more than makes up for a little bit of stress of running a session with little or no prep. Before long, you'll be sitting down to gaming sessions with the players entering the town of Hearthmont, and you'll generate it with a few clicks and a few table references. You'll look back on this moment and laugh and laugh as you realize your players are staring at you because you've been laughing at stuff in your head for five minutes, and they're worried their DM is having a psychotic break. Thank you so much for listening to episode 16. Before I leave, I want to thank our sponsor, Children. Without them, the earth belongs to the cockroaches in 120 years. My name is Jeremy Shelley. Thank you so much for listening

and here's hoping that your next game is your best game.