The Joys of Encounter Cards

 I've had a niggling obsession with card draw mechanics for randomisation for a while now.  I've put together a very esoteric dungeon/wilderness population system based on drawing cards from a deck.  Each suit is a different experience; Humanoid, Flora/Fauna, Hazard, Wonder/Sensory.  I've had fun with it.  Where I always struggled was deciding when to stop creating and make the dungeon make sense.  I would have endless fun making rooms and having them loosely tied together.  Thematically they would fit just fine, because of how I had compiled the tables, weighting towards the dominant faction or dominant fauna.  But they would still be a loose system of ideas.  I experimented with different ways to put them together.  My favourite way when playing solo was to use the system based heavily on Emmy Allen's procedural works, Gardens of Ynn and Stygian Library.  Each room is assigned a number as they are created.  Then I would start in the first room and go deeper, stay here or go back.  Not exactly the same as Emmy's.  I would roll a d6 and add or subtract it from my current room number.  Incidentally, you can use a similar system to make procedural dungeons out of almost any numbered map.  OSE first party products are particularly great for this because they have a numbered table of rooms.  The logic can go out the window a little bit, but a liberal application of "mythic underworld" suspension of disbelief can go a long way. If you draw the map as you go and include the room exits, your character can come back and check unexplored rooms.

Playing this way I would randomly create an objective; This is what brings the character or party to the dungeon.  Randomly assign this objective to a room in on the room table and try to get to it.  Once you have gotten to the objective room all the currently unexplored rooms on your map become dead end rooms.  If you explore them they still have a room attached, but any exits from the room don't exist in this version of the underworld.  I treat repeats of the same number value room as unexpected entrances into the same room, secret passages or tunnels.  All my corridoors and passages between the rooms are lines like a node map, and the rooms themselves are drawn as they are in the module.

This is an aside to the point I was intending to make which is that I love procedural generation.  The most of it I can do before I need to sit down and do grown up thinking the happier I am. I think of this in terms of open and closed mode per John Cleese. The more time I can spend in the open mode, the happier I am and the more interesting my results are.  However if I live in that mode my dungeons have no coherence at a table for a group of people.

The other problem that I found myself grappling with when I made my own dungeons was that if I had to go into and out of open/creative mode, it would stymy my rhythm for making stuff.  I would be thinking to myself "but why is the Fire Giant living next to the Kobolds?"  Which is fine, that's part of the fun, but my problem is that I could spend so long on that, the dungeon creation would cease. My solution to this was to make all the dungeon rooms first and enjoy pure open mode without any worry about layout.  I would make interesting and thematic vignettes or scenes with each room.  I would give roll randomly for the contents  like denizens, flora/fauna, the number of exits, etc.  First make the room interesting.  I would roll for what the denizens are doing and a reaction roll to give them a starting disposition; for these details take a look at d4 Caltrops  OSE tables, d100 activities for every creature in OSE, even the camel.  Also you can reskin these, because I tend to use the human ones for factions (My goblins are acolytes in one dungeon, but they are bandits in another) I also use Knave 2 for reaction tables, because I like the 2d6.  This sort of vignette/scene approach to room resign is super fun for someone who enjoys random or procedural creation; it is heavily inspired by the scenes in The Labyrinth RPG book.

I did this for a while using the Emmy Allen based method above of playing by rolling a d6 and moving through rooms, it works and it's fun.  I've also placed rooms onto an Electric Bastionland style Underground map, this works well for GM prep, but if I want to play it solo I like to be surprised; knowing what rooms exist but not when they will occur is enough of a surprise for me.  My problem with using my own rooms and The Stygian Method (Emmy's one) was that I would be disappointed if I had a random room that I thought was really great, but the dice never let me find it.

McCullough to the Rescue

Once again Joe McCullough of Frostgrave et. al has presented me with a really simple and blindingly obvious solution to the problems I had.  Playing cards.  I would still create my little vignette rooms.  Because I had the humanoid tables weighted with Faction, Sub Faction and Random, and the Fauna tables weighted with a Prominent species, minor species and something odd (or monstrous), the themes I had picked for the dungeon would come out through the numbers of each encountered.  But if I just assign the created rooms to a sequential deck of cards I could be assured that all the notes I want to hit will be in there.  The event or room card system allows me to not know what is coming but make sure that every bit of the pig gets used.

I've fallen in love with this since, and I think more people should use cards as a driver for random tables.  You can weight a random table based on faction prevalence, but you can still roll super wonky when populating a dungeon.  I don't want to decide exaclt what goes where, that's why I'm using a table.  If you're populating factions into a dungeon I know I want this to be the area where the Kobolds who worship a Gelatinous Cube that has a dragon skull floating in it, and they have developed to have sticky hands and be able to spider climb, like Xenomorphs.  Excellent.  They are in combat with little hairy homunculi who have been sent by a wizard two levels down who created the gelatinous cube and wants it back.  Fun times.  There are way more of the Kobolds than Homunculi, and I can weight that on a table.  But my dice could still make my dungeon far more in favour of the Homunculi, because dice have a sense of humour like that.  So I make a d12 weighted table using d4 Caltrop's stuff or random disposition tables to favour the Acid Kobolds. Add one entry to it to bring the number to 13. then assign all those entries to a suit of cards Ace-King.  Each time I have to put an encounter in a room I draw and discard.  When I get to the end of the table I refill the encounters with the same weighted results, but with different dispositions and activities.  This way the enjoyment of randomness is preserved (I don't know what I will draw) but the dungeon or wilderness area doesn't end up super gonzo or off theme.

In defense of dice

I'm not saying that we shouldn't use dice to drive random tables.  I'm a firm believer that getting the same result on a table over and over can be used to set up a theme.  Rather than discarding it the dice are telling you that the thing you keep rolling is important.  But cards have their own charm and are another tool that lets me build a world or a space that feels consistent and interesting, but also creative and surprising to me... which dirves a nice little addictive loop of creation where I get to live in open mode and get that euphoric flow state high, hopefully without ending up with a hot mess at the end because the system I'm creating with has clear parameters that control the oddities so that I don't have to.

Eventual Dragons

One of the upshots of using cards instead of dice for a d12(13) encounter table is that everything will eventually show up.  If you put a dragon in your forest table it's going to show up.  Don't forget to give it an activity and a disposition.  These things are more interesting if the players aren't even notable to the big beasties at first.  The next time I refill the table for the area (once all 13 entries are used) I won't include the dragon, because you're unliekly to see it again soon.  But if you do it will be the same dragon and will remember you if you interacted with it last time.

Different Mechanic, different mindset

The mindset shift this has spawned in me is that it is worth my time to create flavourful tables, because they will eventually get used if the players continue to explore an area.  It is worth making the effort to create vignettes that tell a story about the area and the factions involved.  I will make a couple of example tables in a future post.