Over in the discussion of "old school", John M. pointed to how someone described "stochasticity" as a characteristic of those games of yesteryear, that was lost at some point. I agree; I loved using random tables from the AD&D 1e DMG and I was mildly shocked at a friend's comment back around 1985 that random encounters are horrible. Viewed backwards through a couple decades of gaming and discussion, it's easy to see the divide but even then I thought to myself that the loss of random encounters would reduce the importance of player decisions and make the world seem 'boxed in'. And in fact that was a feeling I sometimes had in that friend's campaign, in spite of his having a fairly reactive GMing style that allowed us, as a group, to take things in whatever direction we wished between scenarios, or even to twist a given session in the direction we wanted.

By contrast I liked to use either customized random tables for a given dungeon/scenario, or the general tables at the back of the DMG. This was good for a number of city encounters and ultimately led to a big set-piece battle against a tribe of goblins, who were attacking a caravan guarded by the PCs, and which a friend told me decades later was the most fun he'd ever had with D&D.

Now I'd rather not turn this thread into debate over the merits of random tables. I'm happy to further explain what I like about them but I'm not going to defend them against someone who doesn't "get it". What I would like to know is, what good tools are there out now, either as game aids or embedded in various games/scenarios? I'm thinking of grabbing a copy of the old DMG from a used book store (mine was stolen during a move in college). I also have the old Cities supplement published by Midkemia. I really wish more games would offer these sorts of things. E.g. I don't thinkTalislanta 2ed does, and it would really enhance the game to have a chart for each region or terrain type, as well as cities (perhaps differentiated for major cities).

I remember that some old supplement (maybe Haven?) even had random city encounters which had a bit of backstory to them. Although this reduced their reusability it seemed like a way to introduce more involving conflicts without railroading. (I.e., not only could the PCs handle the situation multiple ways, but they could pretty much ignore it and move on, perhaps to a goal they've already chosen, perhaps to another random encounter.) A further development, which I don't think I've seen, would be to create cross-linked encounters, so that if you've already had encounter A, then that outcome will modify how encounter B plays. Yet another idea would be to have the GM keep a list of major figures or groups that the PCs have dealt with in the past, and then, on certain results, to draw randomly from that list.

Now I'm going to get really wacky and suggest that random encounter tables could be used to generate not only encounters, but entire pseudo-sentences contextualizing those encounters, via a simple set of semantic rules.

E.g. Roll on the Noun table, get "A Sirashtran war-band"

...pointing to verb table IV (intelligent hominids), which yields,

"headed to [nearest civilized settlement] because"

...pointing to purpose/impetus table I (goals in settlements)

"...they were offered a reward for stealing/abducting"

...pointing to [item/person of note table for the settlement]

..."the gilded scarab of Az-plith."

Rolling such a thing simply means there's an encounter of some type. If you wanted to further systematize you could use rules for figuring out when each party detects the other, and for randomizing the disposition of the encountered group with respect to the PCs. (Just 'cos Sirashtrans are on mission doesn't mean they won't attack if you let your guard down.)

Now, Clinton Nixon has already done something that could be used a bit like this with his Fantasy Oracle, although I think the results tend to provide a little too much information--more of a story outline than a seed--and also (paradoxically) to require more interpretation from the GM than I'd like. Just typing "adventure generator" into Google yields a bunch of other tools, both diced and computerized, e.g. this one.

So basically I'm just looking to see if anyone has seen particularly good use of "stochasticity" that they can point to, or further ideas on its use.

I love using random generators for stuff in general; it can lead to great ideas that wouldn't necessarily have happened in a "normal" session.

I like your sentence generator idea.  Hmmm...might make a neat community project.

My latest favorite set of random tables is quite old, a Gamelords supplement for Traveller called Startown Liberty.  It's a huge set of random tables for generating encounters in a typical startown setting.  You roll on a general encounter table depending on the part of town you're in (red light district, commercial district, etc.), and each encounter has a further sub-table to determine how to play it out.  I love stuff like this.

• Startown Liberty is a good find. QLI may still have some Gamelords books in stock but I have no idea if they're currently taking orders or not.
• The Traveller language charts found in at least CT, MT, and GT. There are online versions/generators online but I still have a fondness for the original charts and die rolls.
• Tsoylani Names without Tears. A similar word generator useful for "exotic" names.
  
• Aaron Thorne's Random Dungeon Generator for Tunnels & Trolls
  
• Gary Gygax's World Builder is like the back of AD&D1E's DMG on 11. Not worth full price IMO but has a lot of random charts.
  
• Task Force Games Central Casting(?) books are held up as the random generator books.
  
• Palladium Books has many random charts in their books. Nightbane in particular has random charts all over the place for chargen, continued in several Rifter articles. Need an oddball creature feature? Good to go.
• R. Talsorian's Lifepath charts, esp. Mekton's

That is excellent.

The thing I like about random generators isn't only that they provide inspiration for ideas, getting you out of a creative rut, but that they encourage a perspective of "stuff" going on in the world that isn't directly tied to the PCs or to a specific plot. Effectively the world is outside the control of the players and the GM. (Although IMO the GM should exercise some discretion when using tables that aren't customized for the campaign or location. E.g., using the AD&D encounter tables 'straight' means that you implicitly accept the use of all those creatures in your campaign, and I've always felt that a D&D GM should have a critical eye toward what elements in the sourcebooks should and shouldn't be included. So if a creature appears that doesn't feel right, roll again.)

With random tables, the preparations that player-characters engage in before heading off on an expedition become more meaningful to me, since there's no question of the GM "reading" the party composition, spell choice, equipment, etc., and tailoring encounters either to match (pushover GM) or counter (evil GM) those decisions. As well, a rule that calls for random rolls per time period, and which has different tables for different locations, gives players a chance to weigh the risks & rewards, and needed preparation, for travelling along different routes or visiting different areas. Time also becomes important as each hour or day spent in a dangerous territory increases your chance of running into something.

Quote from: Casey777Startown Liberty is a good find. QLI may still have some Gamelords books in stock but I have no idea if they're currently taking orders or not.

New copies of Startown Liberty may be purchased here.  Lotsa other awesome Trav stuff there as well.

Thanks for the link!

The environment books are awesome, btw; I picked those up at the same time as Startown.  On the topic of this thread, they contain some neat random generation tables of their own.  The Mountain Environment has a great peak generator that lets you randomly construct a mountain, complete with environmental hazards: rifts, canyons, cliffs, avalanches, etc.

Pendragon runs on randomly-generated stuff. I'm a bit uncertain about how much of that gets into 5th ed., but 4th ed. and the supplements have tables on almost every page.

They're very much about encouraging that sense of a wider world, as you put it, Elliot. Random encounters, events that happen on your land, family scandals, ancestry, possessions, your service as a knight, aging....The multiplication of the detail over time gives characters a grounding in the setting.

Thanks. I do have a used 4th edition, but haven't actually looked at it very closely yet apart from playing in an adventure at a recent con.

Quote from: Elliot WilenNow I'm going to get really wacky and suggest that random encounter tables could be used to generate not only encounters, but entire pseudo-sentences contextualizing those encounters, via a simple set of semantic rules.

I think that's a really cool idea but the tables would be large enough and the context flexible enough that repeated use of components was fairly uncommon and wouldn't necessarily box you into creating another encounter a lot like the laws one that used the same component.  For example, things like "lost barbarian" or "incompetent mugger" might be so cliched in a city encounter table that running into two or more of them might seem like, "What? another one?"

QuoteSo basically I'm just looking to see if anyone has seen particularly good use of "stochasticity" that they can point to, or further ideas on its use.

I recently purchased a copy of the Risus Companion based on some recommendations in another thread.  Lots of good "Old School" random tables in there.   I haven't actually used it yet but it looks like excellent stuff.

What I often do when I GM is not so formal as using a random table.  What I'll usually do is make a "Good for the PCs/Bad for the PCs" roll such that a high roll is good for the PCs and a low roll is bad for the PCs.  

For example, if I want to know what the weather is and roll low, it's raining.  If I roll really low, it's a thunderstorm, maybe with hail and so forth.  If I roll high, it's a nice day.  If I roll really high, it's a perfect day.  

That's also how I handled the random encounters in my D&D game.  I'd break the day up into a few periods (usually 1 or 2 and night, and 2 to 4 during the day) and then make a "GftP/BftP" roll.  If things were good for the PCs, it would be clear sailing or maybe they'd even run into a useful encounter on a really high roll (someone that could help).  If I rolled low, they'd get an encounter.   If I needed more detail, I'd make a second roll and so on.  For example, the first roll might determine that there is a combat encounter.  The second roll might be used to determine if the encounters is easy (high roll), moderate (medium roll), or hard (low roll) and I'd use that to figure out what sort of CR I should look up (I created a list of monsters by CR by environment, which helped).  

Not every roll I make is a "GftP/BftP" roll and sometimes I use other criteria or roll  from a chart.  But the "GftP/BftP" has seemed to be a pretty flexible way of picking between options for me.

(ADDED:  I should add that I place a world-based reality filter over the range of results I consider, thus I pick among options that are plausible for the situation.)

• NBOS' Inspiration Pad (free)
  
• Tablesmith (shareware)
  
• Moldvay Basic D&D has a neat adventure locale and dungeon generator in a few pages. I skipped Moldvay Basic originally so only discovered this neat little game last year.
• The original Mercenary Handbook for Battletech/Mechwarrior has a lot of hiring/campaign stage result random charts. Not sure if later versions continued that.
• One neat thing about using hex maps is the easy ability to randomly add new hexes of terrain and come up with custom charts for that. At least one Traveller Alien Module or adventure used this for exploring uncharted space. A similar idea is The Microlite Campaign.

Huh, based on a quick glance it looks like Inspiration Pad might be an effective way of presenting the semantic rules I described above, through sub-table lookups.

And the Microlite approach is neat--as I see it, it's basically the idea that, at least at the beginning, there's an adventure wherever the PCs' turn. I could see that abstracted into a logical graph with "nodes" indicating the initial adventure sites, and connecting lines indicating time/cost/risk of travel between sites.

Then we can assume that the players will basically agree beforehand to work at an OOC level, deciding where they want to move, so that the game can focus on the adventures themselves. As someone wrote on RPG.net, "Adventurers adventure because that's what adventurers do. Period, full-stop." Let the players supply the motivation if necessary.

Quote from: Elliot WilenSo basically I'm just looking to see if anyone has seen particularly good use of "stochasticity" that they can point to, or further ideas on its use.

I've been using JH Namegen gold, but it's not available anymore, but tablesmith is pretty close to the same thing (with the added advantage it lets you nest tables.)

Then, I made all types of little tables for it, and pulled in tables from other sources. For my own, I made a random planar NPC encounter generator for my planar game. Others I pulled in include:

• The adventure generation tables from the 1e DM's Design Kit by Aaron Allston.
• The NPC personality and background generation tables from GM Mastery: NPC Essentials
• The plane generation tables from Portals & Planes.
• Owen K Stephen's Name generation tables from the Dragon.