The Joys of Random Rolling

As a writer, I appreciate a well-written plot and an exciting story. Books and television shows can provide great tales of adventure that are a lot of fun to experience. But there's something about that experience that doesn't translate to role-playing games.

When RPGs began, people were expected to come up with their own adventures and settings. Most campaigns began with a twenty-minute character creation session, then jumping right into the adventure. Some DMs didn't even prepare very much; they just dropped the PCs at the nearest dungeon entrance and away they went, making it up on the fly.

Old-school games, especially D&D, are great for doing things on the fly. There's no need to do a full month's work to set up the game, because the game has tools built into it to not only make that job easier, but more fun, as well.

See, being a Dungeon Master is a lot like being a writer; almost every author has tendencies and habits that come out in their writing. Maybe it's a particular way of writing dialogue, or characteristics common to the story's hero or villain. Heck, the pulp writers were notorious for writing formulaic stories that had the same basic plots; Lester Dent wrote a famous piece on how to write a story in 6,000 words using a particular formula. And it works; the pulps were enormously popular for decades, and we still, as human beings, crave that style of writing. If you don't believe me, I present Star Wars as the most obvious example; it's 100% pulp, and when it came out it became a world-wide sensation.

But with role-playing games, that formulaic feeling doesn't always translate well. DMs have their particular patterns, just as writers do. Some DMs use certain monsters all the time; others regularly use traps at key points. There's nothing wrong with that, but the worst thing for a game is predictability. Adventurers shouldn't be able to guess what's coming up next just because they know that the 'gods' (the DM) repeat themselves constantly.

Now, it's not that you can't disguise those patterns or minimize their appearance; any halfway-decent DM can do that well enough. But the problem with those patterns is that people will often overlook options, simply because their thought process goes toward A or B, but rarely ever notices F and G. That's where randomness comes in.

When D&D first appeared in 1974, the original boxed set included tables for stocking the dungeon, and for random wilderness encounters. Drawing the map was up to the DM, but you could use the tables to randomly determine what would be found within. So far, so good. But you still had to draw the map, and people have patterns there, too. Again, it's not that patterns are bad, but there's a good chance certain options will be missed.

Then, in the very first issue of the Strategic Review, the first periodical ever published, Gary Gygax provided the solution to that, as well: Random dungeon design tables. Draw your starting room, then start rolling. What's behind the door on the west wall? Roll and find out. Oh, there's a corridor that ends in a chamber. How big is it? Roll and find out. What's in the chamber? Roll and find out. It might be a pit trap; it might be a pool of water. There might be a chasm cutting through the chamber that you have to cross to get to the other side.

Now, I'm not saying that just rolling randomly is going to make a great adventure; it's not. But what it will do is stimulate the imagination, and get the DM asking, 'Why?'. Why is that chasm there? Was there an earthquake a long time ago? A magical accident? A subterranean digger made it? Who knows? But that's where the imagination comes in. And it applies to more than just map design, too.

Here's a brief example of how this could work. I have a spreadsheet that I made for first-edition AD&D that is specifically designed to stock a dungeon, or to provide wilderness encounters, or treasures in a monster's lair. It uses the Frequency rating I mentioned in yesterday's post, and it's designed to mimic the Dungeon Masters Guide's 'Dungeon Random Monster Level Determination Matrix' on page 174 of the 1e DMG. So, depending on what level of the dungeon you're on, you'll encounter creatures of various power levels. On the first level, you've got a 1-in-20 chance of encountering a level III monster, such as an ogre, a gelatinous cube, or even a baby dragon. Most of the things you meet on the first level, however, will be things like goblins, kobolds, and skeletons, things that low-level characters can handle reasonably well.

So, since it automatically does the stocking for me (it saves a ton of time), here's an example of what might be placed on the first level. There's a room with eight orcs who have no treasure other than what they're carrying (a few silver pieces, perhaps). But next to them is a room with a dire wolf, which is guarding three pieces of valuable jewelry. So, why don't the orcs have the valuable treasure instead? A couple of easy answers come to mind.

First, the dire wolf is a pet or guard dog, trained by the orcs. If someone shows up and starts a fight, the orcs open the door to the wolf's room and out it comes, making the intruders' day rather rough. The orcs keep the treasure with the wolf because they can't split the treasure evenly among eight of them, and they don't trust each other with any of it.

The second option that I thought of was to have the orcs separate from the dire wolf; in fact, they want nothing to do with that horrible, nasty beast that will eat them as readily as it will human adventurers. So, they've got the door bolted, and won't open it for anything. As for the treasure, well...the orcs haven't ever been able to get into that room, so they don't even know the treasure exists, and neither does the wolf (nor would it care). The treasure was left there many years ago and forgotten, long before the orcs or wolf ever showed up.

Now, could I have thought of those scenarios on my own? Sure. Would I have? Who knows? Giving the dice free rein to come up with wild and crazy ideas makes for an interesting adventure, though. Here's an example of a more 'out-there' idea.

Lower down in the dungeon (on Level V), my Stocking Matrix put together a set of three rooms near each other that all contain exactly six cockatrices, none of which are guarding any treasure. Not too far from them, there's an adult red dragon. Interesting. What can the enterprising DM do with that situation?

Obviously, the red dragon is running a cockatrice farm, breeding them for some nefarious purpose. And when the cockatrices do their thing on unsuspecting intruders and turn them into statues, the dragon collects them for his own little museum. Certainly, a dragon can carry a man-sized stone statue in its claws, right? So, one of the rooms nearby will have a bunch of statues in it, all petrified adventurers who ran into the cockatrice kennels. And the dragon might have some magic that allows it to separate precious metals and magic from the statue, so it can add them to its hoard. I like this, even though it gives the dragon a kind of magic that doesn't technically exist in the game rules. I can do that, since I'm the DM, right? And it doesn't really affect game play, so it doesn't make the dragon more powerful than it should be.

So, random design can be just as fun as meticulous plotting, and best of all, it doesn't take nearly as long, especially when we can have the computer automate the process in seconds. Which leaves more time for the fun part, too.

While I didn't use random stocking to create Meterra, the upcoming anthology, The Devil's Playground, is based on a dungeon I created a long time ago that does use random stocking. While you're waiting for that, check out The Chronicles of Meterra: Arrival, available now on Amazon in either e-book or paperback.