I am not certain that I am the first to have this idea. In fact, I most certainly am not; there's nothing new under the sun (especially in RPGs). But I did have this idea organically and think that it has merit, so I am sharing it. I expect instruction in the comments about how it has been handled elsewhere.
The idea is similar to Ladder Tables, so I am calling it a "Stepladder Table." The purpose of this tech is to have a random table with memory (similar to the Ladder Table). Stepladder tables would be good for tracking a slowly changing state. To illustrate the idea, I'll use weather, since weather rarely goes from one extreme to the other.
The basic idea
To establish a baseline, roll or select the middle result. This is the current state. Then, each interval where the state would change, roll a dice. If the result is higher than the current state, the state increments to the next highest state. If the result is lower, the state decreases to the next lowest state. If the result is the same, the state is unchanged.
Example: Weather (autumn)
Roll 1d6 every day for weather, incrementing the result up or down the weather table for the season.
1. Torrential rain
2. Drizzle, damp
3. Cloudy, cold
4. Rolling clouds, chilly
5. Windy, cool
6. Balmy, clement
So, on the first day of autumn, perhaps the state begins at 4: Rolling clouds, chilly.
- The next day, the GM rolls the dice and gets a 6. Because 6 is higher than the current state, the weather increments to the next highest state: Windy, cool.
- The next day, the GM rolls the dice and gets a 6 again. Because 6 is higher than the current state (5), the weather increments to the next highest state: Balmy, clement. This autumn is fine so far!
- The third day, the GM rolls the dice and gets 2. Because 2 is lower than 6 (current state), the weather steps down the table to Windy, cool again.
- The fourth day, the GM rolls the dice and gets 5. Because that is the current state, the weather does not change.
Very nice, simple and elegant!
ReplyDeleteI would totally use this for weather, and even for other stuff like "societal mood" or "political unrest/decay/progress/etc".
One thing I was thinking about is that you could use Fudge/Fate dice for this, i.e. roll 4dF and move up and down the ladder by -4 to +4, but with a bell curve that tends to 0 or ±1, so it usually behaves similarly to yours but every once in a while it jumps hard to represents extreme/sudden change ...
My intuition is that this will naturally be a gaussian/bell curve.
ReplyDeleteI like this. The issue I can see is that the extremes on the table will almost always be very fleeting (on a d6 table, you are very likely to subsequently step down immediately from a previous 6 result). For some situations that makes sense but for others if you want more "sticky" results you could roll, say, 3 dice and take the highest, lowest or middle.
ReplyDeleteI am thinking of a weather table that could be useful across multiple seasons. Using your first table, in the rainy season you instruct the user to roll 3d6 and use the lowest result; in the calm season you roll 3d6 and take the highest.
I like this a lot. It has a couple of useful properties: the state changes by only one position each time and the probabities cluster around the middle.
ReplyDeleteThe tables form simple Markov chains, so it's not hard to work out the long-run probability of being at any particular state. This might be useful to bear in mind when assigning outcomes to the various states.
If I've got this right (long time since I studied this) your d6 table has a 3% probability of being at 1, 16% at 2 and 31% at 3. By symmetry, the other end of the table has the same probabilities. For the d8 table 1 is 1%, 2 is 5%, 3 is 16%, and 4 is 27%.
I love this as a more approachable version of Goblin Henchman's Hex Flower. I love the idea of those, but fleshing out 19 options always feels a little daunting.
ReplyDeletehttps://goblinshenchman.wordpress.com/2018/10/25/2d6-hex-power-flower/