Quote:
Originally Posted by Skarg
This seems like the most practical way to do it, unless you can print as many cards as you want to match the odds you want.
I'm not about to try to use cards to replace encounter type tables (which are much more compact and transparent, and I'm not great at shuffling).
However, the type of combination table/cards Chris mentions is like many detailed encounter tables I made starting with TFT circa 1983. That is, they used something like a 4d6 table, and then each line often had sub-chances that were often linear. That way I could have common types of encounter in the middle range, rare things on the ends, and the rarest things be near the ends and also be only one of the things that can happen for that roll. That would be very similar to having a weighted table map to different card mixes as Chris suggests.
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I had a huge table driven dungeon generator that used 30 or so tables, mostly 3d6 or 4d6. It felt tedious pretty quickly, as the average rolls kept coming up, and the interesting things were off on the edges of the tables. It helped when I started checking things off the chart when they were first rolled, and using an adjacent unused value the second time.
But it flowed much better when I converted the tables to decks of cards. Cards took up less space, it was faster to draw a card than to roll and look up on a table, and I could just discard a card when I was done so it wouldn't come up again. And as mentioned, you have precise control of the odds with a deck of cards, and you aren't bound by the faces on a die. You can have 15 cards in a deck, or 237, populated exactly as you like.