Building event tables

Eventually, one key to old-style sandbox play in any game genre is letting your dice choice drive the game and that means event tables. Later versions of the original Traveller game actually give more useful support for the referee in this regard than the original three books; I am going to borrow some of these techniques from the later editions and add them to the toolkit for my game.
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traveller
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Published

December 31, 2018

The Starter and Book editions of the original Traveller introduce tables for random generation of patrons and rumours that the referee can use as templates, in addition to the random animal encounter table that one can also find in the original little black books. While this is useful in and of itself, it’s even more useful because of the new table design introduced, leading to two kinds of table templates which I’ll investigate a bit here.

It’s obvious that the Traveller rules explicitly intend you as the referee to use these different event table types as tools or templates to fiddle with, building specific instances of them for use in your own set of adventures. As my adventures expand and my players continue to investigate the setting, these tables (animal encounters, patron encounters, random encounters, rumours) are going to form the backbone for each setting and situation the players find themselves in. The tables will exist both “in space” (that is, the sub-settings and terrain types for each world can have appropriate tables), but also “in time” (that is, as adventures and campaign time rolls forward, the contents of these tables can adjust over time to account for things discovered, already done, implications of choices, and so on).

2D wide table type

The Typical Animal Encounter Table (Book 3, p35) is a prototypicaly example of the 2D wide table; here’s a slightly abbreviated excerpt of it. These kinds of tables typically have 12 rows, one for every result possible on a 2D throw. When these kinds of tables need to also account for DMs to the throw, the number of rows expands to account for all the possible throw results.

CLEAR Terrain Regina (A788899/A)
Die Animal Weight Hits Armour Wounds & Weapons
2 1 Hijacker 200 kg 18/11 jack 11 teeth A5 F7 S2
3 2 Hunters 12 kg 3/7 none 4 claws A5 F4 S1
... ... ... ... ... ...
9 1 Chaser 50 kg 11/9 none 6 claws+1 A0 F7 S2
10 Event -- Howling carnivores. Out of sight, chasers (below) are heard howling continuously, if the party spends the night nearby, they may attack (throw 7+).
... ... ... ... ... ...
12 1 Killer 200 kg 21/12 none 17 as pike A1 F9 S1

These tables are ideal for accommodating detailed columnar information, along with the throw value, in a compact way.

However, one side-effect of this table style is that it obscures the fact that the chance of rolling each row varies; this is especially the case if DMs get involved in the throw. Book 3 includes construction templates for both 2D (belled throw result chance) and 1D (linear throw result chance) versions of the animal encounter table to help you determine what spread of animal types you might want to use when building the table.

D66 narrow table type

The Starter and Book editions’ patron, random event, and rumour tables introduce the D66 “matrix” type table (a tweaked excerpt of the rumours matrix table from the rule-book you can see in the nearby sidebar). This kind of table helps spray a large number (up to 36) of results across a range of linear-chance throw results, and uses a letter-keying method in the table to let you more easily manage the occurrence chance for individual results. This table style also has the advantage that it’s narrow, and thus ideal for presentation in a thin column or sidebar.

Fake change.

Rumours for ALTA STATION
  1 2 3 4 5 6
1 A B C D E F
2 G U U W W H
3 I U Y Y W J
4 K X Z Z V L
5 M X X V V N
6 O P Q R S T
Specific rumours
A Background information
B Minor fact
C Major fact
D Partial (potentially misleading) fact
E Veiled Clue
F Information leading to trap
G Location data
... ...
Q Background information
R Minor fact
S Veiled Clue
T Misleading Clue
General rumours
U Broad background info
V Misleading background info
W Reference to library data
X General location data
Y Specific background data
T Misleading background data
Consult this matrix weekly on a throw of 7+; also consult this matrix if Rumour is a patron encounter result.

To use this table, throw two dice of different colours; one coloured die gets used to choose the row and one to choose the column (a D66 throw can also generate a linear range of results from 11 through to 66 — this style of table just spreads that out into a matrix).

Notice that you can fiddle with the chance of occurrences in two ways, demonstrated in the example Rumours Matrix shown in the rule-book:

  • Some entries in the matrix can occur more than once. In this case: all the Specific rumours results use keys A through T, and occur only once in the matrix; all the General rumours results use keys X through Z, and occur more than once — U through X three times; Y and Z, twice.

  • This duplication can also carry through into the list of specific rumours: in the rule-book’s template, you can see that a “Minor fact” result occurs twice, as does “Background information”.