Structuring encounter tables 3d6

Encounter tables in Oren

Here’s my attempt at formulating some 3d6 instead of two 2d6 tables for my setting. It’s a lot more work and more to keep track of, but I think that having some options be really really rare makes the world feel more dynamic, so for the kind of game I wanna run it’s worth the effort.

A few things to consider are genre and tone. For this game I really want most encounters to be with people, and the ecology of the setting, so a lot of it should be bandits and cults, villagers, animals, and plant life. After that we put the fun stuff in like dragons and wizards and faeries and monsters. You can read about the general method I’m using here, but I’m going to expand it into 3d6 for a little more nuance. My reasoning is that I want there to be dragons and faeries and I want them to be rare, but there’s only one dragon in my setting. Nick from pencils and papers lays out his tables like this.

2	Dragon
3	Something Weird
4	Weird + builds the setting
5	Weird
6	Mundane + builds a sense of place
7	Recurring NPC
8	Mundane + builds a sense of place
9	Weird + builds the setting
10	Weird
11	Weird + builds the setting
12	Wizard

So I wanna keep the same format, but lets say I want the possibility of running into a djinni or a powerful fae to be on there and I want it to be like less than 1% because getting a wish can be a world wrecking good time. So now 18 is a djinni and 3 is a dragon cause I want my one dragon to be sleeping most of the campaign. Lets see what I can come up with for my specific setting using this format stretched out.

Some extra rules I follow when structuring tables are that low rolls are potentially more dangerous and high rolls are potentially more beneficial. This allows a god to bless the characters with good fortune by adding a bonus to their encounter rolls or a witch to curse them with bad luck with a negative bonus and they could be none wiser. Also if I roll doubles I roll again and add it to the encounter, triples I roll on an encounter table from an adjacent area. This makes everything a bit more dynamic in play and it makes your setting breathe with life.

#	Plains Encounters
3	Dragon
4	Wyvern
5	Catastrophe Tree
6	2d6 Flameous Lads
7	Stumbleweed
8	Living Statue
9	3d10 Brigands
10	Dangerous Game (Owl Bear etc.)
11	Recurring NPC
12	3d10 Monkeys (Fire Grevit) 1-in-6 chance one monkey talks
13	3d10 reclaimers
14	Village d4 (1-2) hamlet (3) village (4) town
15	Forgotten Ruins (Any 1pg dungeon)
16	Wizard
17	Elf
18	Djinn

So I think this works really well for me because I feel like I can just start listing whatever sounds cool and sort it out after, where with the smaller table I felt like I needed to be really picky.

Some clarifications since this is my setting stumbleweed, flameous lads, and crypto-spiders are all from Fire on the Velvet Horizon, and monkey-rot is a disease that turns monkeys, halflings and humans into zombie/goblin/gremlin things. I’m gonna shoot another one out for y'all in this post, so here comes Idlewood Forest.

#	Idlewood Forest Encounters
3	Dragon
4	Troll
5	Changeling
6	1d4 halfings with monkey-rot
7	2d4 Langur Bats with monkey-rot
8	3d10 Masked Ones
9	3d10 Brigands
10	3d4 Wolves
11	Recurring NPC
12	2d4 Langur Bats(night) 3d10 Barons Men (day)
13	Village d4 (1-2) hamlet (3) village (4) town
14	Halfling Holes
15	Crypto-spider
16	Wizard
17	Elf
18	Djinn

On the real common ones I like to add some variation just to keep things from getting stale like a night/day condition. I hope y’all enjoyed my first blog post leave me some comments and lmk what you think.