EVERYTHING IS TABLES

What if, right, every part of a TTRPG was a random-roll table? EVERYTHING IS TABLES answers that question. Whole thing's a set of tables, even the illustration. (If you feel the game isn't visually rich enough, roll 3D6 on the Illustration table and use your damned imagination.)

I've enjoyed random-roll tables for a long time. (I used to read The Dungeon Dozen fairly regularly.) There's something very pleasing about a well-written one, and they celebrate and enshrine the principle of mutable truth that exists in every TTRPG.

What's down this alleyway? We don't know. None of us know, not even the GM. What do these guys think of us? What's in this desk drawer? What spell is on this scroll? It's exciting to poke around at the edge of the world and see what happens.

They seem easy, too. There's a lure to them: you don't have to set up ideas, or decide on one particular thing, or write the connecty bits of sentences that make them into nice big paragraphs. (I'm sure there's a word for them. I didn't pay a great deal of attention in school.) But there's very little room to hide in a short table, and everything in this game is D6s; you can faff around all you like in a D100 table, half of that can be bumph and it doesn't matter tuppence, but anything D12 or smaller is a stark light shone upon your creativity.

It's easy to write bad tables, I guess. Easier to write bad tables than bad prose, as at least tables are shorter.

(The real trick is getting random tables that combine. Don't write one D10 table; write two D6 tables and have them mash together. It's much harder, but it's worth the graft - you start to simulate the joyous act of improvisation where two people come forward with ideas and you pair them into something original. In a way, I've avoided this with EiT, because I didn't have a lot of room for detail and wanted to focus on bodging up a roleplaying game within the restraints afforded; in another way I've absolutely knocked it out of the park, because all these tables do is combine with one another. If you think about it. I'm very clever)

And: I like not rolling on them. I like picking a thing. I like rolling on some of them and fudging the others. I like rolling twice and combining. (I love rolling twice and combining!) I like tossing dice like runes and seeing what the future holds, scrying out the signal from the noise. I like holding the potential truths together in my head and rotating possibilities, picking at the edges of a nonexistence narrative like Charlie Bucket gently revealing a chocolate bar.

Then at last, when he could stand it no longer, he would peel back a tiny bit of the paper wrapping at one corner to expose a tiny bit of chocolate, and then he would take a tiny nibble – just enough to allow the lovely sweet taste to spread out slowly over his tongue. The next day, he would take another tiny nibble, and so on, and so on. And in this way, Charlie would make his sixpenny bar of birthday chocolate last him for more than a month. 

Which leads me to something else that I've been mulling over for a while: the principle of unplayable games, or at least games which require the user to have a think rather than just plug through what's on the page and get to it. I've railed against them, in the past, and I'm softening towards them now. It comes down to the division between two viewpoints, namely:

• A roleplaying game is a set of instructions that can be followed by the players, and arbitrated by the GM, to reach a particular outcome, and

• A roleplaying game is a shape that art can be

Jay Dragon is good at this. (The best? Probably.) Jay's games are deliberately contradictory and understand that they aren't being run through an inflexible computer, but are instead a reflection of the players, and benefit from the introduction of a human context. In Wanderhome, there's a character you can play who has a sword. They're a retired soldier, or someone with a violent past. The sword has the following rules:

• You can never draw the sword.

• When you draw the sword, someone dies. Retire your character from the game.

Rules-as-written, run-it-through-a-calculator, it doesn't make sense. You can't draw the sword, and here are the rules for drawing the sword. But it's not about that. It's about conflicting absolutes. It's using the shape of a game to show a character's roiling inner turmoil. It's gorgeous.

All of which goes to say is that EVERYTHING IS TABLES doesn't work. You're not supposed to take what the tables tell you as gospel. Technically, rules-as-written, you have to roll a 6 to start playing, and every time you don't you have to run a game of Dungeons & Dragons or buy an indie roleplaying game. (Although, if you're forced into it, you can always pick up a fine book at RowanRookandDecard.com.) That's daft, isn't it? Right out of the gate. So hopefully I've managed to make something curious that encourages you to break it and ignore it and patch bits in.

That's all for now. I've been busy over the last few months writing Hollows, but it's done now - or rather, it's with the editors and proof-readers, and it's about to be bundled up in a lexical chrysalis from which it will emerge, lepidopteran and legible, by spring. It's probably the best thing I've ever written, judging by weight of adjectives alone.

Yours in fury,

• Grant x