Unique results with Chartopia lists, tables and charts

Any of these and more sewer encounters could take place in a setting just like this. [Art by Alexlinde from deviantart.com]

Hello friends! We’ve already brought up the Rollable List feature on Chartopia – a semicolon-separated list of items/words/phrases within square brackets. It adds diversity to results without needing to call upon multiple tables. But there’s more to it than a single dice roll. Let’s look into what else it can do for you. In the sewer combat encounter table discussed in the second Chartopia article, one possible encounter for players was adventurers. To mix it up we added some variance in how…

[they mistakenly believe you’re hostile/cultists/etc; they attack because they think you’re after the same treasure they’re searching for; they’ve been hired by an enemy to kill the party]

So what else can you do with a rollable list?

More rolls, better diversity on lists

This totally looks like the kind of dark alley where a muscular bouncer might be standing outside shuffling cards. [Dark Alley art by Christopher Rabenhorst]

For starters, you can use more than one list in a result! More diversity means a more unique encounter. What if you needed to tell your players a tavern? Instead of describing a tavern explicitly, add some variables like so:

The tavern entrance resides [down the darkened alley; facing the main square; between the local bathhouse and house of pleasure]. There [is a vicious looking dog out front; is not enough horse parking outside; are too many beggars out front] but your eyes are soon drawn to the [fat; muscular; tall and lanky; stocky] bouncer at the door who is [flicking a knife; shuffling cards; looking suspiciously in your direction; throwing out a drunk patron]

With a few simple variables you now have 144 unique ways to describe your tavern. Here’s what one result could look like:

The tavern entrance resides down the darkened alley. There is not enough horse parking outside but your eyes are soon distracted by the muscular bouncer at the door who is shuffling cards.

Want to see another? Why not roll on the table yourself?

Stacking the odds

Now, perhaps you want your players to encounter a humanoid. Your city has elves, humans and dwarves in it. The simple version of this would look like this:

You find a [human;dwarf;elf] who gives you a quest.

That’s useful, but at the moment the probability is similar to rolling a 1d3 with 33 percent possibility of getting any option. Towns don’t have perfect distribution of races like that. What if this is a human-settled town, with dwarven neighbours, and a relatively small elf population? Let’s add some weight to these results.

You find a [1-7: human; 8-11: dwarf; 12: elf] who gives you a quest.

The race is now determined by a d12 dice roll. The result is skewed towards human; that has a seven out of twelve chance of coming up. Dwarves, then elves, are respectively less likely.

Collating multiple results

Oooh shiny loot. You know you want it. Go ahead. Click it.

What if you need to roll the same thing more than once?

Your party has just bested a pack of orcs and the adventurers are looting the bodies like good player characters. The orc leader had a full coin pouch. As the gamemaster you determine there’s a chance these coins can be gold, silver or copper. Of course, gold is rarer and copper is far more common. Time to make another weighted rollable list which could look like this:

You find a pouch with 20 pieces of [ 1-2: gold; 3-6: silver; 7-12: copper]

But, that’s pretty sad for the person who only gets a bag of copper. And wouldn’t it be more realistic to have a mixture of different coins?

Let’s give the party a random pick ‘n’ mix:

You find a coin pouch containing EQN(d20+8)[1-2: gold; 3-6: silver; 7-12: copper]

So, we’re still going to be rolling a d12 to determine if we are getting a result of gold, silver or copper, but this time round we are rolling it 1d20 + 8 times (i.e. between 9 and 28 times) on the table. This gives a diverse mixture of gold, silver, and copper.

All this from one button-press. Imagine having to roll all those dice yourself. Yikes!

Here’s a possible outcome:

The d20+8 results in a roll of 15 on the d20; so 23 items will be randomly selected from the list of gold, silver and copper. When using Chartopia’s quick-roll feature, a result presented to the user may look something like:

gold (5)

silver (10)

copper (8)

In other words, 5 gold coins, 10 silver coins, 8 copper coins.

As always feel free to check out the list yourself.

These are just a few ideas of what you can do with the rollable list feature. We’d love to see how you’d use it. Why not create an account on Chartopia and get authoring?

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