On Indexing Notes
This is a short piece I've been thinking about writing for a while, and it just so happens to be perfect for the Random Blogwagon.1 Honestly, this one might be so simple & obvious that most tables are already doing it. Still, I haven't seen anyone explicitly put this technique in words before, and it's something I've only discovered recently, so I think it's worth talking about.
Earlier this year I finished an 8-session campaign of Electric Bastionland. Here's the map as it was at the end of the campaign:
There were several times that my players asked around for rumours. I wanted to pick one path at random & give a rumour about that path.
At the table, I floundered on determining a fair procedure for picking a random path. I got there in the end,2 but it took a minute and it felt clumsy. In hindsight, there's a small & simple change I could've made during prep- index the paths. This is effectively a random table; if I later need to get one at random, I can just roll a die & look up the result.
I started indexing my list of NPCs. In my current Mythic Bastionland game, I'm also indexing the regions of my realm. It's such a simple change, but it's making a difference. By reducing the overhead in randomly pulling something from my notes, I'm reusing more of my prep rather than generating new stuff. Admittedly, I haven't used this at the table much yet, but it's right there when and if I need it.
Here's some theoretical benefits I hope to see as I use this at the table:
- Making the setting richer; putting an old thing into a new context reveals more about the world, both to the players and myself.
- Spending less time describing stuff; players will already know about the thing, I just have to remind them. I believe in the ICI Doctrine, so information is essential- but spending a shorter amount of time to convey the same information will get us to the juicy stuff quicker.
Probably obviously, I won't always be able to roll against my notes. At the start of my Electric Bastionland game, I only had a handful of NPCs & it would have been silly to see the same few characters pop up all over Bastion. I'm also not rolling against my notes when I need something specific; if I need a bartender, I'm not rolling on a table that might give me the Duke. I'll pick an appropriate entry, or generate something new as required.
Also, as my notes grow, the number of entries in each list won't always match the number on a standard polyhedral die. This isn't so bad when there are less than 20 entries, I can just roll a die larger than the size of the list & reroll if the result is too high. But I don't know of a nice way to pick a random entry from a list with more than 20 entries. I could roll for each digit independently,3 but I find this a bit awkward & will often result in rerolling.
Not that those are good reasons not to index my notes; The worst that can happen is I don't use it, and the overhead is minuscule.
The die of fate has compelled me to post this on the 17th.
I have used my judgement as Referee & decided that making any further rolls is unnecessary and would interfere with the perfection of My Beautiful Post.↩What I eventually decided was: roll a d20, start with the blue path at the lower-left corner, then count up to the number on the die by following the path clockwise, switching to the red path when I run out of segments, then to the green & purple paths (the players already know what was on the yellow paths). Not an elegant procedure by any means.↩
Say, for a list with 26 entries, I'd roll a d4 for the tens digit (counting 4s as 0) and a d10 for the ones digit, and reroll all the dice if the result is too high. I doubt there's a better way using standard dice, but let me know if I'm wrong!↩