What the fuck is a table?

I'm an utterly disorganized person. My ethereal form is a raucous tornado of collages, warping and changing and connecting in disproportionate amalgams. Scatterbrained doesn't even begin to cover it. I'm like a vulture-porcupine shedding worms in all directions, everywhere I go. If an assassin wanted to track me they'd only have to follow the inch-thick trail of bodily effluvient to my doorstep.


Tables are supposed to make a DM's life easier. You throw on a table for a random result to simulate the vagaries of life, or to stimulate creative juices in a way your mammalian brain wouldn't otherwise figure.

There's tables for everything. Everything is a table, from the scars on your face to the produce of a mushroom forest. The key of fun d&d experiences is randomness; even the DM should be surprised at what  comes out. That's what attracts me to the game to begin with--unlimited potential and endless modularity.

I never seem to have the table I want when I need it, or I can't find it amongst the pile of paper I keep my scraps in while the players are patiently staring at me for what's going to happen. Most of the time I just scribble down d12 regurgitated insults and roll a die on it, that's my table, usually the number of things on the table don't match the faces on the die. Spur of the moment. Let's try it now:

never critically fail a bushcrafting throw in my universe

Dangers of foraging in the fungal forest

1. white spore ball, oozes cyan pus when cut. Everything that gets its spores on it will grow more spore balls in d4+1 days.
2. evergrowing cornhats. straw yellow stalks w brown hates. Grows magnificently fast and tall. Tastes of blood and celery. Nourishing, but gives you horrible numbing premonitions when your body dumps adrenaline for d3 days.
3. Squat eyed maroon. Hums a geometric tune. Grows by water source. Very bouncy. Turns into slime on contact with water and begins to crawl away into a dark hole where it can sporulate. Hunks of it can be attached to wounds which will regenerate within hours. Afterwards, if the user dies, their body is taken over by the purple jelly and they run away.
4. beige skullpoppies. Shaped like yellow skulls growing out of the ground. Wizardsight gives them fleshy faces. Will talk to those touched by fey and know things that all other skullcaps in the forest see. Desire the contents of stomachs for nourishment. Eventually grows into a fullsized skeleton and begins searching for flesh.
5. Boulderbloat. Car or house sized boulder funguses, hard as rocks. Gnomes often carve their homes into them. Occassionally they grow legs and start walking around. They have a mutually beneficial relationship: Gnomes get a house and boulderbloats get wee little magical gardeners to dote on. Humans that spend too much time around boulderbloats grow spiraling glowing blue lines on their bodies and sprout antennas, eventually growing a boulderbloat out of their back and becoming one.
6. Carnagecage. Look like large ribcages filled with diseased intestines. Animals are driven to eat it. Ribcage snaps closed on anything that touches its soft inner jellies, which it digests & transforms into a budding spore stalk. The sporestalks of this fungus make a great tea which calms nerves & invigorates senses. Highly addictive
7. Pukebush. A throbbing bush-sized welt of ectoplasmic goop. Grows blue pustules that contain its spores. Contact with spores causes uncontrollable vomiting, with the possibility of vomiting forth one's intestines. If the pukebush is burned it releases a toxic smoke that enrages animals of the forest. At the core of a pukebush is a bezoar which is the main constituent of a trans-dimensional prophylactic
8. Virulant Beneficter. A human shaped mushroom, white and blue. Ingesting the virulant beneficter fills one with a sense of duty & higher purpose of the Lawful Good kind. Overwhelming desire to help those in need. Hallucinations last d20+4 hours after which ingester falls into a misanthropic stupor.

Probably a table like this will just be the names and I'll know what it does based on a flash on insight. I dunno where the insight comes from, but even just the act of writing a table sparks something.

The expressed purpose of a table is that you roll on it and interpret the result. But it's impossible to keep track of and organize a bazillion tables for every little thing, and it's silly to try. I think the real purpose of  a table is to act as a quantum cranial stimulant for moments of dire need. You're like "They rolled a crit. huh. oh yeah, that neat crit table I read once...I kind of remember a couple of result I'll throw a d6.......5? What is 5? So like, he smashes the dude's leg off with the warhammer and it goes flying and stabs another guy in the face with the broken bone okay."

I can't imagine someone actually pulling out a crit table and rolling on it to get a result. How do you keep track of all this stuff? Just make something up, something grotesque and brutal which changes the course of the fight in an unexpected way. You don't need a table for that, and the table won't give you enough information to actually go off of, you have to interpret it anyway, so just go with the fiction.

Continuing on the crit table thing, that's really what differentiates weapons in my games, since I use d6 for all damage. Axes lop off limbs, maces crush bones and armor, polearms hit first and run guys through, swords are quick, flashy and strike true, daggers are sleek and cruel, bows impale stomachs and hearts and  eye cavities. I'm more likely to give a guy wielding a sword a bonus attack on an excellent roll than a guy with an axe. I don't need a table for that, I just know it in my marrow.


Tables are better for world building. It's your day off, you chugged a bunch of coffee, you guess you can deal with the consequences of ignoring all your piling-up responsibilities for one more day while you spent 6 to 8 hours frantically kludging together a nonsense world nobody will ever see. Pile together a bunch of tables and go nuts.

but oops, I forgot to save the bookmarks for all those grade A high-falutin'  tables, or I can feel my energy waning at the thought of sifting through my megaplex of computerized folders, none of it organized, or I go searching and quickly get sidetracked into reading and dreaming about guild dogs for four hours and get nothing useful done. So, I'll just write my own fucking tables.

Vancian magic is a core aspect of d&d which I am unwilling to part with for this reason: The very act of being a DM is Vancian magic. You pull out all your tomes, all your weird books on Fortean history & bongo science & obscure mythology, all your graph papers and quill pens and crystals and Tibetan mantra spirals, all your nightmare journals and hallucinogenic teas and homemade musical instruments and you pack it all into your fucking brain. You sit there and you study this soup of gibberish it takes a borderline schizophrenic to comprehend and you pack it all into your skull until it's threatening to burst out through the seams. Then, during the game, you go and regurgitate it all and weave a world of mystery and magic.

Afterwards you forget all of it. You collapse exhausted. In order to do it next time, you have to do it all over again, and the more you do it, the better you get and the more stuff you can fit in there fore next time.

Tables are one small piece of the meta-fractal.