Wandering monster chart assistant
I find it a lot easier to construct wandering monster charts using percentages; you can use this tool to create d100 tables from either a list of percentages or just a list. A simple list is divided up with even chances which you can then adjust.
You can also use this to convert your existing tab-delimited tables and edit them.
When pasting, you can use three formats.
- “01-20[TAB]Monster name” will be converted to a percentage (in this case, 20%).
- You can also just enter a list of encounters one per line and it will evenly distribute the ranges among each encounter.
- Or, you can enter “Monster name[TAB]30%”, one per line, if you know the percentages and want to automatically generate the ranges.
If you already have your chart in a table, copying it will probably copy it as tab-delimited; that’s standard behavior for spreadsheets and word processors. If you build the list by hand, you’ll need to do it in a text editor or other place that allows you to type tabs.
More random tables
- Island Book 1 and old-school tables
- Judges Guild Island Book 1 is a fascinating playground on which to place a sea-going adventure or campaign. It’s also a great example of the usefulness and wildness of old-school encounter tables.
- Random table rolls
- As often as not, when you roll on a random table you are rolling a random number of times. Now that we have a dice library, we can turn the roll count into a die roll.
- Percentage-based random tables
- Our current random item generator assumes that each item shows up as often as any other item. That’s very OD&D-ish. But AD&D uses percentage dice to weight toward some monsters and items more than others.
- Multiple tables on the same command
- The way the “random” script currently stands, it does one table at a time. Often, however, you have more than one table you know you’re going to need. Why not use one command to rule them all?
- Easier random tables
- Rather than having to type --table and --count, why not just type the table name and an optional count number?
- Three more pages with the topic random tables, and other related pages
More wandering monsters
- Percentage-based random tables
- Our current random item generator assumes that each item shows up as often as any other item. That’s very OD&D-ish. But AD&D uses percentage dice to weight toward some monsters and items more than others.
- I brake for wandering monsters
- How do you create a random encounter table? With love and baling wire.
- Constructing encounter tables using Nisus
- Here’s a Nisus Writer macro that makes it a little easier to create encounter tables.
You must have JavaScript turned on to use this tool. There’s enough going on here that you probably also need a standards-based browser from the last few years. I’ve tested it in Safari 5.1, Firefox 6.0 (in fact, it appears to work as far back as Firefox 1.5), and Google Chrome 13.