Using Eposic Dice Tables
Well, there's no single reason to use them; be creative. But, let's say you're in an AD&D game, and you
have these 47 ogres attacking the PCs and their allies. You can use dice tables to quickly generate hit points
for the 47 ogres, to roll their attack rolls, and to roll their saving throws when the PC wizard throws her fireball
at them. You first have to decide what size to make your tables; in this case, I'd suggest a 8x6 table (yeah, that'll
give you 48 total entries instead of 47, but you can just ignore the 48th entry). In this example, we'll use tables
with 8 rows and 6 columns.
Identification of individuals: Assign each ogre a row and a column for easy record-keeping. Generate the
same size tables for this group of ogres, even after some of them fall or flee. The identity of an otherwise nameless
ogre then becomes a specification of a row and column number. If a player asks which ogre hit her, you can say
"ogre (5,3)," which would be the ogre corresponding to the 5th row, 3rd column of your tables. This gives
a consistent means of identifying the individual ogres, both on the dice results tables, and in GM-player communication.
Rolling hit points: Enter a title for this table, something like Ogre Tribe's Hit Points. For each
ogre's hit points, you need to roll 4d8 and add 1. So the number of dice to roll for each table entry is 4, the
number of sides on each die is 8, and the amount by which to modify each table entry is 1. Make sure the number
of rows is set to 8 and the number of columns is set to 6. All the other fields should be blank. Click the Generate
button, and a browser window opens with the table of results. Subsequent table generations will replace the contents
of this browser window, so if you want to keep a permanent record of the results, make sure you do so before you
click the Generate button again. You can either copy and paste the results into a document, or you can use
your browser's printing capability to print the table.
Rolling attack rolls: Change the title to something appropriate, like Ogre Tribe's Attack Rolls, Round
1 or clear it if you don't need it. You decide that only 16 of the ogres are in position to attack. You really
only need to generate 16 attack rolls, but for the reasons specified above, I would suggest keeping an 8x6 table,
and simply ignoring the entries corresponding to the ogres that don't attack. The number of dice to roll for each
table entry is 1, and the number of sides on each die is 20. The amount by which to modify each table entry is
0 (or we could just clear the field). Suppose that for the PC/NPCs being attacked, the worst AC is 9 the best AC
is 3. With a THAC0 of 17, the ogres will miss AC 9 on a 7 or less, and hit AC 3 on a 14 or better. So in this example,
any ogre that rolls a 7 or less has definitely missed, and any ogre that rolls a 14 or better has definitely hit.
You can use this information to set the High and Low Target numbers to generate a more useful table. Set the High
Target number to 14 and the Low Target number to 7. Click on the Generate button. The table that is generated will
show all the numbers that are 14 or higher in bold and all numbers that are 6 or less in italics. So, you know
that any attacking ogre with a bolded entry in this table definitely hit, and any attacking ogre with an italicized
entry definitely missed. If the roll is neither bold nor italic, you'll have to do the math yourself. (Oh well.)
Roll the damage for the successful attacks (if there's only a few, it might be just as convenient to roll actual
dice; otherwise, change the form as needed and generate a table of damage rolls).
Rolling saving throws: OK, so you're way ahead of me. The only thing you need to do here that's different
from rolling attack rolls is to change the title (or clear it), clear the Low Target field, and set the High Target
field to 16 (the saving throw for an ogre). Click on the Generate button. The ogres in the area-of-effect
of the fireball whose table entries are in bold made the save, and those in the area-of-effect whose table
entries are not in bold missed the save. Mark the damage to each ogre on the hit point table you generated earlier.
Suppose you'd like to use these tables, but you don't have a computer at the game. Before you go to the game, print
out several tables of various types (according to what you have planned for the evening) and take them with you.
Copy and paste each table into a word processor if you want to save paper; you can put multiple tables on one page
that way. Determine exactly just how many columns you can get on a printed page, and set up tables that have that
number of columns or less. Put a different title at the top of each table that describes the kind of rolls the
table represents. By the way, you can use HTML tags in the title field. If you want bold titles, you can use the
<B> tag, but be sure to put the accompanying </B> tag at the end of the title, or you'll cause all
of the table entries to be bolded. (For those of you that aren't up on your HTML, here's an example of what you'd
type in the title field for a properly bolded title: <B>This is a bolded title</B>.)
You can easily use a dice table when real dice are not practical. For instance, say you want to randomly choose
five items from a list of 53, with each item having an equal chance at being picked. Well, you can set up a table
of one row and five columns, with the number of dice to roll being 1 and the number of sides per die being 53.
There is no such thing as a d53, but the program isn't restricted by the physical limitations of dice. Generate
the table. If any of the numbers are duplicates, and you don't want to allow duplicates, just click on Generate
and regenerate the table. Just be aware of the statistical properties of what you're attempting, don't attempt
any thing impossible or nearly so, and make adjustments as necessary. For instance, if you're wanting to choose
50 items out of a group of 53 with no duplications, it's easier to generate 3 of the items and identify them as
being the ones that were not chosen.
If you put your mind to it, you can probably come up with other interesting ways of using these dice tables.
Enjoy!