I am a big fan of mini tables. Mine are typically 4 options, two more common and two less so. My tables start out looking like this.
| d6 | |
| 1-2 | Option 1 |
| 3-4 | Option 2 |
| 5 | Option 3 |
| 6 | Option 4 |
I like the inherent bias because it means I can change the feel for an area by making something much more common than others. As I move from one area to another I can swap out one option, or move it to a more or less common place in the table. For example, if I had a caves of chaos type cave complex, I could have kobolds and goblins as options one and two, a hobgoblin in option 3 and an orc as option 4. If I go to the left, I can drop to orc from option 4, move the goblins and hobgoblin down a row and add some kobold archers into option two. Now I am clearly in kobold territory. Go deeper in, and I can lose the goblins and hobgoblins and so on. If I had gone right at the entrance, I could lose the kobolds and add in more goblins and hobgoblins and eventually make the orcs more common, as I more from region to region.
Four options is not a great burden to come up with, and then changing one thing at a time isn’t difficult either. The other option is to not swap stuff out, but add things in. I could have added a single 7-8 option, or two options, 7 and 8. Now we have a d8 table. Tweak by tweak, never having to do a ton of table building.
Random Dungeon Rooms
Using the same idea we can build dungeon rooms or caves. At our top level, we can have entrances/exits as an option, then single door, double door, and stairs.
| d6 | |
| 1-2 | Door out |
| 3-4 | double door out |
| 5 | Stairs |
| 6 | Exit |
That is our first room feature. Now we need to build out some descriptive details.
| d6 | |
| 1-2 | Corridor |
| 3-4 | Square room |
| 5 | L-shaped room |
| 6 | Long room |
I don’t need dimensions in the table, we can just roll a d6+1×10′ for the longest dimension and use half of that as the width.
How about a ceiling?
| d6 | |
| 1-2 | Vaulted with wooden beams |
| 3-4 | Vaulted with cut stone |
| 5 | Packed earth |
| 6 | wooden beams |
Now working left to right, encounter, exits, shape, size, ceiling, I read that as 3, 6, 6, 4, 6, or
- Goblins (from the paragraph above)
- A exit out
- a long room
- 50′ long, 25′ wide
- With wooden beams holding up the ceiling
But what about lighting?
| d6 | |
| 1-2 | darkness, unlit torches |
| 3-4 | flaming torches near the doors |
| 5 | Lanterns hanging from ceiling chains |
| 6 | Floating balls of magical light near the ceiling. |
What can we hear?
| d6 | |
| 1-2 | Wood creaking like an old building settling. |
| 3-4 | The distant clash of metal on metal |
| 5 | The intermittent splash of water falling into a puddle. |
| 6 | The flapping and cries of bats being disturbed from their roost. |
Now, how about an other hazard apart from the encounter?
| d6 | |
| 1-2 | 10′ pit |
| 3-4 | pressure pad that fires darts |
| 5 | a tripwire that rings an alarm bell |
| 6 | a pressure pad that launches a spear |
There is no real practical limit to how many details you can keep randomising, and if you tire of rolling dice, you could get a spreadsheet to do all the dice rolling for you, and stitch them together into something like a sentence or two.
We could have a table with nothing in 1 to 5, but a more powerful foe (Ogre? Direwolf?) in row 6. What about some furniture? Everyone likes a good chest, or barrels and crates. Maybe some treasure?
If you had a printer and sheets of sticky labels (Do they still sell those?) you could randomise sheets of rooms and stick them to blank cards and make an entire deck of rooms ready for you to play on the move.
But, what if you were playing at your computer? I am happy with a spreadsheet and text, but I know that a lot of soloists use AI. My version of Office 365 comes with copilot. I asked copilot to take my text and turn it into a room description for a game of D&D. It didn’t do a very good job, but it is more narrative and descriptive, but it then offered to create a visual for the room.
I think one could print those off, stick them on index cards, shuffle, and play a solo dungeon crawl. It would just be a case of building in enough random tables so that you got variety, and maybe having a card in the deck that was not randomized, but your objective.
We can do this building on the fly using pen and paper and dice, and build the sophistication we want, as we play, and morph the tables as we go, or create the tables into a spreadsheet and have it spit out specifications for the room as needed, or go full AI for bells and whistles. It is the same data at the end of the day, it is just a solo technique to reach a balance between speed of generation vs. the level of detail needed.
There is the spreadsheet I created as I was writing this.