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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4687241" data-attributes="member: 4937">Ummmm...Wow.  Errr...First of all, this is forked thread.  I think it would be much clearer what you are talking about if you made that clearer.Secondly, you are bundling all sorts of concepts together and forcing the poll taker to treat disparate concepts as if they were some unified idea.Thirdly, I'm sorry you got burned by a DM that didn't understand probabilities, but that one experience shouldn't color how you see randomness.No, that would be stupid.  But I don't think the particular example from the 1st edition DMG you are claiming is of this nature actually is of this nature.Take the example of having an entry for Fighter on a table, and then having resolved that there is a fighter you roll 1d6+4 to determine the level of the fighter.  This is not at all the same has having an entry for a Fighter that is always of 7th level.  Level is an attribute of the fighter, and it makes a very big difference whether the fighter is 5th level or 10th.   In the particular example you are complaining about, I think Gygax considers 'knows information' to be the most relevant attribute of a beggar, and that it matters whether it is a beggar of type '1% chance to know things' or a beggar of type '8% chance to know things'.  In particular, I think that the beggar is persistant in the environment.  So that a beggar with the attribute '8% chance to know useful stuff', stays around and in effect, by aquisition of these relationship a PC is advancing (or not) the 1st edition equivalent of a 'gather information' skill.   In that sense, it vary much matters whether you know 5 beggars with an 8% chance to know useful stuff, or 5 beggars with a 1% chance to know useful stuff, just as it matters whether you own a +5 sword or a +1 sword or know a fighter who is 5th level or a fighter who is 10th level.Potentially, "Yes".  In several fashions.  For one thing, small tables are much easier to create than big ones and to plug into existing generation systems.  Sure, I could concievably have a d10000 table that generated all the possible results (and I've seen such a thing), but often it is easier to have X number of d100 tables.  For another thing, when you group things by superclass, you have rules that are specific to the particular superclass.  That is, each subtable can work differently than other subtables in the tree and have its own separate list of notes rules and if necessary subtables.  It's often alot easier to do this than give one big d10000 table crossreferenced with 200 notes at the bottom.I've never enjoyed the concept because it doesn't appeal to my idea of 'skillful play', but I've known players that did enjoy that sort of thing.  I've never risked a draw from a deck of many things, but I was in a party where two players did choose to draw from a deck we found.  Nothing particularly special happened (I don't remember the exact draws), but after pressing there luck once they stopped.  I'm sure that there are parties that drew interesting cards and they still have good stories to tell because of it.Depends on whose plan it is.  I'll say this.  A decent random dungeon generator (such as the one in the back of the 1st edition DMG) will generate a much better dungeon than most dungeons produced by novice DMs.  I generated random dungeons or semi-random dungeons that are better than the dungeons I've experienced from 50% of the DM's I've played under.  There are alot of DM's with poor mapping skills, who lack of creativity in their encounter design, and who generate linear repetetive play where nothing unexpected happens who would greatly benefit from experimenting with the random dungeon generator in the 1st edition DMG.</blockquote>

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