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Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 7953957" data-attributes="member: 1210">Yeah, I have used the random dungeon generator from the 1e DMG in 1e, 2e, and 3e. I've also used several other random dungeon generators. I have both used them on the fly and used them to generate a dungeon, or sections of one, in advance of play. One thing to bear in mind is that, if you're randomly generating monsters from a large list, you are almost certain to end up with a funhouse style dungeon that may not make a lot of sense unless you impose some sort of story-based justification for the weird mixes you get. The DM's role should never, in my opinion, involve attempting to keep the party alive. It should involve using appropriate challenges (by which I certainly don't mean always level-appropriate) and fairly adjudicating those challenges. But that's a playstyle choice.Regardless, I think what you describe is part of the traditional DM role already, but only a part of it. But when you throw in a dominating role for random tables, you're moving towards a playstyle that's pretty far to the sandbox side of the sandbox-to-story based game spectrum. So the various DM skills and techniques that are useful to sandbox play really come into play. You'd probably want to focus on your ability to think on the fly for things like the motivations of and relationships between npcs and monsters, though 5e's DMG has tons of charts that can aid in randomizing all that kind of stuff. Even so, you still need to be able to think through what's going on and how it relates quickly and on the fly, and to follow the pcs where they lead as far as when they try to negotiate or bypass vs. engage in combat (even when the other party to the negotiations seems like a weird choice, such as parleying with manticores).I'm not saying I'm a random table addict, just that I really love them. I prefer to randomize a great deal in my game. I'm also a fan of chaos effects, like things where you stick your hand in the weird frog and get a strange, random effect; I have a d1000 Chaos chart with like 30 subtables that might come up.</blockquote>

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