Foundry VTT Basics Part 10 - Using Roll Tables to Generate Encounters, Characters, Loot, and More!

We'll go over roll tables in detail and cover when they're useful, how to make them, how to get overlapping results, and a whole lot more!

00:00:00 - What are roll tables for?
00:00:22 - Parts of the roll table
00:00:50 - Roll formulas
00:01:16 - Draw with replacement
00:01:41 - Adding results to our table and rolling
00:02:23 - Displaying rolls to chat
00:02:52 - Hiding rolls from chat
00:03:15 - Roll formula quirks and modifiers
00:04:15 - Weights and ranges
00:06:50 - Returning entities as a result
00:08:30 - Use cases for different roll tables
00:11:52 - Returning compendium results
00:13:15 - Returning custom compendium results

[HamiltonWard]

These videos are insanely helpful. I wouldn't be able to use Foundry without them. Thank you for doing this.

[zakmyrr]

The Holy Grail references are awesome. Glad to be a subscriber!

[jonahc]

Hi, love the tutorials so far. Watching your videos to see the functionality of Foundry is what convinced me to buy. I'm hoping that in the future you're able to go over some of the popular modules for Foundry and maybe explain some of the more complex ones like "Dynamic Effects".


Keep up the great content!

[whitetiger]

Just learned how to use them and absolutely love the functionality. Hoping someone creates a great wiki of tables to add.

[mrshcribbles]

Hey dood, keep up with the tutorials. I truly believe FoundryVTT is going to be a great/ better alternative to Roll20.

[scottyoung]

In the first 8 comments I read I saw no less than 4 examples of where modifiers would be useful, but no one mentioned the first one that came to my mind.

resetting the bound to a [1, n] range when using multiple dice.

If you roll 2d6 the range is [2, 12] but you can subtract 1 and get a [1, 11] table where the options around 6 are the most common options

[sandimtavares]

Haven't finished the video yet, but let me show you an example of use for modifiers on a table: Some games have Critical tables(notably the Warhammer franchise) that can be tampered with by modifiers. For example, a sinful character rolls 1d100 on the Wrath of the gods table when he does sinful things, but he adds a modifier to his roll equal to ten times the Sin Points they currently have. Since the table goes from 01 to 150, a character with low sins can never get the truly horrendous results, but a very sinful character is guaranteed to at least get royally screwed over.
Great videos by the way! Considering a purchase sometime in the future.

[huntermay]

my brain just fried. You lost me and it could just be im terrible with instructions. so imma take a nap, i know i need these now i just gotta figure out how to activate these tables. and pray to god i dont forget them.

[isphus]

Modifiers for tables can be useful if your players altered the odds somehow.
For instance, i once ran a table for blessings if players donated to a church. It was a d20 table, but went all the way to 25 because if someone donated a lot of money they could get as much as a +5 to the roll.
There's also a random encounter table i made for players while traveling, and if they're staying in their stronghold i also roll the table, but remove the more extreme encounters (and roll less often).
So yeah, its useful to have that option.

[dmpunks]

@Encounter Library: Old school tables used 1d12+1d8 with results weighted based on the rarity of the monsters in AD&D. This would be one use case for the modifiers in the Roll Formula.

[adminanonymous]

A module I ran used a modifier in such a way that it was a slightly different table of it was night time or if the party is off the road.
For example 1d4 with four option that are easier, but if they travel off the road it is +1 which removes the traveling merchants buy adds another slightly more difficult monster. Then another +2 at night so they come across less bandits, but the highest result being a vampire.
But since the vampire is never on the road it can only happen if you add both modifiers. It makes an interesting way to adjust difficulty without creating a whole different table.

Great Vid - I found a little addtion that might be useful:




- The [[3d6]] determines what is rolled.
To get this link Create a seperate Journal and Drag it into the Editbox - you can copy the text that gets created by FVTT.


Full Credit goes to @fohswe on the Discord who showed me this.

[Kantharr]

How would you use the Macro Entity in the Rolltable? I'm having trouble finding examples that explains how to use that.

[oddiee]

Reading my mind, I was looking at this functionality just yesterday. Thank you.

[gopher]

One reason to have modifiers on a table like this could be if the lower options are bad and the modifier essentially eliminates those options as a possibility. It would also allow you to put higher numbers than what the dice formula would allow that are fantastic but only accessible if you have the modifier.

[BramLastname]

The modifier is nice if you want to make a looping table,
Like you have a list of 100 options but you toll 1d12 every time and add it to the previous result to get the new result.

[benmiller]

I've been going through quite a few of your videos and recently had a thought which prompted me to do a Google search and directed me to this video but it wasn't quite the answer I was looking for.

I assume you already have an answer to it somewhere in one of your videos, but you'll be able to direct me more quickly than frantically searching through everything (yes I still plan to keep watching through more and more of your videos regardless.

Anyway, there's the "walk into a room and everyone says whether they're wanting to investigate or keep an eye out for baddies" scenario, but with that, there's the varying results of what an investigation check might reveal. That could be as basic as more detailed descriptions, but it could also be journal/item/loot handouts. Maybe it's just doing a super specific roll table like this, but is there a way to leave a tile invisible and when a player asks the prompting question for that investigation roll, you turn on that tile's visibility so that when they click, it prompts or just automatically rolls their investigation check and the text and handouts are linked to the value of that roll?

[Parker]

Is it possible to roll different dice on the table to what you have written in the formula box (maybe a chat command such as /table <table name> <dice formula>)? Sometimes, you might have a table where you want to modify the roll (such as a 15 entry table where you roll 2d6 and add a modifier determined immediately before rolling - doesn't happen in D&D to my knowledge, but it's fairly common in Traveller), or in an AD&D adventure I recently picked up, there's a 100 entry table where you might roll a d30 and add a modifier based on intelligence to determine what a character has heard about the history of the place. I mean, I could just edit the formula box for each roll, but that feels like a bit of a pain.

[lewhayberg]

I could see using modifiers in a reputation reward table. For example: if you are new to a guild and don't have rapport with them but you completed a job and they want to give you a reward, they don't want to give you the good stuff yet, so you get a modifier so you can't get those items, but still roll on the table.

[luc]

Don't know if this was ever mentioned, but, You might need to add a +x modifier to a roll table if you're table has for example 20 possibilities, you roll 1 to 10 if the PC's do one thing or roll 11 to 20 if they do another. Could always do 2 tables for it. I have seen an adventure set up like this.