What can I do with tables?

So I was playing around with the rollable tables feature, (free edition,) and it seems like it is severally limited. Is it really just press the roll button and get an ugly output of the result name? There seems to be no way to tie notes, items, macros, or even the actual table to it. Why would I use this feature, get the result "Storm," and then consult something else to see what the effects of "Storm" is, when I could just /r a dice to do same thing? Ultimately, what I was hoping for was to make a loot table, and have any notes of any resulting magic item pop-up. Either just to myself, or openly to the players so that they can decide to stick it in their inventories or group inventory. Or even just a wandering monster table and have it automatically roll to see how many of the resulting monster appear. But if I have to look through the compendium to move about an item, or look at some table notes to see what to describe to a player, or have to open up the dice roller to find out the number of monsters appear, again why would I use this feature and not just roll myself a dice?

It's definitely more powerful with API assistance.  You can get a nicer format with inline rolls: [[ 1t[TableName] ]] The Rollable Tables are very useful for dice with a specific distribution, for example game Dragon Wood uses d6s with 1,2,2,3,3,4 on the faces. You can build those in a Rollable Table with proper weighting.  Note that the Inline syntax with a table containing words only works with a single entry. 

Doomsby said: So I was playing around with the rollable tables feature, (free edition,) and it seems like it is severally limited. Is it really just press the roll button and get an ugly output of the result name? There seems to be no way to tie notes, items, macros, or even the actual table to it. Why would I use this feature, get the result "Storm," and then consult something else to see what the effects of "Storm" is, when I could just /r a dice to do same thing? Ultimately, what I was hoping for was to make a loot table, and have any notes of any resulting magic item pop-up. Either just to myself, or openly to the players so that they can decide to stick it in their inventories or group inventory. Or even just a wandering monster table and have it automatically roll to see how many of the resulting monster appear. But if I have to look through the compendium to move about an item, or look at some table notes to see what to describe to a player, or have to open up the dice roller to find out the number of monsters appear, again why would I use this feature and not just roll myself a dice? I have to agree. I've said it before, but roll20's rollable table feature is not fit for the purpose of an rpg table roller. In an rpg, tables must  be able to do the following, in order of highest to lowest importance: handle modifiers, and constrain to the min and max of the table. Have results on the table include rolls (so an entry might be "you encounter 1d3 orcs) Personally, i think having nested tables (like a table result leads to a roll of another table) should be included, but it's not essential. The top two are, and it's baffling to me that roll20's tables cant do this. I love roll20, but I cannot complain about this particular failing enough. I honestly think this shows a low regard for their own product, and their users, that something so basic cannot be provided. How can you provide a table roller to a roleplaying  community, that does not fulfil the absolutely most basic features that a roleplayer will expect? Tables are extremely common in rpgs. Every single game will use them, if they are functional. It shouldnt need a suggestion to fix this. The roll20 devs should look at this feature, and be shocked that they have allowed such a crippled feature to exist so long, and should do something about it. Bear in mind, there's no Pro feature which does this natively either. People have to create scripts to do it. But that's immaterial, a feature as basic as this, and as necessary  to roleplayers as this. should be a free feature.

It really depends on what you use your rollable tables for, I guess.  I am fairly satisfied with them, because I use them as parts of larger macros.  I generally don't do specific specific values for treasure, so I have a percentile dice roll for each category of treasure for relative value followed by a rollable table with various treasure types.   I also do random encounters in a similar manner.  I don't want numbers, just the type of animal, monster, or person encountered so that I can tailor the results to the party in the game. This gives a long printout more than can be seen in chat at once, so I just captured a portion of it.  (Pardon the typo in the table result.  I will probably forget to go track that down and correct it, since generally I am the only one that sees it...) Now, I think much of my usage probably just doesn't apply to anyone running published modules.  My most used macro that uses rollable tables utilizes results from 25 tables.  It is a name generator that I put together from some pdfs and online resources. I make this macro available to players when making a character in case they have trouble coming up with names.  I have one set up for female names as well. I also have 3 tables set up to work together as an insult generator.  I recently had a demon fighting my players that would output an insult in the notes section with every attack.  While it isn't something I plan on using often, it was something different to throw in the mix.  I think tables are really quite handy in their current form, though I take it some folks don't agree...

I like that format on the name generator. I had previously used a chat menu to give me a choice of what table to roll, but that was a two step process. This is much quicker.

keithcurtis said: I like that format on the name generator. I had previously used a chat menu to give me a choice of what table to roll, but that was a two step process. This is much quicker. It took quite a while to set up, but most of the tables have 80+ entries making for very few repeats from one click to another.  The nicest thing about the tables is that they seem to use very little in the way of processing resources.  That treasure macro has a noticeable (though slight) hesitation as it rolls all the dice.  The name generator is just about instantly displayed even though it pulls from more tables.

Here's the chat menu I used to use. Having the names all appear in one step is a much better solution. Anyway, good use for rollable tables. The biggest hurdle in deciding how to use them is that they are not what gamers traditionally think of when they say table. Most mean a "lookup table", where you generate a key and then find a corresponding value. A lookup table allows you to roll with a modifier, for example. Rollable tables are essentially (weighable) random output generators.

keithcurtis said: Here's the chat menu I used to use. Having the names all appear in one step is a much better solution. Anyway, good use for rollable tables. The biggest hurdle in deciding how to use them is that they are not what gamers traditionally think of when they say table. Most mean a "lookup table", where you generate a key and then find a corresponding value. A lookup table allows you to roll with a modifier, for example. Rollable tables are essentially (weighable) random output generators. The problem with what you and kraynic are saying, is that this random output generator with the only changeable value being the result name is really handy for randomly outputting names. I'm not seeing how it would be useful outside of that specific thing, and even then it sounds like one has to work around it. As you said, this is not what most tabletop gamers will think of when they see the word "table." Even for the nuance between your two definitions, I do want a weighable, random output generator. Just one that spits out more than a name. Going to use weather as an example again, but if I'm to use a table to find out the conditions that the PCs are walking in, I don't want to just say "rain." I'd want it to say "Rain: decrease overland movement by X and take a point of exhaustion if no heat source is provided within 24 hours." If it's really just a dice roller with custom sides, then I'm not sure it has much value besides the name generator examples. Kraynic does have a random encounter example shown, but it appears to me that it's simply a 'lookup table' with the dice roll shown at the top. (Not to insult your work and effort put into these things.)

It gives a percentage roll with the "lookup table" printed below it.  Then it gives me 1 or 2 results for each possible entry from that first table, by pulling results from a rollable table (or 2) for each entry on the lookup table printed at the top.  That allows me to see what comes up totally randomly, but I can also just use a different result if it fits more with has been going on in game or if it seems more interesting than the totally random result.  I only took a screenshot of the top of the output.  Sure seems to do its job to me.  And you can easily do that sort of weather table.  The trick is to decide exactly how far down the rabbit hole of particular weather conditions you want to go.  I have one set up that gives me wind direction, wind speed, temperature variations, and precipitation (which includes fog/visibility distances).  The thing is that you need to have the precipitation table set up for a few different climates (arid to wet).  But that is pretty easily doable, and you could have the final macro written up to output all the climate variations at once if you don't want a different button for each one.

Rollable Tables are great for maps! Its a bit niche, but that's how I use them, at least. Whenever I make a battlemap, I tend to make multiple versions. Night/Day, Intact/Destroyed, etc. I even have a colosseum map table with 20+ versions I can easily switch between thanks to rollable tables. I plug each map (.)jpg in the table as a roll option, create a token, and use that on the map layer as the background. I can then right-click the map layer and select Multi-sided >>> Choose Side to toggle between backgrounds. This has been super convenient, since I only need one game page set up for multiple backgrounds.

Here are some innovative uses from the Stupid Tricks thread: Interactive Tables as Handouts  - Jeremy R. Use Rollable Tables to Spice up Flavor Text  - godthedj Quickly Populating with Rollable Tables  - Mik Holmes Nestable Rollable Tables (Free User Version)  - Blue64 Simplified Hour/Day/Night System With Rollable Tables  - Dwarf Some of these are Rollable Table Token tricks, but RTTs are just a feature of Rollable Tables. Rollable Tables can also mimic some forms of dice rolling that the parser can't handle (if you can figure the weighting of events). Also, what do you see as the difference between results of "rain." and "Rain: decrease overland movement by X and take a point of exhaustion if no heat source is provided within 24 hours."? Aren't those just two different text outputs? Or are you looking to have that "X" filled in by a calculation of some kind? If it's the latter, then yeah, like many things on Roll20, the API opens up new possibilities.

Also, what do you see as the difference between results of "rain." and "Rain: decrease overland movement by X and take a point of exhaustion if no heat source is provided within 24 hours."? Aren't those just two different text outputs? Or are you looking to have that "X" filled in by a calculation of some kind? If it's the latter, then yeah, like many things on Roll20, the API opens up new possibilities. Primarily the impression I got was that characters would be limited by the tiny text box. Even if there isn't, it'd be a nightmare to edit. (Playing around with it some more, not all the text shows up unless it's streamlined in a macro as well.) Ultimately, what I'm wanting is for my players to come up with events that can effect each other in a random fashion, but also be in the dark about the events that the others have suggested. At first, the roll table seemed perfect as players can roll from it without being able to see the full table, but trying things out and it seems like it's only good at spitting out small snippets of information and not the full event. I'm fine with putting in the information, but I want the results to be in the player's hands, even just a simple paragraph the initiating player can read like a secret note.

I wont belabour the point too much. My feelings about tables are pretty well expressed above and I've mentioned them before. But I do want to say that my main frustrating is the way these threads always go. I point out the existing problems with tables which IMO are indefensible, and people then talk about all the other things they can do with them, some of which aren't even features that people expect from tables. I mean, I do think the rollable table token is excellent. if that was the purpose of the feature, and it was called something like "random token images", that would be a great feature to have. But that ignores the fact that its built on a feature which is advertised as rollable tables , and which is not fit for the purpose it is named. People talking about all the other things they can do kind of glosses over and minimizes the very real failing of the feature, Even some of the defences of it (like Kraynics tables) actually demonstrate how terrible the feature is: because they show the very real limits of the feature. That's the best you can do with them. In RPGs, you often need to roll on tables with modifiers, then consult another table based on the result of that. This is the basic functionality most people will assume when you hear of a feature called Tables. The fact that there is no native way to do this in roll20 is amazing. I think long-time users of roll20 are just too familiar with the software, and have learned to live with its limitations, and have forgotten their confusion and frustration when first struggling with these limitations.  I certainly dont want to encourage rabble rousing, I do love the pleasant nature of discourse on the roll20 forums. But I also  love roll20. I think it amazing in some ways, which makes some of its weaknesses really striking and baffling, none more so than tables. I just want roll20 to be better, and that's where this criticism is coming from. For something as basic and  fundamental  to rpgs, tables should be better than this. If people acknowledged this, instead of inadvertently defending them, maybe something would get done about them. I've said my piece :)

Can you give an example of text not showing up unless it's contained in a macro? I haven't run into this before. I just made a test table, one entry with a single word, another with the beginning statements to the Declaration of Independence. I didn't lose text in either result. It's true that the results would look much better in a roll template, but that's true of any text typed into chat. Try this (assuming you are using the D&D 5e by Roll20 sheet) and replace it with the name of your table. /w gm &{template:npcaction} {{rname=Test Table}} {{description=[[ 1t[test-table]]]}} Also, the text input area of the table editor could be made as large as you like with a Stylus style. I'd be happy to work one up if you think it's something you could use.

It has been a while since I set some of mine up, but I think I found that if an entry started with a number, then it would only show so many characters when that entry got rolled.  Now GiGs can be happy that I found something wrong with them as well.  :p

keithcurtis said: Can you give an example of text not showing up unless it's contained in a macro? I haven't run into this before. I just made a test table, one entry with a single word, another with the beginning statements to the Declaration of Independence. I didn't lose text in either result. It's true that the results would look much better in a roll template, but that's true of any text typed into chat. Try this (assuming you are using the D&D 5e by Roll20 sheet) and replace it with the name of your table. /w gm &{template:npcaction} {{rname=Test Table}} {{description=[[ 1t[test-table]]]}} Also, the text input area of the table editor could be made as large as you like with a Stylus style. I'd be happy to work one up if you think it's something you could use. It was a dumb thing. One of my "words" was just a bunch of 'a's about 25 characters long to test the character limit.The Roll button did not like this and when contained in a macro it wrapped the word. You're offered macro is probably be as close as I'm going to get to what I want, I think. Thanks for your help and patience. Echoing GiGs, I think most of my frustration is from the feature not doing what it intuitively feels like it should do: set up and be used like a table from the dmg or a supplement.

Doomsby said: Echoing GiGs, I think most of my frustration is from the feature not doing what it intuitively feels like it should do: set up and be used like a table from the dmg or a supplement. No worries, you're not the first person to make that observation. There are a lot of cool things you could do with a real lookup table. It could act like a mini database for one thing.

Kraynic said: It has been a while since I set some of mine up, but I think I found that if an entry started with a number, then it would only show so many characters when that entry got rolled.  Now GiGs can be happy that I found something wrong with them as well.  :p Haha, progress! :)