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

[@zakmyrr]

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

[@HamiltonWard]

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

[@jonahc7916]

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!

[@mrshcribbles9464]

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

[@EncounterLibrary]

That's the plan! Hopefully I'll have something up tonight and then a few more videos over the next few days :D.

[@Parker8752]

Honestly, it already is better than Roll20 IMO. It seems to be missing a few features that would make me want to use it over Fantasy Grounds, but I'd definitely pay $50 for this over paying for a Roll20 subscription.

[@whitetiger88251]

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

[@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.

[@EncounterLibrary]

Ah, it's great to know there's a use case for them in other systems. It also just sounds like an awesome mechanic that I wouldn't have ever thought about. Thanks for bringing it up!

[@wtrmute]

@@EncounterLibrary Actually, _Downtime Activity: Running a Business_ (DMG page 129) is a rollable table where you roll d100 plus the number of days you've spent in the month personally running the business (as opposed to letting your employees have run of the place), up to a +30. Naturally, the higher numbers represent a better (financial) result for your company in that month, but you might want to let it run by itself without supervision sometimes to, you know, maybe adventure a little.

[@scottyoung6564]

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

[@huntermay8322]

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.

[@EncounterLibrary]

I'm sorry to have fried your brain! If you've got any questions please feel free to ask them and I'd be happy to help out :).

[@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.

[@Kapharnaum92]

Very well explained as usual!

[@EncounterLibrary]

Glad it was helpful!

[@oddiee01]

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

[@EncounterLibrary]

Glad I could help!

Great Vid - I found a little addtion that might be useful: I learned today how to add an Encounter with a variable amount of enemies: Set the Result to text and add a Text like this: "[[3d6]]@Actor[nf576sqMqcDM2weE]{Commoner}" - The [[3d6]] determines what is rolled. - The "@Actor[nf576sqMqcDM2weE]{Commoner}" is a link to the Actor in your World. 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.

[@gopher697]

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.

[@sunlg]

The Star wars RPG from FFG also makes use of this. When a character suffers a critical injury, they roll a d100 and check the table. But the table goes to quite a bit past that. And for each critical injury they have already suffered (or from other modifiers) they will add a +10 on that d100 roll, so taking critical injury after critical injury will increase the chance that you get something really bad. As well as net being able to be too lucky and just get a minor nick over and over again. It also prevent PCs from outright dying to a single critical injury (in most cases)

[@NafenX]

@@sunlg But you wouldn't change the formula for the entire roll table for that one player, right? Seems clunky

[@Parker8752]

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 )? 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.

[@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.

[@adminanonymous1521]

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.

[@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.

[@RPMWrites]

Is there a way to have it search an entire compendium without manually inputting all of the values? I.e. have it pull a random monster from a compendium without directly inputting "Goblin" etc. in the roll table?

[@ryanhuminski262]

I’m having an issue using recursive roll tables in an adventure module. In my development world I create a roll table that calls other roll tables. The result is a clickable item in chat. Great. How do I get them into the modules compendia, so they still work when the end user uses them. I’ve tried building the roll tables using items from the modules compendium. But when the module is installed the end user just sees a link to the second roll table in chat, NOT the result of that second table.

[@brynjabloodmire]

Is there any way to roll a table from inside of an item? Say my player rolls an attack for a battleaxe and inside the chat flavor message it could say "The swing hits the target in the (and then here I would link to my body part roll table)!" So that whenever they attack it would show them what body part they hit.

[@NukerOfFace]

I would very much like to know this too.

[@LuxuriaU]

Via the dynamic effects module, it is possible, aye.

[@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.

[@41luc]

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.

[@GetReadyforGameNight]

Have you done a video on what foundry is like from the perspective of a player? I'd like to be able to send my players somewhere for a good overview.

[@EncounterLibrary]

I have been working on one! I just got it uploaded today so you're in luck :D.

[@benmiller537]

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?

[@vampiregoat69]

I get tables but HOW do you create a macro to roll on a loot table?

[@Lechteron]

My group is going to be switching over to Foundry in a couple months when we finish up the current book of the adventure path we're running. We run Pathfinder 2 and one of my players is playing a Kitsune so he has two forms: a fox person form and a human appearing form. In Roll20 I set up his two forms as options on a roll table and then he can just right click his token and switch between the forms. Do you know how I would go about doing that in Foundry?

[@danieljay-dixon3171]

Two things I'm trying to figure out if this can do, and if so how: The Chaos Bolt spell, where it needs to roll 2 results from an 8 item table, but also add the numerical results together for the spell damage. Random encounter tables often have entries like "2d4 goblins," so is there a way to get the entry to also roll the 2d4 and tell you how many goblins showed up?

[@EncounterLibrary]

I'll start with the easy one: You can use roll formulas in Roll Table results by placing them in double brackets like so: "[[1d4 + 2]] goblins show up!" and it will display that text in the chat message that it sends. For the Chaos Bolt spell you can get two results by having overlapping ranges but you can't have two random results and there's not a built in way to then add the results together unfortunately. You might be able to do that with a macro that runs the table twice, gets the result, adds it together, and then returns a chat message. Someone might be able to help you with that in the Foundry Discord's "macro-polo" channel!

[@NafenX]

If there isn't already a better way to do this (there probably is), I would just duplicate the results table so you have two of them, and when you cast the spell you roll on the first table which has a result that ALWAYS rolls (has a range of 1-8) as well as the 8 results, this result would prompt a roll of the duplicated result table

[@david_demic]

And another use for the modifier is encounter difficulty: Let's say you're running ToA (or similar module or homebrew with rollable encounter tables). To make it a difficulty slider, you could let the numbers on the rollable table be parallel to the challenge rating of the monster(s) on the table. So, perhaps on a d100 table, the 1-10 range corresponds with CR 0-1/2 monsters, whereas a 100 would be a young adult dragon (again going with the ToA range of possible random encounters). To avoid the video game grind (cue Pokemon battle sound of you fighting your millionth Rattata), the GM can use modifiers to completely avoid non-challenging critters. Side note: As a GM you could always increase the number of monsters to re-balance the math of the encounter, but more actors often leads to drawn out battles and TPKs. In D&D action economy is king after all.

[@angel_cheon-sa]

modifier usage: Please read the book "Central Casting Series: Heroes of Legend". when you have tables where higher is better (or worse) then having modifiers messes with the statistical chance of being high or low on a list (obviously). So essentially the answer is.. its useful on a table where the results are some form of gradient.

[@Keaton_Ambrose]

Hey, when are you going to add the tutorial on how to add players?

[@adamblak7105]

Love your series, really glad you're producing great content. I'm striking out on finding a solution to a roll table task I'm attempting. Do you know if it's currently possible to create a table where one of the rows can contain sub table rolls. Example, I'm creating a critical hit table; A row could have the following text to display: "Crushed! Deal the twice maximum result of your damage dice and **roll on the major injury chart**." And in the area marked by asterisks the intention there is to perform a sub-table roll to determine that result as part of the original chat message? That row would be one of many in the original table, and each row potentially referencing sub tables to help fill in the complete details of the result? But the end result might look like the following in the chat display: "Crushed! Deal the twice maximum result of your damage dice and the creature suffered a Crippled leg! The creature’s movement speed is reduced by 10 feet and it has disadvantage on Dexterity saving throws". Where that second half of the result is fed from the sub table?

[@p-leif630]

wow do I add the random amount?

[@FernandoW910]

Is It possible to a player open a rollable table to, himself, see the random loot?

[@EncounterLibrary]

Not exactly, but there is a module called Better RollTables and another called Loot Sheet NPC 5E that together will automatically create a loot actor that has the rolled items in it that may be easier to interact with and transfer items.

[@FernandoW910]

@@EncounterLibrary Thank you very much Matt!!! Your tutorials are amazing! I'm going to buy Foundry because of them. By the way, do you think it is possible to add visual effects to skills? I was told that it is possible to add webm to the templates of the spells, but then I would have to remove each animated template manually after the attack ...

[@bigbuffwolf1]

+1 for Monty Python quotes!

[@kevinwilson8791]

A reason to use modifers. IF the range of options goes from Critical fail up to A Critical positive. For instance how Drunk are you. A one you litterly Fall on your Sword and take damage. A 8 would be max and the drink has No effect on you. - Maybe as a DM you allow the players to add their consistution modifer to the roll. So a player that played a giantman with a high consisution would be less likely to get drunk vs a gnome wizard. (he would have to fall on someone ele's sword.)

[@gotpwnednubs89]

Maybe if high numbers on the table mean better loot, you might want modifiers if your players gain some sort of boon increasing their luck for getting loot.

[@LdapTv1969]

TIL - If you import a Roll Table into a compendium roll table entry and try and roll on it, you will get ""cannot read property 'results' of null" - F12 Troubleshooting showed ""{class: "ServerError", message: "Cannot read property 'results' of null", stack: "TypeError: Cannot read property 'results' of null↵…/foundryvtt/resources/app/dist/sockets.js:1:2018)"}" - After futzing around, I tried to import the table from the compendium to a roll table tab. Then it worked. - Hope this helps someone in the future.

[@simonrichard1871]

It was hard to click on that like button... not because it was a bad video (on the contrary, THANKS!) but it was at 400... flush... so...you know...

[@abigailtyrrell5125]

Loaded dice ;)