Last weekend I did a playtest release for Inspiration. I ended up only doing a release for the Iphone: I figured I’d see if there were any huge show-stoppers before I bothered everyone with an update.

I got very encouraging feedback: besides some UI issues, I got a lot of requests for features which I already know I need, and are already on my upcoming feature list. So I’m putting a week or so of work into polishing the UI and adding a few of the most-desired features. Once that’s done, I’ll release a playtest to Android users.

Here’s the big feature I’m adding: a random encounter generator for every monster.

Up until now, Inspiration has only offered the traditional type of random encounter generator, by terrain type, the way print Dungeon Masters Guides always did it. You’re wandering through the forest, you’re level 5, what monster do you run into? That’s useful at times, but as a DM in the middle of a game, I frequently know what kind of monster I want to use; I just don’t have time to use the official encounter-building tools to create a balanced encounter for the party’s level.

On each monster’s stats page, I’m adding a tool where you can choose a terrain and the desired Challenge Rating of the encounter, and it will make an encounter for you, potentially including appropriate allies, pets, minions, traps, and other complications.

To do this, I’ve made a web of relationships between the D&D monsters. Hobgoblins, for instance, are most often led by hobgoblin captains or hobgoblin warlords, but might sometimes be led by a bugbear or an evil mage or knight. Similarly, hobgoblins frequently employ goblins as cannon fodder, but might also use worgs, ogres, or even ballistas and catapults.

I think it’ll be super useful to be able to instantly whip up, say, a CR 5 goblin encounter (such as 20 goblins with their 5 giant rat pets, led by a bugbear, skulking behind a pit trap), a CR 14 mage encounter (an evil mage with 6 minotaur servants among explosive runes traps) a CR 16 bone devil encounter (one bone devil with its six cambion spawn), or whatever else you need to fit your story.

I’m almost done updating each monster with its potential minions, bosses, and pets. Then after a little testing of my own, I’ll send out an Android playtest. Looking forward to see if you guys like it.

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Like a lot of folks, I’ve been cooped up inside with no D&D, which made me decide 2 things:

1) now is finally the time to release my free 5e Inspiration app beta
2) it should support solo play.

I’ll be sending out beta invitations this week. Sign up here if you haven’t already!

Beta 1 will include dungeon adventures only, from levels 1 to 7. It will support any number of players from 8 all the way down to 1. 5e Inspiration is designed as a DM aid, but it can also be used as a DM replacement if you don’t have another player on hand. The app gives you dungeons full of locations and encounters; you just have to run the battles yourself.

Here are the questions to think about when you try on the beta:

1) Is it clear how to use the app? Are there any user interface elements that are confusing?
2) Could you easily find all the information you need to run battles, traps, and other encounters?
3) How is solo D&D? Is the balance good? Any player deaths? Did you get rich?
4) Any bugs?

I’ll be sending out beta invitations this week. A few days later, I’ll send out a survey.

I hope this app gives you some D&D fun even if the pandemic is keeping you from doing other fun things you’d like to do. And I hope you’re well, and safe.

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In most fantasy universes in which people cast spells, magic is a talent that few are born with. No matter how much they study, some people will never be anything but muggles, while other people are born with the Talent or the Gift or a high midichlorian count or whatever.

There are a number of reasons why this choice makes a fictional setting more coherent and focused.

However, these reasons don’t really apply to D&D, which has never had any pretensions at being a coherent and focused fictional setting.

D&D is a world where magic is common. Most of the D&D classes are spell-users to some degree. Most of the monsters have spells or magical abilities. You might assert that offscreen, within the borders of civilization, magic is rare, but the players’ game experience don’t really speak to that assertion one way or the other. The fact is that in D&D as it’s played, the world is chock-full of magic knapsacks, resurrection magic, and fireballs.

Your wizard isn’t special. If you come up with some demographics that specify that, say, only one in every thousand people has an arcane gift that can be nurtured, you fall afoul of the fact that nearly every D&D party has a wizard, or a variation like sorcerer, warlock, or bard – not to mention the clerics, paladins, rangers, monks, and druids also in the party. I’ve been playing D&D for decades, and I’ve seen a lot of wizard characters, and if they’re all rare and special, they’re the most common rarity there is. When a wizard character dies, we know we can go back to town and pick up another one if we want. We might claim they’re rare in the campaign setting, but they’re not rare in the game. Furthermore, most players don’t want their wizard characters to be feared, or hunted as witches, or even venerated as demigods every time they come to a new town. Every game session of D&D doesn’t have to be the X Men mutants vs. the world. Just leave me alone and let me do my shopping! Therefore, a blase attitude to spellcasters is pretty common among NPCs: the sort of attitude that comes from familiarity.

Your wizard isn’t super powerful – at least not at first. In any edition, a first- or second-level wizard isn’t any more powerful than a fighter, and might be significantly weaker. Sure, a first-level wizard can drop a fighter, and a crowd of commoners besides, with Sleep or Burning Hands, but a fighter can drop a wizard with one hit. It all comes down to who wins initiative. And besides criminal assault with Sleep and Burning Hands, what can a novice wizard do that’s any use? They might be able to get a middle-class job as a repairman (Mending), a mortician (Gentle Repose), a locksmith (Knock and Arcane Lock) or a charlatan (Charm and Disguise Self). They might rightly be regarded with suspicion, but not necessarily with awe. Being a low-level wizard might be kind of like being a grad student. It takes years of study, and might lead you to a respectable career some day, but no one’s really jealous of you right now.

There’s one more reason to avoid the “some people have the Gift” trope, at least for the 5e wizard class specifically. It steps on the sorcerer’s toes. The sorcerer’s story is all “I have a special inborn gift that lets me set things on fire.” Sorcerers are not much of a foil for wizards if the wizard’s story is “I too have a special inborn gift. Mine lets me set things on fire after five years of school.” I much prefer the more democratic message that anyone can go to school, make something of themselves, and learn how to set things on fire.

1st-level wizard spells for the masses

Given all this, I say: Open the arcane floodgates wide! Let anyone into the Arcane University, PC or NPC, from muggle or wizard family, so long as they can pay the tuition. The real limitations on wizard power are more insidious: not everyone has the wealth and leisure to attend wizard college, and, as is true for any other character class, most people stay low level. Few survive, or care to brave, the dangerous adventures required to become even, say, third level and unlock second-level spells.

Therefore, first-level wizards (and clerics, and bards, and other learned spellcasters) might be as common as educated people in our own medieval or renaissance times. Imagine a Shakespearean England where every Oxford scholar can cast Shield but not Suggestion, every vicar can cast Cure Light Wounds but not Lesser Restoration, and every minstrel can cast Charm Person but not Detect Thoughts. Would it really be that different from the standard D&D world?

low-level spells and society

Would this turn your world into Eberron, where magic is commercialized and ubiquitious? Not really. In fact, it’s surprising how much first-level spells resist the assembly line. A world where first-level spells are common actually resembles the medieval world that medieval people thought they lived in. You go to your local cleric for healing, blessings, and the detection and turning of minor demons. You go to the local witch for curses and curse removal. Really, Create Water and Purify Food and Drink are the only first-level spells we’d think of as being economically exploitable, and they’re small-scale.

Second-level spells offer a bit more room for altering society. I believe that lighting cities with Continual Flame is a classic Eberron move. Detect Thoughts and Zone of Truth could change the justice system. Lesser restoration – LESSER restoration – cures all nonmagic diseases, making a 3rd-level cleric better than the best 21st century hospital.

If third level spellcasters are dirt-common in your campaign world, you might stray a bit from the standard D&D pseudomedieval assumptions. But I don’t think you’ll do your campaign world any harm by allowing a Magic Missile-toting scribe in every village and a Cure Wounds-casting cleric at every roadside shrine. If anything, you’ll bring it more in line with the actual high-magic D&D gameplay that I’ve experienced, where no one blinks at the arrival of a traveling wizard, and someone in town can lift the curse on your fighter – for a price.

Traps are kind of an unsolved problem in 5e D&D (of course, I said this before about 4e). On the one hand, you can’t leave traps out, because they’re an integral part of the dungeon delver fantasy. On the other hand, the way they’re usually used in 5e is not fun. Your stock 10-foot-pit trap is (if your passive Perception is high enough) a piece of scenery hardly worth mentioning, or (if your passive Perception is low) an unavoidable hit point tax, or (if your DM doesn’t use Perception) a guess-what-the-DM-is-thinking game, or (if overused) an incentive to play in a laborious and dull style involving ten foot poles.

Even the writers of 5e don’t have a lot of faith in traps. Consider their advice from Xanathar’s Guide:

If your encounters or adventures are sown with too many traps, and if the characters are victimized over and over again as a result, they are likely to take steps to prevent further bad things from happening. Because of their recent experience, the characters can become overly cautious, and you run the risk of the action grinding to a halt. Traps are most effective when their presence comes as a surprise, not when they appear so often that the characters spend all their effort watching out for the next one.

I think this is wrong. Call me naive, but I think traps can be fun. Don’t be stingy. Slather them on! Run an all-trap dungeon. Run an all-trap adventure! If you’re willing to put a little extra work into it, there are ways to make each trap into an entertaining encounter.

I’ve been the victim of many traps in my years of playing D&D (and also inflicted a few as the DM). Sometimes, defeating a trap can feel extremely satisfying, and even falling victim to a trap can be a hilarious table moment. It all comes down to warning the players, implicitly or explicitly, that they might be walking into danger.

Here are the setups of some of the traps I’ve enjoyed most as a D&D player. We’ll get into the trap solutions later on.

player skill vs character skill

The traditional trap dichotomy is between old school “player skill” style and new school “character skill” style.

The “player skill” school holds that characters should perform certain intelligent actions to avoid traps – prod every floor with a pole, throw a coin onto the metal floor, pull the lever with Mage Hand while standing across the room.

The “character skill” style relies on die rolls. Your characters are more competent adventurers than you are – a character with high Perception shouldn’t miss an obvious trap because their player didn’t guess what action the DM expected them to take.

In most D&D situations, player skill vs. character skill is a false dichotomy. If you want to get up a cliff, you can either use an Athletics check or do something clever with ropes. If you want to convince a guard to let you pass, you can make a Persuasion check or you can say something reasonable. There are many solutions to any problem.

Traps don’t have multiple solutions because they often don’t present themselves as problems – by the time you know there’s a trap, the encounter is over. Traps exist outside the usual D&D action loop, which is described in the PHB as:

1. The DM describes the environment
2. The players describe what they want to do
3. The DM narrates the results of the adventurers’ actions

The trap action loop is more like this:

1. The players blunder without warning into a trapped area
2. The DM compares passive perception to static DCs and describes the PCs avoiding or triggering the trap
3. the players write down damage on their character sheet, or take some trivial action like walking around a pit or stepping over a tripwire

That’s why the trap-sprung-without-warning doesn’t work very well. When you remove the player’s ability to react to a situation, D&D becomes a game about comparing passive DCs or about performing methodical danger-avoidance routines – and the game begins to fall apart.

Traps work best when they’re telegraphed.

The odd detail

Remember the list of my favorite trap setups I gave above? The common thread: they all include an odd or mysterious element that invites exploration.

The odd detail can be an obvious clue to the nature of the trap – rubble on the floor below a collapsing ceiling trap, or a dead thief near a poison needle trap – but it can also just be a specific detail that cries out for investigation: a chalked arrow on the floor, or a door painted with a woodland scene. It doesn’t matter much what the detail is, just so it stands out enough to attract the players’ interest.

It might seem like telegraphing every trap makes it too easy on the players. After all, players can just choose to ignore or steer around anything with a suspiciously lush description. Not to worry! Odd details are like catnip to D&D players. Characters come from miles around to stick their heads in the sphere of annihilation trap.

The odd detail is the missing piece of D&D traps because it indicates to the players that there’s something to actively investigate. Without it, traps are just something DMs inflict on characters. You’d much rather have traps be something the characters inflict on themselves!

investigating traps

How do characters deal with traps? Once you’ve indicated that there’s something that may be worth investigating, the players can choose their own course of action. All the DM has to do is react. This brings traps back into the classic D&D paradigm from the PHB: the DM describing a scene, the players stating their actions, and the DM adjudicating the results. As an added benefit, players can organically choose between using old-school player skill and modern character skill, just as they can in other open-ended D&D scenes.

Given a suspiciously odd detail, players will generally act in one of three ways:

countermeasures

Once players are aware that they may be in the presence of a trap, they have two choices.

What I’m suggesting involves work for the DM. Basically, every trap becomes a micro-puzzle. D&D is flexible: players who don’t relish puzzle-solving can roll a few dice to have their characters solve it. But whether the players take a new-school or old-school approach, every trap is the better for a few memorable, specific details.

trap solutions

Here are the “puzzle solutions” to the traps I mentioned at the top of the page.

training your players

Players need to learn that every trap will be marked with a clue. No matter how many traps you spring, that will prevent them from wasting their time searching barren rooms for traps. “You’re in a ten by ten room. Door to the left, door to the right.” There must NEVER be a trap in a room described like this! There’s nothing interesting or off-beat that signals that this is an investigation scene.

Players also need to learn that there can be benefits from interacting with weird elements in your dungeon. Otherwise, every suspicious scratch on the floor will make your players run the other way. Luckily, D&D has a strong built-in slot-machine-like reward system. Treasure! In standard 5e D&D, about 1 in 5 monster encounters come with a treasure hoard, and lots more carry some incidental treasure. Treat traps just like any other encounter. It’s easy to litter treasure around a trap:

traps in the Inspiration app

Of course, my Inspiration app is chock-full of traps. I’ve got something like 80 trap types, from the basic pit trap to the rolling boulder to the demon-possessed item, and each trap is further detailed with 3 or so “odd details”. That’s something like 250 unique traps. None of them are very complex, but I hope they’re just puzzling enough to give your players a moment of uncertainty.

Here’s how I construct the traps, and here are some samples for use at your table today.

trap template

I use a modified version of the trap template presented in Xanathar’s Guide.

Trap Name: The best trap names end in “OF DEATH”, but I leave the prefix up to you.
Challenge Rating: D&D 5e traps don’t have a challenge rating; instead they have a level band, like 1-4, and a degree of severity, like “moderate” or “deadly.” I think this is a mistake. It’s insufficiently granular – even a moderate level 1-4 trap will probably kill a first-level character – plus challenge rating is a tool we already have from monster design! Combining trap recommendations plus my 5e Monster Manual on a business card math, we come out with the formula that a single-character trap should do about 5 damage per CR, while a multi-character trap should do about 3 damage per CR.
Description: A sentence to sum up the trap.
Clues: This is where you put the odd detail that will get the characters’ attention. No trap is complete without one! In my case, to increase the usefulness of each trap in the Inspiration app, I’m providing three possible clues per trap. I hope that this will make the same pit trap feel different if encountered again.
Investigation: What can the characters learn by investigating the trap? I try to include both normal search check results (what the characters learn with a Perception check) and specific, guaranteed-to-succeed actions that will automatically net a clue.
Trigger: What action causes the trap to go off.
Effect: What happens when the trap is triggered.
Countermeasures: What actions the players can take to avoid or disarm the trap. Again, when I can I include both skill checks that will disarm the trap and specific actions that will automatically defeat it.

Here are two examples:

Name: 30-foot-deep locking spiked pit trap
Challenge: 6
Description: This 30-foot-deep pit has a cover which snaps shut to seal its victim inside. It has wood or metal spikes on the bottom.
Clues: A trail of faint footprints abruptly end. (DM note: In this case, there is a corpse in the pit.) OR: an arrow is scrawled in chalk on the floor. (DM note: The arrow points to the pit. It was drawn by a denizen who was worried about forgetting where it was and falling in.) OR: The center of the room is dusty; the floor at the edges of the room is clean. (DM note: The clean area is well-traveled and safe to traverse.)
Investigation: A DC 14 Perception check reveals that foot traffic avoids the pit cover. A DC 14 Investigation check reveals the hidden pit trap. A DC 19 Investigation check not only reveals the pit trap, but discovers a hidden lever, loose brick, or catch which opens the pit lid. A character who taps the floor notices that it sounds hollow.
Trigger: A creature steps on the trap cover.
Effect: The trap cover swings open like a trap door, or swings on a pivot. The victim falls into the pit, taking 10 (3d6) falling damage and 11 (2d10) piercing damage from spikes. The spring-loaded (or weighted) cover then swings shut and locks. The cover can be opened with a DC 18 Strength check; from inside, with a DC 16 Dexterity check using thieves tools, assuming there is sufficient light; by breaking the cover, which has AC 20 and 20 hit points; and sometimes by finding a hidden lever which opens the pit.
Countermeasures: Once the pit is detected, an iron spike or similar object can be wedged under the cover to prevent it from opening, or it can be magically held shut with Arcane Lock. Or you can walk around.

Name: ice-breather trap
Challenge: 12
Description: This trap breathes a blast of cold whenever someone speaks the word “ice”.
Clues: The room is cold. A ten-foot-tall statue of a barbarian or frost giant dominates the room. The statue appears to be made of ice. (DM note: The ice is magical and does not melt.) OR: The room is cold. There’s a carving of a polar bear on the wall. On the bear’s head is a rune. (DM note: The rune says “ice” in Giant.) OR: The room is cold and contains a marble statue of a fur-clad elf. As you enter the room, a Magic Mouth spell animates the statue’s mouth: “Speak not my name at any cost: a river’s skin in the season of frost.”
Investigation: A DC 15 Perception check reveals that the mouth is nearly clogged with snowy ice crystals. A spell or other effect that can sense the presence of magic, such as Detect Magic, reveals an aura of evocation magic around the statue.
Trigger: The trap activates when someone speaks the word “ice” in Common.
Effect: The mouth releases a 30-foot cone of cold. Each creature in the blast must make a DC 17 Dexterity saving throw, taking 38 (7d10) cold damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one.
Countermeasures: Placing an obstacle in front of the mouth deflects the cold blast. A successful Dispel Magic (DC 15) cast on the mouth destroys the trap. Not saying “ice” also works.

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Some DMs have a gift for coming up with the perfect name on the spot. Others flip through Xanathar’s Guide or another name list. Then there’s me: given a minute to think, I can come up with a plausible fantasy name, but in the heat of the moment I might just blurt out a clunker like “Huckabear“.

5e Inspiration has a random NPC generator with a massive name list built into it. I’ve been collecting fantasy names for as long as I’ve been playing D&D, and I’ve brainstormed a lot more for the app. Right now my name list has something more than 6000 NPC names – more than twice the number of names in Xanathar’s Guide.

I’ve vetted all the names in the Inspiration app, which means I’ve said each one aloud to make sure it doesn’t rhyme with something dirty, and I’ve googled it to make sure it’s not a well known trademark or something. (The gold standard for googling a fantasy name: you come up with less than 50,000 hits, and on the first google page is a link to someone’s World of Warcraft character. Then you know you’ve got a keeper.)

How many half-orc names are there?

It’s easy for me to tell you that my name list has 6000+ entries: however, it’s quite difficult to count how many names are in any given category. For instance, how many possible half-orc names are there?

Because Inspiration is an app, I can do more than just create a d100 name chart for each race/gender category. Sure, I categorize names by race and gender, as the Xanathar’s Guide list does – though more than half of my names are nongendered – and also by class. But there are also lots of crossovers and references: on the ranger name list are entries like “roll on the elf name list”.

Inspiration also includes lots of non-NPC names. The app can be used to generate dungeons, treasure, encounters on the land and sea, neighborhoods, and overland maps, so there are big name lists for magic items, ships, taverns, villages, rare books, various categories of monsters, etc. These lists link with the NPC name lists too.

The base half-orc name list might have only 2 entries: one “roll on the orc name list”, and one “roll on the human name list”. Drilling down one level to the orc list, we might have 200 entries, of which ten are like “roll on the evil magic item name list”, to get sonorous names like “Ur Kagal” or “Katak”. The evil magic item name list, in turn, might have a few rolls on the pirate ship name list, for entries like “Winter Wolf”, “Howler,” or “roll on the naval ship name list”. So it’s hard to count exactly how many orc names there are. Do I just count the core human and orc names? The 200 evil magic item names, each a twentieth as likely to come up as a core orc name? The 200 pirate ship names, each a hundredth as likely to come up?

That’s not to mention the possibility of rolling an orc with a barbarian-style name, with all the different name formations that involves: X Y-slayer, X daughter of Y, X Ybane, X Yborn, etc.

That’s all to say that if you use the app to generate 10 random NPCs per weekly game session for 10 years, you might see a random NPC reappear once, but probably not twice.

In a further post I’ll talk about how I generate D&D-style fantasy names. Until then, here’s my orc name list:

Orc Names Roll d20 to select a line. If the line contains 10 names, roll d10 to select the name.

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As part of the Inspiration app, I’ve varied treasure by writing up alternate versions of the 350+ SRD magic items. I’ve come up with something like 2000 variants.

My magic item variants can be divided into 3 types:

Here are some examples of my magic item variants, for the amulet of proof against detection and location, broom of flying, and holy avenger.

amulet of proof against detection and location variants (roll 1d6)

1: a heart-shaped locket scribed with the phrase “thinking of you.” It contains a portrait of the last person to try to magically detect or locate its wearer
2: a necklace with a pendant that looks like an open eye. When found, the necklace’s power is inactive. If the Thieves Cant slang for “night” is spoken, the eye closes and the power activates. The Thieves Cant word for “day” deactivates the necklace and opens the eye.
3: a necklace of 10 glass beads: one bead shatters each time it blocks a scrying or divination attempt. The necklace is nonmagical after all the beads are broken
4: an ostentatious signet ring which once belonged to a princess who disappeared a generation ago
5: a black hooded cloak
6: [miscjewelry] bearing the sign of the god of trickery. This item can also be used as a holy symbol by devotees of that god

In the above examples, I include an item with an extra story power (the locket which identifies the culprit behind divination attempts), and a re-skinned item (the cloak). I didn’t include a cursed version because the Amulet is only useful in a limited number of stories anyway; no need to make it any less attractive. However, since the Amulet is essentially a narrative item, I did include a variant with extra story hooks (the signet ring).

A note on the holy symbol: My app replaces the tag [miscjewelry] above with a random type of jewelry, so you could potentially find an earring or bracelet of proof against detection.

broom of flying variants: roll d8

1: hobby horse with a unicorn head
2: umbrella: its power operates when it is opened
3: articulated brass hang glider
4: winged crown
5: flying horse statue which is activated by turning a brass key. The key may be hidden nearby or in the possession of a nearby monster
6: variant: flying wild boar statue, as above
7: flying shield that the owner surfs on
8: flying throne

I like the broom of flying’s power just as it is – I didn’t include any cursed or extra-powerful versions for this item, just reskins. It’s great seeing an armor-clad fighter astride a broom, but even better than that is seeing the entire party flying cross country via a motley collection of different flight methods – the wizard with a fly spell, a guy with boots of levitation who’s being towed by a griffon rider, and other party members on a broom, a hang glider, winged boots, and maybe Baba Yaga’s mortar. Flying is a cool mid-level power and there’s room for a lot of ways to get it.

holy avenger variants (roll d8)

1. named Gentle Correction. Once per day, as part of a hit with this weapon, the wielder may cast Command, DC 17, on the target
2. named Angelis. This sword has a white hilt with an angel-wing crossguard. 1/week, the wielder can cast Conjure Celestial
3. named Vow of Poverty. The blade resembles stained glass, and depicts knights giving money to the poor. When the wielder draws this weapon, all the coins they are carrying disappear, distributed among the poor of the world
4. its name Blazing Justice is written in glowing gold on the blade. on a Smite, it does 3d6 extra fire damage and bursts into Continual Flame until sheathed
5. named Crusader. This sword is sentient (Int Wis and Cha 16), telepathic with its owner, and hates demons. If the sword helps slay a demon of CR 10+, the sword learns how to cast level 1 Cure Wounds 3/day on its owner.
6. black-bladed sword named Blackbane that exudes an evil aura. Attunable only by blackguard paladins, it does +1d10 necrotic damage on every hit, +3d10 slashing damage to celestials, and doesn’t do extra damage to fiends and undead
7. named Cloudwalker; decorated with angelic symbols. An attuned wielder can cast Fly, self only, 3/day
8. named Honor Bright and covered with binding runes and holy symbols: 1/day, if someone touches the weapon and makes a promise, that promise becomes a Geas

With the holy avenger, I leaned hard into unique variants with extra powers. The holy sword is an integral part of the paladin’s story; a paladin doesn’t want an off-the-rack holy avenger, but a unique sword that was destined for the paladin’s hand. Since it’s a late-game, legendary item, I’m not too worried about slathering on some extra powers.

A few of these variants, like Crusader, are inspired by historical D&D modules. Others are original. Vow of Poverty is drawn from my home game; as a DM, I’ve had a lot of fun with its associated “curse” (or convenience? depends on the paladin).

As I’ve mentioned, I’m working on a D&D app that’s a content generator of all kinds: it spits out encounters, NPCs, treasure, and cool locations.

One makes a random generator by coming up with a bunch of lists, each as large as possible, and crashing them into each other. The bigger each list is, the more depth and reusability your generator has.

How do you know when you can stop adding to a random table? That’s important to me because I don’t just want to make a random generator that looks cool the first time you use it; I want it to provide useful stuff one, two, ten years from now.

the birthday paradox

Maybe you’ve heard this classic math puzzle: in a room of 25 people, what are the odds of at least 2 of them sharing a birthday?

Unintuitively, even though the odds of any 2 people sharing a birthday is only 1/365, the odds of any shared birthday among 25 people is more than 50%. In a room of 60 people, you’re almost guaranteed (99%) to find at least one shared birthday. That’s weird, right? It’s true because we’re looking for ANY shared birthday. The odds of anyone in the room sharing YOUR birthday are still fairly small.

Here’s the full explanation.

You can use this same math to determine how many rolls on a chart you expect before you get a duplicate. A room with 25 people looking for shared birthdays is analogous to rolling 25 times on a chart with 365 entries. On a d20 chart, you can expect to roll a duplicate after only 6 rolls. On a d100 chart, you need only 13 rolls before you’re more likely than not to roll a duplicate. It’s amazing how quickly those duplicates start arriving!

Of course, a chart isn’t totally useless just because you rolled one duplicate. But at some point the diminishing returns may start seriously reducing the value of the chart.

Brute-forcing the birthday paradox calculations further, we find the following:
-If you roll 25 times on a d100 chart, you’re likely to have seen about 22 unique table entries. 3 of your rolls (12%) will have resulted in you seeing a result you’ve already seen.
-If you roll 50 times on a d100 table, you’re likely to have rolled around 40 unique entries. 10 of your rolls (20%) will have generated recycled results.
-After 75 rolls, you will have seen 50 of the table results. 25 of your rolls (33%) will be duplicates.
-After 100 rolls, you will have seen 65 different results and 35 duplicates.

Thus, in total, after 100 rolls on a d100 table, you will have seen something new 65% of the time, and had the experience of seeing recycled material 35% of the time. To adopt the language of rottentomatoes.com, your experience has been 65% fresh.

These percentages hold true for any number of items on a table, just so the proportions of entries to rolls is the same; so after your first 50 rolls on a d100 table, or your first 500 rolls on a d1000 table, you can expect your experience to be 80% fresh.

We have a judgement call to make here, but to me, unless all the entries are highly reusable, a “65% fresh” table feels stale; therefore, if I plan to use a table 100 times over its lifetime, I probably need way more than 100 entries. Let’s choose “80% fresh” as an arbitrary cutoff. At 80% fresh, you see something new on 4 out of every 5 uses of a table. To hit this target, you need to follow this rule of thumb: if you plan to use a random table N times, you need more than (N times 2) table entries.

This seems like a useful thing to know as a D&D designer, and it gets us most of the way towards knowing how big a dice chart or random generator needs to be to do its job. There’s still one more piece of the equation.

reusable vs one-use

When creating a generator, I try to distinguish between reusable and one-use list items.

Reusable items can come up many times and they don’t make a nuisance of themselves. They’re not obtrusive. They also tend to be rather vague and nonspecific. For example, as part of 5e Inspiration, I’m writing a list of random desert locations. “Dunes of golden sand” is a reusable item: over the course of a long desert journey, you’d expect it to come up frequently. “Sandstorm” is a reusable item too. Although it should come up with less frequency than sand dunes, you don’t begrudge multiple sandstorms over the course of a few desert adventures.

One-use items are specific enough that they feel unique. They tend to be more interesting than reusable items. Unfortunately, they don’t wear well. One-use items are the mechanism by which a random generator ages: once you have seen a few of them twice, you’re hitting diminishing returns for the whole random generator. One-use examples from my desert encounters list:

As a player or DM, I’d roll my eyes if I saw any of these twice.

A generator with no one-use items is evergreen, but rather dull. A generator with all one-use items, according to the birthday paradox math we did above, needs to be big enough that most of its entries will never be rolled.

Based on your mix of one-use items in your generator, and how many times you want it to be used, you can determine how much work you need to put into coming up with new entries.

Most of the random tables I write are a mix of fairly generic, multi-use results and rare, interesting, one-use results. To figure out how that impacts a table’s “freshness” calculation, ignore the number of die rolls that are likely to return a generic, multi-use result. For instance: If you’re rolling 100 times on a d100 chart, but half of the chart’s results are generic and reusable, treat it as if you are rolling only 50 times on the table. Thus, for 100 rolls, your half-generic d100 table is 80% fresh.

the freshness calculator

Here’s a “freshness” calculator you can use to figure out how big your random table needs to be to meet your desired level of interestingness. This calculator uses brute force, simulating results 1000 or so times.

what about multi-table random results?

Not all random generators are a single die-roll chart. Many are in the format “roll once on table A, once on table B, etc”. For instance, a tavern name generator could be a single d100 chart where you get a complete name like “The Golden Goose” if you roll a 36, but it’s more likely to be 2 d20 charts, where you roll the “The Golden” on table 1 and “Goose” on table 2. How do you evaluate the freshness of these grouped tables?

I think that for multiple tables, you evaluate each of the tables separately, and then you use the worst result. People are really good at spotting patterns. Once the party has been to The Golden Goose, The Red Goose, and The Unnamed Goose taverns, you just can’t have any more goose tavern names. It doesn’t matter that you never rolled a duplicate on table 1. The repetition on table 2 makes the whole game world feel more creaky and procedural.

how do 5e tables fare?

Now, let’s use this procedure to evaluate a few of the random tables that come in the 5e Dungeon Masters Guide.

5e has been around since 2014. Assuming you’ve run a weekly game for the past 5 years, how “fresh” are the following tables?

The official 5e magic item properties tables. There are 4 tables, ranging from d8 to d20, with 60 properties total. The instructions are to “roll on as many as you like.” Let’s assume you’ve rolled on only one table per magic item, and only for major magic items: say, one die roll every two sessions. By now, you’ve rolled about 120 times, and there’s only 60 entries, so you’ve hit a lot of dupes (43% fresh). Chances are you’ve given up on these charts already. I bet you rolled for magic item properties 10 or 15 times, hit a few duplicates, used the charts as inspiration lists a few more times, and then stoped altogether. That’s roughly what I’ve done, anyway.

How many random magic item characteristics would you need to provide, say, an “80% fresh” experience for 125 rolls over the course of 5 years? Plugging in numbers into the freshness calculator, it seems that 300 characteristics would just about do it. That’s a far cry from the 60 that are provided.

The NPC traits charts. There’s a d20 chart for NPC appearance. How many of the items are reusable and how many are one-shot? I’d say it’s maybe 50/50, with “flamboyant clothes” and “bald” being reusable, and “nervous eye twitch” and “missing fingers” being unique. If I ran into 2 NPCs who were missing fingers, I’d suspect they were the same doppelgänger.

If you’ve used this chart to make just 1 NPC per week for the last 5 years, you have 12 folks running around your campaign world with missing fingers. Clearly this table is not big enough. To provide specific and fresh results for 250 NPCS over 5 years, you probably want a d500 table at least.

the DMG vs the Inspiration app

OK, it’s not completely fair to judge the DMG charts this way. They’re clearly meant to provide inspiration – to teach you how to customize your magic items and NPCs. After rolling on the charts for a few sessions, you’re supposed to be able to do your own homework before each session – spread your creative wings and fly!

Well, that’s bully for the DMG. I, on the other hand, am not here to help anyone learn to fly. I’m here to do your homework for you! The Inspiration app currently has about 500 NPC characteristics, many of them evergreen, and about 2000 magic item variants. It should be able to provide you dungeon mastering freshness for the next 10 years at least.

Next week, let’s look at some magic item variants from the app.

Sign up for the Inspiration beta test!

Read more about the Inspiration app

This week I’ve been working on boring-but-necessary pieces of the Inspiration app to get it ready for playtesting, such as a way to share a dungeon’s random number seed so several people can test/play the same dungeon.

But for this week’s post, I want to give you a gameable slice of the app, translated into random tables that you can roll on with real dice.

Below are the Inspiration encounter tables for the cloud giant. It’s a high level monster, so it’s not as exhaustively detailed as a more commonly-encountered critter like a kobold or a hobgoblin, but on the other hand, I like cloud giants, so it’s not sparse either.

table 1: signs of nearby cloud giants in the hills/mountains: roll d20

table 2: behavior of a single cloud giant in the hills/mountains: roll d20

table 3: behavior of 2 cloud giants in the hills/mountains: roll d20

table 4: behavior of 3 or more cloud giants in the hills/mountains: roll d10

My “Inspiration 5e” app has two modes: “inspiration mode” and “exploration mode”.

inspiration mode

Inspiration Mode is the default mode. It’s for when you’re browsing for ideas to fill out a pre-existing or partially complete adventure. A random encounter in the jungle? A 17th-level treasure hoard? A ranger NPC? Whatever you want. If you like one of the suggestions, you can swipe right to save it for later. If you want to generate a new suggestion, swipe left. Inspiration mode is like Tinder for DMs.

Inspiration mode doesn’t presume anything about your adventure. It just presents ideas to you as fast as possible. It doesn’t ration out the interesting stuff: every location has an inhabitant, every monster has treasure. You loaded up the app because you wanted something, not because you wanted nothing.

exploration mode

Exploration mode is for when you want the app to design a whole dungeon crawl or hex crawl for you. Maybe your PCs ventured into an area you haven’t prepared; maybe you’re playing solo and want to be surprised; maybe you’re running a zero-preparation, all-improv game; or maybe you just don’t feel like doing cartography today.

In Exploration mode, you’ll get a map to explore: a dungeon, an area of wilderness, a city neighborhood, or the like. The map is hand-drawn, procedurally stitched together, and populated with interesting locations and encounters, with every monster, trap, and treasure hoard marked. If you like a map, you can save it; that can be a piece of your campaign world now. This is full Tolkien worldbuilding mode.

Unlike Inspiration mode, Exploration mode provides content at a measured pace. There is the occasional empty dungeon room or deserted hex. While many weapons and armor have cool powers and variations, sometimes the party will just find a plain +1 sword. Treasure is doled out at around the by-the-book rate so that party treasure will match the 5e treasure assumptions.

In other words, Exploration Mode creates something close to a by-the-book D&D campaign (with the addition of hundreds of new monsters, thousands of magic item variants, and tens of thousands of unique encounter details).

exploration in the dungeon

Let me talk in greater detail about what “exploration mode” looks like for the dungeon. This will be completely testable in the first beta build. (“Exploration mode” civilization and wilderness hex-crawl maps will be in a later beta release.)

In Exploration mode, you can generate a complete, procedurally-generated, multi-level dungeon.

Each dungeon level comes with an explorable map drawn in the style of my Random Dungeon Generator as a Dungeon Map poster (but on a phone screen instead of a 3-foot-tall poster.) The map is created with a modified version of the Dungeon Generator rules, though I’ve tweaked them to provide consistency: I avoid overlapping rooms, make dungeons’ sizes consistent and configurable, guarantee stairs down to the next level, etc.

I’ve also modified the official random-dungeon rules to make an Exploration Mode dungeon as much like a human-designed dungeon as possible.

Each dungeon level has a level boss, and the whole level has a consistent theme appropriate to that boss. For instance, a “death knight tomb” will likely contain sarcophagi and other tomb trappings, and will feature many (but not exclusively) undead encounters. The climactic encounter with the death knight will be a difficult one for your level.

Each dungeon level will feature random encounters, tricks, traps, secret doors, puzzling room descriptions, and everything else you’d expect from an underground death trap.

If you like a certain dungeon, you can save your party’s location and return to it week after week. You might fight skeletons on level 1 one week, and a few sessions later be fighting trolls on level 6, all within the same dungeon.

Inspiration AND exploration

Ok, so Inspiration mode is Tinder for DMs – swipe left for new ideas – and exploration mode is Tolkien for DMs – instant keyed maps of any part of your world. Can you have both together?

Well, apart from the fact that you as DM can, and SHOULD, overrule anything and everything that the app suggests, the software allows you to combine both approaches. You can “swipe left” in exploration mode to reroll any encounter or treasure. Get to the end of the Death Knight dungeon and decide you don’t feel like running a Death Knight? Swipe left to reroll the contents of the room! Now it’s a blue dragon lair or whatever. Or, if you have a specific idea in mind – say you really want to run a demilich – you can tap the Search tab, look up Demilich, and run that instead. Nothing suggested by the app is immutable: you know your game world best, and what you say goes.

Now all of this is how the app works today. As I implement more of my ideas, and as a result of beta testing, lots of the app’s features will change. Speaking of which: Why not sign up for the beta test! Within a few weeks, I’m aiming to have stable iOS and Android versions ready for you to test. Sign up for the beta test!

Read more about the Inspiration app

Over the past year or so, I’ve been working on a phone app. It’s a DM tool: it’s meant to be a sort of Random Dungeon Generator as a Dungeon Map for your entire campaign world. I’m tentatively calling it “5e Inspiration.”

0% preparation, 100% inspiration

5e Inspiration is a tool for populating your game world with people, locations, monsters, and treasure. It can be used to supplement, aid, or even replace your game prep.

I’ve been using it to suggest random encounters, random NPCs, and random treasure to fill out my high-level, story-based, plane-hopping D&D campaign.

On the other hand, my buddy Rory has been using Inspiration for the past 6 months to randomly generate entire dungeons and wilderness treks in a procedurally generated West Marches campaign. Rory can both DM and play a PC because he has no foreknowledge about what the party is going to find when they leave town or descend into a dungeon.

5e Inspiration can also be a sort of an “in emergency, break glass” option for when you just don’t know what to do next. Maybe your players just wandered off the edge of the map. Or they just came back to town and are staring at you, waiting for the next adventure hook. Maybe it’s time to reveal the campaign villain and you lost the scrap of paper with his name on it, and the only name you can think of at the moment is “Smerdley.”

5e Inspiration also enables true solo D&D. With the app as DM and you as player and referee, you can play a complete game of D&D on your own. You can spelunk dungeons, wade through swamps in search of lost idols, pick up rumors in town, and race across city rooftops pursued by angry guards. The app provides the dungeons, swamps, rumors, and rooftops.

5e Inspiration also includes a dice roller and a built-in SRD reference, so you can DM with only your phone.

what this app is not

5e Inspiration is NOT an index of dozens of random generators. As a DM, I don’t want to browse or navigate through menus to find the table I want. You know what’s not fun for players? Watching the DM play with their phone.

In my vision, EVERYTHING YOU NEED IS ON THE SCREEN WHEN YOU LOAD UP THE APP: map, terrain, monsters or NPCs with their own agendas, and treasure, all suitable to your party’s level and location. If you don’t like the suggestions, reroll for new ones.

This app is NOT a D&D Beyond competitor. D&D Beyond is a complete D&D rules reference, aimed at both players and DMs, with an ever-expanding library of official content.

While my app includes a searchable SRD reference, its main function is to suggest D&D scenes that you can drop into your game session. It’s purely a DM tool. And it’ll have an ever-expanding library of unofficial content.

The app is NOT a strict recreation of the 5e random NPC, random encounter, and random treasure rules. That would be a useful app, but it would be a weekend project, not my obsession for a year.

Those 5e tables were a starting place. I’ve expanded and varied each of those, through obsessive brainstorming and editing every day for months, until the original rules are perhaps a tenth of the content in the app. I’ve created something that’s probably too big to be printed as a DND book.

For example: