As DM, I want a sense of "the game is deciding things" over "we are playing at my whim". I played totally improv for a decade and when I looked back at it, I found that most of the sessions had gone pretty much my way. Instead of freeing up players and enabling their agency, I had kept things pretty much in the narrow realm of my own whim.
I branched out to like story games type games like Fiasco and had fun with those. Tried things like Fate and BW.
But when I discovered the OSR (and I was late to the party, Grognardia had been blogging for a few years for example. But Next hadn't been announced), I thought that this was had I had been missing.
I played in a few games and it was amazing. What was best? Dungeon crawls with a dungeon where every item was already placed and meaningful. Like a magic mirror that we slowly interacted with and discovered it's properties. Everything was this amazing toybox, the dungeon was this living system. If we moved a rock, the rock was moved.
D&D basics. Obvious to most people here on this forum. Even little kiddies realized this back in the eighties.
But to me, who had at that time been roleplaying for 25 years, this was a revelation. All games I had played up till then had been talking about "story". (I started with some Runequest-spunoff heartbreaker in the early 90:s.) Here we had games that talked about creating a place. I've since DMed a couple dozen sessions and every single time it has been so much better than what I had before with the improv gameplay.
(I can see how this happened, too: how games started to talk more and more about "story" once they had these basics down and was in a position where they could add those elements. But since I and my peers and the people I was learning from hadn't played D&D or Traveller, I was missing out on this fundamental understanding.)
So where do the random tables come into play? Because I want to create a world, right? And they're the best way to convey a sense of a place concisely. Instead of a hefty tome detailing the 1000 year history of a city that I have to learn, give me a few tables of sights, sounds and events that the players can experience in the city. Lists, fine, but why random? Because while I'm very comfortable and used to spontaneity and improvisation, I want to get away from it being based on my whim as opposed to the whim of the dice. I want to be along for the ride just like the players. Instead of looking back at the game and finding it to be a story I told them, I want the game to be about the choices they made with the situation that came up.
Is it better to have a fully stocked dungeon with every magic mirror and its behavior pre-set than to run the game from a random dungeon table? Yeah, I think it's way cooler.
But is it fun for me to read a huge history book (which I pretty much have done now that I've read Al-Qadim) and try to learn it? No. It's a chore.
And when they walk into Mahabba or Huzuz or wherever, I'm still going to need those random NPCs and that name list. So why not give that part a little bit of a heavier load and the long prep-texts a little lighter load?
It's kind of like how Magic: the Gathering told the story of Antiquities through cards. You didn't need to read a big book in order to understand the story, you learned it while you were playing.
3PP has some books with ok, kind of dubious and NSFW settings, but they use this technique to well effect. Red Tide, Vornheim, The Land of Nod, Wilderness of High Fantasy and come to mind. In the TSR era, we had The Isle of Dread and even now my favorite The Lost Mine of Phandelver dabbles in this to make the whole Triboar Trail come alive as you quest along to various more detailed points.
That's why I always rant on Eberron - everything official is a compilation of vague notions (that often contradict), political banalities (that, if taken at face value, the PCs couldn't even begin to unravel in decades of real-time gaming), a collage of superficial plot hooks (unvarnished and straight out of pulp fiction), and poorly drawn maps (to places the PCs aren't likely to go to anyway). The gaming forums and wiki's provide far better (legal!) content at a very low cost.I don't think that's really relevant.
Settings are an entirely different matter.
No, I was talking about settings! I was the one who stepped in the “random tables” land mine and when I did, I was talking specifically about settings.
If I'm buying "ready to run" adventures, I want the details of those adventures. Both the "story" (why the creatures are there, what they're up to, how they'll react to the PCs and hooks for the PCs to get involved) and the mechanics (what creatures are there, maps as needed, stats for anything not straight from bestiaries, treasure and gear, along with other hazards & traps).
Random tables can provide inspiration, but I can come up with that myself. In fact I usually do. I've very rarely run published stuff. Only when I don't have time for...
I agree, for a more specific location such as a dungeon. I’m specifically talking about settings.
Like, Dark Sun? Sword & Planet with psionics vs defiling sorcerer-kings? Sign me up! Oh, I have to read these 2000 pages? Uh...
Eberron? 20’s era pulp action with dinosaurs and magic trains? I’m there! Oh, the book is really vague in all the wrong ways and really specific in all the wrong ways? How to use this... I give up.
Al-Qadim? Arabian Nights and Mirage were the best parts of MtG so to play D&D style adventures there must be awesome! Oh, the entire map is divided into regions and each region is a box set? Nice. Each box set is centered around a linear, literary but impractical to run railroad? Uh... next.
Planescape? Rattling the bone box in Sigil and the planes of Law, Chaos and other weird places! Cool art, cool look. But how do I even get started. I can’t even.
For Forgotten Realms, Krynn, Greyhawk and Birthright it’s not nearly as bad because they’re so compatible with vanilla fantasy or even slightly weird fantasy. I can use Vornheim to run Neverwinter if I change some stuff.
But for the more “weird” campaigns, I’d love it to get to know them in play rather than through learning them. Learning is boring, playing is awesome. <- lesson for life, kids!
Hence. Hexmaps, city maps, random tables. I’m about to start an Al-Qadim soon actually. And I’m going to use Red Tide to do it. And I’m kind of kicking my own ass that I didn’t go with some more complete setting from one of the OSR dorks instead of trying to do this mixing and matching and serial-numbers filing off and re-gluing.
Now, I haven’t looked at Tyranny of Dragons yet. I loved LMoP. It’s possible that Tyranny is eminently usable and non-railroady as long as your audacious enough, daring to go at it with (figuratively speaking) scissors, d100-rolls and glue.
But again, it’s Realms. I already have tons of resources for adventures and encounter tables and city books that could, if you squint hard enough, fit in the Realms.
In hindsight I should’ve stayed in the Sword Coast.
And yes, I realize it is dumb that I’m railing against 90:s era TSR for no other reason than “they made settings that are too cool to be left alone”.
But imagine Dark Sun being presented the way Vornheim, Red Tide, or A Red & Pleasant Land are. Easy to “grok” and no fear that “Oh, no, I’m going to do it wrong, I’m going to contradict what one of the other books say, or what this book said and I forgot, or, or...”. Instead, tables. Because what you see on the results you rolled is all you need to know right now.
Random locations, random encounters, random pocket contents, random events, random buildings...
anything that can help you convey the specific feel or tone of the setting.
Even mid-level NPCs. Like the book tells you "OK, the super big players are this cardinal and this lich king" and then the tables reveal their sub-bishops and lichettes and their various domains.