Life as a NPC (Part 1): My Adventure with Random Encounter Tables as a Way to Plan Free Time

Most people who know me are aware that I'm a planner. It may be my defining trait, in fact, though I'm too close to the subject to say for sure.

That's not to say that I can't have fun. But like my work, the fun things that I do are typically planned well in advance. Theme park and amusement part trips, movie premieres, gaming events and comics conventions--almost all of them occur on a continuously updated and thoughtfully prepared schedule.

However, where my preparation tends to fail me is in those inevitable moments of unplanned free time between commitments: that half day at the end of a long weekend when you've made better-than-expected time in getting home, the morning or early afternoon of a Saturday when the first of your planned activities doesn't occur until midday, the afternoon of a sick day when you find yourself at home and feeling better, etc.

Even then, I'm not stymied by a lack of interests. Rather, I'm confounded by the abundance of them. I like to write. I like to read. I play games. I like to draw and make things with my hands. I like to watch TV and movies and listen to podcasts. My fandoms are numerous: science fiction, fantasy, comics, and other pop culture franchises. And my family shares most of them.

So when I have time on my hands--but only a little bit of it, perhaps a few hours at most--that's when it can be difficult to choose. The debate that ensues is generally unfocused and can often occupy so much of the available time as to render any resulting decision meaningless. Just as often, the conversation doesn't go anywhere and we end up turning on the TV. (I may or may not be developing an unhealthy devotion to Destination America shows like Mountain Monsters and Alaska Monsters.)

Then it hit me one day recently that I needed to plan not to plan. That is to say, I needed to plan for spontaneity. And I already had a mechanism to model after--the random encounter tables common to role-playing games.

If you're unfamiliar with the concept, random encounter tables are printed tables in game modules or other RPG resources that allow a game judge to insert story elements into a campaign based on a die roll. How simple or complex they are depends on the number and type of die being rolled. The number of table options depends on the number of die faces or combinations available. So a random encounter table based on a single six-sided die could have a maximum of 6 outcomes--fewer if the creator of the table decided to assign an outcome to more than one die face (i.e., the roll of a 5 OR a 6). These tables can also be chained together to drive more complex outcomes--with a result from one base table leading to rolls against other secondary tables.

For some people, even just the idea of putting their free time into fate's hands would create no small existential nightmare. However, I'm a peculiar (and, I think, uncommon) mix of anal retentive and whimsical. So the idea of taking the time to not only catalog the various things I enjoy doing but to also value weight them is actually pretty appealing to me. And while I'm still trying to wrap my mind around exactly how I want to use the table, I'm skeptical that I'd do much more than use the die roll to expedite conversation by providing a proposition to either embrace or reject.

Of course, just creating a table presents challenges. I have eclectic interests, and not all of my pastimes will lend themselves to a spur-of-the-moment decision. To be viable for a random encounter table, activities will need to conform to the following conditions:

• They can't require planning or preparation that would require more than a small fraction of the available time--which would typically be no more than a handful of hours
• They likewise can't require travel that would require more than a small fraction of the available time
• I'd likely assign a monetary cap--$50? $100?--since I'd want to control costs associated with any completely unplanned short-duration activity
• It also seems like I'd want to exclude the continuation of any ongoing, longer-term tasks--as it feels like a truly spontaneous act would be undertaken without those kinds of entanglements

So what do you think? How spontaneous would you be willing to be? And what kinds of activities would you put in a random table of your interests?

If you'd like to see what kinds of activities I include--and the logic I'll have used--please join me for Part 2.