Thoughts on a 2d6 Table about Prison

2d6 Ways of Making Imprisonment Complex

  • 2 - Get bought.
  • 3 - Conscription.
  • 4 - Someone goes on food strike.
  • 5 - Constitution checks - how can they be interesting here? Make a 2d6 chart.
  • 6 - A trio of foreigners who speak a different language are a nasty physical presence
  • 7 - A new enemy is also imprisoned for different reasons
  • 8 - Someone makes ‘friends’ but really wants three strands of hair for an escape ritual - get framed, bitch!
  • 9 - Jailbreak?
  • 10 - Sleep is hard. No lights.
  • 11 - Someone digs their way in.
  • 12 - Recess.

Is there a reason Recess and Get bought are the rarest events?

Fair question. Last things i thought of. Worked from the center, out. Center items were things ive used so far and so, come to mind quickest.

Recess in a modern prison is obviously a regular thing (though using it as a complexifying scene maybe less so?). But my campaigns prison is a garrison prison underground without certain modern moralities, as imagined.

To point out it might be more common is likely right.

Being sold, eh. I still see that as two ones on the old sixes. Especially if player agency only rises back up after the sale.

If you don’t want the probability curve of 2d6 to give meaning to the table, maybe just use 1d12?

Oh but I do…

I simply wanted to meditate on the things themselves. Are there richer experiences that are easily summarized that might cross campaign styles, timelines, etc? Is there some aspect to a longer term sentence in an rpg prison that would provide rollable, random experience that might thicken the soup of somebody stuck behind bars.

So no, I don’t want each to be equally available to a dice-rolling game master. I want there to be things at the outskirts of the table that he/she might find a bit of trepidation in putting forward to players.