I am occasionally guilty of watching helplessly as the themes of my blog posts and the focus of my game prep diverge and wander off in different directions, never again to meet. But not this time!
Here’s an old post that I actually use: Feels Within Wheels. I took an “emotion wheel” as a prompt for NPC behavior.
I’ve been using this in my games to good effect, but the table is a little awkward to use directly as a die-rolling prompt. The middle and outer rings of the wheel feature irregular numbers of entries, and some of those numbers don’t correspond to die sizes. It’s always possible to scale them up to a die size (e.g., a choice between five options can be determined by a d10 roll halved), but it's extra brainwork, and in the middle of a session when characters are running around with their hair on fire (figuratively or literally), anything that streamlines decision points is helpful. So let’s make another random Perchance generator.
https://perchance.org/feelswithinwheels
While populating this generator, I noticed some odd details in the wheel I used in my prior post. Why does “dismayed” show up twice on the outer wheel? Is there a meaningful difference between being astounded and astonished? Why is “illustrious” on the table? If I asked someone how they were doing on a given day, and they told me they were feeling illustrious, I would suspect they had been replaced by an alien or an artificial intelligence.
We could fix those things… but ironing out small details isn’t actually that important. A tool like this can be a fuzzy tool. It provides some basic inspiration, but it doesn’t need to be tightly wound or perfectly edited. Some rough edges are OK. Enjoy the generator, and have an illustrious day.
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