Familiar to most, the Magic 8 Ball is a classic oracle. It answers your questions with 20 different responses of varying levels of affirmation, negation, and equivocal ‘IDK.’
It is game and genre agnostic. The online tool is free, accessible anywhere, and one button click delivers new answers. There exists a physical ball it a tactile experience is sought for.
What Is an Oracle?
An oracle – in game-playing terms – is a system to generate answers to questions, develop situations, and provide both context and conflict to play. Oracles are great for people playing games solo or groups roleplaying without a Game Moderator (GM, aka DM).
There are online forms and long discussions and books for sale that are meant to stand in as oracles. Pages and pages. But while the question-and-answer system is superfluous to the Magic 8 Ball for anyone with experience asking pointed questions in a creative context, these other oracles have some nifty charts and tables. There are simple additions for that too:
Filling the Gap: What Happens
Getting the simple one out of the way first: determining what a fictional character finds is easily found out by rolling a D6 for the number of times, then on any table of items common to the setting.
A quick googling of “loot table” or “item list <your genre or favorite RPG>” gives more lists than can ever be used – pick one or switch them up every game session or such. Further, if using the oracle on a particular game or system, you might already have the items in the game rules (which are often given out for free!).
Some examples of simple loot lists include my As Above, So Below and Gunslinger in The West one-/two-page RPGs.
Loot tends to come after an encounter – either bought from stores or pilfered from combat. To find out if there is an encounter, roll a D6 – on a 1, encounter!
Roll once every time of day (morning, afternoon, evening, night), once per quarter of the map when traveling (i.e. there would be more encounters in a dense city vs. a global overland map), per round of combat, and / or after combat. When traveling fast, using a combustion engine, or being especially loud (e.g. gunfire in a quiet neighborhood, shouting in the woods), a roll of 1 or 2 ought be considered for encounters (or 3 and more if using explosives or jet turbines).
For when company comes calling, I encourage the 2D6 table of encounters, a different table created for each area or faction (used in areas populated by the faction), or a generalized list for any moment of any game. An example of those is well-covered in this wilderness guide and this magical fantasy fill-in article. (I will include my own used in the recent month of TTRPG play!)
A little extra flair is to add a reaction system to those encounters met (friendly, ‘meh,’ eager to do ill!)
Bonus: The Hazard System
Encounters are cool, yes, but what about other things happening in the world?
Questing Beast has put together a lovely D6 tool called the Hazard System. Go check out the link and in a cinch, roll to change the world anytime you would roll encounters:
| 6 | Benefit / Breather (Something Lucky) |
| 5 | Rest / Extra Time Taken / Trap / Impasse (Extra Effort Required to Progress) |
| 4 | Expiration / Time Passes (Batteries Go Out, Clock Advance) |
| 3 | Changes in Weather / Place (Fog, Precipitation, Vegetation, Etc.) |
| 2 | Clue / Foretelling (Lead, Advantage, Hear ’em Comin’) |
| 1 | More Bad Stuff Happens (Encounters! Escalation!) |
* I would rearrange as follows to better accommodate levels of danger affecting the result:
6 Benefit 5 Clue 4 Place 3 Expiration 2 Rest 1 Bad
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A Magic 8 Ball as oracle! Readily available loot tables, a simple 2D6 encounter list, and a world-morphing Hazard System are all a person needs to navigate their adventures.
You can see how these tables-on-tables can explode – easy to understand why there are libraries of content trying to fill the niche of oracle in gameplay! Yet this at-max two-page spread of guidance is all that is required for full, engaging play. (In fact, that sounds like a future blog post!)
How do you make decisions in your tabletop games when a GM is not there to provide the context and conflict? What is missing from the toolset above?
I want to know your techniques! Hit me up in the comments, subscribe, and cheers through next week and the next post ~
Jimmy Chattin 
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