Open Table Reflections Spring 2026

22 Mar, 2026

Introduction

I've been running an open table for my university tabletop club for about 6 months now, and in the interest of documenting my tabletop hobby I thought it would make a good blogpost to talk about some of my experiences running.

The Nerd Stuff: System and Procedures

Player-Facing Mechanics

For whatever reason, I have like 5 copies of WhiteBox: Fantasy Medieval Adventure Game, so that serves as the basis/rules reference of the game I'm running. I used small transparent sticky notes to label important sections (the class spreads, the equipment lists, the start of the bestiary and the combat matrices). I used the classic four classes (Fighter, Thief, Magic User, and Cleric) and tried to stay away from the demihuman races if possible (though that didn't always work out as we'll talk about later).

Character generation is basically unchanged from how it's presented in the book, although to accommodate folks who come from systems or playstyles with more character creation options I tried to a) use the vocabulary from those systems (5e, Pathfinder) when they were familiar and b) create little powers and abilities based on that niche. To speed up purchasing equipment, I used Necropraxis's OD&D Equipment Tables¹ to great effect; we spent basically no time on the equipment page purchasing stuff! This was a big departure for how many of my online games with more experienced players went and I'll probably either continue to use these Equipment tables or make my own in the future.

Beyond character creation, there are a few notable changes or choices that I made that I want to talk about here. The first is combat. After hearing about their benefits in the Gay Beholder OSR server, I tried to use matrices for both the players and the monsters during combat. The idea was that players could process their rolls and tell me the AC that they would hit with their roll without my input. This was largely a failure; the players I explained the system to largely seemed confused and struggled to parse the table. Some of this may be attributable to my poor explanation of how it worked, or the fact that the printed character sheet I was using had a row for both Ascending Armor Class and Descending Armor Class, but the takeaway on my end is that this isn't something I should be using at my table going forward. Target 20 seems to be the clear winner here in terms of explainability and speed at my table. Maybe, if I try it again, I'll process all the rolls on my side of the table and keep the matrices hidden, but that seems silly when I could offload the computational burden onto my players.

The second change I want to talk about is the freeform cantrips. The Magic User get 3 cantrips per day; these can be used to create some freeform effect of the Magic User's choice. This was a resounding success and something I'll carry forward in other D&D-shaped things. It helps offset the fire-and-forget nature of low-level Magic Users and gives them a flexibility that's on par with the Fighter. For the sweaty grognards, this is undesirable and impugns upon the niches created by the classes. For the chad gamers, it's a fun and fresh way to bridge the gap between the classic presentation of the Magic User and more modern portrayals of the Wizard.

Prep and Procedures

The overall structure of the game is a wilderness hexcrawl (because I love the hexcrawl, man, I really do) and I was really curious how the old Judge's Guild hex-stocking procedures would stack up against the modern hexcrawl playstyle. I used the Wilderness Hexploration document (now gone off the public internet due to the litigious and disappointingly problematic descendants of the Judges Guild folks) which basically restate and reformat the original tables for use. I was skeptical at first that they'd be useful (one of the results that I got while stocking my hexes was literally just "Refuse: fat") but despite the skepticism they ended up being pretty interesting. Of particular note are the cave, temple, and ruins generators. The cave and ruins generators present some really detailed information about the dimensions and shape of the generated structure, which is the kind of granularity that I simultaneously need sometimes while running but can't be bothered to come up with as a referee. The temple generator is frankly awesome, too. It's got a deity generator that's pretty detailed (it gives things like name, form, domain, how prevalent the religion is) alongside a very flavorful set of tables for generating the table itself. These temples could be non-adventure locations or, as is the case with a few of the temples in the hexcrawl region I prepared, dungeons in their own right.

That flexibility is one of the strengths of the Wilderness Hexploration table. You can insert or reuse some subtables for other subtables in a way that probably wasn't intended while they were being made but make sense in the context of the world. While generating a village I rolled that the lord had a small walled citadel. What better to use to learn more about the citadel than the Castle procedures?

In play, these generated locations have felt fresh and dynamic, and the level of granularity provided by the tables has made refereeing them very straightforward. I've got exact dimensions for the sizes of caverns, the diameter of pits, and other things of that nature that make rope shenanigans and adjudicating spell effects easy. There have been some truly awesome moments that came from hexfills generated by the Wilderness Hexploration stuff and I'm excited for players to find the other stuff that hasn't been discovered yet!

In general, I think the Wilderness Hexploration table provides a level of granularity that can be helpful at the table. I wouldn't check out the Judges Guild tables if you want a particularly unique or evocative experience, but if you're willing to put in the interpretive work to make the details provided by the generator fit your setting I think it's led to pretty good results at my table.

Revelations at the Table: Notes and Observations

The biggest takeaway from running the open table is that it's actually not that big of a deal running games for people outside of the "OSR" play culture. The differences between trad/neotrad/OSR/classic blur the longer that I play in those styles and, as always, at the table the differences in opinion have a way of falling away. There have been a few hiccups guiding people away from a plot-based language (redirecting people saying "Oh, you have to write the story" to something like "the story is what happens at the table") but for the most part people grok this style of play regardless of their background or experience, which is good.

The major thing that prompted me to write this reflection is the prevalence of player character death. In one session, one of the player characters decided to separate away from the rest of the group and explore a side passage that they hadn't taken. This side passage led them into a room full of poisonous gas which exited directly into a hallway trapped with a ballista (1000 Statues continues to deliver even outside of the campaign I've dedicated to it). The player character obviously died. The player seemed pretty bummed and asked me after the session ended if that sort of experience was common in D&D. It was the kind of slapstick death that I wouldn't really have thought twice about in a game online or with my close friends, but it was obviously upsetting and maybe even cruel to this person who I didn't know super well. I think I need to do a better job setting expectations with regards to lethality, or else tone down the silly trap shenanigans going forward. For the type of game I want to run and the people I'm running for, I don't think this quirk of old-school dungeon play has a place.

Another thing that I need to work on is conducting play at the physical table. Online, crosstalk is kind of the devil when it comes to actually getting anything done. Due to the pool of players I find myself in, people tend to be very objective-oriented and aren't the type of people to loiter around and talk in-character to one another. In person, this type of play is both more common, since people don't have to worry about the cross-talk issue, and also completely foreign to me, since the overwhelming majority of games that I've run have been online. Balancing the right ratio of in-character chatter and joking around to getting stuff done is different in person, and more work will have to be done identifying when to step in and say "I think it's time to move on" to preserve the pacing.

On the topic of System, I don't think I've gotten any complaints for running something that isn't 5e. There's this weird compulsion I've noticed where people think they have to run 5e in order to appease some stinky r/Dnd guy who throws his hands up and leaves if he can't play a Tabaxi Gloomstalker Ranger Fighter multiclass, but in my experience running an open table it's been nothing but positive. The real RPG nerds will happily try new things and despite Whitebox being a pretty mediocre retroclone have generally had good things to say about the game and how I run. The RPG newbies have no idea what a 5e is or what a retroclone is and so can't really feel strongly about it at all. At the same time, though, I've been flexible about incorporating ideas like druids and bards into the game. I think an approach like this will prove the most fruitful for most people in a similar situation: run whatever you want, but err on the side of being too permissive with your player's ideas than sticking closely to the rules text.

All in all, I think it's been an overwhelming success. I've had a lot of fun running the open table in person and it's been a staple at the events. Introducing people to "D&D for Babies" has been much easier than I thought it would be and I've gotten a lot out of running a game in person. Here's hoping I can keep it going for another semester worth of gaming!