Doing it with Dice

Generating short story prompts

This all started when someone shared a ‘Hallmark Movie Plot Generator’ into the Book Club with Spikes. I think it’s a fun concept, and I had a little time, so I pulled out my dice and rolled up a plot.

I have, for some reason, multiple sets of dice, even though I don’t (and never have, although I’d have liked to) game. As I was looking at the romance plot I’d just generated, it occurred to me that this was a very good way to justify and use my pretty dice. So! I started pulling together a science fiction, and then a fantasy sheet. There are, of course, approximately a zillion different ways you could do this, with so many variables that the head starts to spin at the concept. For the purposes of ‘using my dice!’ I limited this to six columns:

1. Life stage

2. Character descriptor

3. Precipitating event

4. Motivation

5. Climactic event

6. End state of character(s)

Obviously, this is a simple plot. You could do a novella, I suppose, but generally this would be a short story plot as-rolled, not supporting a longer work without adding more try-fail sequences or characters or… so many variables…

And then, I looked at the dice I had. This further limited the options to 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, and 20 (see where I got the column number?) and that meant I had to think about where I’d put each dice with the column. (Yes, I could use the tens-to-100 dice as well, I suppose, but nothing immediately jumped to mind for it).

Rolling that up, I get: a child miner who is afraid, a used spaceship is bought, cheap, the motherlode is a bust, but they save the universe!

Now, that would be a lot of fun to write. What about fantasy, then? As we talked about it, someone said there were things that are always the villain (or should be) which reminded me of a recent conversation with my husband about some characters being the good guy or the bad depending on the tale or your perspective. So I put in two columns, for hero or villain, using two rolls (or two dice) D10. There is overlap. There was also a comment that some things are overused in fantasy, i.e. elves, dwarfs, orcs, and such, so I left those off.

This was more tongue-in-cheek than the last generator. And I see I missed filling in one villain slot. Joker, perhaps? Nah… not that Joker, anyway!

On my first roll up, I get: "In the wilderness, the eternal apprentice against Baba Yaga, for science!, tech level of muskets, wins the battle and is back where he started older and wiser."

The pictured roll would give me from the SF sheet: a parent and disgraced soldier curious about an exploding spaceship acquires an alien pet and wins the war.

Which again, would be a great story to write. This concept has merit!

Will I use it? Maybe. Will I change it up from time to time? Oh, definitely. There’s so many things I could do with different concepts here. If you’d like to play with it, or roll up your own plot (and if you do, put it in a comment, please!) here’s the link to the google ‘sheet.

I can absolutely imagine this being possible for other genres as well, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn it’s not a novel idea, as I based mine loosely on the graphic someone shared into Discord. Mine is reflective of my top-of-mind characters and concepts, that’s all. Another day, another year, it would be very different I suspect. Which only adds to the usefulness of this thing, in my mind. If I did use it often, I’d change out, removing or adding, variables to keep the plots fresh and interesting to me and my readers.

So, have fun with it, if it strikes your fancy!