I was ripping the text of a table-heavy book, as I am wont to do, to capture the content for use in my random table roller.
For personal use, of course. The product does not contain Open Gaming Content or have any other open license.
Word makes a good staging area for me because of the text editing capabilities. Capturing to Word also means I can render it through my workflow, giving me a PDF that looks the way I like it. This is not just a formatting matter, I often add quality of life elements that make it easier for me to use.
For example, in Pathfinder Occult Adventures, the occult ritual benchmarks by school are presented as a series of one-liners, one per school. This was easy to lay out in a table and much more readable.
In this case, each section of the PDF consisted of a ‘table table’ (roll to see what table to go to), and the detail tables had a ‘label’ and descriptive text. It happens the ‘table table’ could be extended to have the labels of the detail tables.
Which leads to the topic of this post.
When I added the labels from the detail tables, the ‘table table’ becomes wide enough to span the page. This normally becomes a float and moves to the top or bottom of a page and the two-column content flows around it. Under the circumstances, though, it could make quite a good section header: it’ll stand out, and is the first table you want to roll on. The detail tables that follow literally do follow.
I’ve already planned to make it so section headings can have ‘stat blocks’ and stat blocks can contain tables or lists. I’m not sure that would look right in this context, though. A table can be a strong visual marker, and I’m not fond of using section headings in place of, or worse, in addition to, table headings.
Can I make a table a section heading? Or a chapter heading?
NOT YET… but I will be able to soon.