Five Solutions to the Birthday Paradox in Tables

“Has this ever happened to you?”, the infomercial MC asks threateningly while pots and pans clang, and elderly people slip and fall in the background. If you use random tables, particularly of the random encounter variety, you know the travesty of rolling the same result twice. This is incredibly common, especially with your standard 2d6 table, where a “7” result comes up 1-in-6 times. The best tables are written with this in mind with the most common results being the most repeatable, but some are not. But even a 1d100 table, which seems to offer a dizzying array of diverse results, repeats are sure to occur with frequent use. This is the Birthday Paradox, the mathematically maddening marvel that you’re just as likely as not to find twinsies in a room of 25. Sure, I feel special to have the same birthday as Hodag, but maybe it’s inevitable given there are at least 25 other bloggers. As the Blog of Holding noted of the Birthday Paradox and its application to roleplaying games, “On a…