The prokopetz brain worm is reading a source book and thinking "this needs more huge lookup tables"
Most sourcebooks do need more big stupid tables.
(I'll freely grant that my preoccupation is partly an aesthetic thing, but it's not just that. One of my biggest pet peeves with indie tabletop RPGs is how many of them will put the player or GM in a position where they need to Make Something Up in order to render the thing functional, then not provide any worked examples of what that might look like. Like, who exactly is the game designer here, you or me? I strive to always provide at least a dozen worked examples – and more is better – in any situation where one of my games asks the player or GM to Make Something Up, and you know what's an engaging and high-utility way to concisely present a large number of worked examples? A big stupid table.)
There's also something to be said about the size of a table in relation to its expected frequency of use and how that affects the players perception of of how long a game is meant to last
A table with only six options that's supposed to be consulted once per session caps your games total play time at less than a dozen sessions before things start getting repetitive
Quite so. I've touched on this before, but random lookup tables that are far too small for their stated purpose are a frequent vice of indie RPGs. A table of Weird Shit that's ostensibly meant to be rolled on at least once per scene but only has a dozen total entries is just making the hypothetical GM do your work for you in a more roundabout way.
