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 β and more is better β 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.)
Also, this isn't really reader-facing, but as a designer I find that forcing myself to come up with dozens of use cases for a given rule or narrative conceit in order to fill out a big stupid table can be tremendously clarifying. Often I'll come up with a descriptive or mechanical twist that seems wonderfully useful in theory, but when I try to work out actual dice-on-the-table applications for it I'll get stuck after the first three or four, and I realise that I'm about to make some hypothetical GM do all the real work for me. Not cool!
