Multiple tables faster?

Something I have always wondered:

Given: - a table A with 1-100 items - each item has one or more name/ value settings associated with it

Is it faster: - to have a single table with all settings for all items with a key indicating the item in table A - or, create a table for each item in table A, and store the settings there

Why? - say each item has 1-20000 settings, since the number of settings is unknown wouldn't a query for settings require possibly traversing the whole table? So having separate tables would have to be much faster, cause once you have the table name you know all settings in it are your answer