by Ramanan Sivaranjan on March 27, 2013
I’ve updated my Random Character Generator to spit out a table of characters in one go: Random NPCs. My assumption is that a list of random NPCs with stats and basic descriptions could come in handy. If anything, you can use it to quickly generate a bar fight.
A quick tip: you can add a number to the end of the npcs URL to generate that many NPCs. (It currently caps out at 1000.)
by Ramanan Sivaranjan on February 10, 2013
I was thinking the next little web application I was going to build would be something for managing notes for a hex crawl.
One problem with the way they are published now is that you need to flip all over the place because hexes are usually listed in columns. If your players are in Hex 0101 information about Hex 0201 is going to be further away than information about Hex 0116, which seems silly. With a website you could view your hex crawl as a series of 3 x 3 grids, the hex you are on being the centre. Clicking on one of the adjacent hexes would bring up a new 3 x 3 grid with information about the new hexes the players could now move into. This would probably give you a better sense of what’s happening around a hex than the way most books present things. With a web page you could even display a big grid of all the hexes and information about each one. You could scroll around on the page to see what’s up.
The PDF version of Carcosa does a pretty good job of linking to anything and everything it can within its hex descriptions. This is something you can do quite easily with a web page. More so, you could have this cross reference information be generated automatically based on the description the user types in.
As players move around they’re going to effect the world they are wandering around in. You could track these notes and changes, updating your hex crawl as you go. You could track what the players have done, and what your NPCs are doing as well. You could see a history of what’s happened in any hex, which could be handy.
I’m curious if anyone else has thought about this stuff? Is there other stuff about running a hex crawl that could benefit from the power of modern computing?
Commentsby Ramanan Sivaranjan on December 23, 2012
Tagged: webapp
Update 2012-12-26: And we’re back: our long national nightmare is over.
Just a heads up to my readers, and random Internet people, that my three D&D web apps: Random Carcosa, The LotFP Summon Spell, and my Random Character builder are all offline at the moment. My host seems to have broken them when moving my account to a new server. It’s Christmas so I don’t expect my host to get back to me with what’s up too quick, and i’m not sure I’ll have time to dig into this for the new few days.
Commentsby Ramanan Sivaranjan on September 17, 2012
Tagged: dnd odnd greyhawk webapp
A month or so ago I wrote a small Python script to generate D&D characters. Making a character for the older editions of the game is fairly straightforward, the only part most people find slow is picking equipment. In D&D you start the game with 3d6 x 10 gold. With that starting gold you have to decide what to buy. For new players I think this can be intimidating. Brendan of Untimately posted a pretty great table for picking equipment randomly: he basically did the work of buying equipment for each possible starting gold value and class. Using that table you can spit out reasonable random characters that are good to go quite quickly. Over the weekend I took my basic script and turned it into a little web application.
Right now it only picks from the 4 human classes, but should otherwise work quite well. It can also generate characters using the 1974 “Little Brown Book” rules, or the rules taking Greyhawk into account. I would describe that support as “preliminary”. (If there are any obvious mistakes, please let me know.) When I have a bit more time, I plan to add support for letting you pick the class you want to play.
If you have any feedback about the applicaiton, please get in touch. Otherwise, enjoy.
Commentsby Ramanan Sivaranjan on July 22, 2012
Tagged: project webapp lotfp summon
Over the last few days i’ve been working on a little web application to help Lamentations of the Flame Princess players go through the motions of casting the Magic-User’s Summon spell. The spell lets players summon a demon to aid them–hopefully. The LotFP rules outline what sort of demon will show up and whether or not it will listen to the players. It’s a crazy spell. There are lots of tables and dice rolling. It’s a complicated enough procedure that it produced a thread on the LotFP forum to discuss how exactly the spell works. From the discussion there I figured turning the spell into a little web-application would be a small fun project.
For those interested, the site was created using the Python (mini) web framework, Flask, and is hosted on Dreamhost.
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