Print Page

Saturday, May 14, 2016

The Hiring Hall

Hiring Hall is a new web app I made, drawing on DunGen and DunMap. It's a hireling generator, sort of like Meatshields, which helped inspire me to make it by being down long enough to annoy one of the GMs I play with. Meatshields is quite good. I hope it comes back. But in the meantime, and afterwards for variety's sake, give Hiring Hall a try.

There are some shortcomings with it being a one day project, so far. The names are lifted right out of the namer for NPCs encountered in dungeons in DunGen and DunMap. So they are a bit dark and florid for your usual bunch of torchbearers and mercenaries. The weapons to character class matches are poor for some of the rarer classes, like monks and druids. So edit those when they come up inappropriate. Some of the quirky adjective phrases are out of place in this context, like describing someone as especially well equipped when they roll off the same table as everyone else. Maybe give them a bump in gear if that comes up, or a magic item. I fudged hit points to a D6 + 1 for all mercenary/soldier types, 1d6 for noncombatant servants, and D8 per level for fighter type classes and D6 per level for other levelled classes to keep the coding down.  There is room to add a lot of customization controls, and option in the historical names lists in place or in addition to the syllable masher. All of this stuff is grist for iteration.

But it generates NPCs. Some of them make me laugh out loud when I consider using them. That's a win. And it got me coding game stuff again and some of the data structures I added to equip characters for it can feed right back into DunGen and DunMap.


No comments:

Post a Comment