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Sunday, July 5, 2015

Not yet burnt out on DunGen programming

Though probably getting close to setting it aside again while I do some other things...



Today I put in a first cut at Wilderness style monster distribution, and got in another feature I have wanted to start - NPC detailing (individual class, level, and attitude for an initial set of monster types), and treasure scaling for DMs who find my basic treasure roller too generous or stingy for their campaign. Also a few more monsters in yesterday's Wilderness list, and some tweaks to the dungeon monsters list. Treasure generation was really buggy there for awhile today, but I seem to have sorted that out.

Now that theming and basic NPCs are in place, I need to actually start using it to populate a campaign and see how it feels in practice.

Example of a Wilderness graph with location 2 selected:

I'll probably adjust the wilderness distribution to be a bit less biased in favor of lowbies, as right now the level of each is the lower of two 1D6 rolls, so there are a LOT more 1sts than 6ths.

To Do list:
Wilderness customized tables for location details and traps & keep tweaking places and monsters
Names and physical descriptions for NPCs and some monsters
Names for wilderness places
Customized demon and devil characteristics - individuals and groups
Customized dragons and giants
Add your own list of monster types to include in the theme dialog
Maybe some other sort of custom monster generation
Maybe some tying of wilderness creatures to favored locations
Theme tags for dungeon locations and theme selection for locations like that for monsters
Fill in some of the magic item tables - books in particular don't actually specify what they do.
Possibly tweak treasure gen some more.
Add a control to scale magic item frequency relative to treasure amount.
Add personal magic items for levelled NPCs
Add color/shape selection to location dialog and edge dialog
Some sort of keeping track of creatures placed in generation and putting in initial relationship between groups into the notes field.
Give cities a similar treatment to the wilderness once naming and some rules for linking a place with typical inhabitants is in place, probably with a bit more coherence regarding grouping things into districts, naming places, etc.
Possibly a no graph mode for easy generation of lists on a phone during a session.
Possibly a more conventional map mode

Let me know if any of these appeal as things you would like to see sooner rather than later.











3 comments:

  1. I just wanted to say thank you SO MUCH for DunGen! A friend linked to it on Facebook and that link couldn't have come at a better time for me. I'm 2nd in command of a roleplay guild in World of Warcraft, and although I played D&D as a kid I was never a DM. I've been so intimidated by the idea of creating D20 events for our guild that I haven't been able to even sit down and think about what I could do, but your DunGen gives me the tools to start. The encounters alone are enough to get me started, and the mapping will help not just in thinking about how to set up a series of encounters but also in where we can add elements for the RP that don't necessarily exist exactly in the game world but can be imagined there. This is such a blessing for me and I really wanted to thank you for it from the bottom of my inexperienced little heart.

    Is it all right if I link to it on Tumblr, too? I don't know how much traffic you want for this and I don't want to risk overwhelming it.

    Thank you again!!

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    Replies
    1. Sure, link to it. The traffic shouldn't hurt, since it is a simple html and JavaScript app, and runs only in your browser once downloaded, no server behind doing transactions.

      Glad it will help. The encounters it generates use lists that riff off of the earliest version of D&D, so there are many creatures that it will never roll up from later versions, and some that are purely made up evocative names. If you find other things in the Monster Manual that you want to see there, you can download it from Github, run the app from your local copy by opening the dungen.html file with your browser, after adding anything you want into the dungen.stock.js file to customize it to fit your campaign's mix of creatures and situations.

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  2. Oh, and look at some of the other resources on the web. There are some amazing generators at Abulafia for instance, and a lot of guys in the OSR movement putting out tables for this and that, and really nice maps.

    ReplyDelete