More Cohesive NPC Groups in DunGen and DunMap

One thing that bothered me a bit is how much of a grab bag each group of  NPCs was, with a completely random selection there was no implied story there. So now there is an experiment towards remedying that.

Here's what I put in this morning.

When generating a group of NPCs, build a virtual hand of cards.
Start with one Fighter card, since simple combatants are the baseline in old school D&D.
Roll a D8 and draw that number of virtual class cards to match rolls on the old random NPC class collection. This makes up the hand of class cards for this group, a subset of the whole class collection, biased towards fighter, and possibly biased towards another class or classes.

For each NPC, the class is a random draw from the hand of classes.  So now it is more likely to make groups that are a wizard and guards or some clerics, a bard, and guards, and similar groups with more than one of the same class, rather than all looking like balanced random PC parties.

Let me know what you think.

DunGen & DunMap content update

With the new theme tag system in place for details, I spent a couple hours this morning adding to the details list, so there are more to choose from when a theme or two is selected. I'm also experimenting with doubling up on details. Currently one room in six has a detail, and now one in three with a detail gets a second one. I may have to do some sort of weighting system though, so when I add variations, like more kinds of books or corpses, they don't imbalance the table too much in favor of books or corpses.

Updating my Dungeon Generation Tools

In the past month I have put in a lot of time on DunGen, DunMap, and Hiring Hall.

Hiring Hall got extended to have an option to do hirelings for Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea. Though it needs another pass to round out the occasional classed NPCs, particularly bringing up their abilities to the minima for their classes.

DunGen and DunMap got a major lift in the handling of notes, with separate editable fields for things that were all being lumped in the notes field. This is the first step in a UI rebuild that should make it a lot better for the case of saving, editing, and running dungeons.

DunMap got an important bug fix to allow it to load the map images of imported dungeons, so it can properly work like DunGen and allow at least some movement from one computer to another. This is also a first step towards allowing some sort of remote save, maybe by storing your dungeons in your Google Drive or Dropbox, so you can access them from other devices, without making them dependent on a server run by me.

Today I finally finished a long planned feature to extend the theme to the little descriptive details for things found in rooms. Now these are tagged like room types, so if you choose the fort and palace theme, you won't get the weird, horrible stuff tagged with the creepy theme. I'll start adding more again, now that I have them all tagged.

Then I did a few passes at squashing bugs that had snuck in while I was making the UI and content changes mentioned above. Maybe fixed half the outstanding bugs?