Reply With QuoteYou could actually do that with just Excel. At most you might need one or two modules, but I suspect it could be done with no programming.
If I were to do it, I would probably lean more toward doing in Access or some other relational database.
If I knew anything about programming, I'd be more than happy to oblige. Heh.
Im contemplating downloading Visual basic and teaching myself a bit. I've found many very useful supplements that I'd love to put into generator form. Just last night I found something called the "AEG Toolbox" that has an incredible number of things to roll on. For instance, it has tables that with a d20 roll will give you a random store type (actually a few different tables, actually 80 different stores) and then a d20 that gives descriptions of patrons, their motivations for being there, and so forth. It's crazy just how many things this book covers. It's a full 194 pages of just random roll tables covering everything a DM could think of.
Now if I knew a bit of coding, I code make myself a bunch of quick generators for all sorts of random encounters, populating city buildings, and so forth.
You could actually do that with just Excel. At most you might need one or two modules, but I suspect it could be done with no programming.
If I were to do it, I would probably lean more toward doing in Access or some other relational database.
One might also consider TableSmith (http://www.mythosa.net/Utils.html). The new version provides better input options and easier dataset manipulation. In fact, watch this space--I'm going to port the Low-Fantasy Population Generator to TS in the next couple of months.Originally Posted by RPMiller
Cheers,
-Erin
Hi Koor,
Looking over the material more closely, it wouldn't be hard to adapt this for smaller settlements (i.e., towns and villages). I'm "winging it" somewhat, but given their guidelines, one should be able to extrapolate the number of districts for non-cities. Frex:
- Metropolis - 80 districts
- Large city - 40 districts
- Small city - 20 districts
- Town - 6-10 districts
- Village - 1-5 districts
Some of the district types might not fit into towns or villages (e.g., no theatre district in a village or no embassy district in a town), so the GM might have to be more selective in what's included.
For smaller settlements, I'd also suggest a new table to add to page 2: Sparse Population, with a Total Population of 250. To fill in the table, pick the District Types that make sense for smaller-than-city settlements in your campaign, and fill in the columns by extrapolating from existing tables:
- Low Pop district - 0.71
- Avg Pop district - 0.55
- Hgh Pop district - 0.45
As RPMiller states, this would be very easy to put into Excel. Or, going back to my last post, possibly even easier to put into TableSmith. The advantage of either approach is that you can "weight" the values of each class or district type to suit your campaign.
Cheers,
-Erin
Nice
I'll definitately look into doing that. I'll need to learn excel as well.. last time I tried tweaking a table on there, one wrong click and all of the columns and rows got jacked up and the information all went bad, hehe.
Hi Koor,
Excel can be a harsh mistress, but once you tame it, you can do a lot. I think Excel would be useful for keeping the data tables, but you'll need to do a little VB to get some interactivity from it.
With TableSmith, you'd still have to climb a bit of a learning curve, but I think you might have more flexibility with your output. The reason I mention this is because the DMG supplement also includes guidelines for number of buildings by type in each district. It would be relatively easy to include these data in TableSmith.
As a final note, if you're feeling particularly industrious, you could even create a geomorph-style map "tile" for each district, then have TableSmith actually map out the city, based on the districts selected. Probably a larger scope than you intended, but certainly possible and not too difficult given sufficient time ('cause everyone has lots of that, right?).
I'm in the middle of a few Chimera RPG projects right now, but they should wrap up in the March/April timeframe. If there's any interest, I wouldn't mind trying my hand at converting the DMG supplement to TableSmith (though almost certainly depending on some additional help from other parties).
Now that I'm rambling, this brings up another item: there's been repeated (and sporadic) discussion on the CC List about a random city generator. Seeing that CC3 can output command line instructions and TableSmith can accept command line input, this might be a decent stop-gap solution. What we would need are:
- Map tiles for each district
- TableSmith table for each district
- TableSmith table for each district's buildings
- Some sort of "blessing" from Wizards of the Coast to make a derivative work out of the DMG supplement. Not for commercial use, of course, but it would be prudent to make them aware of the project before getting widespread buy-in
OK, I've gone on longer than I'm sure Koor (or anyone else) wanted me to. Toss this about and let me know if there's any interest.
Cheers,
-Erin
Wow, that would be incredible!
With my current job, I have alot of spare time to just sit around. If I had a laptop I'd definitely dive into this while doing nothing at work. I might have to look into getting a cheap one and gear it up for just such an endeavor.
I'll have to look into tablesmith as well.
Erin,
Ok, I've got tablesmith, and registered it.
All I can say is, WOW.
This program is great. It took me a bit to figure it out, their tutorial isn't very good, but I ended up just cutting and pasting their demo code and teaching myself from that. This really is a great program for making your own generators. Currently I'm creating a generator which creates Inns, I kept their code for the Inn names, but i added to that code so that it gives a random description of the interior including number and size of tables. Each table has a group of patrons based on it's size, and each group of patrons is randomly given a race/class breakdown. Im only about an hour into it, but an example creation is:
I need to change that [raceP] (race plural tag) and create a [raceADJ] to fix the problem up there with humans commoners. Also, currently I've only created that one room description, but i'll soon be making more.. your first description ends up taking the most work. I'll be adding [barstool]s and [performerstool] which will require me to create a :barstool patron list, and then a list of possible performers for the performers stool. Potentially I could create a list of possible songs for the performer to be singing/doing as well.The Gladiator and Wizard.
One huge wagon wheel chandelier overlooks a central heart, 6 long tables and a performer's stool.
You see:
A vacant long table.
A wobbily long table with two rough looking humans commoners, and a human girl.
A vacant long table.
A long table with two humans getting drunk with a human.
A vacant long table that hasn't yet been cleared.
A long dirty table with a group of 5 humans.
Owned by Algith the Barkeep.
Hmm... I may just have to give Tablesmith another look. Is it still a D&D only application as far as the system is concerned?
Hi Rob,
TableSmith is system-independent, so you could use it for any game in any genre. All it does is provide a mechanism for generating random results. That's a bit of an understatement, though: there are a lot of internal functions that help you customise those results, TS supports variables, works with static or dynamic datasets, and lets you format output with HTML.
Most of the sample tables and user contributions to TableSmith are for fantasy RPGs, but this is because of user preference and not a limitation of the software (from my own research, fantasy is the most popular RPG genre (just over 75%), with sci-fi coming in at a distant second (~13%)).
TableSmith is just shy of actual programming, depending on what you want to do with it. On the simple side, it can easily help you manage encounter tables or treasure generation. On the complex side, it could build a full-on character/NPC generator.
Cheers,
-Erin
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