Perspective User Feature Questions - would that I could be at Gencon

[the_redbeard]

I've been checking out the videos and the forums and I appreciate that RW has a supportive community and a well-intentioned company.

I've got a brand new 5th edition campaign and my setting and house rules doc is already clocking at 30 pages (clearly I should be dating again). A lot of that is random tables; I'm a bit old school.

I'm a sandbox DM running player-directed campaigns. They go where they want to go. A lot of time, I'm making up new NPCs, random-ish encounters and such on the fly.

I've searched for how people make templates. I've also found that you can use html and javascript to handle random tables.

Finally, my question:

Could I make templates like "random Saxon bumpkin", "random Frankish guardsman" or even "night encounter in the Swallowed Cairns" and (as in the post above) with scripted random tables to pre-fill snippets (appearance, goal, secret, flaw, arms, etc.), make a copy and open it to find the scripted snippets executed and filled in?

I've got inspiration pad (random table executer from nbos) and do a lot of scripted random tables in excel if those make more sense than java (I used to code but its been years) if either of those two make sense to use.

I hope that question is intelligible.

Because, even if it took forever to enter and debug, being able to randomly generate new npcs already connected to the world on the fly would be worth $50+$40/year for as long as I'm gaming (and they'll have to take my dice from my cold dead fingers.)

 

[AEIOU]

You can run random table generators from RW but you can't populate RW fields with that data automagically.

I'm not sure it would be a good investment in time for LWD even though I could find some use for it -- too many critical items that will take up at least the next two years of their programming.

What you may want to watch for on the upcoming Marketplace is the Masks book. It will have 1000 memorable NPCs statted out for use in RW. Since personality is more important thatn stats to me (I can make up stats on the fly for most common NPCs) I plan to copy/paste/rename the NPCs from Masks and players won't even realize if I recycle favorites over and over with different dress, gender, agenda....

http://www.enginepublishing.com/masks-1000-memorable-npcs-for-any-roleplaying-game

 

[the_redbeard]

You can run random table generators from RW but you can't populate RW fields with that data automagically.

Yeah, automagically is exactly what that would be. Given how many programs and websites there are to create random names to full npcs, it would seem like people (besides me, I mean) use random generation when they're not using pre-fab content. It boggles me personally that it's not a feature.

So the scripted random results that I've seen referenced in these forums, what happens to that output, how is that accessed? With no trial version, I'm clueless.

I'm not sure it would be a good investment in time for LWD even though I could find some use for it -- too many critical items that will take up at least the next two years of their programming.

Hmm, well, I already have an opinion on the calendar/web client debate, but I'm still open to bribes.

What you may want to watch for on the upcoming Marketplace is the Masks book. It will have 1000 memorable NPCs statted out for use in RW. Since personality is more important thatn stats to me (I can make up stats on the fly for most common NPCs) I plan to copy/paste/rename the NPCs from Masks and players won't even realize if I recycle favorites over and over with different dress, gender, agenda....

http://www.enginepublishing.com/masks-1000-memorable-npcs-for-any-roleplaying-game

I've seen that. It's one of the few pieces of content (besides, say, a framework for 5th edition that I could modify) that I'd be likely to buy. World creation/destruction is one of the joys of the game to me. Gary Gygax was astounded when he originally discovered that there was a demand for pre-fabbed dungeon modules, saying "Why would you pay us to have the fun of imagination for you?" (Your mileage may vary and probably does.)

 

[AEIOU]

RW is for managing an adventure, a game, a campaign, a realm. It is a database, not a world generator. You still have to do the heavy lifting of entering material yourself. There is nothing in RW that will create a world for you unless you consider the Marketplace for prebuilt material.

That said, it is the most amazing tool for managing all the little details and automatically linking them together: who is where, who likes who, who knows who, where is what, when was what, terrain features, cities, inns, NPCs, creatures, poisons, house rules, deities, philosophies, races, relics, historical matters.... What do the characters know? What do the NPCs know? What is in room 9 behind the secret door? And the more material you add or the bigger the campaign, the better it gets.

 

[MNBlockHead]

I'm also running a home-brew campaign using DnD 5e rules. Generally, the scripts that you read about are just and HTML page embedded in RW, so the results show on, but are not saved on, the page. They do not give you the results you desire.

You have embed an inspiration pad file in a topic so that it launches in inspiration pad, or provide link to a local file, but again it isn't going to populate any fields.

So neither approach works well when you want to have a topic for that random NPC filled in and saved for later use.

I have not done this, but your post got me to thinking...

I use a program call Phrase express with Mouse Recorder. I can create a macro to control anything on my computer I can do with a keyboard or a mouse. I am *sure* that it would be possible to create a topic, run a Phrase Express macro and have it generate random properties and fill in that topic.

For personal use Phrase Express is free.

However, you have to ask yourself, whether that is the best use of RW. Do you need to record every NPC encountered? Even when I create a fully-fleshed out adventure, MOST of the NPCs are just described in the scene in which they are encountered. I only create a separate topic for important NPCs that have an on-going role in an adventure or campaign. Some NPCs may be "upgraded" to have their own topic based upon how things play out during the game, but I just do not use the people topics that much.

I have more people topics for divinities and historical figures than I have for NPCs encountered in adventures.

That said, I just looked at Phrase Express, and realized how easy this would be to do with Phrase Express, and I am now longer going to use Idea Pad.

Funny how someone who doesn't even have or use RW has just inspired me to completely change my workflow. Again, you can't do this in RW by itself, but if you are only using PE for personal use, it is free. I still don't think that I will use it to create a new topic for every NPC, I just don't want to clutter and have to organize so many NPCs, but when creating an adventure it will speed up entering NPCs in a specific scene.

I'll play around with it and let you know how it goes.

 

[MNBlockHead]

Having played around, my observations of using Phrase Express to create an NPC from a person template:

1. Easier to start by manually opening the person template and triggering the macro with a new person-topic open. Mainly this is because I don't know of any hotkey that will bring focus on the navigation pane and I can't use keys to get to a specific menu item. Using mouse macros don't work because you won't know what the collapse/expand state of the various menus will be.

2. I triger the macro by typing the trigger word into the topic name, e.g. "npchuman"

3. Navigating and entering randomly generated text is very quick, but selecting tags while smooth, slows things down (mostly because I have to loop down-arrow presses rather than start typing the first few characters of the tag name).

While in certain circumstances, this might be nice, I think this will work best to create a nicely formated stat block and description/flavor text using random generators and paste it in a snippet.

For me Phrase Express can do everything Idea Pad can but I can have it pasted directly into any where I can paste text.

On the other hand, if I don't like what was randomly generated, I have to delete that text and rerun, whereas in Ideapad I can keep clicking until a like what is generated. Also, Ideapad has one useful feature I use that I can't (as far as I know) do in Phrase Express and that is weight the items in a list, so that some names/monsters/etc. are more common than others.

So, I'm not ditching Idea Pad just yet, but I am going to start looking at more ways to uses the random-generated text functionality in Phrase Express when creating content.

 

[the_redbeard]

Thanks for the helpful tips, especially for your experiments with Phase Express. I may have to look into that for out of game use.

Yes, every NPC would be too much. Especially now, at the beginning of a campaign when I'm not sure what is going to attract the players' interests; they're like cats that way.

I've got two different Hanseatic/Lombardy bankers merchant factions, as well as merchant guilds in some free cities that are starting trade wars even as so many roads aren't safe. The players may take the hooks to get into that, they may not. But at the former Roman mansio (coaching inn basically) they're stopping at there are NPCs working for either of those sides, some openly, some not. I know that's there, but I haven't detailed it yet. I could build that out, but next session their choice is whether to stay on the road or figure out a way to tame/control the water elemental bound to the (now) dead witch's raft... anyway.

I don't know of another product that does autolinking and allows the DM to fine tune how much info is shared.