Random Tables II - More Excel

A few days back I posted an ultra-simple example of a random table in Excel. Since I'm making a few tables for another project, I thought I'd do a slightly more complex (and useful) example, and explain how it works. Here's the basic table, which uses a percentile dice roll and has variable ranges for each table entry.

Random Tables - An Excel Quickie

Someone over on G+ was asking about tools to make random tables for RPGs. I mentioned Excel and the poster said they weren't very good at using the spreadsheet. Since quick and dirty tables are pretty easy with Excel, I thought I'd throw together a quick example, so... here:

This is a very simple table with six entries (A2-A7). A1 is a formula which randomly selects an entry from the table using the INDEX and RANDBETWEEN functions. A8 is a text copy of the function used. Each time you hit the F9 key, RANDBETWEEN recalculates its value, and uses it as an index into the table. Here's what the INDEX function means:

• A2:A7 is the array to work on (that's six rows by one column).
• RANDBETWEEN(1,6) chooses a row value between 1 and 6, inclusive.
• The final 1 parameter chooses the first column.

Points to note:

• The INDEX function takes an array, a row, and a column as parameters. You can get fancier and use RANDBETWEEN for both row and column to create a two-dimensional table.
• The RANDBETWEEN function picks a number from the integer values between and including the given low and high.
• The row and column values in INDEX are values within the given array (A2:A7). The first row/column is always one, and the highest value is equal to the number of rows/columns in the array. Don't use spreadsheet row/column values!
• Using an array reference inline like that leads to unreadable spreadsheets. If we were doing a more complex example, we'd apply a name to the data range, and use that instead.
• What works in Excel generally works in Open Office or Google Drive documents. For example you can see the Drive version right here.

OK, that's it, quick and dirty. There's more complex stuff in this post right here though.

Deadly Blows - Critical Hits Tables

Over the years my regular gaming group has oscillated between using and not using critical hits tables. Our original tables dated from the late 70s/early 80s and were type-written copies from The Arduin Grimoire. Later we expanded these tables with new entries, and finally created multiple tables linked to various damage types.

Dice Rollers and Other Things

Nothing like getting up at 2 AM with a fresh pot of coffee to get some productive time at the keyboard. As you may or may not know I have a web site with a bunch of dice rollers, random tables and assorted other RPG-related stuff. Since I used to run a couple of computer moderated strategy games (Eldritch, Monsters!, and Iron Kings), most of the stuff is email-oriented. The last week or so I've been working on a new dice roller that's web-based and backed by a server database. It's now up and running in beta mode right here.

The premise is pretty simple. Create an account, create a dice session, share the session info with whomever you want to allow access, and you're off. And yes, I know, it's a pain to have yet another login, but no login is not an option because of bots and spammers, and I don't have the cycles right now to integrate a global sign-in with Facebook, Google or the like.

I'm eager to hear any and all feedback, either in comments here, using the comment form on the web site, or via whatever social media you happen to see this on. Thanks for reading and (hopefully) checking out the dice roller.

Random Tables - Update

I've been adding more tables to the random stuff generator. I figured it was time for a full listing of what's there. Most of these are pretty complete. The ones in need of the most work are the demonic creatures generator and the modern residences generator. Here's the full listing:

• Modern Vehicles - Cars, motorcycles, trucks, and various oddball things you might see on the highway. There are generators available for individual vehicle categories or a random selection from all types.
• Modern Residences - Brief descriptions of houses, apartments, condos, and other homes. Each includes a few notes about the interior, exterior, and / or locale. Useful for on the fly scene setup.
• Demonic Creatures - Nasty beasts with fangs and fish heads and tentacles and... well you get the picture. Just descriptions for now.
• Dungeon Doors - Doors, complete with locks and traps.
• Dungeon Junk - Random bits and pieces of garbage to give some color to that empty room.
• Dungeon Noises - An assortment of random creaks, groans, and squeaks. What was that?
• Card Hands - Sets of four five- and seven-card hands dealt from a standard deck of playing cards.

More to come.

Treasure Generator Update

I updated the random treasure generator I've been working on today. It now has at least some data for all entries and is generating a wondrously random range of weird magic stuff. I also rounded out the armor and weapon tables, so entries should be functionally complete.

I also threw together a small collection of other random generators: modern vehicles, fantasy map descriptions, and modern residences (WIP).

Let me know what you think!

Randomness Revisited

A few days ago I wrote about the random treasure generator I was working on. This is just a brief followup to let folks know it's mostly done. Mostly.

Randomness

A long time ago, I had an Amiga 1000. Being both a gamer and a programmer, I spent some time playing around with various game-related programs. One of them was a text processor that read various table-like files and produced randomized results from them. Time moved on, and the Amiga went the way of the dinosaur and dodo, to be replaced by a PC running Windows and another running FreeBSD. Once again I did a bunch of messing about with table-driven randomizers and ported the old Amiga code over to new OSes and new languages.

The latest incarnation is written in PHP, and I just finished the beta version. The first test page is now up, a random treasure generator for D&D-like fantasy RPGs. If you have a few minutes, please stop by and give it a spin. Feedback welcome of course.

Link: http://www.pbegames.com/treasury/

IT Public Service Announcement

We've just passed the start of Daylight Saving Time. Usually this is when you see public service announcements about changing batteries in your smoke detectors or, if you live in Indiana, irate letters to the editor complaining about getting up in the dark. Here's another reminder: clean your computer!

Tiddlywiki - Stat Blocks

I've been toying around with stat blocks in Tiddlywiki, trying to come up with a better way to lay them out without creating too many tiddly-related headaches with formatting and such. I'm still not sure I've gotten it right, but here are three work in progress versions of the Akinak, primordial minions of Anamika. These are screenshots taken from Firefox, so they're pretty much what I see at the table.

Dice Roller Preview

This is just a quick preview of the main screen in the Android dice roller I'm messing about with, showing roll entry and the history of previously processed rolls. This shot was captured from an Android virtual device running on my development PC.

Dice Roller Preview

I still have some work to do, including implementing some additional error checking (allowing d10s to explode on a roll of 3 or higher is bad, m'kay), adding a clear button to reset the entry field, creating a real set of icons, and getting some translations done for the limited number of text messages in the app. Still, not bad for a couple days work in a programming language I don't actually know.

Dice Descriptions

I've been spending some time programming over the last few days, delving into Android development as a way to teach myself Java. As my first project I'm building a dice roller. Originally I was going to use the same text descriptions for rolls that I use on my web based dice roller, but after implementing them I decided I could do better. I'm trying to cover as many rolling mechanics as possible, so I thought I would throw out the roll definitions here and see what other folks thought.

Traditional dice: XdY
Roll X dice with Y sides, sum their values. Y can also be F, indicating Fudge dice, or %, shorthand for d100.

Dice pool: XpY
Roll X dice with Y sides, treating each die as an individual result. As with traditional dice, Y can be F or %.

Modifiers
These can be appended to the base descriptors above. N below is a numeric value.

• +-N - A numeric modifier to the roll. The value is added to or subtracted from the final total for traditional dice, or applied to each die in a dice pool.
• EN - Exploding dice. Any dice roll greater than or equal to N generates another die roll. In traditional rolls the result is added to the total. In a dice pool it is added to the original exploding die's result.
• LN - Drop the lowest N rolls. The classic example is D&D character generation using the roll four six-sided and drop the lowest method, which would be written as: 4d6L1.
• HN - Drop the highest N rolls. Not sure if any game would make use of this. I guess you could make some very lame D&D characters with 4d6H1.
• SN - Count successes. For traditional dice, a total result greater than or equal to N is a success. For a dice pool each die greater than or equal to N is a success.
• FN - Count failures.  For traditional dice, a total result less than or equal to N is a failure. For a dice pool each die less than or equal to N is a failure.

Some things I think I'm missing, but I'm not sure if they're useful.

• Imploding dice - rolls below a certain value generate an additional roll that's subtracted from the first.
• Savage Worlds - Wild Dice. I don't play Savage Worlds, can someone throw me a clue?
• Exploding dice that don't continue to explode.

I'm sure there are a bunch of methods I've forgotten or ignored. Anyone know of a concise list of RPG dice mechanics published anywhere?

Well That Was Unfortunate

The long silence here was not by choice. My main computer imploded shortly before the holidays, so I had the joyful experience of shifting all my stuff from my old sort-of-working-but-only-if-you're-lucky system to a new box. Lessons learned:

• An external hard drive for backups is an excellent investment.
• Five copies of your music library is probably too many.
• Keeping your data organized is a good thing.

I took the move as an opportunity to consolidate a bunch of duplicate data and eliminate a bunch of stuff I really don't need.

Gaming related: I was planning on switching from Firefox to Chrome until I discovered using TiddlyWiki with Chrome requires the TiddlySaver Java module. Not sure if that's going to be a pain or not. We'll see.

Now... back to work!