4e Fan Creations and House RulesWorking on variant powers? Statting up a PC race or your version of a monster? Creating or converting an adventure? Put it here!
Random Treasure Generator (Version 2 now available)
It's finally done. The Random Treasure Generator is here! The complete list of treasure from the PH is in there, and it will generate parcels from levels 1-30, party sizes 1-8, no problem. If you have any advice on how to improve the program, post here, and I'll see what I can do. I will be posting periodic data updates as well, as new material comes out.
If you want to know how to add your own items, send me an email, and I'll see if I can explain it to you.
Current Treasure Sources: Player's Handbook, Dragon 365 "Bazaar of the Bizarre", Adventurer's Vault, Dragon 369 "Bazaar of the Bizarre", Buck-a-Batch Magic Armor, Adventurer's Vault 2 playtest, Manual of the Planes, Player's Handbook 2.
Update November 14th, 2008: Version 2.3 is now online. A few bugs fixed, some functionality added, such as select/deselect all options for the item types and sources. The biggest addition though is that consumable items from the Adventurer's Vault have now been integrated into parcel generation system. Don't be afraid to let me know if anything looks weird or doesn't work.
XML files can be easily edited in Notepad, though I recommend downloading and using Notepad++, because it can handle code formatting of all kinds, including XML.
I tested it for 1st level party, 5 members, and it seems to heavily lean towards certain armor only.
Sorry, I guess I forgot to mention that it only holds armor at this point. As I said before, I'm still filling in all the items and such. By the end of today, I may have all the gold/gem/art parcels filled in. Then I'll get working on the magic items.
Good to know it is working for other people though.
This is pretty dang cool, thanks for all the hard work so far and ongoing. I do have an observation though. I see in the parens that it says after an item that "player's handbook" is listed twice. Perhaps either delete the second mention of it, or put a page # in there instead?
Also wondering if you will try to keep it updated as new magical items, weapons, and equipment come out via WOTC publications?
If I knew XML, I'd help you out to get this stuff done.
Thanks for the tip Traveon, I guess being close to the project I never noticed that I just put the sourcebook in there and never made any mention of it. I'll make it more clear in the next release, which should be tonight. The reason its in there twice is because one is for the weapon/armor, and the second is for the magic item stuff. It looks silly now, but once there's items from multiple sourcebooks it should be a godsend. I'm thinking ahead. I'm not too concerned about page numbers because everything is so concentrated in the books right now. If I or someone else put in some random magic item from some random book that only has that item, I would suggest putting in the page number as well.
As far as new stuff goes, I'm still haven't quite decided on an update plan yet. I'd obviously need to have access to the material to be able to add it myself. I think what is likely is I'll have the basic Player's Handbook stuff in the original release zip file, then an updated set in another zip that people can download and overwrite the old ones.
Does anyone have a better plan?
Oh, and pretty much right away I'll be adding in the items from that Dragon article from issue 365 "Bazaar of the Bizarre: Ashardalon". Everyone has access to that.
I've got the names, levels, sources, and page numbers for all the magic items (not counting artifacts) from the PHB, Dungeon, Dragon, and other books and adventures in a MySQL database for use with my Treasure Trove. If there's any (relatively simple) way I can help, I'd be happy to. For example, I'd be happy to give you a dump of the tables if that would help you.
Unfortunately Asmor, you're a little late to the game. It would probably take longer for me to reformat the table dump than to finish off the rest of the PH myself. Unless of course, you could dump them into an XML file, formated like I have them (in the Treasure folder).
Actually, a dump from the Bazaar article might be useful. I can see what I could do with that. It shouldn't be too hard to write a Perl script to transform the data. Just send it to my email address.
As an update, I'm currently just finished Rods. I'm going in the order they are presented in the PH.
bazaar.zip contains an HTML table of all the items from the Bazaar of the Bizarre article. Unfortunately, the way I structured my tables and the way you've structured your XML files are very different, so it would be a non-trivial amount of work to write some queries and code to format the results in order to get them to be compatible.
I've attached a dump of the magic items table and its supporting tables (magic item levels and sources) so that, if you so desire, you can load the table and do queries against them yourself. Or, alternatively, if you want to provide me with a template I'll be happy to run it.
First off, the program is finished, hurray! Well, more like the initial data is finished, but you get the idea.
Secondly, thank you for the dataset Asmor, but I'm having a bit of trouble with it, since my DBMS is SQL Server. You're right about the dumb too, it looks like I may as well just put in the items myself.
Thirdly, now that its done, what can I do to improve it? I'll be adding that Bazaar soon, but I need some rest. Otherwise I'll get working on the shop inventory program.
Lastly, since I know you looked though the XML Asmor, what did you think of my design? I based it off the SQL Server database I was using before. Would you consider it user friendly?
I honestly have no idea about XML design. It seemed relatively self-explanatory to me, though.
The one issue that I thought you might want to look at changing was the way you've got items which can appear at multiple levels. You've got an entry for each level of the item, meaning if you have to correct it you have to correct several different entries.
Appleseeth, would you mind if I linked to your program? I've had a few people ask me if I was planning on making a random treasure generator, so there's a definite interest there.
Is there a plan to add the function for dumping a set of 'X' treasure packets for easy adventure design / cut-n-paste?
__________________
"Words take on strange and wonderful powers when they are written down.
Context and intonation disappear, and the words sit in a void to be construed according to the mood, intelligence and socio-political leanings of the reader."
--- Siri Agrell
I think the program is absolutly outstanding, and will take away many hours of tedium in designing parcels.
As far as improvments go, it would be kind of a nice touch if you could select what kind of items you are looking for. For instance, if noone in the party favors a Mace, it would be rather swank to eliminate that from the random generation via a check box. I took a glance at the XML files, and I don't understand them completly, so I don't know how you could impliment this code quickly. But either way I thought I would pitch to you the idea.
Otherwise, Excellent job! Certainly a very useful tool.
__________________ Cleric's got 99 problems but a Lich ain't one.
Wow, some good responses this time. Lets see what I can do about them: Asmor: Feel free to link to it. My traffic limit, if I have any, is sorely underused, so go ahead. Primitive Screwhead: I'm not sure what you mean by "dumping". If you just want bucketloads of treasure packets, you can just copy them out of the textbox and paste them to some text file. If its something else, I'll need some more detail. Guyanthalas: There is an "easy" way to acheive that functionality. All you would need to do is remove the weapons you don't want to see from the Weapons.xml file. I'll see if there's anything I can do otherwise that works within the XML schema. I've got a proper job now, so implementing any big changes may take a while for me to get out there. I had a whole unemployed week to get it to this point. Also, I am planning on getting both the Forgotten Realms Player's Guide and the Adventurer's Vault, so those datasets should be coming, just please don't expect them right when the book is released. Thanks for all the feedback though.
I love the program, but have a "small" request (not sure how easily you could implement this though): an option to select sourcebooks you want items from (checkboxes, perhaps?). I had no idea that Bazaar was actually a Dragon article (just checked), and there are a lot more of those coming with splatbooks, magazines, DDI, etc... not every DM will have all of those available.
Linear Mode
And yet another word from our sponsors
