D&D 5E A Monster Making tool for 5e

[FallenWyvern]

I hate to say this, but... I couldn't find the value-add of the tool. I downloaded it to see if it would auto-compute CR based on the DMG rules, and even better would be if it could auto-compute CR for a given spell list (currently I just guesstimate). But it doesn't seem to be designed for that purpose at all.

It's nothing you can't do just on paper (or in your editor of choice) but it's to format it and make it look professionalish. I tried to do CR guessing (there's some disabled code in there if I ever decide to chase it further) but the problem is while I can easily calculate CR for things like attacks and damage, it gets totally useless once you hit abilities and non-damaging abilities. "Multiattack: This creature gets two claw and one bite attack". That's a significant 'average damage' over the two types of attacks separately, and yet there's no real way to parse that intelligently. Spellcasting, as you noted, is just eyeballed from DM to DM and is an art, which computer programs aren't good at.

I'd say if I was to propose the 'value add' of such a tool was to rapidly create the output. There are redditors that I built this tool for, because they were doing this all in photoshop by hand or by editing an html file each day. This speeds up that process.

 

[Dragonsbane]

Using this to make tons of monsters for my PotA campaign. Since you were nice enough to make this tool, I will post a PDF with the dozens of elemental monsters I made with it when it's done

 

[FallenWyvern]

Using this to make tons of monsters for my PotA campaign. Since you were nice enough to make this tool, I will post a PDF with the dozens of elemental monsters I made with it when it's done

Seeing the monsters people make with it is one of the best feelings in the world, especially since it makes me realize as a DM I'm better at programming than designing monsters

 

[Edwin Suijkerbuijk]

One thing you could add that would be nice is if it would give a sugested CR based on the stats you enter, It would require cross refrencing certain stats with the table for calculating Cr in the DMG.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

It's nothing you can't do just on paper (or in your editor of choice) but it's to format it and make it look professionalish. I tried to do CR guessing (there's some disabled code in there if I ever decide to chase it further) but the problem is while I can easily calculate CR for things like attacks and damage, it gets totally useless once you hit abilities and non-damaging abilities. "Multiattack: This creature gets two claw and one bite attack". That's a significant 'average damage' over the two types of attacks separately, and yet there's no real way to parse that intelligently. Spellcasting, as you noted, is just eyeballed from DM to DM and is an art, which computer programs aren't good at.

I'd say if I was to propose the 'value add' of such a tool was to rapidly create the output. There are redditors that I built this tool for, because they were doing this all in photoshop by hand or by editing an html file each day. This speeds up that process.

Thanks for explaining the use-case.

Geeky point: when you say there's "no good way to parse [Multiattack] intelligently," have you looked into packrat grammars? I'm working on a web app for analyzing and executing complicated rolls of the form "20.d20+2:17?" ("how many of these twenty orcs make the DC 17 Con save with their +2 Con bonus?") or "avg.3.d20+5?22:d8+15" ("how much damage on average will three Sharpshooter attacks per turn at +5 for d8+15 do against an ancient red dragon with AC 22, including critical hits?") and it turns out that F# regular expressions are very nearly isomorphic with parsing grammars (see http://bford.info/pub/lang/peg.pdf). Up until now I've had real problems trying to do my parsing as a recursive descent parser on a CFG, because it winds up all kinds of ambiguous and because implementing backtracking is a real pain--but packrat grammars look like just the thing.

So anyway, I'll think of this tool as mostly a publishing tool and not an analysis tool. Maybe after I design my monsters I will use your tool to write them up all pretty.

 

[Azzy]

Because I thought if XP couldn't do 4.0, it needed a variant of 3.x

So... I'll do that now!

Edit: Apparently, Async was also not available in 4.0, so... I need to work around all my beautifully (re: ) threaded code.

If it's a lot of trouble, don't worry about it. The fact that you'd even seriously consider it makes you freaking awesome as far as I'm concerned.

 

[Azzy]

It's nothing you can't do just on paper (or in your editor of choice) but it's to format it and make it look professionalish. I tried to do CR guessing (there's some disabled code in there if I ever decide to chase it further) but the problem is while I can easily calculate CR for things like attacks and damage, it gets totally useless once you hit abilities and non-damaging abilities. "Multiattack: This creature gets two claw and one bite attack". That's a significant 'average damage' over the two types of attacks separately, and yet there's no real way to parse that intelligently. Spellcasting, as you noted, is just eyeballed from DM to DM and is an art, which computer programs aren't good at.

Here's some thoughts if you do decide to pursue it. Have a separate listing for "damage" and "effective damage" (same with hp, attack bonus, and AC). Then, you can have user defined modifiers to the "effective" entries where you could select the type from a drop-down list of of AC, hp, attack bonus, and damage output modifiers (foe example, "AC modifier"), input a numeric value ("+1"), and then given a user-defined label ("Parry"). While this wouldn't reflect on the finished monster form output, it'll allow for the CR calculation and can handle the weird abilities and eyeballed factors by reducing them to their base effect and letting the use define each of them.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Because I thought if XP couldn't do 4.0, it needed a variant of 3.x

So... I'll do that now!

Edit: Apparently, Async was also not available in 4.0, so... I need to work around all my beautifully (re: ) threaded code.

Async as a concept actually originated with F# back in 4.0, and there's nothing fundamental which prevents C# compilers which understand async from targetting 4.0. It's really just syntactic sugar. I haven't used the following but the Microsoft announcement says it allows you to use async with .NET 4.0-targetting code:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bclteam/archive/2013/04/17/microsoft-bcl-async-is-now-stable.aspx

 

[ExploderWizard]

It is a cool little program, but I have to disable antivirus every time I run it or the exe gets removed as a suspicious program.

 

[FallenWyvern]

Thanks for explaining the use-case.

Geeky point: when you say there's "no good way to parse [Multiattack] intelligently," have you looked into packrat grammars? I'm working on a web app for analyzing and executing complicated rolls of the form "20.d20+2:17?" ("how many of these twenty orcs make the DC 17 Con save with their +2 Con bonus?") or "avg.3.d20+5?22:d8+15" ("how much damage on average will three Sharpshooter attacks per turn at +5 for d8+15 do against an ancient red dragon with AC 22, including critical hits?") and it turns out that F# regular expressions are very nearly isomorphic with parsing grammars (see http://bford.info/pub/lang/peg.pdf). Up until now I've had real problems trying to do my parsing as a recursive descent parser on a CFG, because it winds up all kinds of ambiguous and because implementing backtracking is a real pain--but packrat grammars look like just the thing.

So anyway, I'll think of this tool as mostly a publishing tool and not an analysis tool. Maybe after I design my monsters I will use your tool to write them up all pretty.

That could work (the packrat stuff, which I hadn't seen before) but there's still a huge ground to cover there. Multiattack would be a good candidate, but Fiendish Charm from the Cambion wouldn't parse as anything other than a DC14 spell. I'm reading the abstract but I'm not sure my program is a good candidate for something like that.

One thing I was thinking about was an 'estimator', which would look over each ability and tell you which CR it *thinks* that trait belongs to. If it came across anything it could parse (dice notation and DC's most notably) it would try to guess the CR that specific thing belongs to. Then it could look at stats and suggest if it's in line with a few key (read: not copyrighted) monsters for comparison. Same deal with resistances and the like. It wouldn't calculate, but rather crawl your creation to see how in line it is.