I had a few ideas while mowing the lawn today ( I do a lot of my design thinking while mowing, driving, sleeping, etc).
I see 2 kinds of tables in the D&D books. Stats or basic lookup tables and random tables. The 6 basic attributes (STR, DEX, CON, etc) are the most obvious example of a lookup table. You start with a number like 18 STR, but what you're really after is columns of info, possibly even individual access to the column values.
Initially, we'll probably have to skip implementing the ability to look up an 18STR to get the base attack bonus. But it should be something we keep in mind.
I've started the specification right now. All I've got written is the introduction to the business problem. Morrus will take a look at it, and if he likes it, I'll post it here for y'all to see what we're doing (and spot check the work as we go).
The initial product should probably be able to roll up results from just about any edition DMG's tables. It'll have to have the ability to roll dice results and roll against the same table multiple times (so you can do 1d6 [Monsters]).
Fancier scripting, variables, etc, may have to wait, as that's where it gets complicated anyway.
I do suspect that the nice table editor should exist, and we should be able to handle varying styles of defining the row ranges(weights or numeric ranges). It also seems reasonable to enable calling out a specific result by value.
I think the nice table editor is EnWorld's value add on the basic concept. I haven't seen a tool yet that doesn't make the user work with the table definition syntax directly in a text editor. It's not rocket science to make a dynamic editable table in HTML these days.
I see 2 kinds of tables in the D&D books. Stats or basic lookup tables and random tables. The 6 basic attributes (STR, DEX, CON, etc) are the most obvious example of a lookup table. You start with a number like 18 STR, but what you're really after is columns of info, possibly even individual access to the column values.
Initially, we'll probably have to skip implementing the ability to look up an 18STR to get the base attack bonus. But it should be something we keep in mind.
I've started the specification right now. All I've got written is the introduction to the business problem. Morrus will take a look at it, and if he likes it, I'll post it here for y'all to see what we're doing (and spot check the work as we go).
The initial product should probably be able to roll up results from just about any edition DMG's tables. It'll have to have the ability to roll dice results and roll against the same table multiple times (so you can do 1d6 [Monsters]).
Fancier scripting, variables, etc, may have to wait, as that's where it gets complicated anyway.
I do suspect that the nice table editor should exist, and we should be able to handle varying styles of defining the row ranges(weights or numeric ranges). It also seems reasonable to enable calling out a specific result by value.
I think the nice table editor is EnWorld's value add on the basic concept. I haven't seen a tool yet that doesn't make the user work with the table definition syntax directly in a text editor. It's not rocket science to make a dynamic editable table in HTML these days.
