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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ccooke" data-source="post: 6415360" data-attributes="member: 6695890">(Note that I'm not actually asking for legal advice from the internet, here. I'm mostly curious as to what people think)So I've been working on a little coding project to make my DMing a bit better/easier. I'm sure most of us have noticed the NPC statblocks at the back of the Monster Manual, as well as the bit of text that says you can apply racial features to them without changing their CR. Given that both the games I run are in a somewhat urban setting, that made me very happy - I can easily tailor the NPCs that the party meets to the locations they're in. The city of halflings can have sneak-thieves with the Lucky trait. The guard in a High Elven city might open up a conflict with a volley of various ranged cantrips. Most amusingly, from a couple of weekends ago, the (greater) invisible mage the party were attempting to hunt down while dealing with a massive fight was a wood elf - better sneak ability and an extra five feet of movement threw off their expectations a bit (and they didn't see her closely enough before she turned invisible to identify her race).The issue, though, is that applying a racial template is quite a bit of faff to remember. So I wrote some code that understands 5e statblocks, can generate them in Markdown and can apply templates to them. It can even do things like pick random-but-synergistic options for Half Elf/Variant Human extra skills and stat boosts.Obviously there is no way I can ever really share the code at this point. Maybe next year, if the language in the expected free license is open enough (and I clean out anything not included). I suppose if I remove all the actual stat blocks and racial templates, put together a nice file format for allowing people to input their own and released that, it would be okay. What I'm wondering about here is: This is a pretty in-depth implementation of an aspect of the 5e mechanics. Is this the sort of thing that a "free" license should cover? I find myself in two minds about it <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" />As to fair use, I'm pretty sure that posting lots of stat blocks would be taking the piss utterly, but if people would like to see an example of the output, I'll post one (1).(I guess I should probably just ask WotC about this, which is what I'll do once the code's a little more complete. Right now, I have all the races implemented and about the first three pages of NPC statblocks. The code doesn't yet scale AC automatically when DEX increases, and it doesn't know about feats or spells yet in any real sense (so it can't yet pick a feat for the Variant Human, or a cantrip for High Elves). It's doing about everything else, though.I wrote this to make my own games a bit better, but it would be nice to be able to share it at some point.)</blockquote>

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