mattcolville
Adventurer
One of the things that makes life hard for a GM is creating unique bad-guys. If you're like me, you've got tons of books, full of good stuff. Taking advantage of all of it is nigh-impossible unless you have several hours to spend looking through many different books
Lots of GMs just wing it, or cut corners, but I like surprising my players with interesting bad guys that do stuff they've never seen before, and being able to state authoritatively; "It's from [WotC book]." They like this too. It may seem strange, but my players enjoy knowing that I'm using the official rules. It grants them the illusion that while the game is tough, it's fair.
But it takes time to make unique bad-guys, or even friendly NPCs. Takes long enough just to make a single 12th level character, much less a whole enemy party of them. And when I say "unique bad-guy" I don't mean a monster that appears nowhere else, I mean an existing monster from one of the MMs that's been given class levels or gear or whatever and made into an individual.
But it occurred to me the other day when I was looking through Dungeon that WotC has supplied us with a phenomenal amount of pre-built unique bad-guys and NPCs. Between Dungeon, and official WotC adventures, and the unique NPCs in the class books and the unique monsters in the Monster Manuals, there's probably hundreds of 3.5-legal "official" monsters and NPCs.
If they were somehow collected into a searchable database, wouldn't that be a huge resource for GMs?
My first thought, and by far the easiest to do, would be simply to index all the WotC content for this stuff. So you search for "goblin" and find that there's a 3rd level goblin sorcerer in Dungeon 987 or whatever. You have that issue; you have your unique goblin sorcerer with gear and spells memorized, ready to use.
Now that would be, it seems, very useful.
But even MORE useful would be a real database with the info in it! So you don't need Dungeon 987 or whatever, the bad guy is IN the database.
This would, obviously, require A: some database software and B: people entering in the monsters/NPCs.
My first thought was FileMaker Pro, database software I've relied on for 10 years now. But few people have a copy of it, so what good would that be?
Then I thought; an SQL database with a web front-end that allowed anyone to add entries would be perfect. Mistakes would be made, but they'd be discovered and fixed, a la a wiki. You could have a vetting system whereby all entries had to be double-checked by at least one other person before being made available to the search.
The thing could have a list of feats and spells and gear, so that when you print out your bad guy, it tells you what his feats, spells, gear, and special abilities do. No need to cross reference other books when running the monster. It could know when a new feat/spell/item/ability has been entered as part of a NPC/Monster entry and prompt the user to enter what it does. Then that feat/spell/gear whatever is in there and doesn't need to be entered again.
The benefit of this is; it's just data-entry. Apart from entering numbers in a book, no one would actually be taking the time to make any NPCs or Monsters. *That's* time consuming. I reckon a dude could be entered into the database in 10-15 minutes. Because we're using WotC for validation, there's no rules to double check...or even *know*. People could enter dudes without even knowing what they DID. That's critical; this would not be a database for your own homebrew stuff (although that could be an option, as long as you could turn it off) because that requires depending on all the users to correctly validate their creations. Relying on WotC isn't perfect, they make lots of mistakes, but I'd rather rely on the mistakes of the dudes who make the game, than the mistakes of all the players.
For me, I would restrict this to WotC content. A lot of third party NPCs and creatures rely on gear and spells and whatnot from that third party and if I don't use that stuff, I don't want NPCs that rely on it. Whereas, by definition, I use the core WotC stuff.
That being said, there could be a flag for "third party content" that you could turn on or off depending on whether you use or like that content or not. Ditto setting-based NPCs and monsters. If you run a Non-Forgotten Realms game, you're probably not interested in FR NPCs that use stuff specific to FR not available in your game.
Lots of GMs just wing it, or cut corners, but I like surprising my players with interesting bad guys that do stuff they've never seen before, and being able to state authoritatively; "It's from [WotC book]." They like this too. It may seem strange, but my players enjoy knowing that I'm using the official rules. It grants them the illusion that while the game is tough, it's fair.
But it takes time to make unique bad-guys, or even friendly NPCs. Takes long enough just to make a single 12th level character, much less a whole enemy party of them. And when I say "unique bad-guy" I don't mean a monster that appears nowhere else, I mean an existing monster from one of the MMs that's been given class levels or gear or whatever and made into an individual.
But it occurred to me the other day when I was looking through Dungeon that WotC has supplied us with a phenomenal amount of pre-built unique bad-guys and NPCs. Between Dungeon, and official WotC adventures, and the unique NPCs in the class books and the unique monsters in the Monster Manuals, there's probably hundreds of 3.5-legal "official" monsters and NPCs.
If they were somehow collected into a searchable database, wouldn't that be a huge resource for GMs?
My first thought, and by far the easiest to do, would be simply to index all the WotC content for this stuff. So you search for "goblin" and find that there's a 3rd level goblin sorcerer in Dungeon 987 or whatever. You have that issue; you have your unique goblin sorcerer with gear and spells memorized, ready to use.
Now that would be, it seems, very useful.
But even MORE useful would be a real database with the info in it! So you don't need Dungeon 987 or whatever, the bad guy is IN the database.
This would, obviously, require A: some database software and B: people entering in the monsters/NPCs.
My first thought was FileMaker Pro, database software I've relied on for 10 years now. But few people have a copy of it, so what good would that be?
Then I thought; an SQL database with a web front-end that allowed anyone to add entries would be perfect. Mistakes would be made, but they'd be discovered and fixed, a la a wiki. You could have a vetting system whereby all entries had to be double-checked by at least one other person before being made available to the search.
The thing could have a list of feats and spells and gear, so that when you print out your bad guy, it tells you what his feats, spells, gear, and special abilities do. No need to cross reference other books when running the monster. It could know when a new feat/spell/item/ability has been entered as part of a NPC/Monster entry and prompt the user to enter what it does. Then that feat/spell/gear whatever is in there and doesn't need to be entered again.
The benefit of this is; it's just data-entry. Apart from entering numbers in a book, no one would actually be taking the time to make any NPCs or Monsters. *That's* time consuming. I reckon a dude could be entered into the database in 10-15 minutes. Because we're using WotC for validation, there's no rules to double check...or even *know*. People could enter dudes without even knowing what they DID. That's critical; this would not be a database for your own homebrew stuff (although that could be an option, as long as you could turn it off) because that requires depending on all the users to correctly validate their creations. Relying on WotC isn't perfect, they make lots of mistakes, but I'd rather rely on the mistakes of the dudes who make the game, than the mistakes of all the players.
For me, I would restrict this to WotC content. A lot of third party NPCs and creatures rely on gear and spells and whatnot from that third party and if I don't use that stuff, I don't want NPCs that rely on it. Whereas, by definition, I use the core WotC stuff.
That being said, there could be a flag for "third party content" that you could turn on or off depending on whether you use or like that content or not. Ditto setting-based NPCs and monsters. If you run a Non-Forgotten Realms game, you're probably not interested in FR NPCs that use stuff specific to FR not available in your game.
