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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Luke" data-source="post: 613461" data-attributes="member: 602">For RPM its particularly important to start with generalities, then allow for personalized customization of tables to get specific. All this focus has been on weapons, but in RPM weapons are only one category of item out of many categories. Further, the generators are about much more than items, and they can also span several sources (Forgetten Realms, D20 Modern, home-brew campiangs). I don't actually have the luxury of assuming that an RPM user is simply into straight D&D.I'm keen on the "additive tables" idea, but I'll throw some curly questions your way about assumptions made, using your Dwarf Fighter as an example.- Generally I like the idea that racial prejudice will influance weapon choice for a class. How would your system automatically cope with the Dwarf having a few levels of Druid? That pretty much relegates the Axe to the display cabinet back at home. I'm thinking that my idea for allowed IDs could be helpful. A creature with Druidic levels could take on the list of non-metallic weapons for "allowed IDs", and the generators would automatically work in with that.- All this seems to be assuming that we're trying to find the *one* weapon. Looking back to the picture I have here for the randomly generated Fighter equipment, I'm thinking that weapon tables could probably benefit from being split into melee and range weapons. It would certainly make sense to ensure that a Fighter *always* gets a melee weapon, and has a reasonable chance of a range weapon.  A fighter with "just a bow" is going to get into an awful lot of trouble at close quarters.That's what I like about the open, general concept of generators. Rather than be too tightly bound to some tight calculation strategy, you can get creative, and easily work around issues.Based on the Ftr equipment picture above, I could easily link in an extra table link called "Ranged Weapons", which has a blank entry, along with several other options. That way the fighter could get his main weapon, a suit of armor, a shield, and *possibly* a ranged weapon.Is an exhaustive analysis of every possible weapon really worth all the effort? Combining all weapon proficiencies, with all proficiency groups (eg all Simple weapons), for the racial bias and all the different classes (weighted according to relative levels when multi-classed), to get a final probability distribution? Perhaps.Most of the time, you probably get Longsword or Axe anyway. As a computing example, Microsoft put a large amount of effort into optimizing their memory allocator, but the statistics came out roughly the same as the original, simple K+R algorithm. A better analgy could be a system that predicts weather based on a huge input of variables. It probably still comes out with results similar to a comparatively simple and "brain-dead" predictive program.Its worth mentioning that RPM's generators are quite different from what most people are used to. Typically generators spit out a complete result - a piece of statblock text - and that's the end of the story.RPM generators can easily let you tweak the results, or regenerate individual parts (skills, feats, classes etc). Hence expanding 10 times the effort on complex and time-consuming generators possibly isn't in the best interests of users who'd like to keep things simple.That said, the ideas are good, and worth following through.I might need to do some time trials to see how much complexity can be allowed for before things slow down too much. Its *very* important that players don't wait for the DMs computer to spit out results if he's generating a random encounter at the table. I can generate a simple race from the Dungeon Level 1 table 100000 times in 3 seconds - which is a good starting point. <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=":)" />Thanks Again,</blockquote>

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