Dungeons and Dragons

Recently I started playing Dungeons and Dragons with some friends online. It’s a fun and social experience which for me is important since I spend so much time home alone. It’s nice to spend a few hours with friends talking and playing through a cooperative story. I think the team effort is an important part for me, a lot of online activities are either solo experiences or highly competitive. Even being on the same team in an FPS is not really a harmonious experience as each person on the team tries to get the best K/D ratio.

See a Need Fill a Need

One of the significant problems for our group was time wasted by our poor inexperienced DM. Now don’t get me wrong he works hard to give us the best time he can but some things just take forever, and one of those is loot generation. Fifth edition (the version of the game we play) this downtime becomes very intrusive as much of the ruleset is very streamlined. So to help out our group, and as a little project to practice my programming, I made a loot generation tool.

There it is in all its glory. The loot roller follows the rules exactly as laid down in the Dungeon Masters Guide. Loot it split based on the difficulty of the monsters encountered this is known as the Challenge Rating (CR). Each loot roll is then randomised via dice rolls on tables. It’s a pretty simple system really, but the time it takes to roll all the dice and work out when loot your party is going to get is significant and breaks up the story telling.

Links

So that’s my little tool. If anyone is interested you can find it here to download: https://sourceforge.net/projects/hordegenerator/

and check out the source code here: https://gitlab.com/sc14dgis/HordeGenerator

Yes I know it’s pretty poorly designed, please feel free to mock me for its terribleness, and you are of course welcome to grab the code yourself and fix the problems 🙂

The End

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy the tool.