SURELY A LAWFUL EVIL PROBLEM

So if you look back through the mass of my posts, you will notice many many many times that I advocate for mass pseudo-random generation of dungeons, or at least dungeon ideas, based on methods outlined by Moldvay and Gygax and others... I personally stole/appropriated a huge number of tables and charts and methods, and also made up a great deal of items in a huge list amounting to like 3000 lines of code. When I say "code", I mean a couple of decision-tree and number generation code but mostly adjectives and nouns and adverbs! So my most advanced, albeit rudimentary, method is orders of magnitude lamer than a slick AI adversarial network or million-iteration learning model. It's my brain and some tables I lifted from early-TSR books.

Why, a couple of months ago I even had a text-prompt generated artwork post. Yeesh. 

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around how this method - i.e. have the machine do the hard work and fill in the empty spots myself, and gussy it up some at the end - is any different, philosophically, from the GAN-network or GPT-Chatbot method that I am seeing go around. To be absolutely clear, my method doesn't cause me as much internal strife as letting an AI do the majority of the work, but I'm on the fence! Could I ever be expected to do ALL the work involved in generating a vast, demon-haunted underground death-complex?

The answer is probably a resounding NO. But like, maybe I wouldn't ever offer a thing an AI made for sale, it would be like cheating on my art final instead of submitting a shitty doodle, or having someone write me a good dissertation instead of a half-assed one like I would probably write.

Would I try, or play, a module that an AI generated? Yeah, sure, I guess. I have deep misgivings about it in a way that I do not have for purely-randomly generated ones, like donjon.sh and all those.

The machine gods exact a high price, I guess, and like Don't Raise Up What Ye Cannot Lay Back Down

Here are some links to other things you could find with a simple google search:

http://tenfootpole.org/forum/index.php?threads/making-a-module-using-chatgpt.386/

https://aidungeon.io/  - looks like a playable thing

https://medium.com/building-the-metaverse/creating-a-text-adventure-game-with-chatg-cffeff4d7cfd - this one seems to have also used the AI-generated art

https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/za8bmf/openais_gtpchat_knows_about_dd_and_can_even/ - alas, reddit

https://www.thegamer.com/dungeons-dragons-chatgpt-ai-dm/

 You won't believe my frame rate! Haha - JK I'm messing with you. But am I, really?

So I remarked to a friend the other day that even though they are cooking up 6th edition D&D right this moment, I'm just now getting used to 5th edition and starting to see that it's not as lame as I first anticipated back in the Google Plus days. At that time, I lamented something like "I've got DCC, Labyrinth Lord, d20, AD&D, Moldvay/Cook, Call of Cthulhu... why would I need ANOTHER edition of D&D?" You must understand, I just had purchased the Codices for my imperial troops in Warhammer 40K and they dropped 7th, or maybe 8th, or maybe I missed one? Anyways, too many editions, amiright?

Fast forward to last week, I just beat Calamity Ganon in Breath of the Wild on my kid's Nintendo Switch. If I may say, so, I must say the way I did it was pretty epic - I bounced his own big-ass laser beam back at him with my Hylian shield and it was down to the wire, too. I think it was my third try. Breath of The Wild is pretty amazing not because of it's cartoony graphics, or its well-developed protagonist, or its novelty or anything. It's amazing because you can spend a day or two running around the tutorial part of the game (the Plateau) thinking "Damn this place is big!", solving puzzles, engaging in classic Legend of Zelda-style play and then once you get the tools you need to open up the rest of the gaming world it's like KABOOM. It's gigantic! A lot of it is, admittedly, sort of big and empty and just running around exploring and climbing and beating up mobs or getting your shit pushed in by the occasional super-mob sub-bosses. I've got like 25 hearts now, and still getting my ass handed to me by the lion-centaur guys.

She's happy BECAUSE she has a paraglider and a hi-def texture pack mod

It's great because of the paraglider, and because it's non-linear for the most part! When you see a vast open space before you, you can often climb up the nearest cliff or tower, look around with binoculars, spot something to check out and WHEEEEEEE paraglide over to it and check it out. You don't even necessarily have to do any of the side-quests or anything, you could kind of just gather ingredients and cook stuff and run around looking at stuff. There's even a whole section of the map that is entirely optional - one gets the sense that it was meant for bigger stuff that must have been edited out for time. The game even provides a down-hill shield-skiing mechanic for making your way downhill quickly but it wears out your shields - why would I do that when I've got this totally kicking paraglider?

Anyways, BotW has that wide-open, run around agape looking at stuff, beating up monsters and sometimes running away feeling that I like in D&D. I distinctly recall that after I'd finished Fallout 3 and the DLCs for it, I got a "no deaths from jumping" mod and spent my time climbing to the highest points of the game and jumping off of things - night-time, day-time, exploding bombs behind me. I think at one point I was actually trying to figure out how to import a hang-glider or low-gravity parachute model into the game but it's beyond my limited ken.

I suggest you leave airships, binoculars, cars, teleporters, pegasi, telephones, telegraphs, trains, giant-robots, starships, rockets, warpgates, portals, computers, networks, the whole shebang. Give the players reasons to explore and a fun time exploring and the rest of the game will practically play itself. I just got access to a playtest version of "Wasters" RPG testing doc which has a procedurally generated burned-out city and a system for populating it with factions and generating missions etc. and I think it'd be cool to drop into my local face-to-face game. We'll see.

Keep on paragliding and exploring. Seriously the Zelda folks need to do a Nausicaa game with air-to-air combat c'mon folks just money on the table right there

My question, at base, is "What makes an oldhammer Ork or Goblin what it is?" Is it gangly legs? Ape-y arms? A sense of humor and style? Googly eyes and a tongue stuck out sideways? A poser for the ages, I guess.

Long ago, I had two Blogger blogs. One was this one, the other was "The Crowquill and Lasrifle" and it was about my bad painting and weird 40K lists of witch-hunters and zealots and power armor. I folded it into this blog a few years ago, because really who needs two separate hobby blogs? Not me, that's for sure. Like a fish needs a bicycle! Next thing you know I'll be droning on about my Dead Cells/Dark Souls problem, or woodworking, or synths, or any number of other ways I escape the awful reality of the downward spiral of capitalism in its death-throes. The present becomes the future and it's going to be grimdark, if you get my meaning.

The C&L is no longer extant, but I still plastic-minis hobby, for sure. I don't play enough (Frostgrave and Bloodbowl every few years at this rate).  I got it into my head some time ago to make a mostly-goblins and Oldhammer orcks list for 6th (maybe 4th?) edition Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Also, Undead (Vampire Counts flavored), but it's because I like painting skellingtons. So I slowly acquired via eBay a lot of little monopose plastic goblin archers, and scooped up discarded single orcs and nightgoblings, and especially fanatics and other weirdos. I prime things in the spring, and then I wait a couple of years to paint them, because I'm a professional and a dad and husband and who has time when I'm doing real life and like 15 different hobbies? In a fit of pique this weekend I sat down at the table and started base-coating a small army of goblins and nightgoblins from various eras of WFB. I kinda dig the late 80's to early 90's plastic ranges mostly because they are easy to put together and easy to paint, and the Citadel/Marauder lines because of the sculpts and the personality.

So, what do I got on the workbench? I was going to do an escalating "Border Princes" list that was flexible but depended upon acquiring more orcs and gobbos and capping it off with internecine struggles between the goblin shamans giving way to full leadership by a Black Ork and his Wyvern and underlings and man, these troops are hilariously undependable in small numbers (and I guess against elfs and dwarfs). Just on paper, I guess since I've not fielded any but I do have primed and mostly basecoated:

A Night Goblin shaman

A single River Troll

10 Night Goblin spears (modular kit which means big old heads which is terrific)

10 regular monopose Goblin spears - maybe for the Blood Pass set? I think they were the second edition filler troops from the boxed set?

5 fanatics of various stature and physiognomy, some plastic, some metal, one a conversion since his hands were missin'

47 (that's right, forty-seven) plastic monopose goblin archers - hilariously cheap and undependable in terms of the game, also (luckily) cheap in real life (like 80 cents a piece off of ebay). Sort of meditational to paint

I primed these all black with zenithal green to yellow to white highspot highlights - my intention was to thinly airbrush everything but my cheap airbrush is always in need of cleaning and maintenance, so I mostly use airbrush paints slathered on with a brush so it comes out real thin and patchy and you know what? I kinda like it. No-good, unreliable, cheap and good enough to pass the time. I will probably never field them and I don't often share finished minis unless I really like them, which is hardly ever. So, we'll see.

My plan is to get these done with some reikland flesh shade, or maybe reliable old floorpolish-and-black/green-ink and base them badly and crank out some movement trays. Then fill in the command gaps with resin-printed stuff, laser print or hand-paint some kooky orky/gobbo banners, and be done.

I've also got some goblin wolf-riders, an ork boar with rider legs (but no torso), a boar-chariot with crew, and some kitbashed squig-herds. That's about it. I have a secret dream to figure out the formula to get some marauder-proportioned orky and goblin weirdos into a posable format in Blender and crank out some custom resin troops in oldhammer style but this is cloud-talk at the moment (I could probably do it in an afternoon if I really put my mind to it but WORK! FAMILY! GUITAR! ugh). I could easily manage some Ork boss torsos for this boar and extend that to an oldhammer-inspired Wyvern rider - I just need time! time! give me time, precious

I did make a base pig-faced ork head .STL a while back just to make the unit-toffs/boyz have the appropriate lineage but I let that go by the wayside like all things I undertake. I tell you, generalization of hobbies is not the way to go. Better to be obsessive and focused.

Man, Into the Odd was/is so good. Hyper fast setup: 3d6 three times, then 1d6 for hit points. Consult the chart 'n' off you go, with some interesting and balanced (in a way) weirdos. I wish 5e could be that quick and simple.

Well, you know what? It can be!

I dont have Electric Bastionland, or ItO Remastered, or more current iterations of the thing but I do have the waaaaay back ItO , and the early one with the red cover. That is not to say you shouldn't go get those new things, but this is a remainder from the Geeplus days of ItO and has wormed around in my moth-eaten brain for some time. I haven't tried it as such, but it's sprouting now and if radical alteration of the fundamentals of games is not your thing, then probably move along now. I'm ripping it from the Red Cover version down below.

So: You roll 3d6 three times and 1d6 for starting hit points (or 4d4 if you want the median to move up a little bit at the expense of headroom). You put those where you want them. The rest of your stats are 8. Yes, 8. These are 0-level dorkusses. The background will be "Oddball Novitiate" or something like that. Don't apply racial bonuses or abilities just yet. You don't get the rest of the stuff you might otherwise get, either. Save that for after your first mini adventure. Consult the chart (I hope Chris and Paolo don't mind I screen capped it - I purposely kept the resolution pretty low). Where it says 'Arcana', for the really low powered folks, you get a totally-randomly-generated magic item, up to and including Earth-Shaking unique artifacts. ImHO a level-0 with the Hand of Vecna would be awesome, and a perfect candidate for all sorts of shenanigans. Balance and fairness be damned. You can get 1d6 times 10 gold pieces, too. As a treat. for rations and candles or whatever. Then, you get dropped full on into some precarious situation. Maybe your skyship is caught an a mountain peak and you need to get into the town below for supplies (actually happened in a ItO game I ran back in the day)

Weapons do the appropriate amount of damage and types, and firearms can do either Blunt or Radiant or Fire or whatever as you like, since they could be laser guns, too in my game.

Taaadaaaa! Fast and furious - off you go and stay in trouble, kids!

It is Spring, and my brain is afire with bad ideas and worthwhile/-less projects to accomplish. I don't know what it is about this time of year but my nervous system is trying to convert from winter mode to spring mode. It's great - by "great" I mean mild hypomania feels nice - but it's bad because the raw tension of wanting to do a million little tasks and being able to accurately complete like 10% of them means I'm grinding my teeth a lot and strangely hostile and irritable-r than usual. Serotonin issues.

Here is an example project: I have in mind a fantasy baseball draft league in which we use the Deadball rules by W.M. Aker, which use standard DnD dice to simulate a game of baseball. Why? uhhhhhhhhh Why not? I only have the original version of the rules and they are great, and there has been some fun expansions of the system. An April fool's version/expansion a few years ago had my simulated game turn into an orgy of violence and it was terrific, but sadly we (meaning "I") did not complete the game and the season languished.

A cool thing about the original rules is that they provide for random generation of players, or you can convert real players from their stats. As you may gather, this is my literal jam and biscuits: I love that kind of stuff. And so, I have begun work on  not just some league tournament play ideas (probably fruitless and will come to nothing) but also a Tablesmith generator for teams. I'd kind of like it incorporate my funny Dickensian-names generator and also a real-life American names generator that could (hilariously, in my view) incorporate some "Engrish" name changing rules a la that wonky early 1990s SNES baseball game. I would work on this partly because it would allow me to populate my internal fantasy realm (sort of Mad Max crossed with Wizards of Oz) with minor league baseball teams, and partly because I want to toy with the string manipulation functions of Tablesmith... it occurs to me there's a pretty interesting Venn Diagram between 1970's era NY street gangs, Murderhobos as we know them from DnD, and bush league ball teams. Any loose collection of dudes trying to get paid is always going to be a sketchy proposition

Seems to me on reflection that Baseball and DnD are some particularly American brands of past-times, that I used to be very very fond of playing, that just sort of beg to be folded into fantasy Americana

YMMV of course

Anyways, I got a box of 6 packs of Allen & Ginter Topps "vintage cards" and here is my team, plus Randy "Macho Man" Poffo of course. Think I'm gonna add some ladies and maybe some fictional ball players, also

1. John Kruk, Philadelphia Phillies
2. Robin Yount, Milwaukee Brewers
3. Darryl Strawberry, NY  Mets
4. Kirby Puckett, Minnesota Twins
5. Johnny Bench, Cincinnati Reds
6. Reggie Jackson, Oakland A's
7. Harold Baines, Chicago White Sox
8. Ted Williams, Boston Red Sox
9. Don Sutton, Los Angeles Dodgers
10. Mark McGwire, St. Louis Cardinals
11. Andre Dawson, Montreal Expos

more to come, hold on.  Maybe i'll drop my "Minor League Ball Player" background for D&D 5e, and a "Baseball Furies" model stolen from the PS2 _The Warriors_ game... (these are all conjectural and works in progress so ill get em done when I get em done)

If you're a regular reader (I'm sorry!) then you know I dig making stuff with Tablesmith. It's a very powerful automation tool for making all kinds of neat things. A free and very close approximation is Dave Y.'s excellent web-based version Abulafia which has the benefit of talking to other users' tables. I use it to make dungeon keys and other things pseudorandomly. I took a break from untying the knot of code I've put in to make random "weird sci-fantasy" dungeon keys to work on another project. Well, to put it more precisely I wanted to include NPC dungeon parties as planned and random encounters in the dungeon, and I wanted to do it the way I used to do it by hand from the old 1e DMG on page uhhhhh 175 or so.

Easy to make an NPC generator. It really is. You make a random variable generator, plug it into the stats, plug in the races and classes (easy peasy, it's a list), and hit it with a name maker. BOOM! Done. I'm a king amongst lesser beings.

EXCEPT! If you do it that way, you won't be making viable, valid AD&D1e "character NPCs". It was human-o-centric, you see. Gary put hard limits on the demihuman races. Without very high stats, most of the demihuman races could not climb to successful heights. The thing breaks down on entry where races have limits to stats, stat bonuses, and race/class combinations have level limits dependent upon prerequisites. An easy enough thing for a coder to untangle. I'm _not_ a good coder, though, and I have figured out some of the steps (the ones I said were easy), and I am not clearly grokking the rest but it is coming to me slowly. So! I present to you a very quick list of "level 1 character NPCs" spat out by my angry, irritable Tablesmith code. How many do you want? 99? too much text - nobody would read all that. But I will give you, uhhh, 30 to prove my concept. Please note the juiciest bits of these NPCs are not attached - quirks, tragic backstories, motives, villainous plans, etc. All that can be accomplished by referencing OTHER bits of code, but I don't want that part to muss up my problems. The next bit to hard-code is race-based stat bonuses which sounds like it should be easy. It sort of it, but my brain doesn't always do what i want it to. These are all level 1's made with 4d4+2 since the 3d6 way would of necessity make many many non-viable options (which I could winnow out with code but ehhh more steps). Making Assassins evil was a pretty easy task although I thought it would be harder. There are other class/alignment needs I haven't yet coded in, if I recall right (maybe monks?)

Wyrter, Human Fighter 1, NG, S 14, I 10,W 10,D 9,Cn 9,Ch 10, Long Sword, Scalemail

Hallé, Elf Fighter 1, NE, S 13, I 11,W 10,D 7,Cn 13,Ch 14, Staff, Robe

Anores, Human Fighter 1, CG, S 11, I 15,W 11,D 12,Cn 11,Ch 9, Broadaxe, Chainmail

Maynet, Dwarf Thief 1, LN, S 12, I 13,W 14,D 10,Cn 11,Ch 14, Dagger, Furs

Nobby Quidimer, Human Assassin 1, NE, S 12, I 14,W 10,D 13,Cn 13,Ch 12, Crossbow, Hide Armor

Arenradas, Human Magic-User 1, LN, S 10, I 14,W 14,D 13,Cn 14,Ch 15, Staff, Robe

Corela, Halfling Fighter 1, LN, S 14, I 11,W 12,D 11,Cn 10,Ch 11, Sling, Cuirass

Rivière, Human Cleric 1, NG, S 12, I 12,W 15,D 7,Cn 11,Ch 16, Spear, Chainmail

Kelradas, Human Thief 1, NG, S 11, I 14,W 9,D 11,Cn 16,Ch 12, Dagger, Hide Armor

Ippadia, Halfling Thief 1, LG, S 17, I 9,W 16,D 11,Cn 11,Ch 15, Dagger, Hide Armor

Eddavan, Human Magic-User 1, LN, S 14, I 12,W 15,D 16,Cn 11,Ch 10, Staff, Robe

Olafira, Human Thief 1, LE, S 15, I 15,W 13,D 13,Cn 14,Ch 14, Stiletto, Hide Armor

Marandia, Dwarf Cleric 1, LN, S 14, I 9,W 10,D 15,Cn 12,Ch 18, Great Axe, Studded Leather Armor

Godard, Dwarf Fighter 1, NE, S 16, I 11,W 11,D 12,Cn 13,Ch 12, Hammer, Robe

Quièvremont, Human Magic-User 1, NG, S 12, I 12,W 13,D 12,Cn 12,Ch 13, Dagger, Robe

Montaigu, Half-Orc Thief 1, LN, S 12, I 14,W 12,D 10,Cn 7,Ch 9, Blackjack, Furs

Maignart, Human Monk 1, NE, S 12, I 14,W 10,D 13,Cn 9,Ch 15, Short Bow, Robe

Shadradas, Halfling Thief 1, LG, S 12, I 13,W 15,D 15,Cn 16,Ch 10, Dagger, Hide Armor

Fontemai, Halfling Thief 1, CG, S 13, I 11,W 10,D 13,Cn 11,Ch 12, Sling, Hide Armor

Cora Milgrimsible, Human Thief 1, NG, S 8, I 15,W 13,D 17,Cn 14,Ch 15, Garotte, Padded Armor

Kellum, Elf Magic-User 1, CE, S 14, I 14,W 13,D 11,Cn 11,Ch 13, Staff, Robe

Gromgith, Human Thief 1, LN, S 14, I 11,W 12,D 15,Cn 12,Ch 10, Stiletto, Hide Armor

Somneri, Half-Elf Druid 1, Neutral, S 12, I 15,W 12,D 12,Cn 10,Ch 12, Staff, Robe

Kyraatr, Human Fighter 1, LE, S 9, I 12,W 11,D 9,Cn 17,Ch 10, Axe, Plate Armor

Belpas, Human Fighter 1, N, S 10, I 8,W 12,D 16,Cn 11,Ch 14, Short Sword, Cuirass

Cheney, Gnome Illusionist 1, LN, S 12, I 13,W 13,D 12,Cn 14,Ch 15, Staff, Robe

Damarary, Halfling Thief 1, CG, S 14, I 12,W 10,D 12,Cn 12,Ch 15, Dagger, Padded Armor

Lady Knudel, Elf Magic-User 1, CG, S 14, I 10,W 15,D 16,Cn 9,Ch 10, Staff, Robe

Lindvay, Human Cleric 1, CG, S 14, I 15,W 18,D 13,Cn 11,Ch 11, Warhammer, Studded Leather Armor

Ajax Piggful, Human Magic-User 1, N, S 12, I 11,W 12,D 15,Cn 13,Ch 14, Dagger, Robe

Looks like it works! Now, the next couple of bits - making parties of up to 9 NPCs with a certain number of character-type NPCs accompanied by henchmen and hirelings, dependent upon level with certain equipment based on random rolls according to level, I anticipate a hearty challenge and I think I almost have it sorted but I need to leave it for the weekend since Workaday World calls and I must hie away. A bad thing about doing it this way is that these NPCs get generated by machine and wither away into the aether very very quickly without ever having the substance of human effort or dice-rolling the way the old-fashioned method of doing it invests in them... I dunno. I'm an agent of chaos in this regard, I guess.

Is it a crime to make 1000's of NPCs and toss them away into The Nothing? Yes. Yes it is.

Peace be upon both your houses, I commend thee to Mars and Bellona, etc.