Re: (TFT) Tables for the rolling...

[raito@raito.com]

Quoting Joe Hartley <jh@brainiac.com>:
> Heh, I was just going to ask about running it in emacs! Only one way to
> see what will happen, I guess. 

I've only lately been getting into emacs (mostly because it's the 
default IDE for Lisp, using SLIME). I didn't for years because I was 
traumatized at a (not so) young age by emacs on a VT100 connected to a 
VAX. 

Really, I don't know much emacs lisp at all. I've been using SBCL and 
Clisp on Mac and Windows (not having a Linux box at present). I don't 
recommend building Clisp from scratch, though I got it done. THe 
installs for SBCL on both systems worked very well for me. 

The current macro takes the name of the table, the arguments, and a 
bunch of pairs where the first member is the number of chances that the 
result will happen, and the result. I preferred that to die rolls 
because computers are as good at that as anything else, and I didn't 
want to have to recompute everything if an argument to the table 
changed the odds. Maybe someday I'll add the usual sorts of die rolls 
to the thing (probably by making a macro to use the table macro). 

I do know that I'll want to build on it so that I can port the gem and 
jewelry table to it, which requires being able to state ahead of time 
what the result of rolling on a table will be. That shouldn't be too 
hard. 

With the heraldry stuff, I'm generating an intermediate format with the 
tables, chock full of keyword symbols and structure. I've found that 
heraldic language really isn't a context-free grammar, so while I could 
generate a blazon, taking that blazon and parsing it into the emblazon 
would be prohibitively difficult. However, going from the intermediate 
form to either blazon (words) or emblazon (picture) would not be as 
difficult. 

My recent picking up of the heraldry stuff again has to do with my 
great dissatisfaction with the SCA College of Heralds. It seems like an 
unfortunate number of them get their rocks off by saying no, instead of 
saying yes. So what I wanted, besides porting my old random heraldry 
tables, was to expand them such that someone could just keep rolling 
new coats of arms and see what they looked like, and if they liked any 
of them. Using Lisp will make dealing with the vast number of possible 
charges and their variants and quirks a lot easier. I'll probably get 
around to posting that (or links) when I get more done on it. I'm in 
the middle of getting all the OpenGL Redbook examples ported over for 
the cl-opengl project at the moment. 

Obligatory role-playing content. A long time ago, one GM needed a bunch 
of noble characters. He took my heraldry tables and generated a bunch 
of devices (arms). He then made the characters based on what he thought 
someone who would have those arms would have been like. 

It might also be nice to work this in with a mapping sort of program, 
so that GMs might really be able to run the sorts of random encounters 
that happen while travelling. All you'd have to do is say that the 
party is going form here to there. The map/table combo would tell the 
GM where, when, and what the next encounter was. 

Neil Gilmore
raito@raito.com
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