Gygaxian Name Generator

As most people know, the bulk of my generators use real world information. I love what exists because of the amazing diversity. The Gygaxian Name Generator is no different. It mimics what I’ve dubbed Gary Logic.

From what I’ve seen, his general process for names was taking a person’s name and perturbing it into something more interesting. Sometimes that process was a simple reversal; other times he added or subtracted characters. On occasion, made it into a full blown title style name. Quite often he made use of anagrams. Sometimes, he just made stuff up.

I cannot claim to know his thought process but anagram style names were plausible. Doing a difference engine was also reasonable. Making stuff up Gary style? Not so much.

The limiting factor of this generator is it’s use of real world names. I crossed many boundaries–pulling results from Old West, Modern, Medieval and other databases. I was going to use more but the query time eclipsed the 3 second attention span of most web visitors.

At this point, I still want to tweak and tune it further but it produces interesting results so its live.

On Why Digital Fails

WoTC delivered another blow to digital support for their system again today. Many, myself included, consider that a failure but why do they repeatedly fail to deliver useful tools? It all begins at what you define as a useful system.

First and foremost, people desire electronic documents so they don’t have to haul around pounds of books. Most publishers have adopted that approach. Even WotC with the release of hundreds of older titles. Still, they have been silent regarding new releases. By all signs, they have the intention of once again failing to produce any eReader compatible documents. This is a company that is firmly in the physical world in the form of Magic the Gathering. It should be no shock that they want print first and foremost.

They have also failed to deliver digital capabilities on not one but two releases now. Did they ever have a 3/3.5 strategy? I cannot recall. Hasbro is a physical media company. Somewhere upstream is a VP or P who has absolutely no concept of the internet or its abilities. Worse, is the subsidiary, WotC cannot communicate a digital strategy up that chain. Is that pure speculation? Yes it is. But the track record of Hasbro/WotC fucking up digital on the Dungeons and Dragons front cannot be denied.

Here is a tip: More and more gamers want digital books. It’s that simple, no matter what your people say. If they can go to college without lugging 8 pounds of books, its pretty obvious they don’t need hardback RPG’s any longer.

On the utility front, first and foremost quit jacking around. Most of this stuff is simple. Encounters, treasure, spells, spell books. Pure awesome randomness can do that. Where you fail is on the character side.

And that’s where WotC and I agree to disagree. It is probably too difficult to code. Too convoluted. Character creation went sideways in the Gygax era with 1E. The exponential complexity in subsequent editions makes a digital partner balk…at least it should.

Also, if you want to hammer on creative websites, WotC, perhaps you should rethink that. They are driven by consumers of your product to do what you keep failing to do. Perhaps you should encourage them. Or hire them. You know, to do that plan, that you continually fail to accomplish.

Diseases

Sometimes you grab the wrong data set. Well, I do when exploring odd things available from government agencies. I thought I had a full set of diagnostic codes for injuries and diseases. Turns out, it’s a subset of the ICD focused on diseases only. I quit parsing the data. It would make a nice random table of some sorts but isn’t quite what I need.

Disease Listing by Category

Here’s what I managed. The full data is available from the U.S. CDC.

Google Trends — ~4 Years Later

Back in August of 2010, I posted about a variety of gaming terms based on Google Trend data. While its not quite 4 years later (closer to 3.5), let’s see what those terms are doing today.

These are the same terms, with the addition of some new terms (noted below), which I suspected would interesting. Nothing has really changed over the course of a few years. Pretty much anything gaming related is sloping down. Of course, this is trend data based on search terms and there are many, many alternate ways people find materials today; even more than there were four years ago with the explosion of social media.

I also added a few terms based on systems that I hear about on a regular basis — Labyrinth Lord, Pathfinder, and Dungeon Crawl Classics. Virtual Table Top was a new entry as well, since it has been popular the last couple of years. (I tried LOTFP but no trend data was available). There are many others but I chose that small set. Pathfinder and Labyrinth Lord bucked the down and to the right trend. PF is gaining audience based on search popularity and LL is holding near flat. DCC appears to have the same general trend as gaming in general. VTT has a curious cliff at the end of the chart. People appear to be searching for a specific client rather the generic term — namely Roll20. The Roll20 trend line is awesomely upwards.

New Entries

Labyrinth Lord

Pathfinder

Dungeon Crawl Classics

Virtual Table Top

Roll 20

The Original Terms

Overall, the original terms are pretty much what one would expect. Almost everything gaming is down and to the right. Porn is holding strong but seems to have hit a wall of late. Farmville had its moment in the spotlight but lost its luster quickly. It will be interesting to track the downfall along with the “D&D” and “Dungeons and Dragons” terms. I suspect it will crater at some point in the future; a fate I do not foresee with the D&D brand. Cat videos are still amazingly popular. I have no idea why.

Video Games

Trivial Pursuit

Roleplaying Online

RPG

Roleplaying Games

Porn

LARP

Farmville

Hasbro Monopoly

Dungeons and Dragons

Donkey Videos

D&D

Cat Videos

Board Games

3D Online Games

Last Thoughts

I am a bit sad that the donkey videos are flat-lining. Cats are more popular than ever but donkeys just don’t get enough love. Perhaps they are too closely associated with jack asses for the modern politically correct aesthetic.

Some Pseudo Math for Dominance in the Social Network Dungeon Experiment

I’m a full fledged old school gamer so I haven’t used much of the newer mechanisms for encounter balancing. Still, the underlying math attempts to approximate an a metric for dominance levels of creature groups in a constrained environment.

The Challenge Rating (CR)

This is fuzzy math to determine how one creature may measure up against either another average party level and/or another creature. I stumbled on Kaww’s post describing Vorpal Tribble’s approach for determining CR of a creature on the fly.

#1. Divide creature’s average HP by 4.5 to 6.5.
4.5 for 5 HD or lower, 5 for 6-10 HD, 5.5 for 11-15 HD, 6 for 16-20 HD., 6.5 for 20-25 HD.

#2. Add 1 for each five points above 10 its AC is, subtracting 1 for every 5 below.

#3. Add 1 for each special attack (+2 to +5 or more if its got a decent number of spells in its spell-like abilities).

#4. Add 1 for each quality unless you deem it worthy of more. Add 1 for each resistance and 10 points of DR it has, and 2 for each immunity. Subtract 1 for each vulnerability.

#5. Add 1 for every two bonus feats it has.

#6. Divide total by 3. This should be its rough CR

I have a couple of issues with this. The first (#1) is the segmentation of the average HP calculation. While dividing by HD might be more elegant, simplicity is key so I will just use the average in the middle of 5.5.

Most of the games I play use descending not ascending AC so just invert #2. #3 is judgement call so to automate it, I’ll just use the raw number of special attacks. #4 will just use the number of special abilities. Designating one ability over another is complicated so roughly speaking they will just all be the same. My systems of choice have no feats so it will just be ignored. Others may choose to include it.

The simplified calculation is:

CR = (HP / 5.5) + 1 * (#Special Attacks) + 1 * (#Special Abilities)

This ignores AC for now. I will need to source a table that gives some indicator of descending to ascending armor class comparisons. Given the descending nature, I think one bonus CR per 3 points of AC below 10 (9) would work reasonably at first glance. So we could add:

CR += abs(10 – AC) % 3

Then divide it all by 3 per the original calculation.

CR /= 3

Apply this on a per creature basis then average for the group of creatures. This will give a baseline CR for the group. So now there is a rough CR for the creature(s) as a group. Couple that with the number appearing and you can begin to resolve the CR relationship.

CR is Non-Linear

Based on the explanations I’ve read, CR is a non-linear relationship. There is little explanation that determines how 1n CR = 2 CR(n-2) or 1n CR = 4 CR (n-4). There is probably an obvious calculation this non math guy is missing.

My buddy, Keith, came to rescue with a simple approximation

#Appearing * (CR^2) = Dominance Level (DL)

Dominance Level is similar to encounter level in some contexts. Both break down at the extreme of disparate levels. As a rough approximation, it allows for large numbers of lower level creatures to exist within the space of a far more dominant monster.

It is not a perfect metric as Keith explains:

For the moment, though, I would suggest when considering dominance use an exponential-based relationship. The square of the HD would be dead easy, but in D&D 3.x the CR is perhaps a better measure, and one creature of CR n is roughly equated to four creatures of CR n-4 (and two creatures of CR n-2).

By this math 8 CR 3 creatures might be considered roughly equivalent Dominance to a single CR 9 creature (and nowhere near the dominance of a CR 24 creature, 8*3=24 notwithstanding).

Squaring and adding, on the other hand, would give 8*3*3 = 72, while a single CR 9 creature would be 1*9*9 = 81… not so far off, really. For even lower-level creatures you might see 9 CR 1 = 9*1*1 = 9 vs. a single CR 3 = 1*3*3 = 9.

I’m not sure which works better. Nine CR 1 creatures against a single CR 7 creature can be a kind of even fight in the right circumstances (focused fire has some happy effects), but it’ll be touch and go and the CR 1 guys can expect a lot of casualties, possibly TPK. This suggests to me that a lower-CR creature could effectively hold dominance (the single CR 3 creature might be enough to balance them ‘socially’ — equal Dominance score). They could probably beat him if it came to a fight, but would it be worth the trouble and the possibly (likely) casualties?

Dominance Level

DL is not the end-all-be-all metric. It is one of many drivers within a simulated social network driven dungeon. The overall relationships including friendship will determine if one group tries to overtake another. On one hand, if you used it without consequence, the dominant groups would overrun the dungeon. However, those same groups are aligned with other groups or perhaps co-exist so they have no desire to overrun less powerful creatures wholesale.

Spices, Herbs, and Such — Earth based

I had an oddball request for some fantasy spice names. Like most of my projects, I start with our own heritage. History has plenty of unusual names and people utilize an amazing number of plants. So here’s the quick and unedited list of spice like items.

If I move it forward, I’d just alter names and tweak to fit the ecology. The list is not historical. Rather it is the beginning of a more comprehensive list.

Download (PDF, 35KB)

Enter the Hovel

At first I was hesitant to use this space for life stuff but for those following the RPG side of things, they can just use the RPG tag feed rather. It’s my space so choose to take the path less traveled and post on multiple topics. Random topics at times. Prepare.

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Update: Changed my mind again, the Hovel, has its own site.