Here’s a close up of something I made earlier - Although when I say made, I actually mean dropped, broke and gathered up into a pile. But what could they be pieces of?
I’ll give you a clue, they usually come with a 10 year guarantee. A guarantee, that I suspect does not cover being dropped, which is a little unlucky for me to say the least.
In 2003 I discovered a wonderful way to spend Christmas – Alone. Every year since then spent Christmas alone. It is not I because I dislike Christmas, although I am hardly a fan of it’s rampant commercialisation. It is more to do with the fact that it’s nice to get some time away from it all and when I say “it all” I actually mean everybody.
Day in, day out I talk to people and in many cases (most of them because of my job) I am talking to people that I’d rather not talk to. Even with the people I like to talk to sometimes I don’t really want to talk to them – Like when I come home and all I want to do it flake out and pretend the world doesn’t exist. I don’t yet have a place of my own and so I can’t do that as I feel that I should at least make an attempt to be polite to my housemates.
Still at Christmas my housemates go back to their families and I don’t so for two days I have the place to myself and as long as the curtains stay closed I can pretend the outside world doesn’t exist. Now I know I am sounding a little Scrooge-like, but I am not. I make an effort to be slightly festive, I usually cook something involving turkey. This year I am having turkey curry.
I shall also be spending my day reading, coding and painting my Bloodbowl team.
Merry Christmas everybody.
At roleplay last night as it was the last session before Christmas the traditional exchanging of gifts took place, as with any group of friends such an endeavour is rarely treated seriously. Amongst the gifts I found for people included the films Doom, 2001 Maniacs and Serenity, so at least one person got a good film out of my gift giving. Although I will concede that the only reason they got the film was because it was on special offer.
Earlier in the week when I had been discussing buying gifts for the people in the roleplay group with one of them and how hard it was to find appropriate gifts for people, Zak one of the other players shared his cunning shopping plan with me – Go into the nearest Christmas tat store and grab the nearest items appropriate for each person at roleplay.
I got this:
It sounds even worse than it looks and it has only the one heavily distorted song, but it has decided my next character for a fantasy roleplay game – I shall be a bard!
Furthermore to increase the arbitrary nature of deciding my character I shall use my recently created Pathfinder NPC generator to determine the rest of the basic details for my next character. One quick running of my NPC script until a bard was created and the end result was:
Errijon Darkthinker is a male Gnome bard with stats:
Str 8
Dex 15
Con 12
Int 12
Wis 8
Cha 19Errijon Darkthinker has heavily-scarred skin and a squat body.
They also have baby-blue eyes and unwashed silver hair.
Now all I have to do is come up with a backstory…
Woohoo! I’ve completed version 1.0 of my Pathfinder NPC generator. For those with the know how to download and run the program you can download it here: Pathfinder v2
For those that don’t you won’t be missing out for long. The next stage of my cunning plan is to implement it into a webpage, so that it looks all shiny and doesn’t need to be run in a terminal window where it looks like this:
The only change since the preliminary version I put up earlier in the week is to add a simple description of the character. The structure of the sentence is the same each time (for the moment at least), but with the options available there are over 7.5 million possible unique character descriptions on offer which will do for the moment.
The finished product will probably have more, but it will also bias descriptions according to race - At the moment it’s possible for an elf to be fat for example, but for the moment at least descriptions according to race is something for a future version, along with more developed stat blocks.
I know descriptions such as eye colour make little or no difference to the game, but that is beside the point it is the little details that matter and it helps out the GM* by doing as much of the legwork for him as possible. That and it will also mean no Dwarves should have to kill themselves because they wind up with an Elvish name.
*Games Master (or the one who makes the game go) for the roleplay illiterate.
Man or so the theory of evoluton would have it is descended of apes and in an effort to go back to my roots recently I have been trying to teach myself to code in Perl and become a bit of a code monkey. When I was a child and by that I mean 6 or 7 years old I used to have a Spectrum 128K and remember many happy hours typing programmes into it and many frustrating hours trying to debug the programmes - Especially if typed up from Input magazine.
However over the past 15 years barring an hour a week or so during my first year at uni I haven’t done any computer coding at all. Luckily however it would seem it is a little like riding a bike in that you never really forget how to do it, as it’s all come flooding back over the past week or so.
Inspired by a recent change to using Ubuntu instead of Windows and the knock on effect of knocking out my wireless internet I had been exposed to small amounts of code written by a friend, but started wanting to see more. To help me in this he gave me a book to introduce me to Perl and I started working my way through it.
True to form though I was soon complicating things and so where the book wanted me to create a programme to calcuate the circumference of a circle, I was making a calculator. it didn’t take long until I had a functional calculator and started adding various functions to it to allow it to do more. I’ll concede that were I to use a calculator on my computer I would still use the one installed and not my programme for ease of use, but it was a good exercise to introduce me to Perl.
But programmes should have a point after all writing them for their own sake is not enough and so I wanted to make something a little more useful. Previously a friend of mine had written a javascript application to generate NPCs for roleplay games, so that at the drop of a hat if he needed to come up with a character he could. He suggested that I try to port his programme into Perl which he had been intending to do for a while and gave me a couple of reasons to try it - Basically that I’d learn something from doing it and it beat doing it himself, especially as for him it was more of a chore than a task.
I set about the task with enthusiasm, if not skill and decided rather than port it across to write the programme from scratch myself and compare it with his afterwards to see how differently we approached the problem. Despite issues with forgetting semi-colons and only a limited grasp of Perl I now have a working NPC generator for Pathfinder, which is a roleplay ruleset that my friends and I are currently testing.
Here’s a little extract from the code:
#Routine for determining race
sub race
{
#Defines races
@race = qw/dwarf elf gnome halfling halforc halfelf human/;
#Picks race
$race = @race;
$decrace = int(rand($race));
$charrace = $race[$decrace];
}
If that doesn’t scare you and you want to read the rest of it you can download it and have a look - Pathfinder v1
Currently all it does is create a character and determine name, gender, race, class and stats so it is far from complete yet, but it’s a starting point and I am already working on the next version which will add a basic description to the character, as well as give them some equipment and should have that ready in the next couple of days.
I suppose you wouldn’t have to worry about hairloss ever again if something had already caused you to lose it all…