3.5e NPC Generation (Part 1: Needing something different)

3.5e NPC Generation (Part 1: Needing something different)

A number of years ago Jamis Buck created a well renown piece of software that for many is still to this day an important tool for game preparation, NPC Generator.  I have to admit at that point I was still busy developing software professionally and did not have the time to devote to coding my own.  After using his software for a few years I realized I wanted additional features, I needed it to do more.  I was winding down professionally and started initially looking at his source code and considered adding those features but after looking over the code I realized I would have to start over.

One of the things I love most about 3.5e is how you can create new things for it in any number of ways and with that creativity you can end up with an infinite number of possible results.  For me the dawn of the OGL era has been and is the best thing for Dungeons and Dragons.  Though with this creativity comes the time consuming task of creating good solid npc for your gaming sessions, I personally have created some npcs that have taken a few hours.  Now part of this is my fault because I love details but there still is the matter any number of npcs that need to be created for encounters.  As a programmer I was well versed in what software can do so I knew from the start I wanted the final stat block to look professional, in fact I wanted the stat block to look as if was published from an adventure.  I can’t tell you the number of issues of Dragon Magazine that were open on my desk to different stat blocks as examples to compare against what NPC Designer generated.  An npc generated should be able to provide you with a logical npc that fits the reason it exists within your role playing game world; pirates should be able to swim, mountain people should be able to climb, etc.  One of the biggest failures of most generators is they either use strict templates or they simply apply no logic to the generation process, the key statement goal is logical random npc generation.  Once you have all this done I had one final requirement, the ability to add to it whenever I needed to.  This is why online generators never appeal to me because one of the key things about 3.5e that makes it great for me is the ability to easily create new content for my world and fit it in so why shouldn’t my tools be able to handle this as well?  I would have loved for it to be handled by some fancy interface so anyone could easily add new content but with that you trade power and flexibility in your scripting system.  I did do something different than a few other tools have done in the past though; I used a well documented scripting language called vbscript rather than inventing my own or something obscure.  This would allow users to easily find support for how to create new content scripts in my opinion and based on what I seen was fairly successful because those that helped during the beta quickly caught on to the system.


Come back for Part 2