VBA for D&D

First post since June: I haven't been playing or working on D&D much recently. So it goes.

Today I'll dive into some of the work I have been doing on D&D: working on some VBA functions for Excel. These functions are designed with the goal of simplifying my Excel files which track combatants. Over time, they've gradually gotten more complicated. The last iteration looked something like this:

Rows are combatants; columns are information (including damage taken)

The new version looks more like this:

Columns are combatants; rows are information

Aside from a colour change and flipping the table's axes, I've also added a fair bit of VBA code. Right now, I have code for checking whether a character's class is valid based on their ability scores, code for reducing a character's ability scores based on how far below 0 health they are and code for calculating a character's experience earned. I also have a long VBA-free function for calculating a character's THAC0 against a given combatant.

I'll be posting the code up in my section of the Tao of D&D Wiki, where I am now a moderator. Enjoy!

Five Points & Sacrifices

Alexis at the Tao of D&D has recently given DMs some homework:

1.  Name five skills you wish you possessed that would make you a better DM.2.  Name five sacrifices you'd be willing to make to gain any of those skills. 

Few have accepted the challenge it seems: I myself have waited a week since the original post (yay work). Now that I have some free time, I thought it would be a good exercise.

Skill 1:
Provide better exposition & storytelling to my players. I struggle to be clear and concise with my players and make firm choices as to how the story shall progress. When describing a scene, I am erratic: sometimes I remember to add details, other times I lose focus trying to remember what details there should be. When I'm stressed, I tend to miss adding details altogether. Ideally, I'd give the players an appropriate amount of exposition and colour whenever necessary (something I'd need to determine). I would avoid cluttering my exposition with trivialities or giving them information that could distract or confuse them.
Sacrifice 1:
Practice storytelling. I am a terrible storyteller and I often forget details and tell stories non-chronologically. I need to practice for maybe an hour a week, or try the technique Alexis suggests in his comments to Connor Mckay's five points. I also need to commit to my choices. I've done several years of improvisational theatre, and under those circumstances I am very comfortable inventing and creating imaginative stories. As a DM, I tend to clamp up. I want to work on telling stories alone and remind myself to simply be firm on my decisions, even if they play tropes straight or sound unoriginal.

Skill 2:
Keep players more engaged during play. In particular, I'd like to hold my players' attention even when it's not their turn in combat or I'm talking to another player (often, my players tend to splinter off into individual goals and then reconvene session-by-session). I'd like to be able to keep my head above the action and let players know when I will be talking to them and who should prepare their actions.
Sacrifice 2:
I am willing to sacrifice some more time trying an activity which will require me to pay attention to multiple things at once: be it a sport or a job or something else. By spending more time practicing multitasking, I think I can get a better handle on doing so and develop this skill.

Skill 3:
Declutter my organization for the game. Right now I've been moving things over to my computer, and it is very messy. I have PDF copies of books open, browser pages to the Tao of D&D Wikispaces, all my Excel files to run the session, plus OneNote notebooks for recording session details and the campaign journal. Whenever I need to refer to something a little more substantial, like a spell description, the whole game slows right down. I've been trying to push some of the weight of doing so onto the players, but that ends up making me need to ask the players what their spells do which doesn't speed things up nor get me all the correct information.
Sacrifice 3:
Spend some time memorizing and learning more of the rules so I need to keep less open. That would mean giving up time I could spend reading more interesting books to push this stuff into my brain. It might even take some time for me to fix rules that bother me so that I can remember them more clearly (I would remember dedicating the time to change them). I already know that I remember my house rules reasonably well: this would simply be an exercise in learning the rest.

Skill 4:
Be less intense about D&D. My players tend to be new to the game and have school and work to worry about between sessions: they can't commit to strict schedules and D&D just frankly isn't their focus in life. It's a healthy choice that they've made, although one I'm less inclined to make as D&D is my biggest creative outlet when I'm not struggling to practice writing. If the group is less intense, I should cater to their needs and desires as players, so as to avoid pressuring them or intimidating them.
Sacrifice 4:
Let D&D be less important to myself, and give up some of the excitement I get to play. It could make the game feel less special and less meaningful if I let myself be less attached to it, and it would also leave me with time I may struggle at first to fill. But that would give me some time to commit to my other sacrifices.

Skill 5:
Get a chance to be a player and learn from that perspective. Honestly, I've never been a player in an actual game of D&D: I've been a player in a few games of Fate, but that's the extent of it. While I know what I enjoy in other media, I'm not sure what I would enjoy as a D&D player, and that restricts my ability to empathize with my campaign's players. I need to find an opportunity to be a player.
Sacrifice 5:
Quit being a control freak and let someone else take charge. Teach a friend how to DM or go to an event in my area. Accept the possibility of being DMed by someone who may frustrate or bother me, just as much as I may be DMed by someone who inspires me or helps me develop my thinking. Even a bad experience can still teach me about what I want as a player and what to avoid as a DM.

So there are my five. Now to see whether I will actually commit to them.

Programming Power Brainstorming

Some good discussion over at Tao of D&D about the use of computers and technology in D&D, especially in our post-videogame era. It's gotten me thinking some more about my own attempts to use my computer to speed up play and make things simpler. This post won't actually put anything concrete forward, just some ideas.

So far, I've mostly kept to using Excel. With the Item Durability app, I have begun my first official foray into Android development, with the intention of eventually having a series of inventory sheets for groups of characters which players can adjust and modify at their leisure. Of course, because it's an Android app it's not as available as Excel, which leads me to start considering my other programming options more seriously.

Right now, I am starting a summer job where I will be using XML and Python for some scripting on the web. It's mostly basic backend stuff but it makes me realize the value of these tools as they are fairly universal and beautifully simple to use (Python is so magical straightforward compared to, say, C - albeit because it hides a lot of C's ugliness).

Some ideas:

Movement
Get a GUI of hexes going, create a bunch of labels to represent characters and then move people around on a hex-map. Can be done over the internet to allow real-time updating by players.
- would require some more investigation of GUIs
- I can already make a hex map background (it's really just a fancy 2D array)
- Internet stuff I'd have to just steal what I know from C (which at this point restricts me to console I/O, but hopefully I could snag a domain for this at some point)

Climate
Obviously a major point for any "realistic" adventure in the outdoors. It would be great to have something I can just print the current climate from with a quick shell command, specifying the location and the date.
- seems doable, although I'd either need a big database or a kickass way to download stuff from the web
- if I follow the second option, I can "mask" locations by assigning real-life locations to fantasy ones (what I already do for my world's weather)
- alternatively, I could try to set up a full-on system (dun dun DUN)

Economy
Definitely another big project involving getting access to items controlled by trade routes and such. Would probably pillage the basic concept from my old economic system (itself pillaged from Tao of D&D) and essentially just do all the math for me (yay automating repetitive tasks!)
- would definitely require some databasing, which I kinda suck at (better learn SQL)

Crawler
It would be lovely to have a way to just gather information for my game off the internet for analysis later. I spend so much damn time opening up Wikipedia articles and scanning through less-than-scholarly articles to get a good sense of what I can use for developing my world. This would be a project to speed that up in a simplistic way. I could probably throw together a BATCH file to do it, honestly. All the same, not much of a priority.

Right now, I am hoping to get durability off the ground, but I think I may start on everything else in various stages. Part of what pisses me off with premade stuff is, with all the licensing that goes on, it's only ever made for one or two particular products, when virtually every single DM is going to use slightly different rules. Anything I end up putting online will definitely need to respect the variety of styles and techniques out there, which is why I would want a comprehensive list of settings that can be turned on or off.

Away we go!

The Dungeon's Front Door Review

Recently, Alexis Smolensk over at the Tao of D&D published his second collection of essays, The Dungeon's Front Door & Other Things in the Deep Dark. Much like the first collection, How to Play a Character, DFD is a small but dense volume of essays that investigate a wide variety of topics. While How to Play was a compilation of various excellent posts from Alexis' blog, however, DFD takes the theme of dungeons and injects it throughout.

The result is a cheerful romp through the notion of dungeons in D&D. Alexis has changed his format slightly for this collection. Interspersed among the thirteen essays in the book are two short stories and one series of examples. I was pleasantly surprised to discover these: on his blog, Alexis tends to offer a lot of critical analysis but does not necessarily delve into the specifics of his method, a mystery which encourages the reader to devise their own solution and then toy with the implementations.

There are a few central tenets which are put forward. One is the importance of dungeons themselves. Alexis totes the dungeon as a world within a world, a place where the players can retreat from the chaos of the enormous outdoors into a confined, orderly box. To do so effectively, Alexis emphasizes the value of making the dungeon a world. What is possibly the best essay in the book (it's certainly my favourite), "Wyrd," chronicles the history for a mountain cave that is home to both a goblin community and some hungry jellies. "Wyrd" emphasizes the importance of having a closed system to your dungeons: where does food come from? where do tools come from? what are the defenses of the dungeons' inhabitants? Certain oddities, like untouched doors or piles of treasure, may seemingly defy the sense of the outside world, but Alexis reminds the reader that the dungeon is not like the outside world. It's alien and strange, and so are its people many a time. Maybe they revere doors? Maybe there's an old fountain deep down below which spits out coins? Who knows?

The DM might have some ideas. But the players may never know. Alexis again highlights the value of keeping one's hand close to one's chest while DMing. In "Wyrd," the players may arrive at any point during the history of the dungeon, and find something entirely different waiting for them. They may never know what happened. But a DM with such knowledge can cultivate a little mystery and a little strangeness to keep the players' emotions running high. Alexis recommends a little toying with the players' emotions to do so: his essay "Breaking the Fourth Wall" is all about playing with the players' fears. Little pranks when done right can provide a lot of extra fuel for keeping the players amped and excited, much like a rollercoaster ride.

And there should be lots of strangeness and mystery! DFD rightfully points out that real estate is expensive when you're carving through stone. This is an excellent point: though the dungeon is its own world, it's a small world. One door may be all that stands between the orcs and the gnolls. A pit may service both a hungry otyugh and goblins with garbage. Making your dungeons small, DFD explains, allows for every room to have a purpose (which the players may not understand). And often that purpose is fear. The dungeon is not something to be made gentle or welcoming, but a struggle to victory. This is one of the most important points of the essay, and in my opinion one of the best: the more the players fight, the sweeter victory is. The DM is on the players' side to help them accomplish this high, and DFD explains that by using busy dungeons and a gentle dose of evil, players can be given quite the incredible ride.

This is the majority of DFD, but the short "story" essays "Rest" and "Dungeon Extractions, Inc." are not merely diversions from Alexis' critical analyses. "Rest" features an account of a party trapped in a massive dungeon -- some of its references (the dwarf is the first to become upset by the fact that the party has been in the dungeon for "six hundred and twenty-two" days) are later explored in Alexis' essay on megadungeons "A Door Too Far." The story is humorous and showcases some of the absurdities of the dungeon, especially its attractive power. Even after such an enormous amount of time, by which point decisions like which fork to take become tedious, or after treasure, left behind (cannot be carried), has lost all real value, the party slogs forward.

"Dungeon Extractions, Inc." presents the success of a man who has essentially "industrialized" the dungeon crawl. A billionaire entrepreneur, Sir Phelonious (sounds like felonious, no?) the Elf has min-maxed a massive extraction team to capitalize on dungeons across the world, raking in billions in profits. Of course, Phil is aware that his business will soon cause economic collapse and the whole industry will fall apart: Alexis' characters are charmingly genre-savvy (as many D&D players are).

"Flora in the Recesses" is another fun diversion in the book, relatively sparse on Alexis' usual argumentation. Instead, Alexis puts his methods into action to display how the dungeon is justified, inventing plants to inhabit dungeons and to feed their residents. The plants integrate smoothly with the design of dungeon monsters: intensely peculiar but detailed enough to seem natural. It's a wonderful example of dungeon-world design.

All in all, The Dungeon's Front Door is a great read for DMs in need of a kickstart to reinvigorating their dungeons. It's unfortunately a short read, but nonetheless a valuable one on the philosophy of the dungeon. I am excited to experiment with its suggestions for my players.

The book is currently 20% off on Amazon, and you can also purchase it on Lulu.