Hey all,

Over the last couple of weeks I've been cranking out some code to generate rival NPCs for this system. I've got something basic working, to the point where I'd probably be comfortable to rely on it during my session this Sunday, but it does have a few odd behaviours that I may not have time to iron out before I go on holiday next week. I posted it on r/swrpg and got some good feedback, thought it would be great to see what the community at large thought of it.

You can find a running copy of it at https://threetoes.github.io/ and source is at https://github.com/ThreeToes/sw-rival-gen if you feel like forking it and making it better in my absence

Let me know what you think, I know the layout is pretty crap and it's devoid of colour, and that personality traits conflict from time to time, and attributes don't match species.... Basically, it's picking equipment and attributs/skills/equipment from lists at the moment. I will fix it when I have time, but this is an OK stopgap solution I think. Also let me know if you use it live, it's mobile friendly so should work on anything with a newer browser installed. Would be good to get even more feedback on how to make it better

I generated five humans, four wookiees, a gand, and a duro, and all of them had the exact same weapons and items and armor.

One had one talent - a rank in adversary - and nothing else, and the rest had nothing for talents.

In a dire pinch, sure, but otherwise it's odd how they seemed so similar.

It will be more similar along archetype lines, species types at this point only affect names and base wound threshold. Sounds like you might have selected just soldier to have a look? If you switch it to something like smuggler or jedi (jedi is probably not at all useful at this moment since it was my testing ground, there's a lot of crap in there) you'll see more diversity in stats.

I want to implement a point buy system eventually but time just hasn't allowed it yet. Another issue I've had is I've tried to keep to the core rulebooks and only use passive and more common talents so there's less bookkeeping, and also change the way I generate the equipment blocks so it will look at the attributes and skills and choose a more sensible loadout as opposed to the current "here's a list for this archetype, pick 1-3 of them" method. One idea I've had there is to have a set of base equipment loadouts like "brawler", "mechanic", "sniper" etc, and then define a set of acceptable substitutions for each item in that.

Honestly, I like the ambition, but between the NPC cards and OggDudes' character generator, it's currently a pretty well covered area.

That said, f*** it. Make the best **** generator you can. But if I can tell you I had the same handful of items and talents pop up on about 10 NPCs, and you can correctly tell me what class they were, maybe you need to add some diversity still.

Oh no, I appreciate the feedback I'm most definitely aiming for quick and dirty here, this more for when you need a new character because the PCs decided to go off the rails temporarily and pick a fight or visit an odd bazaar they overhear talk of in a bar. Oggdude definitely has it down for specially crafted NPCs, but on the fly stuff is a little harder to do I've found, and you don't always have the cards ready

I'll probably do some restructuring tonight to handle gear better and if I have time some talent pools along similar lines

If you want to add the perception of depth but still he quick and dirty, those traits you have are a solid jumping off point.

Allow a user to set species, career, and choose one or two of the traits (honorable, jumpy, whatever). Then have those alter the starting gear or talents so you can make it seem much more deep than it is, but it's still super straight forward.

Or, for even quicker use, have the traits appear at random still like they do, but make the changes to equipment and talents anyway.

Rejigged the way equipment is worked out, basically the generator class will now look at skill points (which are my next target for sensible choices, they're still a little off) and pick from a list of loadouts. Each loadout has base items (e.g Blaster Pistol and a vibroknife), a list of substitutions it's allowed to make for that item (like a heavy blaster pistol and punch dagger), and additional weapons it can add (frag/stun grenades, etc), along with a primary skill for that loadout. The generator will look at the ones the archetype says it can use, checks the primary skill for each and picks the loadout with the highest associated skill. Still some fine tuning to be done on it and content to be added, but it works way better than the method used before in terms of character diversity