My group says I would be too nice and give players weapons on NPC's and they felt they shouldn't find what they are looking for and when I said ,"You find nothing of use to you." they get really frustrated.

My group also wants to see merchandise, even to pass it over.

So I made a merchant and NPC generator.

This is alpha v1.

Let me know what you guys think.

https://rawgit.com/JmurrayJr/EoteTools/master/EotE_NPC_Merchant_Generator.htm

You can save this entire file to your desktop to use offline or run from a phone/tablet. Everything is stored in the file.

I originally started working on (still working on) a html/javascript character builder, branched it and started NPC/Merchant Generator.

-Thriven

This looks really good. I like that it's not cluttered visually, it seems like I could copy and paste NPCs into my notebook with abandon. I also appreciate your listing of page numbers, that is very handy.

So part of the problem your PCs might be having is that there are some mechanics around using Negotiate to find the items they need, you probably know about them already so I won't belabor the point here. It seems like this would be easy to accomplish with what you've built, though.

As these are NPCs, I wonder if there is any advantage to adding random personality traits and stuff like that to help flesh out the NPC. Things like demeanor, short-term goals, etc., can hopefully add even more flavor at the push of a button.

Would it be possible to color-code the dice pools as calculated? That little bit might go a long way towards usability.

Nice work, I have a deep appreciation for tools like this that aren't too complex or require certain hardware or hoops to jump through to make them work.

Looks excellent, nice job!

This very neat.

Excellent job, thanks for making it!

1 hour ago, themensch said:

This looks really good. I like that it's not cluttered visually, it seems like I could copy and paste NPCs into my notebook with abandon. I also appreciate your listing of page numbers, that is very handy.

First person to say it's not cluttered!

1 hour ago, themensch said:

So part of the problem your PCs might be having is that there are some mechanics around using Negotiate to find the items they need, you probably know about them already so I won't belabor the point here. It seems like this would be easy to accomplish with what you've built, though.

Per a reddit reply I made here

Quote

I am thinking of a checkbox to toggle all fields off but Name and Price. There will be a sheet for the GM and a sheet for the players. I will also add a skill check for each item to determine if they know the weapon or can derive information about the weapon including the Index to look up. I'd also like a streetwise check that allows you see the entire gm sheet (Basically you measure up the NPC, find what makes him tick and then use streetwise to get him to open up).

Here's the thing about my idea about individual items. Is it an intellect skill check? Streetwise? I'd think there are people who are dumb as a bag of hammers but they shoot guns for a living and while they may not be able astrogate a straight line or tell you where they are on the outer rim they have shot 100s of rifles and could know exactly what a weapon or attachment can do.

I'm open to suggestions

1 hour ago, themensch said:

As these are NPCs, I wonder if there is any advantage to adding random personality traits and stuff like that to help flesh out the NPC. Things like demeanor, short-term goals, etc., can hopefully add even more flavor at the push of a button.

I really like the idea of adding motivation, obligation and may a few random personality traits. I will add that in.

1 hour ago, themensch said:

Would it be possible to color-code the dice pools as calculated? That little bit might go a long way towards usability.

I was going to use images for the dice rather than Html entities (a lot of mobile browsers don't support the proficiency die). In regards to color coding I thought black ability die and white proficiency die would be best because I can get confused sometimes when I'm doing a challenge against and NPC and I see green/yellows listed and the next thing I know I'm adding green and yellows to a players check. I can color code them if you think it'd help you. If I get kick back, I can change it later.

1 hour ago, themensch said:

Nice work, I have a deep appreciation for tools like this that aren't too complex or require certain hardware or hoops to jump through to make them work.

When I was looking at the game2.ca dice roller it is completely embodied in a single page. I really liked that. I can put it on a device, have no signal or wifi and still use the tool.

You can right click, save as, and use it standalone if you want to use it locally. It wont update unless you redownload it of course.

6 hours ago, ThrivenLikeDriven said:

First person to say it's not cluttered!

Per a reddit reply I made here

II was going to use images for the dice rather than Html entities (a lot of mobile browsers don't support the proficiency die). In regards to color coding I thought black ability die and white proficiency die would be best because I can get confused sometimes when I'm doing a challenge against and NPC and I see green/yellows listed and the next thing I know I'm adding green and yellows to a players check. I can color code them if you think it'd help you. If I get kick back, I can change it later.

Thanks for considering our suggestions and implementing them. I appreciate that! Upvoted on Reddit as well.

I do like the idea of images for the dice and thus far, none of the online rollers have faced a C&D over their use, so you might be safe. However, having additional images to download presents its own challenges with your present design. I look forward to your solution!

I was thinking that just color-coding the characters as you have them might just be enough - as you know, that extra little visual cue is really helpful for a GM reading a lot of stats while maintaining narrative, particularly an elder GM with glasses that never quite get the job done.

I'm definitely going to yoink this.

It would be nice if you could select sources for their inventory, so that you can select out stuff from books/product lines that you either don't have, or don't allow for whatever reason. It would also be nice if you could select inventory size (number of items generated), even if there was just small, medium, large. EDIT: I'm an idiot, sorry.

It's likely a lot to ask, but granting specific talents (NPCs don't have to follow trees) might serve to spice things up.

This looks like an interesting program. I ran several examples, and had some questions.

Definitely need to add talents. Especially for merchants, they need the social talents.

Can you add a choice for rough power level of NPC? Maybe rated 1-5, which affects how much XP they are built with?

Can you add a "focus" option, where the generator will tend to spend more XP. For example, most merchants would be a "social" build. Maybe social, combat, intellectual, physical, rogue. Probably others.

14 hours ago, Spatula Of Doom said:

It would be nice if you could select sources for their inventory, so that you can select out stuff from books/product lines that you either don't have, or don't allow for whatever reason.

You are the second person to ask for this. I do plan on implementing it. I'm going to compile a list of all the book abbreviations from my data set and set up a multi-choice selection box that by default will have all books selected. Anything not selected will be filtered out.

2 hours ago, themensch said:

It's likely a lot to ask, but granting specific talents (NPCs don't have to follow trees) might serve to spice things up.

and

1 hour ago, Edgookin said:

This looks like an interesting program. I ran several examples, and had some questions.

Definitely need to add talents. Especially for merchants, they need the social talents.

The hardest part of making tools like these are compiling the data. If someone has a talent list spreadsheet, that's like 90% of the work. I also don't want to step on FFG's toes so it does not require to have specific information such as descriptions. A tab delimited or CSV of Spec Name, Talent Name, Tier (1-5), Position (1-4) Left to Right, Index (book it's found in). If anyone wants to help with this. Let me know

Once I get a talent list complete I'm going to start working on completing my character builder . It already calculates free skills from specs and careers, the cost of attributes, ect. I just need a talent list to start from.

I'm also going to combine the work I did in the NPC merchant generator back into my character builder. You will be able to equip items on your character in the builder.

1 hour ago, Edgookin said:

Can you add a choice for rough power level of NPC? Maybe rated 1-5, which affects how much XP they are built with?

Can you add a "focus" option, where the generator will tend to spend more XP. For example, most merchants would be a "social" build. Maybe social, combat, intellectual, physical, rogue. Probably others.

Technically, the Minion - Legendary is a 1-5 scale on the back end. I didn't include xp calculations because they complicated and I was afraid if I combined an amount of attributes it should raise, could totally short skills.

I use the following code to determine how many attributes and skills are distributed.

        //set Modifiers to distribute
	    var extraSkills = parseInt(Math.ceil(1.5 * adversarySelect));
	    var extraAttributes = parseInt(Math.ceil(.65 * adversarySelect));
	    var armorRarity = parseInt(Math.ceil(1.7 * adversarySelect));
	    var weaponRarity = parseInt(Math.ceil(1.7 * adversarySelect));

	    if ($('#SpeciesSelect').val() == "Droid") {
	        extraAttributes = parseInt(Math.ceil(1.7 * adversarySelect));
	    }

So for Nemesis with a value of 3. Extra skills would be 1.5 * 3 = 4.5. It then rounds up to 5.

A Legendary NPC would be a value of 5. Extra attributes would calculate at .65 * 5 = 3.25 and then round up to 4. With Attributes I have it first look through the specialization skills and find a spec skill that has the highest attribute, I give that 1 and then distribute the rest randomly.

I did consider making it XP based but after thinking about how it would work it just seemed to be more reliable from a procedural generated standpoint to use a different system for creation than the PC's. Mostly because of the cost of attributes scaling so high as opposed to skills. Ultimately, if you think about it, it's not like any of these characters are getting attributes or skills they couldn't initially purchase over time.

What's a Legendary NPC?

3 hours ago, Darth Poopdeck said:

What's a Legendary NPC?

© Thriven Games

j/k

If there are more accurate levels beyond what the CRB says I can change epic / legendary.

On 7/21/2017 at 9:48 AM, _Thriven_ said:

The hardest part of making tools like these are compiling the data. If someone has a talent list spreadsheet, that's like 90% of the work. I also don't want to step on FFG's toes so it does not require to have specific information such as descriptions. A tab delimited or CSV of Spec Name, Talent Name, Tier (1-5), Position (1-4) Left to Right, Index (book it's found in). If anyone wants to help with this. Let me know

I wonder if the folks maintaining the Talents sheets have such a thing.

You might additionally find this useful if you haven't seen it already:

On 23 July 2017 at 4:24 PM, themensch said:

I wonder if the folks maintaining the Talents sheets have such a thing.

Could his not be produced from using reports on Ogg's generator?

6 hours ago, lupex said:

Could his not be produced from using reports on Ogg's generator?

That seems like a reasonable idea.

20 hours ago, themensch said:

You might additionally find this useful if you haven't seen it already:

Nice I had not found this one. This actually will help me alot in the character builder with the species. I had a ton of species information but not their XP or wounds. It has a talent list but I need the spec talent trees.

I think i'll quickly make a tool that will allow someone to build a talent tree via a webpage and it will output the json I need and they can paste the json in a code tag. If we all took one specialization talent treet it would go by super fast and I could release my character builder.

You are my hero...I was looking at genning up a bunch of Merchants and other NPCs to flesh out some towns on Tattooine...will save me a ton of time!

I see you can Ctrl-S to save the file, what kind of format does that use? I'd like to be able to gen a bunch and keep them on hand, change their inventory as needed.

Also is there a way to set a particular set of parameters then randomly generate the rest? ie I want Rival-level Merchants, not Epic-level. And maybe some way to change the rough size of their stock?

Great work, I will certainly be investigating this further!

3 hours ago, GandofGand said:

I see you can Ctrl-S to save the file, what kind of format does that use? I'd like to be able to gen a bunch and keep them on hand, change their inventory as needed.

Also is there a way to set a particular set of parameters then randomly generate the rest? ie I want Rival-level Merchants, not Epic-level. And maybe some way to change the rough size of their stock?

I need to write some instructions for it.

Lock the page hitting the lock button and then hit ctrl-s and save the entire generator file off to your hard drive. When you open the page on your hard drive, "locking" it prevents it from autogenerating a merchant on load. I need to number all weapons, armor, equipment so that way I can serialize the data and it could be stored in a single string.

I also added "locks" to each item which allow you to select items you want to keep when you are regenerating equipment or merchandise. I also added X's so you can remove certain things from the list as well. Maybe you really liked that list but it put in a lightsaber hilt that narratively, you don't want.

Sometimes, the generator equipts an NPC with Scuba gear for a vendor on Tattoine but you really want him to have that disrupter pistol. Lock the disrupter pistol and "regenerate equipment".

Also, I left it so when you regenerate a merchants equipment it doesn't count the locked items in the 1-2 weapons and 1 piece of armor it distributes. So if you want more weapons, lock a weapon and regenerate equipment and it will add 1 to 2 more each time.

looks good!

I have an old copy of 760 Patrons for Traveller which gets a fair bit of use for "random dude generating", too.

On 7/21/2017 at 9:48 AM, _Thriven_ said:

The hardest part of making tools like these are compiling the data. If someone has a talent list spreadsheet, that's like 90% of the work. I also don't want to step on FFG's toes so it does not require to have specific information such as descriptions. A tab delimited or CSV of Spec Name, Talent Name, Tier (1-5), Position (1-4) Left to Right, Index (book it's found in). If anyone wants to help with this. Let me know

Once I get a talent list complete I'm going to start working on completing my character builder . It already calculates free skills from specs and careers, the cost of attributes, ect. I just need a talent list to start from.

Something like this? I put this together to help me with my Spec sheets.

Compiled Talents

There are two pages. The first page is the nuts and bolts and an index of which Specs have the Talents. The second page has the Talent descriptions. The latest book, Disciples of Hominy, has not been entered; I don't have a copy of it yet. (If you get an error trying to open it, just click the Open button in the upper right. I don't know why dropbox does this to me.)

Very cool game addition

is this no longer available i can't seem to get to it

same question, was very much hoping to use this and then saw that it had been removed