Hey everyone, I'm a programming student that hates rolling for initiative and other things. I'm working on a program that will do all of that for you.
This is still a work in progress: features are missing, bugs are crawling around.

What I've got:

You can create adversaries, Lich Master will roll initiative and create attack pools based on their stats.
Minions are implemented and their dice pools will change depending on how much damage they take.
Damage on adversaries is tracked and adjusted based on their soak.
You can roll criticals against your players.
A player's defense is automatically taken into account when you do try to attack them.
You can create any adversary you desire! As long as that desire is an adversary without any talents or abilities and consisting of only weapons without any qualities.

What I'm planning:
I want to release a simple combat version of the demo below soon. I've still got some bugs I need to squash. Talents and qualities need to be added.
Right now, the advantage table, besides criticals, are just reminders for you. They don't actually do anything when you click them. I'd like to change that, so if you select a boost on your next attack it will boost your next attack so you don't forget when weird stuff or food happens between actions.
I want to have an ongoing effects window for player shenanigans against your adversaries. Right now, this app only tracks direct damage against your adversaries.
I need to implement a reference for your adversaries. In the demo below if you were to click the adversaries name, it would do nothing. I want it to open a panel giving all of their skills and stats in depth. More importantly this will give a link to their talents and abilities. For the time being I'm planning on this just being a reference until I can figure out if implementing talents in a clean and procedural way is doable.

An idea I have is to try and break abilities down into inputs and outputs that the program can understand. Right now for instance, criticals are read in at their critical value based on the weapon being rolled. The program understands that and assigns the critical to the appropriate slot. Inputs could be advantage symbols or triumph that could be fed in a similar way. Outputs could be damage on the player or perhaps an ongoing effect such as 'Jacob is immobilized'. This would sit in a corner for like two actions and then disappear.

Wild speculation ideas:
You can currently setup encounters and place adversaries into them. Only adversaries. I'd like to expand how you can plan an encounter ahead of time. Such as adding terrain features: traps, cover, impassible terrain. Or maybe adding quest items attached to certain rolls (if they pass perception here they can find the body in the wheat field, that key item will lead to encounter b7 if passed).

Maybe randomly generated encounters? Right now I'm having adversaries be sorted into groups when you create them. The reanimates are part of the Undead group. The bandits from the core book are part of an outlaw group. I just have this implemented so you can better organized adversaries you create. It shouldn't be too difficult to set up a few parameters and tell the program to randomly pull 3 rivals and 2 minion groups from this adversary type because the players set the cows on fire, that wasn't supposed to be feasible option, but now I need some angry guards.

One question. Will this be windows only application?

I love the idea, and believe this will be a great asset. Thank you.

Will we be able to adjust for in-house rules? For example, are we inputing a critical value itself for a weapon or are we selecting the name of a weapon from a list which then inputs the value from a database? If the later, can we edit the database to our own liking? As another example, the video clip has, "Reanimate" as a minion. Did you previously input the Reanimate's values for the session or was Reanimate in a database? After watching the video again it appears you are inputing the values on the fly?

@kkuja
I'll have to get back to you. There's certain things I'm still learning in the world of programming, but this is built in Python on Windows. From a quick search it looks like I'll have to rebuild some things to get it to work on Mac but completely doable if there's enough demand.

@Sturn
So to explain things more clearly, there's a separate section for creating your own adversaries. I made a quick video creating a brand new adversary. In the video there are three groups hard coded in as a demo. You'll be able to create your own groups. This is merely for organization. So when you go to your adversary list you know your players are going to be ambushed by outlaws. You don't need dragons or royal marines. You need outlaws, so you can select the outlaws group and get only the adversaries you need instead of sifting through a campaign worth of adversaries.

10 hours ago, BringBackForbiddenStars said:

@kkuja
I'll have to get back to you. There's certain things I'm still learning in the world of programming, but this is built in Python on Windows. From a quick search it looks like I'll have to rebuild some things to get it to work on Mac but completely doable if there's enough demand.

@Sturn
So to explain things more clearly, there's a separate section for creating your own adversaries. I had that bug out in the original clip, but I'll get another demo showing adversary creation later today.

linux please

This looks amazingly useful.

Keep up the great work.

On ‎7‎/‎31‎/‎2018 at 7:26 AM, BringBackForbiddenStars said:

@Sturn
So to explain things more clearly, there's a separate section for creating your own adversaries. I made a quick video creating a brand new adversary.

Thank you for the new video. That looks pretty awesome.

It begs another question for me though. Will we be able to edit the skills list due to specialty campaigns or house rules?

This is looking like something I would use, but concerned of what platforms it will be available on. Looks like just for windows. My old laptop is..old. I do most work from a desktop (not in an appropriate gaming place) or an Ipad anymore. I've used the Ipad for gaming by putting images and a virtual tabletop on a large TV screen in my gaming area. I would love to have this running on a second Ipad instead of trying to see if my ancient laptop can still boot up and download it.

So first, skills:
As I'm demoing, I'm forcing the program to use the Terrinoth setting. In the actual version, you'll create your own setting. You'll pick one of the standard types laid out in the book (such as Fantasy or Space Opera or whatever) and this will import the talents and skills suggested in the core book. You can then edit from there adding new skills and deleting ones you don't need. That way you're not creating new settings and re-adding athletics and deception twenty seven times.

So first, you create or import a setting. Adversaries, skills, talents, and campaigns are tied to a setting. Then players and sessions are tied to a campaign. If you have multiple campaigns in the same setting they will share the same adversary database, skills, etc.

One thing, skill-wise, I am considering changing is displayed skills for weapons. Right now, you can tie any skill to a weapon. That's a big list of uneeded skills most of the time. I'm considering limiting this to just combat skills and a few outliers such as discipline which I've seen used for runes in Realms of Terrinoth. Are there any GM's out there who would be opposed to this change? Is anyone striking with Medicine or Coordination? I do want to keep this as clean as possible but that could remove some options so I'd love input.

Next, platforms:
This is initially being deployed on Windows. I want to make sure I can get the main features working as smoothly as possible and windows is the easiest for me to do that. I'm all for transitioning this over to other platforms after that. To speed things up, I can focus on the essentials. This will include creating a setting and fully running combat. There are features I want to add like note taking and random encounter generation, but I can put those on hold and get a combat manager/adversary creator out as a version 1.0 to a couple of different platforms. That being said, I'm still learning all of this so it will take awhile navigating how the heck to get some of these features actually working on an ipad.

if you put the source on github i can test build on linux

This looks amazing. Can't wait to start using it.

Brilliant work.

Even though it's not being built for it, I think I'd like to give this a shot for running Star Wars. Things are similar enough.

23 hours ago, Terefang said:

if you put the source on github i can test build on linux

Here's the github for it if you want to give it a shot: https://github.com/HoudHolm/Lich-Master

Warning that at the moment I didn't plan to collaborate with this build so it's gonna be like a jungle of code. A lot of comments are placeholders to help me remember things. I need to clean up the adversaries and combat module. If you want to reset things with a clean database, I've been deleting the Terrinoth database and re-establishing with the establish_db(name) method under database until I actually incorporate that into the program.

after installing tkinter and imagetk from deb-packages, it works out-of-the-box with python3 on linux-mint-19 !!!

good work

you should include a "requirements.txt" file in the github repos so all requirements can be installed beforehand, and a venv can be created for distribution

On 8/5/2018 at 8:23 AM, Terefang said:

after installing tkinter and imagetk from deb-packages, it works out-of-the-box with python3 on linux-mint-19 !!!

good work

you should include a "requirements.txt" file in the github repos so all requirements can be installed beforehand, and a venv can be created for distribution

That's great to hear! I'll include requirements in my next commit. I finally have a good chunk of time to work on this, so I'm hoping to knock out the setting portion today.

Had some life stuff get in the way but now we're here with an alpha .

You'll have to keep these in a folder somewhere, then launch Lich Master with start.exe in the dist folder.

I've only actually tested this on my computer so please tell me if this doesn't run at all for you.

Only the Terrinoth setting is available with a few talents for testing, custom settings to come in the next build per the attached image. I don't have an official tutorial, but I have a few blog posts talking about features here .

If you want to attach talents, gear or magic, they can be added under abilities. Custom talents and gear coming later.

Things to note off the top of my head:

To get from the session manager to an encounter you'll have to double click the encounter. I'll probably add an additional button later.

In this version there's a console that pops up with the program. That will be gone in a more complete version but for now helps squashing bugs. If something breaks you can shoot me a message the console output and I'll know what it means.

Soak applies automatically to damage but not to strain. Keep that in mind when dropping down damage.

Known issues:

The remove player button doesn't work from the create campaign menu.

There's not an upper limit to characteristics. You can enter 55 for Brawn and it should calculate dice pools with that in a way I haven't properly tested, but I imagine would definitely break the program.

A lot of what comes next is basically data entry. I know how to do it but just need to get around to doing so. The next addition (gear, talents, and custom settings) should come a lot quicker.

Edit: just realized the preview doesn't show this, but I'm allowing you to import settings as a base. So let's say you want to create an Android setting. There'd be a button where you can import all the base Sci-Fi skills and talents then go from there.

A Mac version would be amazing! It’s looking great so far