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The charts for random item generation in the GMG are awesome! Great job Paizo Staff. Now that we have such awesome charts, we need a way to make them *fast*.
In the past I've used programs such as TableSmith which take charts such as the ones presented in the GMG and allow enterprising GMs to select either a treasure value or encounter level and have the program spit out randomized loot for that level or approximate value automatically. This would save a tremendous amount of time without depriving the players of the awesome content in the GMG item generation tables.
TableSmith has the functionality to do this, but as I'm not a programmer I lack the skills needed to properly utilize it to build out the tables necessary to automate this process. Is there someone out there with the skills and desire necessary to make this happen? TableSmith is just one suggestion, I'm not locked into this at all. It has been suggested that this could even be designed in Excel.
I might pass this idea along to the guys who created Hero Lab; they obviously have the programming skills and profit motive but I'm unsure if this is too far from their core line for them.
If anyone has suggestions or is willing to put together an automated treasure generation system for the GMG, the community will heap you with praise and accolades.
TableSmith is available here: http://mythosa.net/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.TableSmith
I do a fair bit with Excel (see my profile for my Excel-based character sheet). I don't have time to pull all the GMG data out right now, but if you (or anyone) can do so and put it in a simple table format, I could build an automation tool for this very easily.
Try NBOS Software's Inspiration Pad Pro (it's free despite the name). Pretty easy to do basic things in it but it's capable of some pretty complex tasks as well (I created one that creates the fluff for alternate Earths based on tables from GURPS).
M
What are you using to generate the mundane items, where the book only refers to the standard Core Rulebook equipment tables that have no random number listings?
I'd love to have a downloadable offline tool, so I can use it when running my games where I have no internet access.
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I've been working on it in a Google Spreadsheet, but its nowhere near any point I'm ready to actually share it yet.I've got many of the tables in Google Spreadsheets too and started dinking around with random generators. If you get something functional I'd love to put it on d20pfsrd.com.
The script is pretty well worked out, I just don't have much data in, I first started working doing NPC backgrounds. I'll share it with you once it gets a little farther out.
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That sounds awesome, guys. Like Zaister I too would like to have a chart for generating random miscellaneous loot, but that wouldn't be that difficult to build. When we're talking about an online tool we can easily use d57's if there are 57 items in any given category. It would be really cool if that miscellaneous section included stuff from Adventurer's Armory as well.
I'm anxious to see what develops!
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Wouldn't the stuff in the GMG be better suited to Access than Excel? Since you're mainly wanting just a "click and dump" result when using it anyway. Access seems to hide everything better and putting a tab in to input more data wouldn't be a problem and risk messing the whole sheet up I'd think. Or am I wront in my thinking?
