Praxxian
commented
3 years ago I really appreciate your comment! Brightens my day that other humans have actually used this, haha. I haven't updated in a while, but mostly from lack of interest from other parties and also busy with my own home D&D games. I am certainly receptive to feedback, and it will reinvigorate me to develop this further.
- This was something I grappled with because magic is one of those things that is so different between settings. I sort of built this to be a foundation for medieval fantasy where you could add as much magic as you like and according to your own magic systems, since by default there is very little. E.g. you might have a high fantasy setting with no arcane magic, just magic from gods and the outer planes.
New locations like a wizard tower, monk's dojo, warlock lair, etc would not be difficult to implement, but where things become messy is determining what goods/services they can provide and for how much. One could spend a lot of effort pricing magical items from D&D, although there is some work out there that may be available for free to leverage. I will think more about this.
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This was my intention of the Major Industry setting, although I have yet to fully implement this as it is. I would like to develop this more. I think it may be more intuitive to have separate geographical features that can be ticked, and for each one a percentage of agriculture gets shifted away for them. E.g. something could be near both hills for mining and a lake, so peasants have a an equal chance of working in either mining, fishing, shipping, or typical agriculture.
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At the moment that general description comes from a roll table and does not have any real relationship to the generated data for people/businesses. However, personality stuff is rolled for people, and I could potentially shift/weight those rolls if the user selected some sort of disposition setting (scale of friendly, pleasant, neutral, rude, hostile). In that case I would take a look at the description generation to replace people descriptions and only leave in the things that aren't really reflected in the data, such as being a famous burial site. That way the peoples' disposition is always known and reflected in the data, and the descriptions are just flavor to take or leave.
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I have thought about this, too. I could expose these percentages as an Advanced Setting because it is a very crunchy sort of thing to tinker with.
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This is very related to #4. In fact, it may be worth coming up with some presets that the user normally picks from that sets the values in #4 behind the scenes, but if the user wanted to get really specific, they could choose Custom and input the ratios themselves to indicate this.
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Things like parents/children/siblings are inferred from people in the same family. E.g. 2 spouses and a child imply the spouses are the parents of the child. This can be a little unclear with fantasy races because their ages can be at unintuitive scales. A 38 year old elf is basically a child. I avoided putting this as an additional column because the table was getting so wide as it is. I could make this a little more explicit. The grandparents thing I have wrestled with, as there really isn't an explicit intergenerational family that gets created. Generally, I create individuals to match demographic trends (age/gender distributions), then I match them to couples, and then I match couples to children. Single parents and orphans are all possible, too. I have thought about adding in grandparents as another level in this, though. It would certainly make things feel more realistic. As long as I can make the demographics make sense, this would be cool to add.
MSWallack
lefoudre
JamesPildis
First, let me say that I absolutely love your RPG City Generator. I came across it while looking for just this sort of thing to help me populate some towns that I'm creating both for a novel that I'm writing and/or for an RPG setting (in the same place as the events of the novel). In any event, there are a few things that I would love to see added to the generator (and I hope that you're [a] still developing the generator and [b] receptive to feature requests). I don't think that any of these suggestions would be particularly difficult to implement (though I'll admit that even though I work for a software development company, I haven't written any real code myself in ... well, I was writing it in Pascal...). So here are the things that I'd love to see:
1) Allow the user to indicate whether the setting is high or low magic (which may impact such things as the wizard tower or inventory of shops).
2) Allow a user to have a little input as to the setting of the town (e.g., in the forest, along a river, by a lake or ocean, etc.) and then add or omit certain professions based on the locale (e.g., no fishermen or boatwrights if no water).
3) I'm not sure if the nature of the people and/or businesses, etc., have anything to do with the information generated about the town (e.g., built on the place of an ancient ruin or war among thieves guilds). If not, never mind. If so, it would be great if the user could pick from some sort of list to direct what sort of town might be generated (e.g., I might need a peaceful agricultural town known for its ales).
4) Allow a user to indicate whether the town has nobility or not (or estates or not) or, perhaps, the percent of the town that might classify as nobility.
5) Similar to the previous, allow a user to indicate whether the town is prosperous, poor, or somewhere in between.
5) This one is probably the most difficult: The generator already handles spouses, but I wonder if it would be possible to add other sorts of familiar relationships (e.g., parents, grandparents, siblings, and children). Sometimes, this is obvious, but other times, less so.
I really hope that you're receptive to some or all of these sorts of additions to your generator, and I'd be happy to discuss any possible additions or changes. And whether you make changes or not, I'm grateful for your efforts and the generator that you've so generously provided to the RPG and writing communities.