Perl

A recent posting by another Savage player brought me back to the idea of using GraphViz in gaming. This particular example was in mapping player characters with their in game relationships to people, places, things and ideas to help a GM visualize how they are all interconnected.

I decided to bone up on some of my D6 knowledge by working my way through creating a nice, big spell list. I got a few spells done (about halfway through the A's) and decided to share the beginnings of it. Half the list of A's are placeholder sections to help me speed up a bit when it comes to creating the spells. In some ways it would be nice to have a little program to help handle the basic calculations (less prone to minor mistakes creeping in if the computer does the addition, subtraction, etc...).

Updated Aug. 7

After doing the data collection for the D6 Probabilities with the presence of the Wild Die I thought I'd take a look at the Savage Worlds system and see how the probabilities show up for the open rolling of a D6 with a second die worked out.

No surprise, the results show a fairly linear falloff for the initial values (up to around 10 or 12 depending on the size of the second die rolled with the D6) with a lessening of the slope after that point (almost a sharp turning inflection point).

One interesting problem I’ve occasionally encountered when doing stuff for various games is visualizing the paths through the game. The simplest one would be the path from one adventure to another for a party. A more complicated one would be an entire campaign with various adventures broken down by either level or some other gauge of experience for the game system.
One good example of the latter was posted to the Triple Ace Games site about the game setting Sundered Skies (a Savage Worlds setting). This graph was laid out in something like Visio by hand. Each of the adventures was clustered and linked to the next adventure in the series or Plot Point.

So, this problem keeps coming up again and again in various forums dealing with the loved and, for the most part, forgotten system from West End Games, D6 System. The problem is the presence of the "Wild Die" that was introduced in Star Wars 2nd Edition. As usual, there isn't a whole lot of grey space in this debate... or shall we more accurately say "Love/Hate".

I created a small perl script that takes in the number of iterations and the number of dice that are part of the roll and outputs the list of target numbers that were rolled, how many times they were rolled and what % of the rolls do they represent. The script takes into account the result of the Wild Die. I settled on 1,000,000 iterations as it seemed to give a consistent sample response when run several times.

So, I updated the myminicity fetcher to also have the ability to post a report to a web forum (vbulletin) after it gets done going through the various cities it has been asked to work with. To do this I added a few options to the script to take in the location of the forum, the thread ID that you want it to post to and the username/password that it needs to log in to the forum to post. To make it a little easier to use I have included a .bat file that can be edited to hold the username and password and other options and then just double-click the .bat file to run the fetcher.

I found this site, MyMiniCity, from another site. It is basically SimCity in a webpage, but instead of the city creator controlling where and what gets built, that is decided by the links that users follow to get to the particular city. Since each IP address can only visit the city once a day and have an influence on what the city gets (population, roads, parks, factories, strip malls, etc...) and that is decided by the link the user follows, I decided to write a little perl script that can parse the XML for the given city or cities and from that decide what link should be followed when going to the city itself.