[drewry]

Very cool, I especially like that it’s faithful to the DMG. I saw the mention of Donjon, I’ve used the Donjon tools for years and have always loved using them but felt the lack of persistence and interconnectedness was missing.

It’s why I’ve been working on something similar over the past few years and dungeon generating is definitely on the roadmap. It’s called OpenDnD and it’s attempting to be a complete set of open source DM and player tools. The first 5 tools are fairly useable but very much still beta. For those interested, the code’s up on GitHub: https://github.com/opendnd/opendnd.

[pure-awesome]

Cool idea. Starring it to see where it goes.

Maybe I'll even contribute! ;)

Are you planning on adding support for other versions as well (for those features where it matters), or will it just be 5e?

[drewry]

Awesome, contributors would be greatly appreciated :) I'm still working on writing up the main roadmap (it's a very ambitious project) to make it easier for new contributors. Currently, it'll be mostly focused around 5e although I'd love to add support for other editions as well. Especially for things that are highly useful to have support for like character sheets. But I see other things like supporting older versions of the generators described in the DMG will be a bit more difficult to do as it would require more fundamental changes to the code.

[pure-awesome]

I'd like to know, though, are you aware of other Open Source D&D tools that are available?

I had a quick peek on GitHub now, and it brought up: https://github.com/adventurerscodex/adventurerscodex https://github.com/incomingstick/OpenRPG

So, is there any reason to roll your own from scratch rather than contributing to one of the existing projects?

If it's to have your own project that you have complete control over, or if it's just to do something fun yourself, that's totally cool. I'd just like to know.

[drewry]

Great points, I'd be happy to give some background. I originally started working on the project just for our DnD group about 5 years ago. At that time there weren't many other projects available or if so I wasn't aware of them. It was mostly Donjon and a few others that were available and none were built as individual packages that could be composed together and weren't open source. The GitHub org you see now is actually already a merger of existing efforts that were started by other developers who were working on a character sheet generator. The opendnd repo was only started recently as the tools have grown over the years and needed a sort of all-encompassing project.

That being said, I'm aware that other projects are out there now that have similar goals -- some further along than us as it's mostly been me working on it in my free time. However, I would say that our design decision is pretty different from the others in that each component is designed to be a separate standalone tool that can be used as a component to build other things. Because the end goal is so ambitious I think this design decision is critical if the project is ever to get close to achieving that goal. If I had to summarize in one sentence what we're trying to achieve, it's kind of a Dwarf Fortress level of detail but fully open source and fully interconnected components.

[pure-awesome]

Great, thank you for this detailed response! It sounds interesting.

I'll pop you an email and we can continue discussion via a format better suited for this kind of discussion.

[AlphaWeaver]

Awesome work! One thing I would love to see here would be more examples on what each module generates, since it doesn't really provide those at the moment.

[drewry]

Thank you for the suggestion, I'll add some example outputs. Perhaps something like asciinema may be useful. I used to have some animated gifs of a recorded terminal session but I removed it as so many changes were happening it got outdated fast.