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Old 06-27-2018, 11:32 AM   #1
Bruno
 
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Default GURPS DF / DFRPG Random Dungeon Generator

Random Dungeon Generator
(This post is a stub)

You can have a look at it online care of Celti

https://dungeon.celti.name/

and care of Eric B. Smith

http://gurpsland.no-ip.org/#Dungeon
http://gurpsland.no-ip.org/Dungeon

You can also download it to use offline on your home computer - the only software it requires is a web browser that can run javascript (currently, not really functional on mobile devices that I know of).

Kyle Norton manages our blog at Dungeons on Automatic, which also covers reports from testing random dungeons, monster tokens specifically for DF for online play (or making "pog" style minis for tabletop play with a colour printer), and suchlike.
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Old 06-27-2018, 11:33 AM   #2
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Default Re: GURPS DF / DFRPG Random Dungeon Generator

WHAT THIS IS AND HOW TO USE IT:

A HTML/CSS/JavaScript based random dungeon generator for the Dungeon Fantasy RPG, and for GURPS (particularly the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy product line).

This is intended as an entirely stand-alone and cross-platform application. It does not require web hosting and it does not require installation of a scripting environment or other special software. You can visit it at one of the web presences at https://dungeon.celti.name/ or http://gurpsland.no-ip.org/Dungeon, or you can run it at home! All you need is to download, unzip, and then open "index.html" in a relatively modern web-browser (I just can't support IE6, sorry).

WHAT IT IS FOR:

The primary intent is twofold:
  • to accelerate game preparation, so the GM can minimize paperwork and maximize fun
  • to remind GMs about the many factors of dungeon design that are core parts of game balance in DFRPG and GURPS.

The most obvious two issues when GMs design their own "dungeons" are forgetting about mana and sanctity levels (making spellcasters particularly powerful), and not providing a varied enough palette of challenges (resulting in one profession becoming "the best" or another profession becoming "the worst"). Individual GMs have their own blind spots - unintentionally doing something the same all the time. The dungeons generated may not make sense, but they definitely have variety - and even a silly random dungeon can remind you about dungeon details you usually forget.

The extreme use-case for this app is "push button, receive dungeon, start playing by reading out what's on the paper". It is currently possible to operate this way, but the experience will have bizarre elements introduced by the random systems and be a bit lifeless. Consider taking 30 minutes to review the output and replacing unsuitable encounters and descriptions. Or come up with a story to explain the insanity!
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Old 06-27-2018, 11:34 AM   #3
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Default Re: GURPS DF / DFRPG Random Dungeon Generator

WHAT IT DOES:

This app produces a dungeon map image with customizable resolution (suitable for printing or for online play on a virtual tabletop) and a formatted room-by-room key.

Implemented Features:
  • Control over dungeon size, shape, room sizes, room frequency (lots of rooms packed into a small space vs rooms scattered around), hallway squigglyness, number of dead-ends, staircases, general dungeon security level, monster difficulty.
  • Hallways include height.
  • Room dimensions, including height.
  • Monster encounters keyed to party CER ("Combat Effectiveness Rating" - a starting party of four is usually in the 100-150 range).
  • Wandering monster table, populated primarily from monsters found in the dungeon.
  • Treasures keyed to encounter difficulty and overall dungeon CER (with option to produce completely random treasure using the DF8 treasure generator service, online)
  • Concealed treasures.
  • Doors with GURPS/DFRPG statistics for forcing open, picking, and breaking down. And shoving open, if they're particularly heavy.
  • Secret or concealed doors
  • Portcullises and how hard they are to lift.
  • Traps (currently handled by references to published traps).
  • Notes on general environmental conditions (Mana level, Sanctity, lighting).
  • Odd dungeon features (misty or dangerous atmospheres, weird and magical pools and fountains - and mundane ones).
  • Random dungeon junk in rooms to provide some colour and potentially interesting environments to interact with.
  • Randomize travel time to the dungeon or select manually. Further dungeons have better loot, but burn more resources to get there and back again.
  • Travel to the dungeon is in a stated Survival specialty (chosen randomly)

TODO:
  • Traps in hallways and otherwise in specific hexes rather than nebulously in a room.
  • Create random rumours about the dungeon to find in town.
  • Create some quest hooks - provide McGuffins to recover, kidnapped NPCs, name particularly notorious monsters, generate bounties
  • Generate some "exceptional" monsters with lenses or special abilities.
  • Have the program create completely new traps keyed to party CER, and provide statistics to the GM
  • Pit traps, and pits as an alternative to stairs to the next level. I love pit traps.
  • More dungeon environmental conditions:
    • What are the walls made of and how easy are they to climb?
    • What are the floors made of, and do they impose any interesting effects on movement and combat?
    • These have implications for PCs trying creative solutions, and are key factors for determining Natures Power for druids (not currently evaluated).
  • Determine Natures Power level.
  • Traps in specific room hexes and in hallways.
  • "Setpiece" rooms and encounters - hand-crafted by a human to be guarenteed to make sense.
  • More variable hallway widths, option to force a minimum of 2 yards or 3 yards.
  • More coherent hallway digging algorithm (as an option; insane is also fun)
  • option to create "flow" in the dungeon level, adjusting difficulty according to proximity to entrance/exit.
  • match up stairs up/down to a "generate next floor" option
  • option to regenerate a room, encounter, treasure, or trap if you don't like it
  • Themed monster groups (with the option for totally insane monster groups too)
  • Dungeons (or subsections of large dungeons) entirely populated on a selectable theme
  • Cool hash-fill dungeon design
  • put water on the map
  • position dungeon junk on the map? (may never happen)
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Last edited by Bruno; 06-27-2018 at 12:37 PM.
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Old 06-27-2018, 11:35 AM   #4
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Default Re: GURPS DF / DFRPG Random Dungeon Generator

CREDIT:
This project is significantly based on version 1.0.3 of the random dungeon generator created by drow (drow@bin.sh). We owe drow a significant debt of gratitude. Thank you for making this work possible by sharing your code. Drow specifically provided the bulk of the actual map making code, which we are elaborating on.

Modifications and elaborations by Emily Smirle and Kyle Norton. Programming and data by Emily Smirle, Project Management and data by Kyle Norton. Code contributors include nasfarley88 and eggdropsoap. Pull requests are welcome!

This project is licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0

GURPS is a trademark of Steve Jackson Games, and its rules and art are copyrighted by Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by Steve Jackson Games.

This game aid is the original creation of Emily Smirle and Kyle Norton and is released for free distribution, and not for resale, under the permissions granted in the Steve Jackson Games Online Policy.
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Old 06-27-2018, 11:44 AM   #5
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Default Re: GURPS DF / DFRPG Random Dungeon Generator

Quote:
Originally Posted by ericbsmith View Post
Heh - as it is open source I'm very much a "The More The Merrier" mindset. Nothing bugs me more than finding references to a decade-old utility that sounds super handy but seems to have evaporated from the internet. Gaming utilities tend to remain super handy after a decade or two, because my books are still here, but can I find that O:WoD character generator any more? *sigh*

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bengt View Post
It seems like the name is the randomization seed for the dungeon, so shouldn't the name be included in the "Link to re-create this dungeon"? Right now you get a different name and layout if you just use the link, but the same one if you also copy paste the name.
Correct, and that's a good catch, thank you. I forgot the dungeon name wasn't stored as part of the options object. I'll have that fixed in the next update (unless a Git Gnome beats me to it)

Quote:
Originally Posted by acrosome View Post
And the generator seems to heavily favor spiraling hallways. Them's a LOT of hallways. But maybe I just need to play with it more.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ericbsmith View Post
Increasing Room Layout to Tight removes a lot of the hallways, while Dense removes them almost altogether, favoring rooms connected directly to one another.
The corridors are (currently) laid down by a drunken walk. The tunnel digger goes out a door and digs a spot, then it has a random chance to keep going in the same direction or to pick a random new direction. If the direction chosen is blocked it has a chance to make a junction (if applicable) or picks a new direction.
What the Corridors setting controls is that likelyhood of continuing in a straight line... but it's still just digging blindly with no particular destination in mind, which means when it's "straight" it does march happily in a straight line... but it tends to spiral after hitting a barrier. Trim Deadends can help with this as those spirals are all dead ends, but it's only a bandaid over the issue.

My current big project is providing an alternate corridor algorithm that actually works to connect rooms with some basic pathfinding logic (A*, oh how I love thee). This will result in a much higher proportion of tunnels that "seem to be going somewhere". I'll probably make the ratio between chaotic tunnels and lawful tunnels a tunable setting :)

Quote:
Originally Posted by ericbsmith View Post
Another one is that when printed the first page contains only the Dungeon Name, making it a giant waste of paper. I fixed it for the version on my website by making a slight modification to the dungeon.css file.
I changed the width in the following lines, at the very bottom of the file, from 100% to 90%.
Code:
    canvas {
        object-fit: contain;
        width: 90% !important;
    }
I swear that fit when I was testing it. Regardless, I've incorporated the fix.
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Old 06-27-2018, 11:58 AM   #6
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Default Re: GURPS DF / DFRPG Random Dungeon Generator

This is absolutely amazing! I've mainly used random generators as a novelty toy so far, but I might even consider using this for a GM-less play. You could easily rotate GM duty by room if you want to preserve the challenge and have one party member be the designated torch bearer.

CER might not be perfect, but neither are all the other balancing systems devised for games.

The only suggestion I have is to add metric room descriptions as an option. 90 x 90 feet is still not intuitive for us Europeans, especially when we don't play that other game (tm) and are thankful for GURPS' affinity to yards.
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Old 06-27-2018, 12:33 PM   #7
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Default Re: GURPS DF / DFRPG Random Dungeon Generator

Quote:
Originally Posted by Blind Mapmaker View Post
This is absolutely amazing! I've mainly used random generators as a novelty toy so far, but I might even consider using this for a GM-less play. You could easily rotate GM duty by room if you want to preserve the challenge and have one party member be the designated torch bearer.
Random generators have been used for solo or GM-less play since the earliest incarnations of the idea. I think the first ones were explicitly for solo play but I won't swear to it. Regardless, since we're trying to make it as "complete" as possible, we definitely aim to support this kind of play to our utmost. The dungeon you make will make about as much sense as Buffalo Castle :)

Quote:
Originally Posted by Blind Mapmaker View Post
CER might not be perfect, but neither are all the other balancing systems devised for games.
And when you're asking a computer to do things, "eyeball it" is terrible instructions :)

Quote:
Originally Posted by Blind Mapmaker View Post
The only suggestion I have is to add metric room descriptions as an option. 90 x 90 feet is still not intuitive for us Europeans, especially when we don't play that other game (tm) and are thankful for GURPS' affinity to yards.
As a Canadian, I sympathize. I'll look into it; it's all in Yards internally, so following the SJG standard of 1 yard = 1 meter is doable.
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Old 06-27-2018, 01:35 PM   #8
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Default Re: GURPS DF / DFRPG Random Dungeon Generator

Quote:
Originally Posted by ericbsmith View Post
I changed the width in the following lines, at the very bottom of the file, from 100% to 90%.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bruno View Post
I swear that fit when I was testing it. Regardless, I've incorporated the fix.
My fix was more of a "quick fix" than a real fix. The problem appears to be that the proportional dimensions of the default Rectangle layout are so close to the available print area of 8.5x11 paper that the image takes up the entire page, with no room left over at the top for the Dungeon Name header. It probably doesn't do that on A4 paper (which is taller and less wide). Most of the other map layouts have a 1:1 proportion, so don't have that issue; excepting the L-shaped layout which is so tall proportionally that it always spills over onto two pages (and when it does it prints the header and the top 2/3 of the map on page 1 and the bottom 1/3 of the map on page 2) . This suggests that the best fix for the Rectangle is to either make it slightly less tall and more square-ish (prefered) so that there is room for the header at the top of the page at 100% width or to make it even taller and more rectangular so that at 100% width it spills over onto two pages. That change, I suspect, is in the back-end of the java code somewhere and I didn't go poking around there.

The 90% width fix just winds up shrinking all maps down, losing ~20% of the possible printable image area unnecessarily.
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Old 06-27-2018, 02:00 PM   #9
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Default Re: GURPS DF / DFRPG Random Dungeon Generator

I don't do dungeon crawls but I love a good procedural generation tool. This looks really good, I've been playing around with it for 20min now :) Good job!

How do GM typically handle fog of war in play? Do they just draw corridors on the go, as players progress, while referring to the complete printed dungeon behind their GM screen, or is there some more clever/less error prone way?

Also, it raised a vaguely unrelated question: 1-hex-wide corridors end up have alternating hex/2-hex-halves, and I although I've been playing with GURPS for a long time, I'm ashamed that I have no idea how the rules handle that? (common sense would indicate characters would just go forward and alternatively occupy overlapping hexes, but I don't know what RAW say?)
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Old 06-27-2018, 02:21 PM   #10
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Default Re: GURPS DF / DFRPG Random Dungeon Generator

When I play online, I make use of MapTools' great vision blocking and fog-of-war tools, which require a little bit of preparation for lots of payoff (in my opinion).

When we play on the table, I generally draw it in with dry erase markers as the group progresses - but with exceptions. Sometimes I prepare a large map wiht lots of details, and I preprint it (and tape the pages together) because I don't particularly feel like replicating it by hand. I've covered up parts with paper, but if it's mostly a large open area or outdoor, I often just plonk the map down.
My face-to-face group are all GMs (we rotate the duties) and are good at firewalling information.
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