2018-02-19

Arena on GitHub

"Arena" is a Java code package I've developed over the years to simulate combat in Original D&D and generate statistics on the results. We've used it to look at level-based demographics, assess monster metrics, generate bands of men in the wilderness, and lots more.

Recently I placed all that code in a GitHub Repository, so if you're a coder, hopefully this a more convenient way to access, inspect, verify, download, run, and fork that package if you have any inclination.

Features added in the past few months that are new there: (1) Treasure generation by random methods (for both dungeons and wilderness: see DungeonTreasureTable and MonsterTreasureTable), whereas previously treasure XP was added based on pre-calculated averages. (2) Party-based combat in the Arena, so we can simulate groups of adventurers in a dungeon together (in Arena, see command switch -z), whereas previously it was solo encounters only. (3) Encounter table generation in the dungeon, based on Equivalent Hit Dice values (see EHDToTables). In future posts we'll look at some observations gleaned from these added features.

Also recently I put the up-to-date version of the OED Monster Database, used in conjunction with that software, up on the OED Games website. Recent modifications are changes to Equivalent Hit Dice (EHD) values for about a half-dozen monsters (as a result of new data from the software), and an addition of an "Env" column, which is 1 if the monster appears in the dungeon environment (used for the automatic encounter table generation). Again, hopefully the website is a convenient location at which to access that resource.


2 comments:

  1. Great looking work, Delta! Thanks for contributing this to the community!

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    1. Thanks for the kind appreciation! Also a good exercise for me, as it forced me to look at the code in a different perspective and clean some things up, you may know the feeling. :-)

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