Played the first Slipgate Chokepoint game, and, unsurprisingly for a new game, the players and I all struggled through character generation. It’s not particularly difficult, but we hadn’t done it before, good values are low, down is up, we fear change, etc.
So then Alone in the Labyrinth told me about his character generator for PARIAH, which uses a website called perchance. This is a deceptively simple site that allows you to write lists of things and then pick from them at random at evaluation time. Here’s their example:
animal
pig
cow
zebra
sentence
That [animal] is very sneaky.
I befriended a wild [animal] yesterday.
The sentence variable will select one from its list when used, and that will recurse back, evaluating
any other variables along the way.
This then lets us do things like:
STATS
name = [first_name] [last_name]
HP = [roll("1d10+5")]
Brawn = [roll("3d6")]
Brains = [roll("3d6")]
Dexterity = [roll("3d6")]
Willpower = [roll("3d6")]
As of course it has a dice plugin. Although it’s worth noting things get rapidly more complex as variables are evaluated on each print and are being converted to HTML and JavaScript and I’ve not really worked out some of the fun in there to allow re-rolls. I can barely do Traits changing your Inventory!
But nevertheless, here’s my attempt at a Slipgate Chokepoint character generator. It’s still not quite right, but it’s getting there.
If I ever get it perfect, I should probably make a Stay Frosty version as that wouldn’t be much harder 🤔…