Questions Regarding Using Emacs With Org Mode For Basic Fantasy

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Shortstop
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Questions Regarding Using Emacs With Org Mode For Basic Fantasy

Post by Shortstop »

Hey there!

I got into Basic Fantasy recently, specifically for solo play.

To make it a bit easier and to prevent myself from having to constantly refer to the PDF or the actual book I have, I have thought it through and think that having quick access to functions that generate tables with information from Basic Fantasy would be cool.

So far, I'm kind of going through the Basic Fantasy book and converting what I can into charts or tables via Org Mode in Emacs, and can be found here:
https://github.com/SamuelBanya/BasicFantasyOrg

Does anyone know if there is any similar project that does this?

I've seen D&D type stuff with 'Markdown' and probably could convert it to Org Mode via 'Pandoc' in Emacs, but wanted to see if anyone had attempted this in Org Mode.

Mostly using this method since I use Emacs for everything including note taking, so it would be 100x easier for solo play to just generate random characters on the fly with associated and corrected reference tables with random values to reference, etc.

Thanks!
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lars_alexander
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Re: Questions Regarding Using Emacs With Org Mode For Basic Fantasy

Post by lars_alexander »

I use emacs with org mode, and am interested in this project. :D

Welcome to the forum!
Shortstop
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Re: Questions Regarding Using Emacs With Org Mode For Basic Fantasy

Post by Shortstop »

Hey there, Lars.

Thanks!

I was going to say, do you think this kind of project is something that should be able to generate Org Table functions at will right?

Do you have any experience with creating modes or anything of that nature? I have never created an Emacs package myself, and more or less have just generated my own Emacs config over the years, so I'm curious for your thoughts on what I should do.

Obviously, bare minimum, the tables from that Basic Fantasy book need to end up as Org Table based tables so that's a given.

How to call upon tables though is another story.

I was thinking maybe something like 'M-x bf-org-create-dwarf-thief' etc to just generate random tables that way with random values that are balanced.

Curious for your thoughts. For now, I'll try to just add the 'tables' for the stuff. I was being a bit ambitious to add descriptions of stuff, and other things, but honestly, I think the biggest thing that could aid people that are interested in solo play like myself are to just be able to generate necessary tables on the fly whenever required.

Curious to your thoughts in terms of how you think descriptions of things like items, races, etc should be handled as well.
sean8223
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Re: Questions Regarding Using Emacs With Org Mode For Basic Fantasy

Post by sean8223 »

I had extracted all of the tables in the core rules into .org form as a lark a while a back. They're generally organized by section as they appear in the original doc. Basically anything that was table-like in its presentation. Glad to see other emacs users here!

Note: the forum software won't allow uploads with a .org suffix, so I added .txt to the end of the file.
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Shortstop
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Re: Questions Regarding Using Emacs With Org Mode For Basic Fantasy

Post by Shortstop »

Hey Sean,

Awesome, that looks great! What's your take on this? Do you think its warranted to go the route of creating a related Emacs package for Org mode that contains functions that just generates these tables on the fly?

Curious as I've only done web development projects, but never actual projects based in Elips directly. Curious for your thoughts as well!
sean8223
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Re: Questions Regarding Using Emacs With Org Mode For Basic Fantasy

Post by sean8223 »

Shortstop wrote: Thu Jan 26, 2023 8:50 pm Hey Sean,

Awesome, that looks great! What's your take on this? Do you think its warranted to go the route of creating a related Emacs package for Org mode that contains functions that just generates these tables on the fly?

Curious as I've only done web development projects, but never actual projects based in Elips directly. Curious for your thoughts as well!
While I have been an emacs user for many years, I haven't written a lot of elisp and never anything at the level of a package. My instinct is that if you're looking to generate random characters or treasure hoards (say), having these tables in a format like JSON or XML would probably be more useful, since you could use any programming language to process them. Of course the output of such a tool could be .org text.

My interest in .org is primarily as a writing tool. LO Writer is tedious, and I have toyed with the idea of converting .org to .odt with the BFRPG stylesheet but I don't really submit a lot of material for the editing team to work with so it hasn't really gone beyond the idle thought stage.
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Re: Questions Regarding Using Emacs With Org Mode For Basic Fantasy

Post by Solomoriah »

FYI when uploading random things, please just pack them in ZIP files.
My personal site: www.gonnerman.org
Shortstop
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Re: Questions Regarding Using Emacs With Org Mode For Basic Fantasy

Post by Shortstop »

sean8223 wrote: Thu Jan 26, 2023 8:35 pm I had extracted all of the tables in the core rules into .org form as a lark a while a back. They're generally organized by section as they appear in the original doc. Basically anything that was table-like in its presentation. Glad to see other emacs users here!

Note: the forum software won't allow uploads with a .org suffix, so I added .txt to the end of the file.
I have included your tables in the main project as well so that everyone else can benefit from this too :)

Just updated it here:
https://github.com/SamuelBanya/BasicFantasyOrg

Let me know if you guys think I should include functions in this whole project, because I'll look into this if you find it useful. I'm thinking that its basically just functions to spit back the tables out, and maybe another to generate your own player character tables as well with randomized values.
Shortstop
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Re: Questions Regarding Using Emacs With Org Mode For Basic Fantasy

Post by Shortstop »

Also just added a character sheet org file as well. Looking good so far :)
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