This blog has moved!


This blog has moved!

See this post for details.

Or just head over to the new site.

Saturday, April 5, 2014

DCC Toy: The Monster Cruncher

Introducing the DCC Monster Cruncher

This is an Google Spreadsheets thing I've been playing with for a couple days. I find the DCC Core Book is kind of scant on monsters and it's harder to bullshit stats for that system than in other OSR games. The idea of the Monster Cruncher is a few basic inputs can give you the stats you need to run a monster in combat, and don't need to halt the session to figure out how the thing works.

This page is to give it a permanent home. You can come to this post to access the newest version.

To give it a whirl, click the image below. The version you see will be locked, but you can add a functional copy to your own Google Drive by going to File --> Make A Copy

I have no idea where I even found this image

Things it does

  • Copy/Pastes nicely into Notepad/Word/whatever, so stats are easy to save once generated.
  • Determines Attack Bonus, HD type and saves according to Creature Type (based on Jeremy Deram's excellent DCC Monster Helper PDF)
  • Calculates spellcasting bonuses. These are so simple (HD+Per or Int) that they almost feel redundant and a waste of space. May remove them in future versions.
  • You can input ability scores. Modifiers will be calculated and applied accordingly. 
  • Determines attack damage by weapon type. This includes natural weapons. Damage scales to creature size, although small, medium, and large non-natural weapons all currently give the same result, but my reasons for having done that are making less and less sense, so expect that to change. Weapon damage is scaled as per D&D 3.5. (This was very buggy and hard to implement. Let me know if you run into any trouble with it, it might need some further finessing.)
  • I'd like to say it's mobile compatible but, at least on the iOS google drive app, the drop-down menus don't work and putting in entries manually is kind of sketchy. It's mobile tolerant.
Possible additional functions
  • Concatenated HD output (like, instead of telling you that your HD is a d8, it combines all relevant information into an expression of XdY+Z)
  • I'd like to make an Action Dice calculator, but that feels like more an art than a science. Then again, so does everything in DCC, and that hasn't stopped me so far . Still trying to figure out what kind of parameters this would use. HD certainly, maybe also Creature Type?
  • Critical Hit Die/Table! I just thought of this now. I hate looking that shit up. This'll definitely be added.
  • AC calculator. I'm a little hesitant with this one, mainly because I'd want to put it near the top, which means moving everything down and that fucks up all the functions. But it seem important enough that I'll probably do it fairly soon. There's a great Base AC by Size table in Critters, Creatures and Denizens that I'll probably use for starters. That value will be modified by armor type worn (there'll be a drop-down menu for this) and a generic natural/magical/bullshit AC modifier field you can use to tinker the numbers.
Current Version: 1.2

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.