Show Notes
In this episode of the RPGBOT.Podcast, we discuss designing custom monsters. How do we make a monster that’s unique, exciting, and tells a cool story? How do we turn that into something in our games?
Find Ash on StartPlaying.Games.
Materials Referenced in this Episode
- RPGBOT.Podcast Episodes
- Content From RPGBOT.net
- Other Stuff
Image by Seth Metoyer on Pixabay.
Transcript
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Do you think the monsterizer could be made to output attack/action paragraphs in the format that D&D Beyond homebrew system uses?
If that’s possible, a series of articles acting as a reference how to add features to homebrew creatures, items, etc. would be very useful. The fact that they’re unpolished dev tools really shows.
I added functionality to export your monster to DnDBeyond as described in the v1.1 announcement post.
Unfortunately, DnDBeyond doesn’t have an easy to import all of the data in one go. The best solution I found was to paste into the fields one at a time. It’s extremely inelegant, but I set up buttons to copy the values in the markdown format the DnDBeyond expects. The easiest and fastest solution is to have the monsterizer open in one window and DnDBeyond in another, then go back and forth. It’s annoying, but it’s reasonably fast.
I mean the stuff like:
Scissors. Melee Weapon Attack: [rollable]+4;{“diceNotation”:”1d20+4″,”rollType”:”to hit”,”rollAction”:”Scissors”}[/rollable] to hit, range 5 ft., one target, Hit: 7 [rollable](2d4+2);{“diceNotation”:”2d4+2″,”rollType”:”damage”,”rollAction”:”Scissors”,”rollDamageType”:”slashing”}[/rollable] slashing damage.
There’s a lot of stuff that is constant, or could be selected from a dropdown list, but as-is, the rollable tag formatting is easy to break. It would help to have something that lets the user fill in the fields in a more intuitive, human-readable way which would then output the code block formatted properly. Maybe it would be better as a feature of a browser extension like Above VTT.
That syntax looks like a roll20 macro or something along those lines. I haven’t seen that syntax used in DnDBeyond (though that certainly doesn’t mean that it’s not there).
Could you point me to an example of a homebrew creature on DnDBeyond which includes that syntax? Or maybe some documentation if you know where to find it? This sounds like a great improvement, but I need some more information to implement it effectively.
I guess I wasn’t seeing that before, but it’s showing up now.