Delving Deeper monster database

[karsalfrink]

Work in progress: a database file for all the monsters as described in OD&D retroclone Delving Deeper.

[karsalfrink]

So far this just contains the examples Dan shared earlier.

[karsalfrink]

Over on the Wandering DMs discord, Dan says:

• Treas(ure), Align(ment) columns only take 1 character.
• Nothing between the Dam(age) and Special columns affect the assessment, so you can just fill in dummy values if you want.
• The major trick will be to synch with my codes for Special abilities, and hope those mostly work the same as Simon's interpretations. Likely just copying from my standard Monster Database is best in most cases (https://github.com/danielrcollins1/Arena/blob/master/MonsterDatabase.csv)
• Spell-casters can use the code "Spells (N)" for an Nth-level wizard. Other types of spell-casters require custom code (so probably out-of-bounds unless a coder digs in). E.g., you see for Android I just filled in the average 2nd level magic-user status (randomizing per Android would take some custom code; similar to the Titan). And one more thing -- Simon gives sweep attacks vs. any opponents of 1 or 2 HD, and also gives sweeping to all monsters (as in LBB Vol-2), which my system doesn't do. That's kind of an inherent difference we just need to cross our fingers and hope doesn't add up to much. Since my system assesses all PC levels 1-12, that category is only 1/6 of the overall input; and since they're consolidated by a harmonic mean, which is "dominated by the minimum of its arguments" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_mean#Definition), it'll make even less difference if just levels 1-2 give an apparently high power rating. Ah, sweep attacks; complex to the point that you're forced to learn more math.

[karsalfrink]

Just a quick update to say that I copied over all the monsters from the DD web page into a Google sheet. First it needs some cleaning up (getting the data under the right columns.) The next step would be to translate the values into a second sheet that has the OED structure. Then it would be a simple matter of exporting the whole things as a csv and committing it here. After that I imagine there will be some debugging of individual entries etc.

[karsalfrink]

So I've pushed a simple export of the stuff that's on the DD website tables.

One thing I did was for those entries that are preceded by a header (e.g. "Dinosaurs", "Golems"), I added the singular of the header to the entry name itself (e.g. "Dinosaur, Brontosaur").

The first obvious thing to fix is for the Number column, convert the listed ranges (e.g. "2-8") to dice notation (e.g. 2d4). If anyone knows a clever way of automating that, I'm all ears.

Then I guess it's a matter of going through the DD monster descriptions and adding the entries for the Atk, Dam and Special columns by hand.

As Dan mentioned, the Align, Type, EHD, HDD, Env, and Source columns don't matter for the simulation so can be safely ignored for now.

[karsalfrink]

Couldn't resist quickly going in and fixing those values for number appearing. To-dos remaining:

• [ ] Check MV values -- these should only be one number?
• [ ] Check HD values -- same question, only one number, right?
• [ ] Check percentage in lair -- not sure if relevant at all for our purpose, but quite a few list n/a or otherwise
• [ ] Check treasure values -- never had a look at if DD uses same scheme as LBB OD&D, also not sure of relevant for our current purposes of calculating EHD
• [ ] Add number of attacks from DD monster descriptions -- default is 1
• [ ] Add damage per attack from DD monster description -- default is 1d6
• [ ] Add special attacks