Note notturne

https://www.ted.com/talks/anil_seth_how_your_brain_hallucinates_your_conscious_reality

A new version of the Calc spreadsheet to handle the combats. I added on the right side the initiative order; also, the current attacker is highlighter both on the initiative order table (right side) and on the couplings table (middle). I also restructured a lot the table on the left. My idea was to make it a little more "storytelling" and a little less "data entry". The labels will change according to what is the next expected action (by me or by the players) and thus I should avoid to be confused during the combat resolution. I plan to create a new sheet to resolve social and academic actions, so that they can have the required depth as well.

Yesterday was Sunday, and as usual, we had our (short) session playing Decipher's Lord of the Rings RPG. In this game, I am the Narrator (or Dungeon Master if you prefer); my wife plays Carawen, an Elven female warrior from Mirkwood, and my daughter plays Luna, a (very young) wizard, pupil of Radagast, from the land of Rohan. They are in year 2700 from Third Era. At the moment, they are traveling in the Iron Hills directed to Cape East, the most eastern of the Dwarven settlements in the Iron Hills. They are following the tracks of another Dwarf, Nar son of Dar, who was hunting a Dragon years before. In the last short session, while they were camping on the road they met Morwen, a mysterious woman who was traveling alone coming from Cape East. During the night, they were attacked by a group of six orcs, but they were able to overcome them, also thanks to the prowess of Morwen with her sword. While they were warned about the possibility of attacks of Orcs on this r

Another version, with a few more changes, namely: the buttons have been moved away from the spreadsheet to a toolbar the grid has been removed and re-added only where necessary a new sheet has been included which I will use to look-up the attributes, reactions and skills a problem with critical hits has been fixed: only melee critical were shown

I am currently running a couple of RPG campaigns in Tolkien's Middle Earth; the first one is set seventy years before the fall of Erebor, and the second one four years after the Quest for Erebor. So, I decided the day of the year (in game time) when the two campaigns were going to start, and we started from there. My players were very diligent in keeping track of the time, and we had a nice journal with all their notes about the events. After a while, I decided to use some random weather generator. The first one was https://donjon.bin.sh/d20/weather/ ; this is a very simple weather generator, which is very good if you have to generate a week or two of data, but it becomes somehow cumbersome if you want to generate a longer calendar. The second one was https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDBehindTheScreen/comments/6ckopi/rpg_weather_generator_daily_weather_based_in / ; this is a very detailed generator, which will generate one year of weather. I modified it so that the names and descriptio

As you can see from the new image, the spreadsheet is progressing. You don't need anymore to have two sheets open side by side (even though it was fun to do) and you can run all your combat from a single sheet. Here are the additions: there are a bunch of new buttons: "Stordisci" (the enemy is staggered), "Sanguina" (the enemy is wounded and it is losing one HP/round), "Atterra" (the enemy is Prone) "Fai alzare" (the enemy stands up), "Mostra critica" (shows the description of the critical); "Infilza" (Lodged arrow) is currently not working; the "Danni" (Damage) button will parse the damage type (e.g. 2d6+3) and calculate the appropriate amount of damages; the spreadsheet shows temporary conditions (Staggered, Prone) or permanent (Dead) conditions for attacker and defender; on the right side, there is a new range (called Couplings) where you can record, for the attackers, their targets; this is usefu

This is a screen capture of some of the sheets I am using to run the battles in my campaign for the (now defunct) Lord of the Rings RPG. The left part contains the stats for the PC and NPC in the battle, the right part contains the controls to resolve the combat itself. As this is still a WIP, when I will have something more complete I will actually upload the (OpenOffice) sheet.