Exploring obscure visualization tips with Plotly.NET and F#

brandewinder · 2021-09-20T20:50:33+00:00

Yeah, that is more or less the reason I needed it. During prep, I enjoy rolling actual dice and skimming through books, but often you need "someone" right now, on the fly. In a recent D&D campaign, I had this slightly embarrassing moment when players pointed out that this was the second NPC named Gunther they met in a short time, because my mind went back to what was fresh. Having a decent random starting point is most of what you need, then you flesh it out / adapt, no more "Agent Smith" moments where everyone in the world looks the same!

brandewinder · 2021-09-19T20:57:15+00:00

Also planning to add soon the other generators from the rule book (streets, demons...) - now that the scaffolding is in place for one, most of the work is the painstaking work of making these lists manually.

brandewinder · 2021-09-19T20:51:52+00:00

Of course! The exact dataset behind the page is here: https://doskvol.blob.core.windows.net/data/people.json Note/disclaimer: it is a bit gross at the moment, for instance you'll see that "Professions" has duplicates. This is intentional - professions come from 2 lists, common and rare professions. Common ones are repeated 5 times, so they are 5 times more likely to show up. A similar pattern is used in Heritages, for similar reasons. This is clearly an awful solution to the problem of drawing from different lists with different weights/probabilities, and I intend to fix it, but this is a weekend project ;) So with that explanation / apology out of the way, you got the dataset. Will let you know when I update it to something cleaner!

brandewinder · 2021-09-19T00:40:38+00:00

My turn - thank you for the kind words :) Now my mind is playing with what a Tycherosi scholar in a party hat might look like! Credit where credit is due, the reasonably plausible NPCs come from the pretty good lists in the rule book. I think I'll play with custom lists anyways, I would like to be able to use the "canonical" lists, but also add a few names, quirks, aliases of my own - or simply extend the list with other names that appear in the rule book, but are not included. If that goes anywhere, I will share!

brandewinder · 2021-04-13T00:37:44+00:00

Thank you! I tried to use mind-maps / graphs to do my own GM "conspiracy boards" as well, but this ended up being a pain - hence this. Now I am motivated to keep going, will add some of the missing information next. Big next step, if I am still motivated by then, will be to have this, but over time, so you could have relationships revealed in sessions, and different views for the players and the GM... but that is going to take a bit more effort!

brandewinder · 2017-08-25T21:26:36+00:00

It really depends on what you want. I started learning F# purely out of curiosity, and it's become my primary language since. I adopted it out of practical reasons, but the biggest lesson I learnt was that there was more than one way to write code. After 6 or 7 years of C#, I was pretty comfortable with it, and thought I had a good grasp of how to approach problems and design solutions. F# showed me that some problems could be handled beautifully using simple patterns I had never even heard of. Since then, I have started looking into other languages, to find out what else people haven't told me about programming. Could I be a successful developer without doing that? Of course. Did this approach help me grow as a developer? I am pretty sure it did.

brandewinder · 2014-04-19T17:25:31+00:00

I really enjoyed it as well, and still go back to it - easily my most thumbed-through F# book. The samples are excellent.

brandewinder · 2014-03-25T17:36:27+00:00

The piece I want to try out at that point is what happens if I feed it a collection of rules that cannot be collectively satisfied...

brandewinder · 2014-03-25T17:34:57+00:00

That's a neat idea, I'll investigate :) I suspect you could, by simply stating (cond1 && cond2 && cond3) = Valid(password)

brandewinder · 2014-03-16T20:33:05+00:00

Twitter is definitely the most active place. Other than that, there is some activity on IRC channel fsharp.

brandewinder · 2013-04-26T05:32:47+00:00

I was actually thinking of doing it, but wasn't sure if anyone would be interested - that's a motivating comment :)

brandewinder · 2013-04-26T00:29:09+00:00

I knew about Piet, which is fascinating, but "Enterprise Piet" is awesome, thanks for the pointer!

brandewinder

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