Introducing GM Notepad: A Command Line Tool for GM-ing

On a commute home from work, while listening to Judd Karlman’s “Daydreaming about Dragons” podcast he wondered about ways to organize notes for Non-Player Characters (NPCs 📖). And I started thinking. How might I organize my content for access while gaming? And what kind of content? More importantly, what kind of tasks do I need to complete as a Game Master (GM 📖).

  • Remember a character name
  • Lookup their passive perception
  • Lookup a random table
  • Roll on a random table
  • Create a random character name. Maybe based on a culture.
  • Record quick notes about an NPC

I thought about swnt, and command line tool for Stars without Numbers. See the github project for more information.

And I thought about Alex Schroeder’s tools.

I have kicked this around for awhile. I made an attempt in Rollio. But I built that to roll on tables. I needed something more general.

Introduction

By default gm-notepad interacts with $stdout and $stderr. There are three conceptual buffers:

  • interactive (defaults to $stderr)
  • output (defaults to $stderr)
  • filesystem (defaults to your file system)

When you type a line, and hit <enter>, gm-notepad will evaluate the line and render it to one or more of the buffers.

Examples

First, take a look at the help: $ gm-notepad -h

Usage: gm-notepad [options] [files]
Note taking tool with random table expansion.

Examples:
	$ gm-notepad
	$ gm-notepad filename
	$ echo '{name}' | gm-notepad

Options:
    -l, --list_tables                List tables loaded and exit (Default: false)
    -r, --report_config              Dump the configuration data (Default: false)
    -p, --path=PATH                  Path(s) for {table_name}.<config.table_extension> files (Default: ["."])
    -f, --filesystem_directory=DIR   Path to dump tables (Default: ".")
    -x, --table_extension=EXT        Extension to use for selecting tables (Default: ".txt")
    -t, --timestamp                  Append a timestamp to the note (Default: false)
    -d, --defer_output               Defer output until system close (Default: false)

Color options:
    -i, --skip-interactive-color     Disable color rendering for interactive buffer (Default: false)
    -o, --with-output-color          Enable color rendering for output buffer (Default: false)

    -h, --help                       You're looking at it!

At it’s core, gm-shell interacts with named tables. A named table is a file found amongst the specified paths and has the specified table_extension. Let’s take a look at the defaults. In a new shell, type: $ gm-notepad -r

Which writes the following to the interactive buffer (eg. $stderr)::

# Configuration Parameters:
#   config[:report_config] = true
#   config[:defer_output] = false
#   config[:filesystem_directory] = "."
#   config[:interactive_buffer] = #<IO:<STDERR>>
#   config[:interactive_color] = true
#   config[:output_color] = false
#   config[:list_tables] = false
#   config[:output_buffer] = #<IO:<STDOUT>>
#   config[:paths] = ["."]
#   config[:table_extension] = ".txt"
#   config[:with_timestamp] = false

You’ll need to exit out Ctrl + D.

By default gm-notepad will load as tables all files matching the following glob: ./**/*.txt.

Included in the gem’s test suite are four files:

  • ./spec/fixtures/name.txt
  • ./spec/fixtures/first-name.txt
  • ./spec/fixtures/last-name.txt
  • ./spec/fixtures/location.csv

When I run gm-notepad -l, gm-notepad does the following:

  • load all found tables
  • puts the config (see above) to the interactive buffer
  • puts the table_names to the interactive buffer
  • exits

Below are the table names when you run the gm-notepad -l against the repository (note when you run this command you’ll get a preamble of the config):

=>	first-name
=>	last-name
=>	name

Now let’s load gm-notepad for interaction. In the terminal, type: $ gm-notepad

You now have an interactive shell for gm-notepad. Type ? and hit <enter>.

gm-notepad will write the following to interactive buffer (eg. $stderr):

=>	Prefixes:
=>		? - Help (this command)
=>		+ - Query table names and contents
=>		<table_name: - Write the results to the given table
=>
=>	Tokens:
=>		! - Skip expansion
=>		/search/ - Grep for the given 'search' within the prefix
=>		[index] - Target a specific 'index'
=>		{table_name} - expand_line the given 'table_name'

Now, let’s take look at a table. Again in an active gm-notepad session type the following: +first-name

gm-notepad will write the following to interactive buffer (eg. $stderr):

=>	[1]	Frodo
=>	[2]	Merry
=>	[3]	Pippin
=>	[4]	Sam
=>	[5-6]	{first-name}Wise

These are the five table entries in the first-name table. “Frodo” is at index 1. “Merry”, “Pippin”, and “Sam” are at indices 2,3,4 respectively. For the fifth line there are two things happening. First the index spans a range. Second, notice the entry: {first-name}Wise. The {first-name} references a table named “first-name” (the same on you are looking at). Now type the following in your gm-notepad session: Hello {first-name}

gm-notepad will read the line and recursively expand the {first-name} and write the result to the interactive buffer and output buffer. The expander randomly picks a name from all entries, with ranges increasing the chance of being picked. In the above table “Frodo”, “Merry”, “Pippin”, and “Sam” each have a 1 in 6 chance of being picked. And “{first-name}Wise” has a 2 in 6 chance.

In the session you might have something like the below:

=>	Hello SamWise
Hello SamWise

The line with starting with => is the interactive buffer. The other line is written to the output buffer.

To wrap up our first session, let’s try one more thing. In your gm-notepad session type the following: {first-name} owes [2d6]gp to {first-name}:

Frodo owes 3gp to SamWise

Let’s take a look at the +character table. Your table indices need not be numbers. And you can mix numbers and text. _If you expand the table via {table} each text index counts as 1 entry. For the below table, each entry has a 1 in 3 chance of being randomly chosen.

=>	[name]	Grell
=>	[ac]	15
=>	[hd]	12D12