Preamble
Hello again! I’ve been quiet because things have been astonishingly busy this autumn season. But I have not given up my goal of using Tinderbox to manage my roleplaying game campaigns! Things MIGHT be getting a little simpler for me, because I’ve started running a Dungeons and Dragons game, and there’s a lot more consistency and support in that space (statblocks etc).
Current situation
I am about to begin running a D&D campaign called The Wild Beyond the Witchlight. It’s a published campaign (which is a series of related adventures) with a lot of moving parts and recurring characters and locations, and in spite of this complexity, there is no searchable PDF. Additionally, 3rd parties are constantly producing supplemental material using the same characters and locations and I might want to integrate that stuff.
One of the first things I want to do is map out all the characters! The adventure helpfully has some summaries of key NPCs in a web page.
I want to copy & paste that material into a TBX file so I can (with some effort) see relationships and generally keep track of what’s going on. It’ll also help me with embellishments like tying in player back stories.
I have attached a sample file where I have put some NPC information (cut and paste from the adventure). For Amidor I manually cut and paste the attributes I wanted to use from the note. I didn’t do anything other than paste Agdon into the file.
Actual Question
What is the best way to automatically parse Agdon’s note so that it can automatically set his Attributes based on the note text? For instance, automatically setting his alignment to Chaotic Evil.
Also, how do you pre-define a User attribute with a data type of Set?
THANK YOU! and happy Thanksgiving! NPC SAMPLE.tbx (90.8 KB)
Head backstage : https:/backstage.eastgate.com/; you’ll have received your login credentials. Get the latest test version there. (It’s a test version: be sure always to have terrific backups!)
This means, "Take the text. Skip over everything until you come to the characters “Alignment.”. Now, take everything else up to the next carriage return, and store that in the attribute “Alignment”.
Two observations:
My post violates the rule that we don’t discuss unreleased features here. We shouldn’t have long to wait, but better to discuss this backstage, not here.
Automating this is definitely possible (and will be sort of fun!). But manually copying and pasting is not a terrible option. I think you could do a character a minute, or 50 characters in an hour. It’s not a lot of fun, but it gets you to look at each character in the story — and getting your hands on your data is a good thing.
To make an attribute, go to the Document inspector’s user attribute pane. Make the new attributes, give it a name, and then choose set from the Type menu.
