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5E Monster Stat Block Generator

JohnnFour

Game Master
Staff member
Adamantium WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Gamer Lifestyle
Demonplague Author
Borderland Explorer
A nice creation:
https://tetra-cube.github.io/dnd/dnd-statblock.html

Would love to see CL someday offer output options like this.

GUI question for you.

What could be done to make monster input into this tool faster?

It's a pain filling out all those form fields. What would you change to make such data input faster and easier?
 

ELF

Generator Sage
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
That's surprisingly functional implementation, given the unwieldiness of D&D stat blocks.

I'm not sure how well the D&D rules can facilitate this, but it would be nice if the user could first select a preset (a monster type in this context), and then apply additional templates to it. The templates would only apply to a subset of the fields, and potentially add more description paragraphs as well.
 

JohnnFour

Game Master
Staff member
Adamantium WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Gamer Lifestyle
Demonplague Author
Borderland Explorer
Yes. I think the first order is to make a smart form whenever possible. A login provides any user data, for example.

I think next would be to design a form for three user types:
  • Mobile/Tablet
  • Desktop Mouse
  • Desktop Keyboard
Mobile means different screen orientations and making things easy to tap. No small drop-down tap areas - big circles or boxes. Also, spinners instead of drop-downs, and screens with multi-select capabilty (eg just keep scrolling through each decision and tap as you go instead of forcing all decisions on one small pixel range).

Desktop Mouse also provides easy click zones and can also take advantage of right-mouse buttons.

Desktop Keyboard should provide logical keyboard shortcuts and logical tabbing orders so you never need a mouse to complete the form.


With large forms like this one, I think auto-save would be great. It's going to take you awhile to figure out each form element if you're in creation mode. Your session could timeout, wifi drop, or some other issue. So having a Save button is ideal.


I'm thinking about this because I'd like similar forms for D&D, PF, and other game system Libraries. While CL offers simple system neutral tools like the 3LNPC generator, I'd then like users to add crunch to those NPCs as needed for sessions.

I see the Library as an add-on, and not part of CL Core.

And some game systems will need more form elements than crunch.

For me, this all harkens back to a wonderful site that used to be called DM Lilith's Tools. She built forms so you could upload NPCs, magic items, etc. to share with other website visitors. Her library grew to 100s of NPCs and you could sort by CR, Type, Tag, etc. I used that site heavily for my D&D 3.5 campaigns.

I contributed a few NPCs, but the forms involved so much time and fiddly interactions I did not submit many.

So I want to try to make form entries a lot easier for the CL Library when the time comes.

Any other ideas on how to make long forms for game crunch data entry and management easier for users?
 
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