The most fundamental aspect of a character–besides how you role play their actions–are their ability scores. In fifth edition (“5e”) Dungeons & Dragons, there are six ability scores: strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma.
There are a few common ways of rolling for these scores and the
ability_scores function accepts three of them. You can (A)
roll four six-sided dice drop the lowest value and sum the remaining
three dice, (B) roll three six-sided dice, or–for the truly wild–(C)
roll a single d20 and trust the dice gods to still give reasonable good
scores.
Regardless of your chosen rolling method, if any score is less than 8
or the total of all six scores is less than 70, a message will be
printed to let you know that you might be justified in re-rolling for
your character’s abilities. There is an optional quiet
argument you can set to TRUE if you don’t want that message
to print regardless of the roll outcomes.
If you are creating a player character and already have your desired
class and race in mind, you can go one step further and use
pc_creator to roll for ability scores, include racial
modifiers to those scores, assign your highest two scores to the “most
important” abilities for that class, and return final ability scores and
modifiers as a dataframe.
# Create a half orc barbarian
dndR::pc_creator(class = 'barbarian', race = 'half orc', score_method = "4d6")
#> Total score low. Consider re-rolling?
#> ability raw_score race_modifier score roll_modifier
#> 1 STR 12 2 14 +2
#> 2 DEX 11 0 11 0
#> 3 CON 12 1 13 +1
#> 4 INT 11 0 11 0
#> 5 WIS 8 0 8 -1
#> 6 CHA 11 0 11 0Note that to it does require under the hood tweaks to accept various
class/race information so not all character races or classes are
necessarily supported. I’m always happy to add support for new ones
though so feel free to open a GitHub Issue
and I can add support for the missing class(es)/race(s) in the next
version of dndR.
You can check currently supported character races and classes with
the dnd_races and dnd_classes functions
respectively.
# Identify supported character races
dndR::dnd_races()
#> [1] "aarakocra" "bugbear" "changeling"
#> [4] "dark elf" "dragonborn" "drow"
#> [7] "forest gnome" "goblin" "half elf"
#> [10] "half-elf" "half orc" "half-orc"
#> [13] "high elf" "hill dwarf" "hobgoblin"
#> [16] "human" "kalashtar" "lightfoot halfling"
#> [19] "mountain dwarf" "orc" "plasmoid"
#> [22] "shifter" "rock gnome" "stout halfling"
#> [25] "tiefling" "warforged" "wood elf"
# Identify supported character classes
dndR::dnd_classes()
#> [1] "artificer" "barbarian" "bard" "cleric" "druid" "fighter"
#> [7] "monk" "paladin" "ranger" "rogue" "sorcerer" "warlock"
#> [13] "wizard"If you have a single ability score and want to remind yourself what
roll modifier that translates to, you can use the mod_calc
function.
If your party uses experience point (XP)-based leveling, you can
quickly determine your current level for your earned XP with the
pc_level_calc function. This function also returns what
your proficiency bonus should be and the minimum XP threshold for your
current level.
Big thanks to Humberto Nappo for contributing this function!
DM: “You walk into the tavern and glance around the poorly-lit, grimy room. In a corner booth, you catch sight of the traitor you’ve been hunting these past two weeks–Tymoth Grissel. You nearly had him in the Sootpile mountains but that rockslide allowed him to escape by the skin of his teeth. He won’t escape this time.”
Player: “Cool, cool, cool…but who else is in the tavern?
DM: …
When I’m DMing, I sometimes struggle with improvising background
non-player characters (NPCs) that aren’t relevant to the current
questlines when my player ask about them. To hopefully help fellow DMs,
dndR includes a function to let you quickly respond in
situations like the one I’ve described above. The
npc_creator function quickly selects a random race and job
for however many NPCs you need.
# Make three NPCs
dndR::npc_creator(npc_count = 3)
#> Race Job
#> 1 changeling farrier
#> 2 hill dwarf archaeologist
#> 3 orc outlanderIf your players decide to go chat with the goblin carpenter passing them on the street (or whoever else they cross paths with) you can then improv more details about that particular NPC as needed. Hopefully this function helps you skip the “uh…” step of trying to on-the-fly come up with some brief NPC descriptions that give depth to your world.
Note that because both NPC race and job are selected randomly you may wind up with some unusual combinations. I hope that adds to the fun but feel free to re-run the function until you get NPCs that fit your world and intended tone.