Did you know you can use rolling-tables to create randomly generated text? Yes you can! Here's a short tutorial on how. Inside the macro we can run the Rolling Tables inline, producing the
name of the randomly selected row in our macro's output to the chat by
using this format [[1t[table-name]]] . After some searching before doing this I realised there was no documentation for what I wanted. I've since updated the Documentation to include this fun little tidbit <a href="https://wiki.roll20.net/Card_Decks_and_Rollable_Tables" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roll20.net/Card_Decks_and_Rollable_Tables</a> . If you want to create random flavour text for your NPC's, or randomly generate quests, then this might be the solution for you too. I wanted to do something like tracery by Galaxy Kate , a javascript library for text expansion. In Roll20, on a free account you sadly do not have access to javascript scripting awesomeness. A challenge presents itself! I wanted to see if my programming skills could wrangle something useful out of the tools and hand to get the functionality I wanted. Turns out it's pretty darn easy and you can do it without programming skills! Using the Rolling Tables to store words like nouns, verbs, adverbs etc. and Macros to glue words into sentence you can generate random text, and even give weighting to certain words if you like using the Rolling Tables weighting. To try it yourself you can follow these steps then modify for your own needs. Tutorial Get some ingredients together... Create a new rolling table called animals . Enter a few rows with animal names: elephant, walrus, bat, snake, platypus, ostrich etc. Save your table. Create a new table called colours . Add a few rows of colour names to it: blue, green, purple etc. Now create another table called verbs , Add in a few rows like: bite, walk, sleep, drink, eat etc. Let's create yet another table, this time call the table places , Giving it a few rows like pond, river, clearing, inn, camp, lodge, bog etc. And finally in our table creation binge, we'll make a new table called feeling , giving it rows like angry, sad, confused, disatisfied, happy, ecstatic, etc. Ok, now that we've lots of stuff to work with, we shall move on to the macro part to glue together some randomly generating text! Write a recipe... Make a new macro and calll it whatever you want. I'm going to call it sentence1 . Write your sentence and call the rolling table for your random words using [[1t[table-name]]] . Here's an example for our new macro, #sentence1 The [[1t[colour]]] [[1t[animal]]] likes to [[1t[verb]]] at the [[1t[place]]] when [[t1[feeling]]]. Bake it! Run your sentence macro! So when we run our tutorial macro by typing #sentence1 (or whatever you named your macro) in chat - or clicking it in the macro bar - it will output something like: The green walrus likes to sleep at the camp when sad . or The red elephant likes to eat at the inn when happy . Enjoy your delicious randomly generated word cakes! There you have it. If you make a few such sentences, then you can create randomly generated stories by linking them together. This way you can help bring more life to the npcs within the roll20 system. Currently the above tutorial's output still clearly shows that the Rolling Table words or roll results. If you have suggestions on how to make them appear as normal chat text let us know! I hope you've found this little tutorial helpful. Happy gaming! // Darren K
