Cleaning up a D&D Character File

January 3, 2011 Timothy Sanders

A couple of months ago Wizards of the Coast "upgraded" the Character Builder program from the downloadable .NET application for Windows to a Silverlight program that can run on a Mac. In theory I support this. However, one crazy thing happened: the new program doesn't send text to a printer and instead sends big images. This means if you print to a PDF file two things happen: the file size is obscene (12 or more Mb for a four page file), and the text is blurry as all get out.

After some struggling with this I had an epiphany: if WotC wants to give me images go ahead and work with that, process the images, and get a smaller, sharper file. After some messing about I came up with a process that works well for me. If you have a Mac and you want to play along here's an Automator app. You'll also need a scriptable image editor - I use Acorn from Flying Meat software. (You might ask why not Pixelmator. The answer is Pixelmator seems crashy when run from script. I have a version of this that uses Pixelmator but I have to run it 5-6 times to get a successful output.) Here's what you do:

Run the Character Builder and hit the Print button.
When the print dialog opens use the PDF button in the lower left and choose "Save PDF to folder as TIFF". Pick someplace (I use the Desktop) and let it run. You now have a TIFF file for each page in the character file. These are fat and they are blurry but we'll fix that next.
Select all of the pages and drop them on the Automator App.
The Automator app uses Applescript to tell Acorn to open all of the TIFF files, run an Unsharp Mask on them, and save them again.
The Automator app then creates a new PDF from the Images. This will be named Character.pdf and it will be on your Desktop. You can now delete the TIFF files and enjoy a readable PDF that can put on an iPad (for example.)

To be clear, this is still a work-around. The Character Builder ought to output text and then you could just use the print to PDF button normally. This workaround isn't great - there's still some definite halo effects on the text and the files are still pretty fat. My sorcerer (Gurdrian) was a 471 Kb PDF file with the old builder and my current version is 6.1Meg - over an order of magnitude larger, while looking worse. This is sucky, but it's less sucky than the 15 Mb version simply printing from the app to a PDF create

Anyway, if this helps somebody out there, here's my Automator app. No warranty, etc, blah, blah but it does the trick for me. If you try it and have an issue drop me a line and I'll see what I do to help.

Character Builder Cleanup App

Awesome D&D Humor

March 11, 2010 Timothy Sanders

Something Awful has a post about the original D&D supplement from way back when.

Steve: Yo, this is OG D&D style right here. Name randomly jammed in there and ridiculous old lady with no pants riding a horse.

Zack: Somebody, presumably a human, looked at this image and said, "Yes, that's good. Let's put it in the front of our book."

Steve: Maybe that sort of quality control explains why there are multiple pages of naval combat rules and minimal character creation information.

Zack: Poor quality control can't explain why they decided to devote nearly an entire page to egotistical swords.

I laughed a lot. Worth reading.

Interesting D&D Interview at the Escapist

March 5, 2010 Timothy Sanders

If you're interested in D&D I think this interview has a lot of interesting tidbits in it: discussions about what they changed and why.

AM: What is the audience for today's Dungeons and Dragons, and how is that different from the audience for my Dungeons and Dragons, growing up in the '80s and early '90s? AC: One thing we certainly saw over the course of 2nd edition was the audience did tend to age along with the game. The game was a very playable, a very entertaining system, but it didn't necessarily speak to the people who were coming up into the optimal RPG age category through new ways. When we were all playing 1st and 2nd Edition, we didn't cut our teeth on MMOs or console gaming or Facebook or any of those things. At best, maybe we had experience playing Monopoly or games like that, Risk, so that D&D was a totally foreign thing. That's just not true anymore.

Kublacon!

May 26, 2009 Timothy Sanders

Yeah I really did post "Hey the blog's back" and then not post for a week. Sorry 'bout that. In my defense I ended up being busy preparing to go to ... KublaCon. I've been to GenCon once, back when I was fresh back to the States from Germany and stuck in New Jersey for a year, but the gaming convention bug didn't really stick with me in any meaningful way. But lately I've been getting the itch to play D & D Fourth Edition instead of running the game (as a DM). I talked Blake into going with me to check out the "Game Day" event that Wizards had when Players Handbook 2 released back in March and while that had the stereotypical gaming collective problems it was still fun. Monster Manual 2 came out last week and there was Wizards-sponsored event for that on Saturday. I was trying to talk my players into attending that when Cyrus mentioned he was going to be at KublaCon. So I decided to take a flyer on it and go to KublaCon, make a RPGA Living Forgotten Realms character, and generally check out the scene. The RPGA stuff is pretty fun overall. Basically there are some rules about how you get magic items and managing character advancement and then a whole set of adventure that you can sort of hop around from convention to convention. It strikes me as a little tough to follow in that there are stories, but each adventure is supposed to be roughly a third of a level and most of the storylines have the first adventure for character levels 1-3 and then the second adventure is for character levels 4-7. In other words I played in a session last Friday (East 1-1), and I need to play in something like eleven to twelve other adventures before I can play East 1-2 and revisit that storyline. The odds of me remembering much about it are pretty slim by then. I played three times over the weekend and got my character (a gnome sorcerer using cosmic magic) up to level 2, as well as acquiring a spiffy +2 weapon that he can't use until he reaches level 3. It was enough fun that I'll probably try to play more in the future. I also got to play several new-to-me boardgames over the weekend. I played EuroRails, which is one of the classic Rails series but I had never played any of them before. I liked EuroRails enough but I think the pacing of it is somewhat off. It was really slow starting (and we were using "expedited" rules to make it play quicker) and it seemed to suffer pretty badly from a "once you have fallen behind you just fall further behind" mechanic. I think it's probably one of those things where if I had experienced it back in 1990 when it was released it would have blown my mind, but nearly twenty (!) years later it suffers a bit in comparison to state of the art. I'd certainly play it again or one of the other games with the same basic rules, but I don't see jonesing for a copy myself. I taught Agricola to Cyrus and some of his friends on Sunday night and we played that twice (using the beginner rules without Minor Improvements or Occupations). Agricola is a really good game, I think it deserves knocking Puerto Rico out of the #1 spot on BoardGameGeek, as it is a very similar game but doesn't bog down in the end the way Puerto Rico does and it has a lot more variation/customization to it. Lastly I checked out Dominion and Small World, both of which are relatively recent releases. Dominion really shot up the charts last year after it was released (it currently sits at #6 on the Geek), but I had never really understand how it plays. The idea is that each player has a deck of cards and every turn you buy new cards to put in your deck, so you're simultaneously using the deck to draw a hand of cards to play in order to build the deck. Basically you build up an economic engine (in your deck of cards) and use that engine to generate more and more wealth (represented by cards in your deck) until you can buy victory points (which are also cards in your deck). It's a really elegant design and there's a lot of subtle interactions between the cards. If the dealer room had still been open when I finished playing Dominion I totally would have bought a copy and made Cyrus play it later that evening. Small World wasn't as good, but it was a fun little game, it had decent depth while not being overly complex and it played quickly. Small World is apparently some sort of redesign/retheme of Vinci, which I didn't know because I had never played it. There's a list of creature races available that are matched up randomly with a "profession". Each race has some sort of bonus power, and the profession confers some additional benefit as well. Each player purchases a race and then gets a certain number of tokens which they use to conquer territory. Once you've expanded that empire as far as you can (you don't get more units after the initial race purchase) you can put your race "in decline" which means they continue to hold their terrain and you get points for that but you can't move them around or anything and they are weakened such that somebody will soon expand into their territory. In the game I played there were nine turns (it might change for other numbers of players? I'm not sure) and it takes an entire turn to put a race into decline so that's a major strategic decision when is best to switch horses. I liked both games, enough so that I ordered both of them from Funagain. Dominion plays two to four players and Small World plays two to five and I think Karin will like both games. Games that play well for two players and Karin would like are the gold standard game category for me, as we can play them without having to arrange some sort of larger social gathering. Anyway, KublaCon was fun. I came home a little tired (we stayed up until after 3 AM on Saturday night/Sunday morning and that's a bit much for my old bones these days), but I guess that's probably a good thing for a convention. I would seriously consider going back next year.

More Modern Drawing

January 19, 2009 Timothy Sanders

I posted recently about using Pixelmator for my D&D map. Friend-of-the-Snarking-Post Tony made a comment about how he had recently acquired Pixelmator and so he was kind of following along with my work.

How timely. I recently bought Pixelmator myself, as part of a Mac application bundle deal. I’ve never really done any computer-based drawing, except for some very basic doodling in MS Paint and similar tools. In particular, I’ve never used Photoshop, or any other “layer based” drawing tool. So I decided to play with your drawing (well, an approximation thereof) as an experiment in Pixelmator. With respect to the cities and their text, it seems to me that in order to reposition them (or replace the text), you have to cut and paste, which creates a new layer, then move the city’s layer to get the city re-positioned, and finally merge the new layer back into the main “Cities” layer. Does that sound right, or is there some better way to do that? At first, I thought I should be able to “select” a block around the city and just move it around, as I would do with an object in Visio or a similar tool. But I guess that’s one of the fundamental differences between vector-based and bitmap-based drawing tools. At least I think that’s the right terminology. Anyway, thanks for reminding me to start playing with Pixelmator.

Well, if people are going to play along I can throw the files up! Here's a few more bits of work I've done over the last week or so, plus some discussion of what's underway. First off, to Tony's question: No you can select a block and move it about. I didn't move the cities on this version of the map but I did move a few of the text labels to make room for some roads. One thing I know from watching the "pros" is that real artists will use keyboard shortcuts - they pretty much work with a pen in one hand on the tablet and the other hand on the keyboard doing tool selection and sometimes even scrolling the screen. So, to move part of a layer in Pixelmator:

Make sure you're working on the layer you want to be working on.
Use the Rectangular Marque Tool (hit 'M') and draw a box around what you want to move
Use the Move Tool (hit 'V') and you can drag the selected box around in the layer.

You're done! (You can also use the move tool and hold down Option to get the "Duplicate" tool and make a copy of a selection within the same layer. I used that technique to make the city dots for the two Dwarven mines without creating new layers for them.) As a random note, I notice that if you flatten text you lose your font information. I'm using 14 point regular Hoefler Text for the labels on this map.

(click image for embiggenation) Changes:

I created a "Lego Tree" brush and used it to paint on the Tarsenwald Forest
I added a backfill for the Tarsenwald in a separate layer so I have the shape available later if I need it.
I added the Dwarven mines of Barin's Respite and Thunderaxe Hall to the Cities layer
I labeled the Cairnflow River (not sure why I missed this before.)
I extended the Cairngorm Peaks to the south and also added in a western spur. (I needed to explain why a forest is one side and a desert on the other.)
I added the Tarsis Desert, home of the slavers who destroyed Klavin - this event features in two characters backgrounds.
I added a layer with roads. I draw on the road layer at full opacity, but the layer itself is set at 50% opacity so it blends against other items such as the Cairngorm Peaks. It's below the City layer so I don't have to worry about the edges versus the city dots.

I need to label the sea (the Crescent Sea) and we could use some more detail east of the Peaks but overall it's taking shape. The next thing I'd like to do is break up the solid color fills with some texture, but I'm pretty happy with what I have so far. There are twelve layers now - two more for Tarsenwald, two for the Tarsis Desert, and one for the roads.

Here's all of the source files and the Pixelmator file itself.