marrying dnd to perl

I’ve been playing Dungeons and Dragons off and on since I was in elementary school. I remember my brother’s collection of carefully painted miniatures, although mostly I remember the ochre jelly. I’ve been writing computer programs for almost as long. Both hobbies have had large gaps in continuity, but they’re still things I like and things that get a lot of my time.

Every time I try to do something to combine my programming with my RPG playing, though, it goes into the rough. Lately, though, I’ve gotten a bit better at picking which RPG problems need some code. For my previous game, I wrote a DateTime extension to deal with Standard Time, which was something like stardates, except less nebulous.

For my current game, which is a fantasy D&D campaign, I’m getting more ambitious and writing a set of calendars – one for each of several fantasy races, of varying complexity. I’m not yet sure that I’ll even use DateTime, which is a scary prospect. DateTime is ridiculously useful for dealing with time as kept by humans on planet Earth, but once you leave those confines, it’s astounding how little it gets you!

I think I’m also finally going to finish my overhaul of Games::Dice, which I’ve poked at numerous times over the last few years. I think I’m finally close to knowing how to make it really useful.

I’m also pondering whether I want to write an XML-to-Moose-Object converter for D&D 4E Character Builder files. The rub there is that once I finished, I’d need to learn how to use a PDF generator so that I could finally start printing them.

The real weird experience, though, came when I realized that I needed to do something sufficiently complex to warrant releasing the heart of the code to the CPAN. I can’t really explain what the code is for, because it’s related to things that my players haven’t seen yet, but I found myself needing a very simple form of two-way area-under-function math, and wrote Math::VarRate to make it happen. It was fun, and next up I get to make it work with Math::BigFloat numbers.

In fact, that need is part of what led me to think to test for objects as hash keys in the new tests for 5.10.1’s overhauled ~~ operator. So far, we’ve found a few bugs. Anybody reading this should try to help find some more.

For now, though, I think it’s time to stop thinking about D&D until my next game on Saturday. Until then, I’ll try to focus on Perl. I’ve got so much to do before YAPC! I’ll have to write about all that tomorrow.

Written on May 15, 2009
🏷 dnd
🏷 game
🐫 perl
🧑🏽‍💻 programming
⚔️ rpg