There is an additional benefit to this sieve of yours: I write my adventures in Obsidian, and when I playtest them I often fiddle with pandoc to get a decent booklet. This plus the various booklet makers will speed that process up substantially!
Glad to hear it! Hopefully it works smoothly and I look forward to reading/playing your next adventure
Amusing side note: I was trying to find an adventure to use as an example of the rendering/editing process, and reached out to Chance Dudinack to see if he'd let me revise the Black Wrym of Brandonsford with all of the stuff I wrote about in my review. I was lamenting to a buddy that Chance never responded to me (which stalled this project for ~3 months), and he suggested that you'd be delighted and that your work is typically under permissive licence.
My reservation was that I already think your adventures are so technically tight that it's less interesting to show a before/after, compared to what I'm able to do with the Chaotic Caves
The inventory manager looks great. I think this is single highest value thing to automate in RPGs. Slot-based inventory is okay and is easy to track but I find I quickly run into annoying edge cases. All the edge cases are avoided by just assigning everything a weight (no matter how small) and adding it up, but then tracking becomes infeasible without automation. This looks like a great solution if you're running in-person and just want to automate this one bit.
The identification feature is also handy, currently I give items a reference letter and maintain a separate notes document so I can reveal things later, but then I feel like I sometimes have to give a mundane item a letter so as not to give the game away.
Index cards: works fine initially but becomes unwieldly. You have to keep re-calculating weight/value as you obtain/sell stuff, the cards get mixed up, and because they stack, you can only see a couple of cards at a time rather than your whole inventory
Half-playing cards: you can see slightly more at once, but they tend to not be big enough for complicated items
Writing items on the character sheet: really falls apart for complex items and trying to transfer items from character to character is a nightmare. You can do a hybrid thing where complicated items reference an index card, but now you have a source-of-truth problem
google sheets: this is the low-tech version of the inventory manager. you can have a master sheet with columns for name, character, weight and value, and then other sheets that have a filtered view for one character. this is what i recommend if you don't have a dedicated app
---------
edit
> Slot-based inventory is okay and is easy to track but I find I quickly run into annoying edge cases.
yeah same; eventually the rulesets start making exceptions where multiple small items stack into a slot (scrolls, coins, daggers, etc) or items take up multiple slots (2h swords, armor, bulky treasure) and now we're back to weights with smaller numbers. I also think there are too many slots for what the design is trying to accomplish
if you want a game where everyone's inventory is meaningfully limited and they're forced to make interesting choices about what to carry, you need to have a lot less slots. the best implementation i've seen is actually fortnite: you have 5 slots total, but there's 6 categories of stuff you want to carry. short range guns (shotguns/smg), medium range (rifle), long range (sniper), movement/utility (shockwave/jump pad/etc), health item (med kid/bandage) and shield item (shield potion/minis) so it's literally impossible to carry everything you'd want and you have to choose where you're okay being weak
OSR feels like it wants to go for that design but every implementation i've tried lets me carry everything i could want, especially given that we have henchmen, wagons, etc (and the whole problem is trivialized by bags of holding)
This looks great. I'm excited to start messing around with The Sieve but I'm having some trouble (admittedly I'm not a tech wiz).
I have managed to install Rust, cargo, pipx, and weasyprint through Powershell (and obviously clone the repo). But when I try to do "the-sieve adventure.md" it tells me "'the-sieve' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet," etc. This is almost certainly an error on my mind rather than in your code, but I'm a bit stumped as to where I went wrong.
Okay, yeah, I see what you mean with the target and release folders. Unfortunately, I'm now getting an error with weasyprint cause it "cannot load library 'gobject-2.0-0'" (possibly my weasyprint installation is wonky). I'll keep working at it, but in any case I appreciate the help and I think it would probably help people to have a precompiled program.
But overall, really great work and super useful. If I'm giving feedback on feature requests for the inventory manager, a simple export function to export all saved player inventories and an import function to restore them would go a long way. I also think that a duplicate character function would help too. For OSR games, I end up giving players the same pregens with the same starting items often and duplicate tools make that it easy.
Thanks! I'm a little wary of scope creep/feature bloat but I'll mull over it
In the meantime, it's open source code so anyone can fork the repo and add those features - any competent LLM should be able to knock that out in 15 minutes or so
These are great! But my one issue is that I don't know how to edit these, upload them, and share them with players. I know you have a tutorial using github and filebase, but I found it really difficult to follow. Maybe I'm just not cut-out for making/using webapps to that level.
There is an additional benefit to this sieve of yours: I write my adventures in Obsidian, and when I playtest them I often fiddle with pandoc to get a decent booklet. This plus the various booklet makers will speed that process up substantially!
Glad to hear it! Hopefully it works smoothly and I look forward to reading/playing your next adventure
Amusing side note: I was trying to find an adventure to use as an example of the rendering/editing process, and reached out to Chance Dudinack to see if he'd let me revise the Black Wrym of Brandonsford with all of the stuff I wrote about in my review. I was lamenting to a buddy that Chance never responded to me (which stalled this project for ~3 months), and he suggested that you'd be delighted and that your work is typically under permissive licence.
My reservation was that I already think your adventures are so technically tight that it's less interesting to show a before/after, compared to what I'm able to do with the Chaotic Caves
I mean, he's right. I'm a fan of this project though!
Wow! A big thank you for sharing these!
This is awesome!
Dice Grid is awesome, perfect for my solo games. Thank you!
The inventory manager looks great. I think this is single highest value thing to automate in RPGs. Slot-based inventory is okay and is easy to track but I find I quickly run into annoying edge cases. All the edge cases are avoided by just assigning everything a weight (no matter how small) and adding it up, but then tracking becomes infeasible without automation. This looks like a great solution if you're running in-person and just want to automate this one bit.
The identification feature is also handy, currently I give items a reference letter and maintain a separate notes document so I can reveal things later, but then I feel like I sometimes have to give a mundane item a letter so as not to give the game away.
Thanks!
We've tried...
Index cards: works fine initially but becomes unwieldly. You have to keep re-calculating weight/value as you obtain/sell stuff, the cards get mixed up, and because they stack, you can only see a couple of cards at a time rather than your whole inventory
Half-playing cards: you can see slightly more at once, but they tend to not be big enough for complicated items
Writing items on the character sheet: really falls apart for complex items and trying to transfer items from character to character is a nightmare. You can do a hybrid thing where complicated items reference an index card, but now you have a source-of-truth problem
google sheets: this is the low-tech version of the inventory manager. you can have a master sheet with columns for name, character, weight and value, and then other sheets that have a filtered view for one character. this is what i recommend if you don't have a dedicated app
---------
edit
> Slot-based inventory is okay and is easy to track but I find I quickly run into annoying edge cases.
yeah same; eventually the rulesets start making exceptions where multiple small items stack into a slot (scrolls, coins, daggers, etc) or items take up multiple slots (2h swords, armor, bulky treasure) and now we're back to weights with smaller numbers. I also think there are too many slots for what the design is trying to accomplish
if you want a game where everyone's inventory is meaningfully limited and they're forced to make interesting choices about what to carry, you need to have a lot less slots. the best implementation i've seen is actually fortnite: you have 5 slots total, but there's 6 categories of stuff you want to carry. short range guns (shotguns/smg), medium range (rifle), long range (sniper), movement/utility (shockwave/jump pad/etc), health item (med kid/bandage) and shield item (shield potion/minis) so it's literally impossible to carry everything you'd want and you have to choose where you're okay being weak
OSR feels like it wants to go for that design but every implementation i've tried lets me carry everything i could want, especially given that we have henchmen, wagons, etc (and the whole problem is trivialized by bags of holding)
This looks great. I'm excited to start messing around with The Sieve but I'm having some trouble (admittedly I'm not a tech wiz).
I have managed to install Rust, cargo, pipx, and weasyprint through Powershell (and obviously clone the repo). But when I try to do "the-sieve adventure.md" it tells me "'the-sieve' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet," etc. This is almost certainly an error on my mind rather than in your code, but I'm a bit stumped as to where I went wrong.
Okay, update here: https://github.com/beaurancourt/the-sieve/releases
rewrote it to not need any dependencies, and packaged the whole thing as a native desktop app
did the build work when you ran `cargo build --release`?
if so, that should create a program on your computer; mine builds to `target/release/the-sieve`
then you'd run `./target/release/the-sieve adventure.md`
i'll see if i can ship some pre-compiled binaries for folks to just download
Okay, yeah, I see what you mean with the target and release folders. Unfortunately, I'm now getting an error with weasyprint cause it "cannot load library 'gobject-2.0-0'" (possibly my weasyprint installation is wonky). I'll keep working at it, but in any case I appreciate the help and I think it would probably help people to have a precompiled program.
Ok I think I finally got it, thanks! Excited to play around with this
Huge!
But overall, really great work and super useful. If I'm giving feedback on feature requests for the inventory manager, a simple export function to export all saved player inventories and an import function to restore them would go a long way. I also think that a duplicate character function would help too. For OSR games, I end up giving players the same pregens with the same starting items often and duplicate tools make that it easy.
Thanks! I'm a little wary of scope creep/feature bloat but I'll mull over it
In the meantime, it's open source code so anyone can fork the repo and add those features - any competent LLM should be able to knock that out in 15 minutes or so
These are great! But my one issue is that I don't know how to edit these, upload them, and share them with players. I know you have a tutorial using github and filebase, but I found it really difficult to follow. Maybe I'm just not cut-out for making/using webapps to that level.
What are you trying to edit or upload?
The dice roller is a website: https://dice-grid.web.app/
The inventory manager is also a website, you just need your own URL. For instance, here's one for you https://ttrpg-inventory.web.app/the-oven-alchemist
You can change the last part to whatever you want, everyone using the same URL will see the same data
This custom site is great! I will give it a go. Now to figure out how to modify it with my AI models haha.