What do you wonderful folks use? Is ACKS similar enough to b/x in the treasure tables that we can use online resources developed for B/X games? Does ACKS have its own?
I know that in this digital age someone out there is using a random generator to stock their hexes.
You can certainly use the B/X treasure generators if you’d like. B/X’s tables yield results very similar to ours over the long term. They tend to have more variance in the short term.
We don’t yet have ACKS treasure generators online - for now I do them by hand, still!
I have created a treasure generator for ACKS in JavaScript. The powers at Autarch have the source files by now, and if you want to test it I have uploaded temporarily to Dropbox:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/25220351/treasure.html
What it does is: it rolls for all the different categories in each treasure type, then it rolls for each bundle in the special treasures table, and finally it adds all the results together for a total number and a list of items. What it does not do is rolling in the potions, scrolls or magic items table, so those items are left of the totals and appear as generic in the final listing.
Please let me know if you find odd results. So far I have been the only one testing it.
Is it supposed to be able to generate a value of 0? I’ve had quite a few nil results
Yes. Some of the starting treasure types have low percentages in every category, so they can yield a result of zero. On reverse, they can sometimes yield much more than the average value listed.
At some point I was contemplating printing out the roll results, but I think that it would be more of a distraction that an actual help.
Ipersonally use the Idea Pad from NBOS. It is a free tool to create random generators. A bit of a learnign curve at first but really logical and you can create awesome nested tables with ease. As I said the tool is free and the datafiles are txt so sharing is easy.
Interesting tool, I had to type a lot of the tables as arrays, and that is not easily read or maintained after. Does it produce a javascript or other code that you can implement on the web, or you need to have the tool installed?
It is bound to the tool.