Going Rogue...

Well, less than a week and already failing with to show any painted miniatures.  Still from little acorns!

I'm going to buck the trend slightly though by staying on topic (kind of).  The reason I created the programme from my previous post was that Advanced HeroQuest was wonderfully table-driven and lends itself perfectly to writing simple excel and access based tools to help things along - I've written a programme that happily stores converts AND generates HeroQuest character and monster profiles that I will finish one day I promise...

That brings us to another table driven game requiring lots and LOTS of rolling of dice...

At least I painted these, even if they are a few years old!

Yes, good old rogue trader.  Where the points system for generating your own characters was... entertaining to say the least.  But years later, a little bit of wizardry with Access and we get this:

307.75 points.  Says it all really...

Now if we had all had something like this back in the day things would have been so much easier - imagine being able to generate rogue trader squads with multiple randomly generated heroes in a matter of minutes instead of hours. How much more time we would have had for painting and playing.  I'm guessing that somewhere out there something like this already exists - a game that is a hybrid of both worlds, using computer programmes to generate the characters, playsheets and maps and the allowing the player to run a pen and ink campaign with minimal rolling.  Now we just need 3d printers to drop in price a bit more and even out minis can be randomly and instantly generated!

This little toy also spits out random names for characters and forces (currently only loaded with Space Marine names, but one day...) which is where this blog's title came from.

Anyway, that's enough for now, here's hoping tomorrow actually involves the generation of new stuff that I will actually use in the next 12 months!

To finish here's a lovely little quote I found when I was re-reading the rogue trader rules as part of this project;

"It is unlikely that we’ll ever see a full range of plastic vehicles for Warhammer 40,000 from Citadel either"

Oh how times have changed...

FPPaul