Experience Tables

Total experience for Table Top Role Playing Games (TTRPGs).

This program takes as input a file written in text, of the form:

character points [reason]

The reason is optional. The character must be a single word without spaces. You can use whitespace characters such as spaces and tabs to format the text to make it more readable. For example:

Ron       1 Critical failure on Expeliarimus
Harry     2 Critical failure to resist On The Edge
Hermione  1 Saving these two knuckleheads.
Hermione  2 Saving these two knuckleheads.  Again.

And produces a summary of the experience which looks like:

Ron:      1
Harry:    2
Hermione: 3

Using It In Play

During the game session, record experience as it happens using your favorite text editor. To report experience totals at the end of the session, run:

./experiencetab todays-experience-file.txt

Running Your Campaign

If you keep all of your experience files in a single folder, you can generate an experience summary for your entire campaign with:

./experiencetab experiencefolder

If you maintain a campaign website or wiki that uses markdown format, you can have output in markdown:

./experiencetab --markdown experiencefolder

The output will look something like:

| Character | XP  |
| --------- | --- |
| Harry    | 2 |
| Hermione | 3 |
| Ron      | 1 |

It will render like:

Character	XP
Harry	2
Hermione	3
Ron	1

Campaign Website

If you maintain a campaign website, the campaignexperience.sh script can be used to generate a markdown page that most static site generator systems will understand. The file includes instructions for modifying the file as needed.

campaignexperience.sh campaign-experience-file-directory

If you are using a Windows system, you will need to run this script in a bash shell, or under the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Building

You will need:

• CMake version 3.16 or better (latest is bestest). Be aware that Linux distributions tend to ship CMake well behind the development curve, so don't assume that just because you have the latest Linux you've got a recent enough CMake. The good news is that it's very easy to build the latest CMake from source and install it on your system.

• Version 9+ of GCC or CLang, so that you have support for the c++ filesystem library. On Windows only building with mingw is supported. The easiest mingw is by choco install mingw64 and the only version officially supported for Windows.

• Make (on Windows, get make via choco install make).

Configuring The Build

Create a folder below or outside of the root of your file checkout or archive expansion. I usually create "build" below the root fo the repository.

mkdir build
cd build

Inside of the build folder, run

cmake ..

If you are windows you will need to add -G "Unix Makefiles" to the cmake command. Visual Studio builds are not supported. You can install a recent version of the GNU compiler (which is supported) using chocolatey.

Build and confirm a good build with the included test suite.

make && make test

That's it, you're done. Copy the experiencetab program to a location in your path, and you're ready to rock and roll.