gemini://gem.hexandcounter.org/gemlog/posts/dmode08.gmi

I pushed version 0.8 of decide-mode to GitHub (yes, I know) last night. My old project (previous release was in 2017) started out just because I wanted a convenient way to make my text editor say YES or NO, but it has had die-rolls and other random stuff for a long time. The big new thing in 0.8 is that there is now a proper text format for typing in random tables for the decide-from-tables generator, heavily inspired by the format used by Abulafia (random-generators.com), but with far fewer features (for now?).

Even if there has not been a release in 4 years, I use this thing all the time myself. It happens that I play some solo RPG in front of my computer for instance. But I find this useful outside of that as well. It became a habit to hit ? ? to insert a random YES or NO, or to hit ? 6 to roll 1d6, etc. I always have this minor-mode enabled when I edit org-mode files, and I have a global shortcut C-c r set up to roll dice. You never know when you need to roll some dice in your text editor.

I always liked the simplicity of the format used by Abulafia. Not the more complex pages that mix weird Wiki-syntax with HTML, but most tables that are just line-based lists of phrases with optional weights. Most (all?) random generators have something similar, but Abulafia's tables are Creative Commons Attribution, and they have thousands of them (spread out over 1500+ wiki pages).

Unfortunately Abulafia has been broken for months. The content is still there and the source of all tables can be seen (and copied), but you can not generate any text there as something broke on their server. There are also some old dumps of Abulafia on archive.org. The most recent I can find is from 2014. I do not think much has happened since then, and that dump is still a great source of random generators.

Next step? Probably to finally publish my repo where I gather random tables with free licenses. There are some Creative Commons role-playing games that has great random tables, in addition to Abulafia. Harvesting Wikipedia categories for lists of things is tempting.

Emacs decide-mode 0.8 random generators