Crowdshuffler - fill your worlds with NPCs

[evilmastermind]

https://www.crowdshuffler.com/
Hi everyone, I created a tool that allows dungeon masters (and players) to quickly generate NPCs or characters that can be roleplayed with just a quick glance at their traits, for those sessions in which you have to improvise a lot, or for when you need to fill your stories with a bunch of random people.
I personally use it to generate NPCs ingame when my players want to explore zones for which I have no informations prepared, and when I'm at home preparing a new town or settlement for the next session, and I need to generate a major, a couple of guards, a priest, a village fool, etc. Some of the NPCs I generated even ended up becoming the party's best friends or mortal enemies, because if you're good at imagining causes and consequences of the traits generated, you can build whole stories out of those NPCs.
A list of options allow you to "generalize" NPCs for any roleplaying game, but I specifically added support for D&D 5e, 3.5 and Pathfinder classes and skills in case you need those informations for their backgrounds.

What do you think of it? Do you find it useful? Would you like it to be different or is there something that I can improve? I'll eventually add a statistics generator to the website, but it's not really the purpose of the whole thing.

Here's an example of what it generates:

Thirgen Bloodhammer, male Dwarf (Enterprising,Babbling)
The pharmacist who mysteriously wanders at night.
-German accent.

[Wizard_Lizard]

WOah that's really cool! thanks!

[InvisibleBison]

Is it intentional that the lairs are all ridiculous?

[evilmastermind]

Is it intentional that the lairs are all ridiculous?

Yes.

[Kyutaru]

Kind of feels light. When I need a one-dimensional NPC I can just think of something myself. The trick comes from making them all different. That requires generating a personality which you've done but also some means and motives and goals that can be used, otherwise I'm also stuck inventing a backstory to make the character more than a Walmart greeter. To have depth they need reasons to exist and to seem like more than a cardboard cutout with a copy paste catchphrase. I used to not have NPC planning or a randomizer and it resulted in the players knowing quite well whether an NPC mattered or not purely by asking enough questions that I didn't have prepared answers to. Improv actors generally know more about the character than their name, profession, and the voice you should be using for them.

[Eldan]

Not bad if you just need a quick background NPC. Haven't looked at the site yet, but from your output... could you maybe add one more sentence along the lines of "relationships"? Could just say "loner", could say "has an older sister in the same business" or "has three children". Just something that ties them together a bit more.

[evilmastermind]

Kind of feels light. When I need a one-dimensional NPC I can just think of something myself. The trick comes from making them all different. That requires generating a personality which you've done but also some means and motives and goals that can be used, otherwise I'm also stuck inventing a backstory to make the character more than a Walmart greeter. To have depth they need reasons to exist and to seem like more than a cardboard cutout with a copy paste catchphrase. I used to not have NPC planning or a randomizer and it resulted in the players knowing quite well whether an NPC mattered or not purely by asking enough questions that I didn't have prepared answers to. Improv actors generally know more about the character than their name, profession, and the voice you should be using for them.

Thank you, your suggestions are quite useful. A friend of mine told me about a tool that could help me generate a backstory like you described... I'll look into it and see what can be done :)

[evilmastermind]

Not bad if you just need a quick background NPC. Haven't looked at the site yet, but from your output... could you maybe add one more sentence along the lines of "relationships"? Could just say "loner", could say "has an older sister in the same business" or "has three children". Just something that ties them together a bit more.

Yes, this seems in line with what Kyutaru said: I might have underestimated dungeon masters' need of a backstory!

[Mastikator]

Very nice. What does "realistic" level mean? Mostly 1s and 2s?

Also technical question: does the backend use the excel sheet or did you rewrite it in php?

[Eldan]

Yes, this seems in line with what Kyutaru said: I might have underestimated dungeon masters' need of a backstory!

I mean, I can probably improvise backstories on the fly, but having a few nudges in a direction would be nice. And it mostly won't come up, but it's nice to have.

[evilmastermind]

Very nice. What does "realistic" level mean? Mostly 1s and 2s?

Also technical question: does the backend use the excel sheet or did you rewrite it in php?

Yes, the idea is that most of the people you would encounter in a D&D setting are level 1 plebs.
I uploaded (and expanded) the content of the excel sheets in a MySQL database. I'm using PHP to generate the characters, and Javascript to handle the settings.

[evilmastermind]

I mean, I can probably improvise backstories on the fly, but having a few nudges in a direction would be nice. And it mostly won't come up, but it's nice to have.

Yes I totally understand. There are many things I can add to help DMs, from a simple description of the characters' appearance, to a few lines about their past, and even a reason why they would want to interact with the players.

[jayem]

One thing I thought when I was wondering about custom villages was to make it semi-deterministic (I can't remember how I did it, I think it was nested modulo multiplication to shuffle things up)

The idea being that just by noting down (or calculating) the basic map-shape, specialty and a shortish seed you then filled in the details and houses and could recreate it exactly the same way each time they came back to it.

[Palanan]

I usually like to build and develop NPCs much more thoroughly, but this could be useful just to have on standby, for that inevitable moment when the players start talking to the single NPC I didn't come up with a name for.