Using App Gen to create the ultimate D&D DM companion tool

🤝 Community Show & Tell
1

For the longest time I’ve been thinking about how I could use some Retool App to create the ultimate companion tool for running D&D (and other ttrpg) games.

Problem: I love the imagination part of running a table, I love the RP’ing and the story, but I often times get bogged down in admin and planning. To the point where it’s to the detriment of the game itself. For a long time, I’ve been using ChatGPT to create rollable tables, so why not take it to the next level?

Project: So here’s what I’ve started to build and iterate on:

  • A system that can store items across multiple campaigns like
    • Plot points
    • Character notes
    • NPCs
    • Session notes
    • Session context
  • A system that I can use for prep, specifically for
    • Ideation on a concept
    • Recap of previous session
    • Suggestions on plot points
    • Smart reflections & notes based on my stated goals
  • A system that can help do all the admin tasks
    • Integrates with Discord for alerts and messages
    • Integrates with google calendar for planning game nights

I know, it’s a lot of stuff… So thank god for App Gen because I finally got to start iterating on my ideas.

I decided to start with this section of the project Ideation on a concept by using this prompt

I want to create a chatbot that i can ask questions to about my D&D campaign. The goal is to be able to ideate around a concept, and then extract relevant items into a list or upload to a database for use in the future. How can this be done?

Do not make assumptions, and ask for clarification on anything you dont understand.

I want the UI to contain a way to chat, a way to highlight & save specific sections of text, and then a way to organize or analyze those snippets to prepare for saving in a database or external source location

Then I went back and forth with it for a minute, which ever user on here it was that said to include “Do not make assumptions, and ask for clarification” was so right- I found the back and forth post that initial prompt to be very helpful! 10/10 do recommend others do the same.

Ultimately, this is where my app ended up. I’ve got a chat box, and then I use the annotate text to tag items. Next in my build will be cleaning up and ingesting those tags, and posting the info to my DB.

image
image1876Ă—952 64.7 KB

Then we also have the skeleton on manual entry as well.

image
image1866Ă—1372 145 KB

I do think that because of the nature of everything needing to be related, interconnected, or having influence in the world- that this table set up probably isn’t going to be my best display of my data items. So I welcome suggestions!

However- that’s where I have to pause for now! Credit limits have been my personal BBEG :slight_smile:

10 Likes
2

Welcome to the community, @gabandgoof! And thanks for sharing - this is super cool. :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like
3

@gabandgoof This sounds like it will be a really great tool as you keep fine-tuning it. Keep at it!

I myself have created a couple of tools for a Pathfinder campaign I am in. I created a scheduled workflow that posts in Discord (and has the persona of a character in our campaign for nice flavor) and keeps track of our hosting and food-providing responsibilities since we do it on a rotation. I also created a chatbot that uses Retool vectors that have access to several PDFs for the written campaign and related source materials, so I can ask it questions about the adventure.

1 Like
4

That’s sick! I love this idea - do you integrate the scheduling with gcal?

5

Unfortunately, no. My group meets weekly on the same day of the week so the schedule is just sort of assumed, but I did put in an option where I can designate that we are skipping that week so it knows not to send a message until the following week.