Overland Encounters Spreadsheet

[Cole]

I wrote a small utility for Openoffice's Calc and decided to share it.

It generates overland (wilderness) encounters.  Calculates how many days it would take, , the distance, how far a party would see on a terrain, and one of the best features, it calculates if it's a hostile or benign encounter.  For the benign encounter, I used the 120 benign encounters from roleplaying tips, and I roll randomly for them (I repeated some , since not all of them were suited for all terrains).

The spreadsheet has a few bugs, I would be delighted if any of them could help me solve it.  One of them has to do with setting a datasource.  At the moment, it has to be set manually (I have instructions on how to do it on the readme.txt file).  Also the drop down menus sometimes 'gray out' and they only return to normal when the spreadsheet is saved.

I have not included the aquatic terrain or any 'severe' storms.
Also, I have included in the results sheet the starting point at day 0 with no hours traveled (marked as N/A) and since there is no encounter, I have also set the visible at to Not Available (N/A).  Following the same idea, I have included a special 'Set Camp' row at the end of each day.  For my party, once they set camp and decide who is going to be on guard, I have them roll to see if there will be an encounter.  But since there were no rules for setting camp in the wilderness, it is mostly open for whatever the DM decides to do.


Download the OverlandEnconters.ods HERE

Download the readme.txt HERE


Example output sheet, using the overland encounters spreadsheet.

[Eorla]

Wow.  This is a really nice idea.