I just wandered in!
I just wandered in here, and I'm admittedly necro'ing a thread about eight months old. In the eight months since then, though, TableMaster II has gone from some notes on a blog (it wasn't until a few days after Baron posted that it could even print out "Hello World") to a running program actually used by actual users. And I hadn't even realized this thread existed. So, with apologies for the necroposting, my comments on the above:
The guys from NBOS Software are from my old hometown (though, interestingly, when I lived there neither of us was writing software; that came three or four years later). They're cool, and Fractal Mapper in particular is awesome. After all these years away from the industry, I'm hoping we'll both be at GenCon and I can buy them coffee and catch up.
So I'm certainly not going to talk down their stuff; if I hadn't written TableMaster, I would probably want to use InspirationPad. It is indeed free, and it certainly does more than the free TableMaster demo (which you can pick up off the
Wintertree website, download link is at the bottom of the page). But I do have to stand up for my software! I'm a table geek from way back, and I wrote TableMaster to be the ultimate table handling program. (if you read through my blog, you'll see one post where I was explaining how to do something, realized that TBL
really needed a command for some of that ... so I added it then and there, put up the new version for download, then finished up the blog post!)
The thing that makes TableMaster stand out is the natural-language nature of its scripting language, TBL. You can write a table almost exactly like you'd write on on paper and TableMaster makes sense of it. In fact, I've just been putting together a little product called the "Power Failure Emergency Kit" -- it contains a couple of logo dice and a batch of printed tables, which are actually TableMaster tables. (this came about because I got the dice for promo use and realized they were just too cool
not to do something with) With a few exceptions in some of the Table Packs where I got kind of programmer-y, you can quite easily use the same tables with dice or TableMaster.
Here's what a TableMaster table looks like:
.table Gems
.roll <1d10>
1-4 Topaz
5-7 Sapphire
8-9 Ruby
10 Diamond
You can get fancier:
.table Gems
.roll <1d6>
1-4 .rollon Semiprecious_Stones
5-6 .rollon Gemstones
(and of course at this point you'd have two more tables for the appropriate types of stones)
Something Traveller players might find particularly interesting is the Science Fiction Table Pack. If you download the demo, it's one of the demo table packs -- the demo tables print out preset files that are actual TableMaster output from the real thing, so you can see what it looks like.
I first bought Traveller in the days of the little black box. Then, when the big black box came out, I bought that because I wanted to keep all my booklets together; between every single rules addition, most of the adventures, and the Journal, there were a lot of them. It went on from there (the Virus was a bad idea, but I bought the books anyway). It is by far the SF game I've both played and run the most. So when I wrote the tables for the Science Fiction Table Pack, there was a distinct Traveller flavor to them. There's nothing actually Traveller-specific, but everything feels like it would fit smoothly into a Traveller world, because, well, it was written by a Traveller referee.
So, yeah, TableMaster isn't free. It costs only five bucks less than the new Traveller core rulebook (or ten bucks less, if you want it digitally instead of physically). And that SF Table Pack is as much as a referee's screen (again, slightly cheaper if you get it by email). It certainly can't compete with "free" on price.
But there is this: Free software doesn't buy the groceries. It is, like my long-ago DiceBox, a promo for other things that do. So if you, as a software developer, don't want to be trying to convince the cashier that they should take good wishes and kudos instead of money, you
have to focus on the software that buys those groceries. In the case of NBOS, that's Skwyre, Fractal Mapper, etc. For Wintertree (aka me), that's TableMaster. I am constantly improving TableMaster because that's what I do. TableMaster, not a map program or a database or a virtual tabletop, is the thing that pays for my groceries, so that's where my focus is. I personally think it's the best table-running program on the market, and if I ever find out that it isn't, I'll change it until it is.
