I’m pretty obsessed with a TTRPG system called WOIN (What’s Old is New). I first learned about it from my friend Mike who described it as a more open system than DnD 5e that included canon for creating and/or playing in any world/campaign from high fantasy to space opera. The idea of playing a Cyberpunk themed campaign appealed to me at the highest levels because it’s a genre I’ve always been enamored with. One of my favorite games is Shadow Run for Sega Genesis and the thought of a sandbox dystopian cyberpunk world was too good not to try as a first-time TTRPG player.
Turns out it is massively fun to play and I quickly began looking for online resources for character creation. There are two available via the official site and, in my opinion, work just fine as is IF you have a rule book in front of you and are aware that some of the decisions you make regarding your character have prerequisites. The prerequisites aren’t made clear during the character creation process on these sites which isn’t a huge deal unless you or your GM is a stickler for rules.
That said, I’ve been wanting to create something in Go for a while. It’s a language I’ve been wanting to learn and traditional methods like watching videos or building small apps like a calculator don’t do well for me. I need to care about what I’m creating or else I have no desire to pay attention to what I’m “learning”. It’s a weird idiosyncrasy of mine but it works and like a lot of tech people, I have started and abandoned many projects in the name of learning. My last project has spanned a few years and it’s still running despite me rarely updating the blog. It was fun, I learned a lot and that little forex bot is still running. I started with $1000 in a practice account and the current value sits at $799.10 which I think is pretty good for being completely hands-off and running since June of 2020. Down $200.90 after all the craziness of covid through now is pretty damn good considering most trading algorithms go broke quickly. I’ll never be rich but I learned a lot about forex and Python.
This brings me back to Go and WOIN. I had the idea of creating an API for WOIN and all the data needed to create a character. Then I found this, which is for D&D only but you see where I’m going with this. With an API built around verbose data, it would be easy to make whatever WOIN-related web app you wanted.
So that’s the project, create an API for this TTRPG system I love. I don’t expect it to get much traction outside of its community, maybe not even inside, but I’ll learn some Go and how to build an API along the way, and in the end that’s all I care about.
This will be an ongoing series of posts as I go through collecting the data, getting it into a DB, and then building the API in Go. Hint I’ve already started so the next post will be coming soon.