Roll for Initiative!

What is this?

This is a terminal-based initiative tracker primarily aimed at Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition. I use the term "initiative" mostly for being recognizable, and most systems have something similar: a queue of actions that happen in order given a numeric value.

Jump to installation instructions

Motivation

All initiative trackers I found only are bloated. They cram as many features as possible with little to no regards to UX. I'm going back to the basics: a CLI tool to manage initiative. No "create encounter". No "what is this creature's initiative bonus?" popup.

I hate the "create encounter" feature of these initiative trackers. I admit, this might be due to my GM style, but I don't want to plan every single encounter the night before. I don't know what my players will do, I need the flexibility to improvise.

The main motivation for me to create this, really, is just so I have a clean interface with really shallow menus and no setup time. This is the project philosophy.

Quick tips

• Type help or help command if you have any doubts.
• Tab completion is your friend. After beginning to type a command, press tab to cycle through the suggestions.

Flow

This is a TL;DR. You can find more information after this.

• Run add name initiative as many times as you like. initiative may be a number or a diceroll expression.
  • Entries are ordered by their decreasing initiative value.
  • If there is a tie, you can reorder them using move lower_entry_name up or move upper_entry_name down.
• Any time you want to see the queue but it's not visible, run show.
• Run start.
• Press enter when the input field is empty to advance to next entry.
• When a creature dies or for some other reason its entry is no longer relevant to the queue, type remove dead_creature_name.

That's pretty much what you need to know to use it at a basic level.

Advanced usage

Todo

Installation

To install the rfi command to your user scope, run:

pip install --user --upgrade roll-for-initiative

If you want to install directly from source, you can do:

cd /path/to/target/source/dir
git clone https://github.com/wqferr/RFI
cd RFI
pip install --user --upgrade flit
flit install -s

Running it

After installing it with either method, you can run it with rfi on linux, or with python -m rfi.app on any platform if that doesn't work.

Special thanks

This application is made using the following libraries and tools:

• flit (build system)
• pipenv (virtual environment)
• texttable (pretty text tables)
• dice (dice rolling for add and chinit)