GMHT: Game Master Helper's Toolkit

This is the homepage for GMHT, the Game Master Helper's Toolkit. This is a toolkit for people writing software to help role playing game GMs. It will make it easy to write NPC generators, plot generators, software to create random bars, that sort of thing. It is written in Java, and requires Java 1.2 or 1.3.

Should you get GMHT?

GMHT is a quick and easy way to write programs to create things for your world: it makes it easy to write programs to generate NPCs, monsters, etc.

GMHT also makes it easy to assemble your own "GM's console" containing the customized tables that you want to roll on while running your games.

There is a short "ad" available, which gives you a sort of one page overview or introduction to what GMHT can do, and how it does it. And also an on line tutorial, which goes into much more detail about how to use the features of GMHT. (But note: not all the links from this page will work! If you download GMHT, you will get all the documentation, but not quite all is on line here.)

Downloading GMHT

Before you download GMHT, you need to join the GMHT emailing list. This is a low volume mailing list, which lets me keep track of who is using GMHT:
Subscribe to gmht
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GMHT is distributed as a jar file (gmht-0.5c2). (There is a test suite in a seperate jar file, in the same directory.) If you don't already have it, you will need the third party jar files used by GMHT (gmhtliba.jar), as well.

0.5 Release Notes

I'm currently testing "Release Candidate 1" for version 0.5.

0.3 Release Notes

The 0.3 release is more stable than 0.5, but lacks many of the foward looking features which future GMHT releases will be based on. I don't recommend using it.

Want to Help with GMHT Development?

Only got a few minutes?

  • Download GMHT, and run the smoke tests on a new platform! Tell me if it worked, and any problems you found. (This only takes 15-30 minutes!)
  • Read over the "start here" and tell me if it made sense, and told you what you needed to know.

Only got a few hours?

Here are a bunch of programming projects which can be done in just a few hours, but will be very helpful.

  • Add a new type of dice, by writing a new subclass of Dice. For example, you could do Weird West style dice rolls, or Storyboard style roles, or Shadownrun style dice pools.
  • Extend the current Dice class to handle "roll 4, but only use the 3 best" style dice rolls.

Have more time than that!

Here are a bunch of programming projects which will take a little longer (maybe a few days), but would be very helpful, and fun to do:

  • Extend the automatic regression testing framework using JUnit.