Getting Started with TALE

Running the application

TALE is a Command Line Interface (CLI) application, meaning it needs to be run at your system's terminal, whatever that may be. How to use a terminal is beyond the scope of this tutorial. Luckily, the internet has many resources available to help if you're not familiar.

Tale can be run on its own

./tale

Or preloaded with tables from files:

./tale some_tables.tale more_tables.tale

TALE basics

The application relies on Tables, Table Groups, and Scripts. These currently MUST be made in a basic text editor (like Notepad/Gedit/vim/etc. NOT a word processor). By convention, they are saved in files with a .tale extension. When getting started, you will most likely find it easiest to just save these files in the same directory as the TALE executable, so that loading them is more straightforward.

Defining Tables

For examples on how Tables can be defined, see Table Basics, List Tables, Table Probabilities, Tables w/ comma separated numeric keys, Textually Keyed Lookup Tables, Table organization Tags, and Tables w/ Statements. These examples are also available directly in the application via built-in help.

Table Naming: Table names may contains spaces (e.g. Farm Animals), and be alphanumeric (e.g. 10gp Gems). They MAY NOT contain punctuation without being in quotes (e.g. "Treasure Hoard: Challenge 0-4").

Defining Table groups

For examples on how to define Table Groups, see Table Group Basics, and Table Groups w/ Statements.

Defining Scripts

For examples of how to define Scripts, see Script Basics.

Using TALE

Once the application is running, you should see the welcome prompt:

-----+- Welcome to TALE! ---->
     |   Type a command to get started, 'help' if you're unsure what to do, or CTRL+C to exit.
TALE +->

From here, the most common action is rolling. This can be either just rolling dice:

TALE +-> Roll 3d6

Or rolling on a defined table:

TALE +-> Roll on Magic Item Table A

Basic Interaction

TALE evaluates (or tries to) whatever statements you enter into the prompt, then shows the output of that evaluation. These could be simple Arithmetic Expressions, Roll Expressions, Lookup Expressions, Load Statements or one of TALE's more Advanced Features. Any of these expressions or statements can also be included in .tale files. They can either be directly in the body of the file, and executed when it is loaded, or within Tables or Scripts, and executed when rolled/invoked.