Twitter bots

In case you're looking for some randomised laws or regulations to add to your D&D world, look no further than my new Twitter bot: @dungeon_laws.

If you haven't seen it, I've also previously made @dungeon_junk, which generates random... well, junk.

Following! 😊

Twitter bots are interesting! Can I ask you a bit about how you made it? What language did you use, what librarires, etc.? No tech talk is too nerdy, don't hold back :) !

We're on a website built by a dev who's randomly experimenting in the tech that drives it. It'll only be too nerdy when we're talking in binary that needs to be compiled by hand.

Agreed!

I got my computer science degree in the 90s, so I'm pretty behind in web dev and interacting with social media platforms. I've used the Twitter4J library to write simple Java programs to interact with Twitter, but I'm pretty sure there are better ways and I'm interested to see what others have used.

If all goes well, I'd like to put the random generator from this website I made into a Twitter bot one day.

I use Cheap Bots Done Quick (CBDQ) which allows you to enter Tracery grammar and then will periodically post to the linked Twitter account.

Tracery is a bit like Mad Libs. You give it a basic format like "My name is #name# and I am a #job#", then you have lists like:
name: ["Steve", "John", "Mary"]
job: ["engineer","astronaut","scientist"]
When CBDQ goes to post a tweet, it runs through your code and randomly substitutes one of the names for the #name# placeholder, and so on for all the #placeholders#. The grammar can be a lot more complicated than that - the lists can refer to other lists, which refer to other lists, and so on.
Dungeon_Law's grammar looks a bit like this:
"#Introduction# it's #words_for_illegal# to #list_of_activities# in #list_of_locations#"

It's incredibly easy to make a simple bot using CBDQ and Tracery, and I encourage you to give it a try.

Thanks for sharing your method :)

Kind of reminds me of how they created the rumor mills for the City of Lies boxed set for L5R...