In Operation Dragonborn, Tippi Fifestarr has taken ownership over the role of developer relations. This means he will be responsible for making the developers more successful, in building during the sprint, and in future sprints or contributions to the open source MIT code-base.

What is Operation Dragonborn, and why do we need a Glossary?

<aside> ⬆️ You can learn more about Operation Dragonborn linked above, but in a few words: We are building a service which takes a D&D Character Sheet as a .pdf and transforms those words into visualizations, personalized to whatever character you are, as long as it’s Dragonborn.

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Only ~50 million or so people a year play D&D, and in their first game session (often called Session 0) they will all need to have ready a character sheet and at least one good visualization of their character. The longer it takes for these to be made, the less time the group is having fun playing and learning about this new adventure together. Plus, if we eventually break free from this specific slice of scope that we got from The Narrow Arrow during our backstory, we can help a billion or so people turn documents into images and then let humans layer into it for fun and profit. 🤫

The difficult part is how we take a PDF and transform it into a visualization. To build this tool, or be able to speak about it to others, you’ll need to know a bunch of words. Instead of struggling to remember, or even knowing what to search for, just come to this page (skip to the BIG HEADER: Glossary below) and find the terms you are looking for (and what they mean).

<aside> 🛠 NOTE: This page was developed as a tool and launchpad for accelerated learning. It’s kind of like a Front-End for all the Research & Development we’ve been doing, most of which is collected in this Back-End Document.

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Medium Section Heading <h2>: Background Knowledge

During research for the R&D Scavenger hunt, Tippi was reviewing the fundamental knowledge of fine tuning article shared by SlyRacoon during the hackathon. He discovered several important words and phrases.

He knew that a Glossary would be helpful, to get the team on the same page, at least with words (and helpful pictures?).

Big Header <h1>: The Glossary

  1. D&D Character Sheet
    1. To keep the sprint tight, we use D&D Character Sheets that are outputted from https://fastcharacter.com/ and saved as .pdf (using the print to pdf function on their computer).
    2. Later sprints can use other sources for the character sheets, such as different creation methods (such as DnDBeyond, Roll20, or hand-drawn) and file types (.jpeg anyone?)
  2. .PDF
    1. We want to work with just the searchable text of a character sheet
    2. Some pdfs are just image files, that won’t work with the way we are parsing the text in the PDFs.