Dungeons & Dragons & Drupal

Hacking and slashing your way through real-world content management problems

For the past twenty years, whenever I learn a new language or technology, I follow the same pattern. First, I’ll follow along with some online tutorials or examples from books. Then I try to solve some simple problem I’ve been having lately using only this technology. Finally, when I want to be certain I grok it, I build a D&D character generator. If I can do that, I can build anything a project throws my way.

Dungeons & Dragons is a microcosm of Drupal site building; from the narrative-driven business logic, to the intensely detail-oriented rules (each of which have one or more custom exceptions), and even to the edge cases that only have to be considered because of that one Chaotic Neutral stakeholder. D&D Player Characters have fielded data to store, modifiers to apply, skills to filter by class, and special rules based on previous selections. Database limits are easy to enforce until someone finds a Bag of Holding, throwing all the encumbrance validation out the window.

This session will cover:

• Learning Drupal 8 the D&D way!
• Creating a D&D Player Character (PC) content type
• How to create custom fields for a PC data, including custom compound fields with Field API and the Paragraphs module
• Complex workflow and content versioning to handle how PC levels stack (which can be removed in the case of vampiric Level Drains)
• Handle intricate entity relationships (effects of magical items on stats)

This session is intended for people familiar with Drupal, but are still expanding into larger, more complex projects.

You hear something behind you. Roll for initiative.