Ok figured it out. The old lisp does work, sort of, need to use in paper space, does not work well in C3D model space.
I don't know exactly what Roughen does, but if the idea is something like this:
you can use WobblyPline.lsp with its WPL command, available >here<. It works in either model or paper space, and has options about number of segments, degree of wobbliness, whether to delete or retain the source object(s), etc.