I come before you today not with a question to be answered so much as a plan seeking critique.

I have noticed that most software for organizing and maintaining the state of characters, plot, and setting in Roleplaying games is either kind of crap (OpenRPG, sorry), limited to a specific system (Grapevine), or both (Penguinvine, sorry again).

I am considering throwing myself into the ring here, and starting a generified Grapevine replacement. I feel that Perl/Tk is a good solution for it, as the code will be heavy on interface and presentation and light on number crunching.

So far, I'm still trying to decide if this is worth going after. It's something I would use, and that I think would be useful to others. My plans for it would definitely include open sourcing it as soon as there was something remotely worthwhile there.

Feature goals:

• Multi-system: Different RPG systems will be supported by loading a user-creatable file describing the character creation process for each system. Key things tracked by this file:
  1. Types and names of attributes attached to character.
  2. Categories of attributes.
  3. How an attribute is bought (by leveling up, by point buy, etc), and cost of attributes.
  4. Attribute dependencies.
  The goal is to be able to support, at minimum, GURPS, D&D 3.5, World of Darkness (new and old), Paranoia.
• Player/Character tracking system, supporting one-to-many links both ways (One player running many characters, or one character shared by several players).
• XP tracking system, option to track expenditures automatically (ala Grapevine).
• Setting and Rumors management, tieable to specific characters OR to traits (As in, you can make "Rumor: Tilly, Madison, and Greg" OR "Rumor: Anyone with Knowledge: Kinky Sex Parties 20+". Possibly also allies/contacts management.

What I'm looking for here is suggestions, pointers at projects that might already be something like this, and a general consensus on whether this would be cool, and whether it would be worth the effort.

Thanks in advance, Monks.

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tsuJ rehtonA lreP rekcaH
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