japhy,

I highly discourage you from using the AD&D 3.5e rules. To do that will require licensing from Wizards of the Coast. Instead, check the WotC website looking for their Open Gaming system. Use that instead. It's almost identical to AD&D 3(.5)e, except that all trademarks have been removed. Of course, that means few prestige classes, and no defaults for Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance or Eberron, but that's ok. As long as you make it easy for the end-developer to add new spells, ignore existing spells, add prestige classes, set the map up however they want, etc., then they can go get the license for these things from WotC, allowing DCK to continue to be free (or not, but it can be free).

If you get that far, then you can look at creating a trademarked DCK, sort of like how the PCGen team formed Code Monkey Publishing to do exactly that - sell trademarked data sets to users of PCGen.

In my ideal world, DCK and PCGen would share data formats. Unfortunately, PCGen uses an abomination of a format which I would not want to implement a new parser for. PCGen does plan on going to XML one day, but by then you might be somewhat entrenched in your own XML format. The advantage to sharing, of course, is that you'd not have to type up all the open gaming content that WotC has released, and could get to work almost directly on the engine to use it.

Just my two cents (CDN). :-)

Ok, I should rewind a bit. The first thing I want to accomplish is to be able to mimic the old gold box games. Now, it's like I didn't know AD&D has advanced a lot since then, but after looking at the Open Gaming information (the many RTF files), there's so much more than I really feel is necessary for an old-school computer RPG.

I'm talking about a simpler time...

_____________________________________________________
Jeff japhy Pinyan, P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.: Perl, regex, and perl hacker
How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart

I understand ... although having jumped from AD&D 1st edition to 3rd, I can say that the 3rd edition rules are much more coherent, and thus more easily programmable. Fewer exceptions, more natural progressions, less arbitrariness. All that and lots more flexibility, too.

No one says you need to support everything - I would just encourage you to use OGC as your basis - which will allow you to continue advancing your support for OGC and allow some really modern games, too. What I mean is that you can support a subset of OGC to start with, and add support for more stuff as time goes on.

If you need help with the licensing, I know several people in Wizards of the Coast, having played Magic for over 10 years.

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