in reply to RFC: RPG ;-)

My first thought was 'you're trying to make an Army Builder for RPGs.' ... and then I realized, Lone Wolf already makes such a thing ... but they're a commercial software company, and from the looks of things, they only support three games right now.

I've played way too many RPGs over the years, but never any of the White Wolf stuff -- you're probably going to need to talk to lots of people who are familiar with different systems, to discuss the relative difficulty of describing a system in a given data structure. I personally haven't done tabletop RPGs in almost a decade (or LARPs for more than 6), but you can probably track down people who are passionate about a given game system who are willing to give you a little time.

I don't know how busy he is these days, but Drew Curtis from Fark was a huge Shadowrun fan back when I worked with him in the late '90s ... although I wouldn't suggest dropping my name, as I burned some bridges when leaving.

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Re^2: RFC: RPG ;-)
by pobocks (Chaplain) on Nov 06, 2008 at 22:35 UTC

    I'm more setting my sights on Hero Lab, but the concept is similar. Shockingly similar, and I am kicking myself a little for not checking it out more thoroughly. But more focused on out-of-game management, and with slightly less hand-holding.

    I'm more and more thinking that the real problem with this is going to be figuring out how to programmatically decide how to layout the character-creation pages from the system descriptions. I think that alone will justify categories being separate objects.

    for(split(" ","tsuJ rehtonA lreP rekcaH")){print reverse . " "}print "\b.\n";
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[d/l]

      Display is a separate issue than the modeling to actually store the data -- after all, you might want multiple displays for each sheet -- some for editing, some for printing, some for on-screen display. Depending on what you're envisioning for everything, you might have another screen for the DM-equivalent to see multiple player sheets at once, or a display for a player to update their character as the game is running (HPs, inventory, XP, etc) as opposed to the types of editing that'd take place at character creation.

      Even for character creation, you might have a 'randomly generate and tweak 20 NPCs' vs. 'nitpick every choice'

      ...

      I'd focus on what needs to be stored and how to store it before getting worried about how to display things and how to store the information about how to display it.

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In Section Meditations