I'm pretty much a new DM and I have been absorbing the huge amount of d20 information out there. I've pretty much decided that there is a LOT more good, useful, and interesting material than I can hope to keep track of on my own.
One thing that is absolutely essential for me is a variety of software tools that keep track of various information. Unfortunately, none of these rolls really talk to one another. Luckily for me, as a developer I'm in a position to do something about it. I've been designing what I think is a pretty flexible and useful XML representation of the various d20 rules and trying to use it in my own, home-grown character generator.
So far, I can throw information from the core books, FR, Rokugan, Ravenloft, and Dragonstar at it and have it stand up pretty well. What I think is important and interesting about this is that it's really easy to define classes, skills, and feats using XML without resorting to recoding my tool everytime a new mechanic or prerequisite is introduced. More importantly, I hope, the publishers could produce XML equivalents of their rules while the tools people could concentrate on interpreting those rules.
I have a little work to do to formalize the schema and show some examples of expressing some of the difficult prerequisites and effects associated with the rules. It will probably be a week or so before I have this information written and uploaded to my site. In the meantime, I would really like to know if developers and publishers would welcome such standardization, how they feel about working with XML, and what sorts of things are likely to pose challenges.
One thing that is absolutely essential for me is a variety of software tools that keep track of various information. Unfortunately, none of these rolls really talk to one another. Luckily for me, as a developer I'm in a position to do something about it. I've been designing what I think is a pretty flexible and useful XML representation of the various d20 rules and trying to use it in my own, home-grown character generator.
So far, I can throw information from the core books, FR, Rokugan, Ravenloft, and Dragonstar at it and have it stand up pretty well. What I think is important and interesting about this is that it's really easy to define classes, skills, and feats using XML without resorting to recoding my tool everytime a new mechanic or prerequisite is introduced. More importantly, I hope, the publishers could produce XML equivalents of their rules while the tools people could concentrate on interpreting those rules.
I have a little work to do to formalize the schema and show some examples of expressing some of the difficult prerequisites and effects associated with the rules. It will probably be a week or so before I have this information written and uploaded to my site. In the meantime, I would really like to know if developers and publishers would welcome such standardization, how they feel about working with XML, and what sorts of things are likely to pose challenges.