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Message: <blockquote data-quote="soulcatcher" data-source="post: 254710" data-attributes="member: 5940">yes, this is true - trying to classify everything first IS an exercize in futility - no one will get anything done, and they will just sit around trying to establish a starting point.What I am wanting is for this to A) be decentralized, and B) to break the work out into seperate areasso - feats being my main example, it should take at most an hour to make an XML definition for that, as it's very simple.  But, but creating this standard way of talking, we get the ability for programmers to use that as an API.  Programs like PCGen, or others could then just suck feats out of any 'D20 open content database', because that database will know how to import and export this XML feats document.  By agreeing on this one standard (which only would need to be used for programs, not personal data as you mention later) one essentially opens all those feats up to be used for anything from feats editors to character generators (or whatever else).the Key here is that I DON'T think that any one group should have to wait for anyone else's definitions to become finished - so if there is a feat group (like the FanCC people making the Net book of Feats) - they could start cataloging this stuff immediatly. (and in their case they already have) Right - but this is not necessarily the 'Master' - give the 'Master' Feats database to the people who know feats.  This allows anyone to be able to personally run a 'huge database', and there could be more then one on the net.  The Open Gaming community, just as in it's progenetor, the Open Source/Free Software movement is not likely to want to only have one of these - you can gaurentee that more then one person is gonna want to run a cool wiz-bang rules repository on their website.  More power to them - it spreads the bandwidth out across multiple parties.  Hopefully though, we can establish some controlability, by establishing 'go to' databases for the master information. I know about them, and I think that the FanCC would be a perfect home for this, they have a good foundation from which to build upon - but being as I am not on the council, I have no say in their future direction. I understand, and I sympathize.  But I do feel that there is value to having an agreed upon standard - that is build to handle future growth.  This is beneficial, because it gives a foundation to lots of programmers out there, who could leverage this work - but without forcing them to require a database backend for a simple treasure generator.  And once again, it creates the situation of allowing GM's to easily pull rules from net DBs to define their own campaignsOf course, that is the nature of open communities - but there is no reason that a group cannot create an organization that represents a good chunk of the community. And that is precisely what I want to enable.  If you get individuals/groups to take ownership of segments of the rules, they can each process stuff quickly.  This shouldn't be democratic at the rules level - vote a person in, and let them do their job - but you can leverage that work to create your own database, where YOU select the rules YOU like.I would think that each area of the rules (back to feats) would probably just add anything that was submitted (as long as it's OGC of course) - but then they could choose to publish something that contains the recommended rules to use - precisely how the Netbook of Feats works today - but with the addition of accepting OGC easily (from published works), and granting access to the database by a known APIIf it's done correctly, you (for example) could pull down the feats, remove the chaff (by say removing all feats that aren't paper published, or removing all the ones the FanCC considers to be badly created - you could then take this set, and select what you want to offer from your database.</blockquote>

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