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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jimmifett" data-source="post: 5587575" data-attributes="member: 55006">Languages are quite simple, they have no mechanical purpose, however, you still have UI concerns. Do you have a drop down or some sort of select list? You have to manage that list somehow, that requires as I mentioned above, some way to filter and decide which languages belong in a given campaign. That will take one or more columns in the languages table, a whole new table in the DB to store inclusive source material from which to filter the language table, the UI to add and remove sources associated with a given character, and a way to search sources for the name of the language to simplify source material management. Do you have a generic text field? You allow the player to type in whatever they wish. Lets say on the backend for comparison purposes, you force it to all upper or all lower case. Now you have to query the table to see if it already exists and enter it into the table if not present or get the primary key of the existing entry to store for the character. But now you don't have a list of languages unless you have a seperate area that has a default list. You could also do a mixture of the two with a combo box (enterable text plus select list in one element) to show the default list of languages (perhaps also having source material management) as well as allowing the user to enter a custom value (backend defaulting to auto adding user info as a source material identifier and adding that source to character campaign sources). You are still looking at a non-insignificant amount of work. And that is only for languages that have no mechanical hooks into anything else. You start working with religions, or really any other game mechanic, it gets dicey, fast, and a simple text entry or combo box is no longer sufficient. If languages at some point in the future do become some underpinning of some other game feature (if it isn't already), you now have added complexity that may not work well with this solution and you are looking at even more work to redesign. Lets also examine IP concerns. Lets say in the future the CB now supports 3pp material. You are going to need to have in place a means to prevent the user from entering in clones of 3pp material depending on licensing issues. You may have to go back and purge huge swathes of hastily written kludges to allow limited custom content in order to accomodate these 3pp publishers. Lets not make the mistake of thinking the expediancy of a client side supposed 'quick and easy fix' to accomodate custom content is quite that simple when you are dealing with a commercial product.</blockquote>

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