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<blockquote data-quote="PeterDonis" data-source="post: 341582" data-attributes="member: 6906">I've been working for some time now (in my copious free time <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />) on a character generator that basically works as you described. Every attribute, stat, spell, power, object, etc. that a character can have is an &quot;item&quot; that can be of various types and have various data fields attached to it. Then you have a (potentially huge) table of effects that one item can have on others. The problem is that these effects can cascade indefinitely, so it's a highly non-trivial task to figure out how to ensure that, every time an item is added, dropped, or changed, you catch *every* possible repercussion of that change. If the system for defining such effects is sufficiently general, I believe the goal that you've stated can be met, but as I said, it's a highly non-trivial task (in the mathematician's sense of &quot;non-trivial&quot;, where tasks that are &quot;trivial&quot; are those which require anything less than a Ph.D. to accomplish <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />).Peter Donis(edit) One other thought: the N-body problem actually has no analytical solutions for N greater than two in classical physics (in quantum physics you can argue that the N-body problem has no solutions even for N=0, since the vacuum is not necessarily a stable state). All the models out there for many-body problems are numerical approximations, which are not general enough to apply to all situations. Which indicates to me that we'll never come up with a single program that can handle every possible rules variation that the d20 community can dream up. But we can still try. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="PeterDonis, post: 341582, member: 6906"] I've been working for some time now (in my copious free time :)) on a character generator that basically works as you described. Every attribute, stat, spell, power, object, etc. that a character can have is an "item" that can be of various types and have various data fields attached to it. Then you have a (potentially huge) table of effects that one item can have on others. The problem is that these effects can cascade indefinitely, so it's a highly non-trivial task to figure out how to ensure that, every time an item is added, dropped, or changed, you catch *every* possible repercussion of that change. If the system for defining such effects is sufficiently general, I believe the goal that you've stated can be met, but as I said, it's a highly non-trivial task (in the mathematician's sense of "non-trivial", where tasks that are "trivial" are those which require anything less than a Ph.D. to accomplish :)). Peter Donis (edit) One other thought: the N-body problem actually has no analytical solutions for N greater than two in classical physics (in quantum physics you can argue that the N-body problem has no solutions even for N=0, since the vacuum is not necessarily a stable state). All the models out there for many-body problems are numerical approximations, which are not general enough to apply to all situations. Which indicates to me that we'll never come up with a single program that can handle every possible rules variation that the d20 community can dream up. But we can still try. :) [/QUOTE]

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