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Message: <blockquote data-quote="reanjr" data-source="post: 2137925" data-attributes="member: 20740">Exactly.  That's what I meant in the other thread by wanting to have all the rules in xml.  Let's face it, if all one needed was the data, someone would have done it a long time ago.  But the main thing people seem to exchange in OGL is not new spells, etc., but new rules.  That's the tricky part.  I would also like a utility that can theoretically be used for D&D, Arcana Unearthed, Masque of the Red Death, my own system, World of Darkness, etc.  While it may seem at first that some of these systems are totally different, there are certain to be a lot of similarities.The problem is that as soon as someone adds a house rule, all the data becomes useless (I am, of course, exaggerating).  You need a way to extend not only the data set but the functionality.  I've experimented in the past with an OOP approach, and at a certain point it hits a wall.  The extensibility model becomes absurdly complicated and you have to code for exceptions all the time.  My new AOP approach is coming along much nicer (I'm almost glad I lost all the code to the previous attempt).  I've accomplished more in a couple of weeks then I did in months with an OOP approach.This is why I've approached it in a manner very much like Lisp.  By design, it is extensible in ways that make it able to do things it was never designed to do.My question to you (given your example): How does the application know what to do with a skill in the first place?  That has to be hardcoded in.  It also needs to understand what a skillname is, how to perform a check (including what a DC means, how to "roll" 1d8+1 and maybe some other things I'm not seeing right away.While it may seem fin to hardcode this, what happens when someone wants to houserule action points?  Changes it so that all die rolls are rerolled on maximum results?  Use a med kit?  Deal with a form of aggravated damage that can not be healed in that fashion?  Implements Wound/Vitality?  Any of these house rules could make your entire snippet up there useless to the end use (some only occasionally, some completely).Since house rules are par for the course, that's why I am trying to focus on a system that can handle them.  I appreciate this thread coming up, because it offers us a chance to really home in on this idea.The stuff I wrote above I did off the top of my head during work.  There are all sorts of ideas floating in my head on how to implement a system that can do this (I've even revised some of the stuff above - for instance, I've now designed it so that the application doesn't need to explicitly understand compare, but instead can infer it from a much simpler assert function [if (condition) { run code }]).Does anyone know of a good free web app (ASP/ASP.NET/PHP) that would allow me to host what I am working on and allow people to make comments and suggested changes?  I think it would be very useful for discussion.</blockquote>

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