Digital DND

[nirelyn]

Hello All,

I've been working on a set of tools for the creation and management of 4E characters. Overall goals are:

• Open storage format and access. The characters themselves can be stored in XML on the users machine, or via an online web service with exposed load/save methods (This means you can write your own UI, should you chose to).
• Ship with two interfaces. A graphical windows UI (In progress) and a web based front-end (planned).
• Users can link characters to games, and assign a DM for those games. The dungeon master can then have access to the online, updated, characters via a custom tool designed to run and plan games.

However, I have encountered a few problems.

1. The nature of the gaming license. I know you cannot copyright game rules, which means that no part of the games mechanics themselves are copyrighted. How does this work for things such as deities? Powers? Feats? The method we are currently using is to show feats, skills and deities by name without anything else. Does anyone have firmer details on this?
2. I've seen a number of digital representations of powers, via custom sheets and tools but was hoping to find a raw list of them. Is there any such list, or will that not come until the SRD launches Jan 1st.
3. Format. I've run through a few incarnations of a character sheet. Would players rather see the cumulative addition for a character sheet or just the final values? In the second case, a configuration page could still show the information. In all cases, the sheet is entirely printable. Ex:

• Initiative = Dex + 1/2 Level + Misc = (4 + 6 + 2 = 12)

Or...

• Initiative = 12

This is all in hopes of having a very reliable, transparent system that will for starters function as a very strong character sheet and second as a system for actually playing.

Thanks