Product I Want: Customizable PHB

[Kid Charlemagne]

This is something that I've been thinking about for a while... Here is a product that I would love to buy: something that would help me to create my own, personalized PHB for my campaign. It would be based on the 3.5 SRD, it would allow me to easily choose which feats/spells/domains/etc I want to include (and allow tools for me to add my own, so I could add feats from non-SRD sources), allow me to easily modify the class entries and add house rules, and it would help me produce a PDF of the result, which I could then print out or email my players.

It would include clip art that I could use to enhance the appeal, it might include a few "standard" templates that I could use, and it would allow me to import my own art.

I don't know how plausible this is; in a lot of ways I could take the rtf files of the SRD and do this myself, but I'd like the tools all in one package to make it happen...

 

[kenmarable]

I actually have a database/web app design all planned out, a potential business model, etc. that I've been toying with for a couple years. But considering what it would take to actually get it in place and successful, I haven't devoted the months it would take to get it up and running. When 4e was announced, I was very close. If it had been a closed edition, I would have decided to build it in a second. But since it's open, it still seems like more effort than benefit.

But it would be wiki-ish, with anyone able to post new rules and rule variants. Individuals could sign up for a yearly fee to collect the rule variants and additions into their own collection. The authors who posted the rule additions/variants would receive portions of the annual fees of anyone who includes that author's work in their collection. So the more people who include your rules in their rulesets, the more you get paid.

Seems like a really cool idea, and I'd love to build it, but it would dominate all my efforts for a very long time, and the climate hasn't lent itself to being worth it enough to focus on that rather than other things I'm mucking around with.

Of course, if Paizo is interested in the Pathfinder RPG taking on this organic, customizable model, I'm available.

 

[kamicosmos]

Very small market for something like that. Most people that are going to homebrew, well....homebrew. And, if you're doing it on the computer, you have Windows, Mac, Linux to think about. Is it going to be open source, or will people have to buy Adobe Acrobat and MS Office to make it work? And, a product like that is going to cost at least as much as the core books anyway, so...what's the point? Not any where near enough buyers out there. It's much easier to just buy a scanner, get open office and an open source PDF maker, and do it yourself.

 

[kenmarable]

Very small market for something like that. Most people that are going to homebrew, well....homebrew. And, if you're doing it on the computer, you have Windows, Mac, Linux to think about. Is it going to be open source, or will people have to buy Adobe Acrobat and MS Office to make it work? And, a product like that is going to cost at least as much as the core books anyway, so...what's the point? Not any where near enough buyers out there. It's much easier to just buy a scanner, get open office and an open source PDF maker, and do it yourself.

I'd go with a web app that acts like your very own d20srd.org that can also create an offline version (PDF at least, possibly even mini version of the hypertext rules). Downloadable software is so 1990's. (Of course with Adobe AIR, web apps can become downloadable software, too - but prettier and cross-platform with no extra coding.)

Plus get OGC from various products in there so that people can have a single ruleset encompassing the SRD, their own material (including their own house rules and any non-OGC they input themselves), and OGC from plenty of other sources.

It would be subscription based and with enough interest could easily be priced less (per year at least) than the core rules books.

Somehow, I would greatly prefer that to sitting down to scan thousands of pages of books, cleaning up the imperfect OCR text, cutting and pasting what I want, and then arranging it into some document that I can print. But that's just me. I might be lazy but I like the idea of integrating an entire book of OGC monsters into my own personal SRD with a single mouse click. (Oh, and that personal SRD is fully searchable, hyperlinked, and has built in tools such as advancing a monster using just a slider bar and some feat picking).

Of course, it's no small task, which is why I haven't decided it's worth the effort yet. But I've been refining the designs and data models for a couple years now and it's less complex than the sort of stuff I've been building as my day job. I don't know if there's enough of a market out there either, so who knows.

 

[jdrakeh]

It's much easier to just buy a scanner, get open office and an open source PDF maker, and do it yourself.

Having a layered PDF with multiple options that you can turn on and off is much easier than building a document from scratch. I'm not certain how anybody can reasonably argue otherwise. I've done layout for money. Laying out a PDF to professional standards for printing is a job.

 

[Haffrung Helleyes]

I would love this, especially if , for example, there was a 'simulationist' tab that I could choose that would open some feats, classes, and spells and allow others, with similar treatment for high magic, low magic, and narrativist campaigns.

Ken

 

[TerraDave]

We ended doing this for our campaign:

http://www.terra-viejo.net/SRD/

But ya, it really, really could have used some art.