Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="ThirdWizard" data-source="post: 5550983" data-attributes="member: 12037">What if I told you that you could have an easy to read document that looks just like a PDF that can be used on any platform, allows you to edit it, and pulls new data to update itself (telling you, of course) when there is errata released? What if I also told you it would be available when you were offline? What if I also told you that you could view the information on all your devices: your Windows Machine, your Mac, your Linux Box, your phone, and your tablet?What if I further told you that you could rearrange the chapters as you see fit? Copy useful information into a separate document that you could add notes to and arrange however you want? With an Internet connection, have built in tools in the document do calculations for you? Use first or third party applications, your choice, to access all the information in different ways such as a VT, a character builder, monster builder, encounter tools?This isn't easy. But it is not crazy conjecture. This is something that can be done by competent programmers. What if a RPG was released as a Web Service? A Web Service is basically a way that an application, web site, whatever can call in a platform neutral manner using XML various functions and queries on a central source. That information can then be saved for future use , displayed to the user, used in calculations, or whatever purpose is possible. This would allow all of the above to work.Subscribers could query for a list of classes, then based on that a list of classes, their powers. Then you could query for combat rules. You could query for expressions. I could call something like GetPowerCards(oCharacterXML) and it would return an XML representation of all the Powers associated with that character, complete with calculations done using the latest errataed rules. It could check character validity. I could pass a character and return all the errata that affects the character released within a certain timespan. Whatever you can think of, this model could perform.This would take a forward looking company to pull off. They need to realize that the benefits of massive massive ease of use offset any perceved side-effects from allowing third parties access to the services. They would have to realize that they aren't competing with third party providers, they are enabling them, they are increasing the power of their users, which will in turn make their users happier and bring more people in. The tools would be so powerful, so useful, that they wouldn't have to worry about things like piracy, because they are offering a service to their users that a document can't possibly compete with!It's asking a lot. It's asking for a total overhaul not only of how information is presented, but a huge amount technological faith and understanding as well as a shift in management paradigm. I don't see it happening any time soon. But, it would be glorious.</blockquote>

Verification