I had the chance to look over "Three Days To Kill" (John Tynes/Atlas
Games) the other day. I was impressed - it reminded me of some of the
really good adventures found in the old White Dwarf magazine (for those
that remember the good old days!),
Anyway, the booklet contains two main OGL/d20 sections - a bunch of
monsters and some rules for drinking game.
What has struck me is that quite a lot of d20 sections will contain
discrete data - monsters stats, weapons stats, spell stats, etc. Given
that one purpose of d20 and OGL is to distribute this cool stuff about
so that others can reuse it, shouldn't we start thinking about the
medium to do this, at least electronically.
Now for the 3 non-gearheads on the list, XML (eXtensible Mark-up
Language www.xml.com) is a platform, protocol neutral way of storing and
describing data. What this means, simply, is that Mac, Windows and Linux
users can swap files without worrying about Word 2000 or StarOffice or
rtf compatibility. It also means software can understand the data,
rather than it just being a bunch of words. An example XML document for
d20 might be....
<monster>
<name> Goblin </name>
<alignment> chaotic evil </alignment>
<armour class> 12 </armour class>
...etc...
</monster>
Now say you had an entire Monster Manual done in this format, rather
than .pdf, given a good XML editor you could quickly find all the
monsters that are chaotic evil, or have an armour class more than 16.
More over you could very easily (using XSLT and ECMAscript) generate
hit points and treasure for individual monsters on the fly.
The best things in some ways about XML is the ability to transform it
into other formats - the most obvious being html and pdf. Take our
Monster Manual again, we're going to produce a Lightning Print (soon
available in the UK BTW) adventure booklet. We've design some cool
layouts and written our Non OGL stuff. Now we import our XML defined
monsters into the document - they immediately get turned to text that
follows of layout designs, after a little editing it's done and goes off
to the printers. On our website we provide the XML versions of monsters,
so that anyone can take them off the web and use them - formatting them
how they like.
I strongly believe that if the OGF can provide DTD (document definitions
- basically what should go into the monster XML documents) for things
like Monsters, Weapons, Armour, Equipment, Spells, etc., all us budding
d20 writer will have a much, much easier time. It will also open the
space for RPG software tools developers to give loads of toys to play
with.
Maybe people have already spoken about this? Maybe it's to early to
think about it? Let me know. Flame me privately for inaccurancies in my
description of XML.
Sasha Bilton
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