The Gaming Den

I think we need a voting system, honestly. No offense, but your critique is one voice.

SunTzuWarmaster wrote:I think we need a voting system, honestly. No offense, but your critique is one voice.

Well, it *does* provide a starting point for discussion.

I'm interested in seeing what Bigode has to say.

SunTzuWarmaster wrote:I think we need a voting system, honestly. No offense, but your critique is one voice.

I didn't mean otherwise. I meant d20srd.org hasn't stopped existing and the work on porting tgdmb.com material isn't even close to done.

I'm busy cranking out new content myself, although migrating back to New Zealand might take some time off my hands. I believe a voting system would be good, but how do we decide who gets to vote?

I'm still trying to figure out what the hell you guys are even talking about.

So am I.

PDF material? Porting TGDMB stuff to d20srd? What?

I think the pithy summary is: Warmaster's talking about porting d20srd.org deemed appropriate into "the Tome .pdf" to have a full game, and I'm telling him that's a horrible use of time at least until the .pdf catches up with relevant homebrew here.

EDIT: critiques posted; aside from "How do we deal with the size of the player character?", here in IMHO, take a look at It's My Own Invention. I apologize for the twin ills of referring only to the .pdf (BTW, I mentioned some organizational stuff there, so I guess Aktariel should take a look) and not having read (recently) the relevant discussion.

Maxus wrote:

TheNotSoEvilNecromancer wrote:

Maxus wrote:Okay, here's a stab at it.

A tenant of the design philosophy

So are you renting out the design philosophy to boarders or...

Tenants...Tenets... *not sure which is the right one*

PRINCIPLE!, there we go.

Tenet

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tenet

I thought that we were talking about making a whole SRD... I may be mistaken...

The voting is something along the lines of "do you think feat X, as written, is worthy of inclusion into the Tome". The voting would be a starting point, and people would state why they believe it is or is not.

SunTzuWarmaster wrote:I thought that we were talking about making a whole SRD... I may be mistaken...

AFAICT, there's all of 2 people talking about that: you, and fbmf, who actually seems to have done it already sans hyperlinks. And I'm not opposed to the idea: I just think it's work redundant enough to be left for later.

Question still stands:

If someone wants to contribute, what should they do? Where are we going?

First, post on IMOI. Then, link to the vetting thread. Lastly, harass Surgo until he clears it, assuming there are no outstanding issues from community members.

I think.

I think that's how it's going. The problem is, I push things out or hand out the source and...

drop a stone into a well

and wait.

I don't know who's in charge of what gets in or doesn't, except perhaps Surgo's (and now mine) collective apathy. I also don't know who's currently "in charge" of the next edition (v6), inasmuch as someone actually is.

That being said, right now my intent is to finish adding Koumei's Video Game Magic items to the current build and call v6 done. Not perfect, but "good enough."

Then we can start talking about major rewrites for v7, or some sort of SRD.

In all honesty, there really ought to be some segregation between the PDF and the SRD - people tend to work better when they focus on one aspect of a project rather than tackling the whole. Not saying that they disassociate, but just that some pick up the SRD and others pick up the work on the PDF.
(I will say that in this case I'm a typesetter and an editor, not a game balance-considerer - I write or put in what I think is good, edit it, format it, and so on - so if you give me copy, I can typeset and publish it.

Thus I wouldn't want to be part of the vetting process, for example. Others might not want to "code" or edit, but have strong opinions on and/or experience with game balance and design.)

Err.. ignoring SRD and vetting process concerns, I've got a simple typographical error that needs to be corrected in teh pdf on page 79 and fourth line from bottom of the first column.

What the feat "Slime Trail (fiend)" reads as is so:
What it should read as is:
At least, sans the capitalization of hte word. I've jsut capitalized it for effect as I'm using the code tag.

fbmf wrote:In my gaming group, we refer to our rewrite of the PHB and parts of the DMG based onFrank and Keith's work as "Final Edition".

Pretentious, I know, but I'm doing this once unless I'm getting paid for it.

Game On,
fbmf

Is there any chance of this final edition seeing release outside of your group? (Without you being paid for it.)

Shouldn't it actually read "Your body secretes" etc. etc. etc.? You bodies isn't quite... English.

SunTzuWarmaster wrote:Side note: I am on travel for the month of January (my girlfriend and gaming group hate me). I will have time to try to get some of the grunt work done (a cleric class format, for example), and learn LaTEX. Also, I can host as needed. I do not check the forums daily, however (more of a weekly basis).

If you are really up to tackling this I don't think there is really any reason to wait for the Tome updates. A conversion of the D20 SRD to marked up and hyperlinked LaTeX or ConTeXt or Lyx would be a necessary first step anyway. As a programmer I'd lean to ConTeXt because stuff like hyperlinking and conditional compilation are built in and it seems more straightforward to write something which can be compiled to both nice looking PDFs and websties.

With both LaTeX and ConTeXt you could also abstract all the many repeated structured bits of text (base&prestige classes/feats/spells/monsters/etc) into XML files with automatic compilation (TeXML) to marked up text. Which allows all kinds of neat tricks (for instance you could compile the PDF with old/new statblocks for monsters depending on preference, on a website you could have structured searches using the XML, the data could be integrated with maptool and other such programs etc). Most of the data entry necessary for this seems already done so "only" the stylesheets for conversion would have to be written.

Almost all the necessary work for getting a nice looking SRD is pretty much orthogonal to the necessary rewrite/truncation of the SRD using the Tome as a guideline. Metric fuckton of work though ...

Time is passing.

edit:
I can't help but wonder if we shouldn't just pay to download the offline version of d20srd.org and then hack out the parts that suck (feats, for instance) and replace it with stuff from the pdf, or alter the stuff that is broken (Polymorph, Wish).

It would certainly save time.

I mean, we would have the html source, and there would no longer be any of this bullshit about formatting.

Hmm, I just noticed there is an entire Docbook version of the SRD on that site I linked ... unfortunately the XSL transforms I assume he used for part of the creation of the Docbook XML isn't there, but maybe he would provide those on request. Docbook might not have quite the range of options as TeX, but in theory it can do stuff like 2 column output, background images etc ... so it should suffice.

SunTzuWarmaster wrote:I mean, we would have the html source, and there would no longer be any of this bullshit about formatting.

How is formatting bullshit? Lets say you have a Docbook version, Docbook includes hyperlinks ... it can be pretty printed to a good looking 2 column PDF or it can be converted to HTML (same is true for LaTeX, ConTeXt and Lyx BTW). If you start in HTML you have given up the option of being able to get something which will look nice on paper (and having computer parseable sources for the feats/spells/monsters/classes/etc).

For instance here is a version of the SRD generated from XML code from Andargor, it's not directly generated from the Docbook ... but I assume both are mostly automatically generated from the same source.

SunTzuWarmaster wrote:I can't help but wonder if we shouldn't just pay to download the offline version of d20srd.org

Hmm, I still think working from XML sources makes sense, for nice looking PDFs and print outs. After trying to massage Andargor's sources into modern Docbook I'm going to have to agree with you on starting from d20srd.org though. (Andargor's XML is a bit of a mess, the tables are extremely screwy, a lot of the internal links don't make a whole lot of sense and it's just plain not valid Docbook code.) The d20srd.org sources are pretty clean, should convert to Docbook quite easily with a bit of XSTL magic, I'll give it a try next week.

Where are the summon elemental spells (for the elementalist) from? Are they just Summon Nature's Ally only for elementals?

I think that they're from Complete Arcane.

Just loaded the PDF onto my eBook-Reader and it looks great.
Even better, with the bookmarks I can find something in reasonable time.

cu

Thought I read somethink about an 0.6 Version...
Did I imagine it?

Korwin wrote:Thought I read somethink about an 0.6 Version...
Did I imagine it?

Seemingly.