all hail the Apple hypercard stackreverancepavaneOctober 21 2010, 16:01:37 UTC
I'm actually using something similar at the moment for my active games. I take the PDF text and essentially cut it up and tag each section. I can then quickly summon each section by tag, rather than search through the linear book. Works quite well, especially since tags are effectively nested. It also can display the linear book. The added advantage of doing this is that supplements, expansions, and house rules (I'm an inveterate modder) can all be placed in a single canonical reference document. One of the things I want to do (but since I don't yet have a tablet I'm in no hurry to do), is to revise the system so that other forms of linked structure are viable, beyond linear, via content, via subject tag, and via index (both active search and passive). Primarily I'm thinking of integrating it with an editable character sheet, which has active links to the rules concerning each element of the character sheet, so that players can have an electronic copy of their character sheet on the tablet during play, which also serves as a rules
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I've had a few tries at writing campaign layout documents in Voodoo Pad which is effectively a cool little wiki generator - it works rather well for outlining plots e.g. the adventure opens with the players in 'someplace' which is a direct link to everything you've written relating to 'someplace'
it's also rather handy when you need to remember the name of the NPC that you made up on the spot when they need to reappear 3 sessions later - provided of course you remembered to note their name down...
In the world of writing computer code, it's now the norm to have no paper manuals at all, and the definitive reference work to be online. A set of game rules aren't the same as a set of computer language rules of course (for one thing, I hope they're a lot less complex!), but looking at how they're done may help.
Hmm. If I were producing a paper-only RPG as a staple-bound book, I think I'd put introductory info in the front of the book, and common reference info in the middle, which is the easiest place to open to for that kind of binding. Someone get me a time machine; that would've been pretty clever thinking in, say 1985 or so.
Anyway, the sort of magic you're talking about is not (I think) possible with PDF, but is with HTML+CSS+JavaScript. I linked to TiddlyWiki upthread, which is an example of the sort of thing that can be done with those technologies.
I keep all the data for my gaming worlds in ConnectedText, a commercial single-user wiki program. It has a lot of really nice "database" like features that makes it ++good for the kind of world building I do, and I think it could be useful for doing RPG design as well. (I could have done Earth Delta in it, come to think of it, but at 430+ pages now, no way in hell am I going back.)
For example, every NPC has hidden (in "read" mode) property tags with things like name, level, class, location, and any other bit of data I think is useful. Another page uses the "$SUMMARY" command to produce a grid-like table of all the NPCs, with the properties listed (and there's a zillion options and flags to format it). I could easily do something where each Feat, say, was tagged with specific properties and then create a master list which could be filtered by a user-defined value, such as "Warlock" or "Elf".
The main drawback is that that's no "reader" program -- you can export to HTML, but you lose a lot of the functionality, especially the plug-
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I'm actually using something similar at the moment for my active games. I take the PDF text and essentially cut it up and tag each section. I can then quickly summon each section by tag, rather than search through the linear book. Works quite well, especially since tags are effectively nested.
It also can display the linear book.
The added advantage of doing this is that supplements, expansions, and house rules (I'm an inveterate modder) can all be placed in a single canonical reference document.
One of the things I want to do (but since I don't yet have a tablet I'm in no hurry to do), is to revise the system so that other forms of linked structure are viable, beyond linear, via content, via subject tag, and via index (both active search and passive).
Primarily I'm thinking of integrating it with an editable character sheet, which has active links to the rules concerning each element of the character sheet, so that players can have an electronic copy of their character sheet on the tablet during play, which also serves as a rules ( ... )
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it's also rather handy when you need to remember the name of the NPC that you made up on the spot when they need to reappear 3 sessions later - provided of course you remembered to note their name down...
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Here's a manual I use every day, and find easy to use. Probably incomprehensible to a non-coder, but it may give ideas.
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/9.0/CFMLRef/index.html
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Anyway, the sort of magic you're talking about is not (I think) possible with PDF, but is with HTML+CSS+JavaScript. I linked to TiddlyWiki upthread, which is an example of the sort of thing that can be done with those technologies.
Reply
For example, every NPC has hidden (in "read" mode) property tags with things like name, level, class, location, and any other bit of data I think is useful. Another page uses the "$SUMMARY" command to produce a grid-like table of all the NPCs, with the properties listed (and there's a zillion options and flags to format it). I could easily do something where each Feat, say, was tagged with specific properties and then create a master list which could be filtered by a user-defined value, such as "Warlock" or "Elf".
The main drawback is that that's no "reader" program -- you can export to HTML, but you lose a lot of the functionality, especially the plug-
Reply
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