Discussion on GURPS 4E Revised or Database

[munin]

Originally Posted by johndallman

A few problems with that:

It doesn't give you the organisation scheme: that has to be devised, and is not trivial.

Supporting a lot of different databases and servers on different platforms and getting them to behave consistently is not trivial either.

Any structured data (which I believe is what we're discussing) will necessarily require you to define its structure. That is a problem to be addressed, but its not an objection to using a database-server structure specifically. Any solution you come up with will require that. But organizing material into books/chapters/sections from a database is a really basic web problem (little different than how this website organizes material into forums/subforums/thread/posts), even with optional rules to be chosen to be included or not.

Modern database and server roll-your-own packages are mostly all cross-platform already, which is the point of their existence. The only thing that will differ across platforms will be the user interface, and that's only if you don't use browsers. I haven't researched them recently but I'm sure there are packages to generate pdfs from database content as well. There's a lot of stuff out there.

Converting a book to a structured-data version would be the equivalent of layout work -- specifying headings, content flow, etc.

I'm a few years out of practice, but setting up a web server to serve this content wouldn't take even a small web company very long. They'd probably spend more time on appearance and user interface than on the database back-end, but then I was a database guy so I may be overestimating the difficulty of the other work based on how hard it would be for me. :)

But honestly, I have no idea if this would be a good thing for GURPS.