Discussion on GURPS 4E Revised or Database

[doulos05]

Originally Posted by Refplace

I think the only reasonable option at this time is essentially a database driven index. Rather then include the rules, traits, monsters and what not it just lists the titles, rule names, costs and a few basic things you can find in the free PDFs they already make available.
Also a UI form for adding House rules and such, as well as flagging campagn specific items to filter things.

This I think fits within the SJG guidelines and might get permission to publish. A content inclusive item however would not and would require some major overhead and liscening discussions.
Of course making the index is about as much work as making it so it includes contact :( The advantage there though is it gets you a working model if the company decides to go that route at some future time.
However would enough people be interested in that to justify it?

Actually, I bet they could make money on a free rules index where you could type "Grappling" and get a list of every PDF related to the topic from pyramid to Technical Grappling and everything in between. It would expose products more rapidly and widely because you could quickly find the supplement with the rules you needed.

[Raekai]

Originally Posted by Refplace

I think the only reasonable option at this time is essentially a database driven index. Rather then include the rules, traits, monsters and what not it just lists the titles, rule names, costs and a few basic things you can find in the free PDFs they already make available.
Also a UI form for adding House rules and such, as well as flagging campagn specific items to filter things.

This I think fits within the SJG guidelines and might get permission to publish. A content inclusive item however would not and would require some major overhead and liscening discussions.
Of course making the index is about as much work as making it so it includes contact :( The advantage there though is it gets you a working model if the company decides to go that route at some future time.
However would enough people be interested in that to justify it?

The GURPS Character Assistant is practically already an index. I'm wanting exactly what I talked. I don't mean to sound snooty our pouty, but there's a reason that I'm not just asking for an index.

Originally Posted by doulos05

Actually, I bet they could make money on a free rules index where you could type "Grappling" and get a list of every PDF related to the topic from pyramid to Technical Grappling and everything in between. It would expose products more rapidly and widely because you could quickly find the supplement with the rules you needed.

Or maybe I lied. That functionality would be nice, but I do think an index is still a little short-handed.

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by Raekai

The GURPS Character Assistant is practically already an index. I'm wanting exactly what I talked. I don't mean to sound snooty our pouty, but there's a reason that I'm not just asking for an index.



Or maybe I lied. That functionality would be nice, but I do think an index is still a little short-handed.

I realize it is not all that you want. I would like something more as well and in fact built part of it for my own use. Makes keeping my world better organized then pen and paper.
However what your asking for is really not trivial. The technical aspects aside the publishing, liscneing and other aspects are really huge and SJG is unlikely to want to deal with those issues. If they were ready then they already would have. But your talking about something that would be very resource intensive. the index would be a prototype that could later be expanded if it was agreed and that other issues dealt with.
Propose or get someone to propose what you want but I dont see it happening at this time. the Index however seems likely to pass approval and if it is liked then maybe an expansion would be more seriously considered.

[Raekai]

Originally Posted by Refplace

I realize it is not all that you want. I would like something more as well and in fact built part of it for my own use. Makes keeping my world better organized then pen and paper.
However what your asking for is really not trivial. The technical aspects aside the publishing, liscneing and other aspects are really huge and SJG is unlikely to want to deal with those issues. If they were ready then they already would have. But your talking about something that would be very resource intensive. the index would be a prototype that could later be expanded if it was agreed and that other issues dealt with.
Propose or get someone to propose what you want but I dont see it happening at this time. the Index however seems likely to pass approval and if it is liked then maybe an expansion would be more seriously considered.

Hmm... I definitely see your point. You could certainly build it as an index. If that goes well, then the whole interface could be built. This organization thing is just my biggest frustration with GURPS. I use quite a few books/articles, but only really a few things from each book, but copy-pasting really makes things ugly. I might just have to try again, I guess. GURPS can be so cluttered at times.

[pfharlock]

Some thoughts.

I like GURPS 4e pdf's. I own some hard copies, but I never use them anymore, I have all the books on my laptop and on my kindle fire, when I play I reference them there, everything is searchable :) The pdf format has really worked well for me.

If this model is working for SJG, then I say go with it. I've been loving it, and I see no reason for that end of it to change.

I (as I'm guessing most people here do), modify the rules to suite my tastes, I do this mostly in my head, I don't really need a program to do it for me. Not sure I would trust a program to do it for me.

Regarding building technological tools to help role playing in gurps...

As people have been talking, two models/examples have been swimming in my head to emulate, both utilize communities to their best advantage. I think GURPS has a strong community and developing software that leverages the community itself makes more sense to me.

mobile device app stores utilize the collective development tallent of all the programmers out there who want to develop for mobile platforms by giving them a place to publish their stuff and even some monetary incentive. The published work is then rated by the consumers directly.

The developers in GURPS are writers/authors not programmers, does an app store like paradigm even make sense??? not sure, but interesting. Put out a website where people can write supplements/adventures/world settings/etc, these materials would be tied to their accounts (making it kinda a social website thing like github), and everyone who consumes those materials could vote on the quality. It would have the benefity of collecting all such works in a single location so that the community could get at those resources easily. The writer's incentive to post there are two fold, to be read in the first place, and you could setup a payment process not unlike what exists in the app stores. It would be like e23 except completely organic in how the content get's developed. You could post the existing cannon material on such a service.

Second thought, wiki's, the community itself is allowed to curate the "cannon". So again, you build a service that supports this model. The hard part here is, the basic set, and supplements aren't free, so maybe you would have to be a valid purchaser of the product to be able to use this service.

At any rate, the idea is, you publish all the cannon material much as it is now, then you let the community change it. Obviously there would have to be some trusted curating going on, but the idea is, you let the cannon rules become a living document that changes constantly over time. The cannon of this year might be very different from the cannon 2 or 3 years from now.

Example, a change I would propose on a system like this would be dumping the feint maneuver alltogether in favor of simply using deceptive attack. Obviously the community would have something to say about that, but if enough people feel the way I do, feinting would just go away at some point, replaced entirely by newer mechanics that evolved. You never have a "5th" edition, only the "current" edition.

Don't know, radical ideas, don't know if they are worth anything, fun to think about though.

Hat's off to SJG, thankyou for making a wonderful system.

[Langy]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

My desire for this would be to be able to mouse over a page reference in any rulebook, and it go to an owned copy of the referenced work, and bring up in a box the rule in question.

Yes. I'd also desire the ability to do this from a character sheet.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Kuroshima

Personally, this is something I've though about a lot. I do have my preferred solution, and it's a Tiddlywiki, that is, a wiki that lives in a single HTML file, and loads in all standards conforming browsers. It even has mechanisms user generated content and for importing content from other Tiddlywikis.

The nice thing is that it's like a non-linear notebook. I personally feel that such a structure is ideal for ongoing reading of technical works (maybe not for the initial read, but for sure for making sure you find item XYX fast and in a rational way).

Yeah, non-linear is the way I'm going (or going to go) with Sagatafl too. Linear makes less and less sense to me every year.

In order to make sure that most pertinent content is read, one can create index documents that are collections of hyperlinks to sub-documents, e.g. an index document for character creation, an index document for creating a fighter/warrior type character, an index document for creating a magic-using character, and index document for movmenet and other physical actions, an index document for combat and injuries and recovery and medical skills, and index document for xp awards and character advancement. And so forth.

One problem with wikis, at least the multi-page (e.g. MediaWiki, as in Wikipedia) kind that I'm familiar with, is lag when you click on a hyperlink. Usability expert Jacob Nielsen has said that users experience a computer response as instant when it occurs in less than 1/10 second. Clicking on a hyperlink in a wiki and getting the new page to load is slower than that.

I don't know how the everything-on-one-page wiki thing works, and I find it hard to visualize, but that may be one way forward for a GURPS 5th Edition. Alternatively, all the content should be downloaded onto the user's tablet, smartphone or computer in advance (taking up probably no more than a few hundred MB, or maybe a dozen GB if you want the high-rez illustrations) and then automatically checked for updates every so often.

That'd be the ideal solution, anyway.

[Yorunkun]

Much as I would like to see a GURPS database and believe it to be technically feasible, I don't see how SJGames could build a sustainable business-model around this.

For the database to be useful to hardcore fans like us, it would have to include ALL the 4e rules-content from ALL existing and future books/PDFs, ideally including Pyramid. IMO, the only feasible payment model for this would be a long-term subscription, to prevent people signing up for least cost and copying all the content.

So how would SJG price access, viz their existing business of printed books, PDFs and the Pyramid subscription? If the cost for this DB-subscription is low, it will cannibalize the sales of GURPS books and PDFs - which are only marginally profitable as is, and mostly due to long-tail economics of the back catalog. Inversely, if the subscription is too expensive, it won't attract enough users (especially new ones) to pay for its cost.

Again, I'd love for SJG to try and succeed at this, but how?

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by Yorunkun

So how would SJG price access, viz their existing business of printed books, PDFs and the Pyramid subscription? If the cost for this DB-subscription is low, it will cannibalize the sales of GURPS books and PDFs - which are only marginally profitable as is, and mostly due to long-tail economics of the back catalog. Inversely, if the subscription is too expensive, it won't attract enough users (especially new ones) to pay for its cost.

Again, I'd love for SJG to try and succeed at this, but how?

Actually that is the easy part, at least technically.
Each publication would be a module and encrypted. You buy whatever modules you want and there added to your copy of the database. This ccan be done offline or as an online server. However it means additional publication efforts and I am not sure there would be enough profit to justify the extra man hours.
But it is not a hard process, just one that would take some extra man hours.

[pfharlock]

Originally Posted by pfharlock

The developers in GURPS are writers/authors not programmers, does an app store like paradigm even make sense??? not sure, but interesting. Put out a website where people can write supplements/adventures/world settings/etc, these materials would be tied to their accounts (making it kinda a social website thing like github), and everyone who consumes those materials could vote on the quality. It would have the benefity of collecting all such works in a single location so that the community could get at those resources easily. The writer's incentive to post there are two fold, to be read in the first place, and you could setup a payment process not unlike what exists in the app stores. It would be like e23 except completely organic in how the content get's developed. You could post the existing cannon material on such a service.

When I posted the above, I wasn't thinking in terms of github's service, but that would be cool too.

IE, if I write an adventure, I get feedback from people through discussion threads tied to my account, I can choose to integrate their suggestions or not at my pleasure since I'm the author. Somebody else though can fork my adventure, make their own changes in their own account and when they are done send a pull request to me. I can either accept the pull request and pull his/her changes back into my original, or let the two drift apart and let the community decide which they prefer.

Also solves the problem of abandonment.