The cool cats over at Roll20.net have rolled — ahaha, aha — the open content rules for Pathfinder into their in-game-accessible Rules Compendium so that virtual tabletop players can look them up quickly and easily.
“What makes the Compendium even better than a digital PDF is not only its separation of the rules onto their own pages (like an encyclopedia), but the fact that it is built on top of structured data,” writes Roll20’s Riley on their blog.
“Rather than just a collection of text, the Compendium is designed to actually ‘know’ that a Fireball Spell has a range of 120ft. That will allow us to build advanced search capabilities, where you can search for an entry based on its attributes rather than just free-form text. So for example you could see all the Spells with a range of 120ft. Or all the monsters in the Bestiary that have a CR of 5 and live in Desert environments.”
While they’re (smartly) choosing to open with the very popular Pathfinder, Roll20 hope to integrate other open content licensed games in as well, such as vanilla D&D 3.5, 13th Age and Dungeon World.
The Compendium itself will be open for anyone to contribute (and add new games if applicable) to. “We’re also looking into ways that we can allow you to build your own Compendiums for your own private games,” writes Riley. “Your house rules, etc.”
If you’d like to look at the very early Technical Preview, you can browse the Pathfinder Compendium here.
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