[pure-awesome]

I'd like to know, though, are you aware of other Open Source D&D tools that are available?

I had a quick peek on GitHub now, and it brought up: https://github.com/adventurerscodex/adventurerscodex https://github.com/incomingstick/OpenRPG

So, is there any reason to roll your own from scratch rather than contributing to one of the existing projects?

If it's to have your own project that you have complete control over, or if it's just to do something fun yourself, that's totally cool. I'd just like to know.

[drewry]

Great points, I'd be happy to give some background. I originally started working on the project just for our DnD group about 5 years ago. At that time there weren't many other projects available or if so I wasn't aware of them. It was mostly Donjon and a few others that were available and none were built as individual packages that could be composed together and weren't open source. The GitHub org you see now is actually already a merger of existing efforts that were started by other developers who were working on a character sheet generator. The opendnd repo was only started recently as the tools have grown over the years and needed a sort of all-encompassing project.

That being said, I'm aware that other projects are out there now that have similar goals -- some further along than us as it's mostly been me working on it in my free time. However, I would say that our design decision is pretty different from the others in that each component is designed to be a separate standalone tool that can be used as a component to build other things. Because the end goal is so ambitious I think this design decision is critical if the project is ever to get close to achieving that goal. If I had to summarize in one sentence what we're trying to achieve, it's kind of a Dwarf Fortress level of detail but fully open source and fully interconnected components.

[pure-awesome]

Great, thank you for this detailed response! It sounds interesting.

I'll pop you an email and we can continue discussion via a format better suited for this kind of discussion.