If you’ve been paying attention to the Questions section of the Broadsheet, there have been several questions from “Jeremy” in the last week. Turns out, that’s because Jeremy has been going through the Gods & Monsters text and reposting it for an on-line gaming group, on a custom forum for that group. That’s a pretty cool idea, and a great way to reposition open gaming text.

You can get a glimpse of it at Cauldron. Registration is required, most likely because the site is meant for play. Cauldron is a play-by-post game. We used to call these play-by-mail, and I think they’re still called PBM even when they’re done over e-mail or forum postings (acronyms live forever).

If you’ve been looking for a game to play in you might see if they have any openings left.

I think that creating forums with the game rules at the top sounds like a great idea even for groups that meet in person. Looking over Cauldron is really making me hope for the day when a truly easy to use XML-based word processor becomes available. Right now, repositioning open text is usually as easy as copy and paste... and copy and paste... and copy and paste. Which isn’t particularly difficult, but in the future even that repetitive step will be removed.

Some people are already using XML, and the tools should soon improve enough for the rest of us. Note that I’m not talking about XML for the document’s file format, nor something like XHTML for the document’s formatting, but XML for the document’s structure. Something similar to Word’s outline mode, but taken much more deeply. Not just for the document outline, but for the maintenance of database-like data (such as spell lists and encounters) within the document, much like Word’s outline mode works for the overall document today.