| Hyeena |
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I would LOVE to build robust tools for Pathfinder. I've asked to time and time again. I can't get Paizo to take me seriously, apparently. Their licensing model is their worst enemy in a digital world.
When I've talked to Vic about this, I utterly failed at getting anything set in motion simply because I didn't already have a company established even though I can prove my qualifications very quickly. I was flatly denied before I even got the chance though. I also have very qualified colleagues who would love to do this. I simply don't understand why this space is hard to improve.
The long and short of Paizo's stance as I understand it is that if you aren't already a large company or a company that is a long-time incumbent in the RPG space, you have no chance.
The big thing for me and my Web Developer friends is I really don't want to figure out some hacky way to get the Data from the books into some structured format. As I see it I have a few options:
1: We input everything by hand. We started that, and it's TOUGH. I can't image doing that for subsequent books.
2: We wait for someone else to do it, scrape it from their website, and turn it into the way we want it.
3: We create a web form, and peddle the data entry to friends and family.
4: We try and do some REALLY wacky parsing between the PDF and a usable format. We've tried this, and we can't get anything super reliable.
5: We buy some structured format from Paizo. I've reached out to Paizo once, and I don't really think they understood what I was asking for and forwarded me to an e-mail to potentially become one of their licensees (Ala AON style).