Been working on my spell database. But, I’m now unsure of how to proceed. Basically, I’ve got two sets of spell documents, one in D&D and one in Hero. The idea is to combine the two so I have the flavour text of the D&D spells but the Hero System mechanics.

Up until recently, my thought was to create a MySQL database that housed everything, and use PHP to access that database.

However, one of the first things I did was to go through the D&D spell list file and quickly convert it into an XML format:

<spell>

<title>Take That You Fiend</title>

<level>Wizard 1</level>

<effect>1 Target</effect>

<description>Zaps the target. Ow!</description>

</spell>

And so forth. Given the way the spell list was arranged, that was fairly easy. And the Hero System equivalents are in HTML from a webpage, so I could probably quite easily convert them into XML, too.

So… now what? Keep them as XML? PHP does XML pretty well, too. Or come up with routines to put all this stuff into a MySQL database?

Decisions, decisions…