Thanks!

I have looked at the existing state of play, and the conclusion I draw is that if I were only ever going to be interested in writing an RPG or IF I would certainly get, learn and use Inform. However, I am doing this with the two equally strong interests of writing an RPG and getting really good at Perl, OOP, etc. So I'm determined to do it the hard way, so that at the end (if there is an end), I can say 'thus did Tiefling', and understand every bit of my code. Also, I'm not sure how receptive Inform (for example) would be to an attempt to build all the core D&D character classes and several prestige classes.

As a note, I will be producing (in the end) a modern-setting version of the game which will lack the specific copyrighted identities, and be a bit more in the whimsical line of early text adventures. This will be posted here on PM, in all likelihood.

As for your explanation of references - thanks! This looks like the way to implement the first Perl version of my project. One question: is the long string in your penultimate line a single scalar for all purposes?

Oh, and another: Could I include lists in that hash by reference? (Storing feats, spells, etc. as booleans is not efficient, IMHO. I want to be able to brew a new feat and not have to go and set the bit in all the PCs.)

And another: If, for example, $character{'Bob'}->{'Class'} holds 'Ftr', and $class{'Ftr'}->{'Base Attack'} holds 'Good' (to indicate that fighters have Good attack bonuses, which are generated by a short procedure in the combat module), what would be the code to retrieve Bob's Base Attack type? I may be being dense here, but I'd rather be clear.

Thanks again!

Tiefling