Game-book CMS using Ruby on Rails

Hi all,

For those of you who weren't growing up in the 80's to 90's a game-book is a piece of interactive fiction that could be described as a cross of a role-playing game and a novel.

So the player reads the text, makes choices, and then rolls dice to see the outcome of those choices.

The idea

My idea is to use Ruby on Rails to create a Game-Book authoring system in a three stages approach

1. Create my own Game-Book
2. Create a Game-Book CMS using a define rules set //rules meaning game rules, here
3. Modify the Game-Book CMS to allow authors to design their own rules

Requirements

The player should be able to create his/her own account, and a character that would persist on a database. In other words, you can play a bit then return and continue the story where you left it.

Dice, bookmarking, and game rules should be handled by the application itself.

I'm loving learning Ruby and I think it could be perfect for this sort of it, however I'm still fairly new, so

3 Questions

1. Am I right about using Ruby? Or should I try PHP?

2. Will this kind of app be heavy on the server? (i.e. should I restrict the number of beta players?)

3. This would be my first "real" Ruby project so any bit of advice is heartily welcomed