I wasn't referring to Perl as a language with that, but rather CGI utilization in general, at least with matters like this.

Samuraid was pretty much going with what I was saying. Utilizing addon scripts would be the easiest way to go, especially if you're not too knowledgeable on the subject. The forum doesn't necessarily have to be your front page, but they can be integrated with each other. Hybridizing the two makes it a lot easier to set up custom fields for race/class/etc. and use them across both forums. It would mostly go to save you the trouble of writing out PHP scripts and managing MySQL databases manually.

Most likely, if you have something you want to do for integration, someone's written something similar for phpBB, so it'll save you a lot of work.