Category question - how to show description
 

Hi all. I think I'm missing something somewhere and can't figure out what.

I'm massively editing/enlarging the Race/Species category in Mechanics area to include many of the features of PC Wrede's world-building topics.

What I'm seeing, however, is that if I create a new topic from this template, the snippet names and not the descriptions are displayed in the blank fields. When I go to look at something like Group: Government, it's showing the description, not the title, which is how I want it.

Ex: included category Group: Government subject (how I want it)
Headquarters - this is the snippet title, and is not shown in grayscale in the empty snippet
A brief indication of the group’s primary base of operations - this is the description and is shown in grayscale in the empty snippet

Modified Race/Species Category NOT how I want it
Materials - this is the snippet title and IS showing in grayscale in the empty snippet
What is the most common building material? Why is it used (availability, cheapness)? Does it have any major drawbacks (wood=the Great Fire of London)? - this is the actual description to prompt for input and is utterly absent.

I hope I've explained this clearly enough to help someone help me. I'd really love to know what I missed/did wrong and hope it can be fixed with ease.

Thanks in advance.

To what world-building topics are you referring? Sorry to take your thread off-track (which I can't help with), but this sounds intriguing.

Heh, it's ok. After no responses, I put in a support question as I really need this answered.

Back in the old days of the interwebs, when everyone was using dialup of some flavor unless you were at a corp or university, the author Patricia C (PC) Wrede did a bunch of Usenet posts about a list of categories she had created to help flesh out world-building for her books. Each category had a number of questions in it to really flesh it out.

Some of the questions were of a global nature. Most of them are per culture and some were per nation. Some years ago, I went through them and parsed them out for how I wanted to do things and saved it as a word doc; that's what I was trying to put into RW so I could have all that kind of flavor in my world.

If you use this search string, you'll find a bunch of results. pc wrede world building

I'd love to hear what you think when you look at them. Cheers!

Ok. Will look at that and get back to you. However not having seen this, I will tell you that the WotC product “World Builder’s Guide” is reallly awesome for that and includes tables if you need inspiration. You can get it on DriveThruRPG. I can’t recommend it enough.

Ok I looked at her questions, and I think they are a good complement to the reference I listed. I would probably start with her questions and then head to the World Builders’ Guide. There will be some overlap but the reference will take you down to village level.

I believe I have a copy of World Builder's Guide in a Rubbermaid container under the porch.
It was a really useful product.

Back when FRPG's were not tied quite so tightly to the publishers world there were several very good books and article series on the concept.

I saw the Wrede stuff many years ago and it's a good start to designing anything it covers.
IIRC Ed Greenwood, it could have literally been almost any of the then big names in RPG's, wrote an article, or series of articles, in Dragon that I found very helpful sometime around 1985.

Have you checked out WBG, KBS? Really an awesome thing relative to any other treatment of the subject I have personally seen.