What is the intent of content sharing
 

Hi all!

I'm a veteran GM of 35 years experience and a professional board game developer who has just found the works of Lone Wolf and fallen in love. I've been reading up on the features of the products, history of development, and trying to catch up on the state of the forums. I've binged watched tons of videos (thank you so much in particular to Mr. Plunkett, your work is appreciated) and read several guides.

I snatched up Hero Labs with the limited 5e SRD and got myself situated with the Community Pack right away, and the program and content are just what I needed.

I eagerly jumped into Realm Works. Though I was sad to see the immense work put into some published campaign settings could not be shared (i.e. Mr. Plunkett's massive Faerun setting), I could understand the reasoning. However, I still had the expectation that I could find the appropriate 5e content for the mechanics area in Realm Works, but that does not seem to be the case.

Is the intent that everyone who is using Realm Works for 5e mechanics content types it in themselves? I've looked through the Realm Works Community Content spreadsheet but don't see critical elements such as monsters, spells, or rules. Am I missing a download somewhere? Has the export/import feature arrived so recently that a full community pack has not been put together yet? Is there a licensing issue that hinders community sharing in Realm Works while encouraged in Hero Lab?

From reading the forums, I'm getting a nebulous feeling about the content manager and Paizo that might have something to do with the limited access to sharing content, but I don't know. Is there a WotC concern about sharing content? If so, how does Hero Lab (by the same developer) have a community pack with tons of content from the books posted not only the forums put mentioned on the official developer site? Am I comparing apples to oranges, because I can't reconcile in my head why I can have instant access to every spell and character ability in Hero Lab but not monsters, items, rule snippets, and the very same spells in Realm Works.

Should my expectations be that I enter all the weapons, armor, magic items, hundreds of spells, hundreds of monsters, and rules snippets either all at once or as needed as I add them to my campaign....just as I'm sure others have already done in the past? This seems like a tremendous amount of duplicate work for us as a community, and seems like there should be a better way.

Am I missing something or should I buckle down, pay my dues like everyone before me, and start entering all this 5e content from my books?

Thank you,

Tom

Hi,

You are touching an interesting point.

RW is relatively new software and much more niche than the Hero Lab and Army builder. It is universal campaign organizer which requires more effort to work with, to prepare in advance and is limited to GM audience mainly. This reduces the amount of possible contributors for free content, just as it is in the open-source world. Here your mileage may vary :)

If nobody messaged you about realm based on 5e SRD (it is the only portion of the license that can be freely used on the web without sentenced to death), check the FB group as well. I am 100% sure that someone out there has 5e srd in ready to share realm, but it is hiding in plain sight :)

On the licensing part - yes, you are not allowed to share or sell realms with content that is not free, open or licensed to you, but i doubt anyone can prevent you to share with other friends for personal use. It is the wet dream of every publisher everyone to buy their own books, no group sharing (especially the dead trees), but it will never happen, people are not dumb consumers (i hope). In fact, i hate so much the model where digital books = printed books (or close), that i either pirate or wait some grand sales. I always buy the printed books for systems i will play, but I don't find fair to pay three times for something I already own, especially when the effort for the digital products being close to none and restrictions more (DRM, effort to crack it so it does not bother you and etc).

I have Dark Heresy 2, since i am Warhammer 40k junkie.

Go with pathfinder. It is based on 3.5 edition and LWD has a license with them. You can expect lots on content market material for PF.

Some things that need to be made clear.

1) The Content Market is not yet available. Until it is no material will be available for sale through LWD.

2) Sharing copyrighted material, such as 5e material sought by the op, is flat out not going to happen without a license from the publisher. The OGL for 5e as I read it does not allow for that sort of republishing.

3) Paizo has much broader community use guidelines that would at least in theory allow material from the CRB and other Pathfinder hardcovers to be shared as long as it wasn't sold and didn't compete with a Paizo product, or at least that is how I read the published guidelines. People have pretty broadly discussed sharing realms that were Pathfinder mechanics and nothing else.

hi, im also an old DM coming back to making an adventure with some old friends, and bought Realm works to help me with the campaign

i readed that pathfinder 3.5 rules can be imported so i have all the rules, spells, etc ready for use in my campaign.

how i can get that? someone can share a realm in realmworks with me with all those rules already entered?

thanks in advance and sorry to bother.

There's stuff happened in the Facebook group currently around the 5e SRD. LWD plan on selling it too but alas we are waiting for the Pathfinder content to be ready to sell.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/207294946148092/