Story and Mechanics Source in all groups by default.
 

This is the eleventh time I have tried to ask this question, its turned into a wall of text that requires full editing and better descriptions that just get more complex as the day has gone on. I've been working this since 7am this morning on posting this, and its now nearly 6pm -.-

I guess I was taking so long because I want logical information and education (and I know I'm a difficult student).

For me, the following statements are true. 1 is more important than 2, etc...

1. Creating custom Categories for anything, in the long run, is not advisable.
2. Separating content into the Book Source they come from looks more impressive.
3. Whatever category you use to define a Book Source, needs to be presentable at the root of each Grouping. And this category must be presentable in all Groupings.
4. Both Story Source and Mechanics Source are non-editable Categories, thou can be recreated as a custom Category.

So instead of continuing to type more wall of text (which is a bad thing), lets see if these pictures makes my point.

Why is this right?
https://i.imgur.com/ASnAGKT.png

And other than the fact this cannot be done, why is this wrong?
https://i.imgur.com/vjkUTh1.png

Which then leads me to wondering, why we can't use the special nature of Story Source and Story Mechanics categories (they can't be edited) and say they can be in all Groups?

If you are organising things by book, then won't you not be using the category subheadings to organise your topics?

At the top level you would have each book topic, and then underneath each book topic you would have all the chapter topics that make up that book.

I've never really used the category grouping view, except when I select something like "don't show topic hierarchy" so that I can quickly scan all races from all books.

I don't separate out the information about races, or classes etc., by source. That seems counterproductive. If I or one of my players needs to look up any of the rules crunch on elves I don't want to try and remember what book the stuff is in.

I just have a single article on each race and each trait, or whatever, that comes from some sourcebook is marked with a snippet tag.

IOW have you actually used the organizational method you're advocating? It doesn't seem all that useful except for simply transcribing entire books into RW which ultimately isn't useful at all IMO.

So, much of my RW frustration came from breaking your first rule (Creating custom Categories for anything, in the long run, is not advisable.) I wish that LWD had just said that to me in the beginning. The majority of my crashes and broken realms came from breaking that rule. In theory RW can handle it, but in practice you are asking for trouble (IMHO and experience). Since I have stopped trying to customize RW I have not had significant issues. This is a real shame since the ablity to customize is supposed to be a big selling point for the product.

I think the story sources category was mainly intended for use by authors and not the majority of users. Its seems that they intended them to contain the authoring info (authors, illustrators, copyrights, ect.) as well as the synopsis for a GM running it or a player playing it.

I don't even try to separate it all out by source. For a while I was including a tag that showed the source, but then LWD added a tag with the same name to RW and it screwed me. Since then I have not been using it. I have a large realm I can not export due to issue and LWD never answered my help request. The whole episode was the reason I quit using RW for a long time and still am only lukewarm about RW today. I can't help but wonder if each update (which I totally want the updates) will screw me again.

I have customized several categories in my main realm without issue. I've never been clear what the issue has been between what I did and what the people who had problems did.

I did have the issue with the tag domain named "source" getting added and conflicting with my existing tag domain of the same name which took longer than it should have to fix, and was never handled by LWD. But again between my many realms I have many added and extended tag domains and that is the only major issue I've ever had.

Ditto: my main realm is all custom categories and mostly custom tag domains and I haven't had any issues. I also combine together information about character options or common world items into single Articles/Topics with Tag Snippets to say which books originally contained the information. Having just one Topic/Article for everything makes more sense to me than keeping with the book organization. You can already do that by using the books or PDFs directly.

If I were to speculate (and I do all the time! :) I'd say that one thing I don't do with that realm is imports or exports. I wonder if some of what folks have seen is from stressing that mechanism, especially during a time when no bug fixes were forthcoming. My Paranoia realm is also old enough to still use the Legacy game system, which is unlikely to change any time soon.

My main realm was legacy back when export started. Converting it to Pathfinder failed miserably at first. But within the first month or so a big fix came out that let me convert successfully.

I have done exports from it back then as tests of the system. Once the issue with legacy conversions was resolved I've been able to do exports from my main realm and imports into blank realms and into existing realms without any unexpected problems.

Rather than separate source books using containers, I'd recommend a custom tag for "Resource" or "Publication" so you can track the book it came from, sort on it, etc.

There's an official tag for resources but it's locked so we can't add additional sources hence the need for another that does the same thing.... I understand the reasoning for it being locked (so official material uses the official tags spelled the official way). I disagree with that but whatever.

So here's my take:

Book Source topics are of most use to people who plan to make content available "by book" in the Content Market. The Paizo PRD is full of open content, for example, so someone can make their own version available to compete with Paizo's. Mechanics in Paizo's content are mostly open content, so making rules elements (Feats, Spells, etc.) available "by book" makes it easier for other users to find them in the (eventual) Content Market. For the end-users, not so much. Players just care that they can find their Feats, Spells, etc. -- and being hyperlinked within RealmWorks means that the book may be a useless appendage at that point.

Custom Categories are the way to go' Using the built-in Categories is the best solution if you expect to purchase a lot from the Content Market, as these are the Categories that purchased content will appear in. As I have long since given up on the Content Market, making customized categories that represent the information the way I want it is a much better option (for me; others may disagree). True, it means that going forward I will need to enter everything myself, but since I have already completed a good portion of the existing Pathfinder rules, that is not much of a deterrent.

This is still a problem with one of my realms. I tried to get LWD to help fix it to no avail. That was before the re-emergence of Rob and while LWD was deep in denial about how things were going. If I tried again now, I may have better luck. I can sync the realm and export it, but the import always fails. I am not currently using that realm, so I haven't tried contacting LWD since things have been turning around.

Please do reach out to us at support@wolflair.com about this import fail issue.

If I was to ever to buy or download a rulebook for RW it would be purely to slice up and put the pieces I cared about into my existing articles and to merge stuff like feats and spells into my existing lists of such. I'd never maintain something as a book.

Custom categories make only a limited amount of sense if you use a lot of published material which all follows a single convention. Paizo, for instance, has been very consistent in how they describe settlements and other geographic locations. It would make little sense to deviate from the standard Pathfinder categories of you were using a lot of that material.

I'm pretty close to this and really don't understand the fuss about all these things. I neither organize my things by sources nor do I use custom categories. Heck, I even still use my legacy realm I started around 2012 because there's some kind of problem with converting to Pathfinder and it really doesn't matter.

I categorize most of my stuff either by location or storyline and the rest just stays in the pre-defined structure like groups, thing lists and such.

I actually do both. Sort by book and have my own custom book source tag entries. which is larger than my monitor can actually show at once. Image

I don't know why I want it sorted into books in each of the sections...

I wonder about something... I will test something and be back.

[edit=1] Before the time of computer entitlement, if we sat down for a game of tabletop roleplaying games, we would need all the books to reference and would have to know exactly where to look, that's why book indexes where valuable, bookmarks of varies kinds and paper notes became vital to the game.

Even now, we buy books separated out by content, we buy adventure paths, we download unofficial content via PDF all separated out into subsections, which may or may not at a later date become printed official content. To me, therefore its logical to keep that formation when imputing content. Errata's come out with book and version numbers. We get the information from a book it would seem logical to keep that in book form for data entry.

Even D&D Beyond separates its books out, heck it separates it out per chapter.

My long term goal is to have each book in realm works as its own separate realm, and when I need to, import the contents into the realms that needs them. [/edit]

I found that the most annoying thing about the Paizo PRD was that everything was sorted by book, so you had to go looking across several books to find the feat or rule that you were interested in.

d20pfsrd got rid of the books and put all the relevant information from all sources about a particular subject into the same area. Much easier - it is useful to have a reference within the rule to where it came from (in case you need to quote it to somebody else), which in RW can be done by assigning a tag to an individual snippet.

Whenever I use snippet tags it crashes for me. Thou I literally just found out that was a thing.