Content Market: Initial Reactions, Experiences, Tips
 

So, I opened my wallet and bought about $100 in content from the Content Market. Mostly this was Kobold Press Material that I already have in print format. I also imported the SRD.

This thread is to post your experiences with the new Content Market and to share tips on how to best integrate purchased content into your Realm(s).

This thread is NOT meant to be for review of specific items sold, I think it would be better that each product have its own thread.

Some initial reactions:

The web site is easy to navigate and the information provided with the products are sufficient to understand what the product is.

I do wish that there were some previews of content, though I'm not sure how that would be accomplished. It isn't like you would just show X pages like a PDF product preview.

Purchasing was smooth.

Only being able to download one purchased product at a time was a small annoyance, but I don't expect it to impact me much going forward as I'll likely only being buying one or two items at a time.

Import when smoothly.

I recommend importing an item into a realm of its own and checking out how it is organized before importing into a "live" realm. Often, you may find that you only need certain topics or articles from a purchased work.

I'm not sure how duplicates are going to work. For example, I have the SRD. If the full content of the official core books for 5e are ever made available, I expect there to be lots of duplicates.

Overall the organization of the materials I bought are well done and work fine within my existing realms. But it is causing me to go back and rethink some things and once again play around with the navigation pane view settings.

For example, I notice that large lists of items, like monsters, spells, equipment are often organized into containers to break up by alphabetic range. E.g. Monsters A-C, Monsters D-G, etc. My preference is to just have all monsters listed alphabetically. I'm assuming there are some performance reason to organize them into containers. I suppose to minimize scrolling.

So now I'm thinking how to integrate imported material with material I already have entered. For example, I now have all SRD magic items organized in their containers. But all my custom magic items are outside any container. I moved the SRD magic item container so that it shows under Magic Items instead of General Equipment Articles.

The more I play around with CM content, however, to more I am convinced that the creators are using different navigation view settings than me. I think I need to revisit the help materials and relearn the settings for the nav pane.

Share/View Imports is a handy way to see all the imports you made for a given realm and to jump to that import's "Getting Started" topic/article. It would be nice if there was a way to see this across all realms in your account.

On that note, in the future it would be nice if I could just import content and apply it to different realms without constant export/import jobs. I realize that may not be technically practical. And I don't have a big issue with how it is handled now, but it would be nice if more of this were in the background. For example, when you purchase content on the CM, instead of downloading, when you next login and sync realmworks, it would show up as realm (or better a new Content tab) and then from a realm you could simply import from the content synced to your account.

Overall, I'm very happy with the Content Market. I'm glad that it is finally out. I'm happy with the content that I bought and I look forward to a lot more content being available, including, hopefully official WoTC 5e books, EN World EN5ider material, Critical Role's Tal'dorei setting, and content from other major publishers like Goodman Games.

I'm also looking forward to users being able to post their own material to share and sell.

This might be due to the bug that was fixed last year which was causing a problem if too many entries were displayed in the topic list panel.

Alternatively, it might be providing a quicker method to find a monster beginning with a middling letter of the alphabet (e.g. Remorhaz), so that you don't have to do excessive scrolling of the topic list panel.

And funny I griped the opposite the PF bestiary has no such alpha organization and I would have liked it.

Just goes to show, no matter how they do some organization, some one will want it another way lol.

My eventual plan is to have all the PF1 rule books in my mechanics ref. I know that's a big large, but one of my continual gripes of RPGs is rule look up over 207 books. Not with RW, I can link the rule(s)..Outstanding from a time saver point of view.

It turns out the we had a breakdown in communication on our end regarding the various monster books. One of the guys wasn't aware of the merging implications and thought it best to add the groupings (since they are definitely helpful within individual books). Those groupings are currently being removed from the small number of books he worked on, which includes Tome of Beasts. Updated versions that omit those groupings will hopefully be available later today.

Seeing some Qs in the Facebook Group about the difference between the RW Content and the HL Content. So here's a picture I made to try explain the benefit.

And for those questioning the need to own the Paizo pdf in order to buy Paizo content. Here's a recap.

Paizo enforced a change year where you need to own the pdf in order to purchase the same content on a digital platform.
It's actually a really good thing if you look at it from the right angle.

Think about the D&D5e landscape.
You buy the hard book.
You want to buy the DnDBeyond content, you must pay a license fee and data entry fee.
You want to buy the Fantasy Grounds content, you must pay a license fee and data entry fee.
You want to buy the Roll20 content, you must pay a license fee and data entry fee.
You pay the license fee to use the same content over and over again if you want to switch platforms.

Now Pathfinder is better imo.
You buy the hard book and pdf from their website using their model.
The pdf is basically a one time purchase license.
The pdf (aka license) is associated with your account.
If you buy the Realm Works content, it checks the website, confirms you already have a license and the price is therefore reduced to only cover the data entry fee.
If you buy the Fantasy Gorunds content, it checks the website, confirms you already have a license and the price is therefore reduced to only cover the data entry fee.
If you buy the Roll20 content, it checks the website, confirms you already have a license and the price is therefore reduced to only cover the data entry fee.

It's better for the consumer really.

https://i.imgur.com/yLNSZBe.png"]htt...om/yLNSZBe.png

One thing I have noticed so far. I purchased 'Rise of the Runelords', I had been creating the content for this myself while converting it to 5E, so was looking forward to eliminating the data entry. It looks like content was entered via cut and past from the pdf (as I was doing) since I see the same text formatting issues I was experiencing, for example an extra space after an 'f' - "Aldern swore off the f layleaf". Not a major issue by any means, just interesting that they had the same issue I had.

That's a well known issue with PDF's and trying to extract plain text from them.

While I imagine a good proofreading should catch those RotRL is huge and proofing the whole thing would be a significant undertaking.

We don't do cut-and-paste from the PDFs. With the exception of the first few books we did, everything is processed using a bunch of heavily automated tools. These tools include dictionary searches to fixup the vast majority of the traditional problems with pulling text out of PDFs, such as the common issues with ligatures you cited. We probably catch and fixup over 99% of the issues. Unfortunately, the tools aren't perfect and the dictionary doesn't know about adventure-specific terms like "flayleaf", so they didn't catch and fix that one. But they definitely caught all of the references to "halfling", I'm guessing. That one obviously didn't get caught during the proofing pass, either.

I picked up RotRL and it looks great, unfortunately my group is in the last half of book 6. I know the content market just came out, but what are plans for the future releases of AP? I have money to burn!!

This is probably really simple (I'm sure it is) - but the "see this article" link is getting me a 404 page, and I'm actually going over the explanation quoted below thinking "it can't be that simple!?"

So, I've downloaded my files, they're waiting patiently in my download folder. I just create a new Realm to import the file into and then find the file in the download folder and import it... Can I just erase the downloaded files, then? Should I keep them in a folder for RW downloaded files frokm which to do the import process? Is there another best approach here? :confused:

PS: awesome work, Robb and team! The content market is easy to navigate and understand even to someone who finds online shopping a bit convoluted.