Questions about import/export
 

I have had my head buried in my script since the import/export feature was introduced, and I've caught some of the discussion here, but not all of it, so I'm asking for a little slack if these answers have already been given.

What I have caught is that best practice is to develop your world as its own realm, and develop adventures/campaigns as separate realms, then you can create a third realm where you import both to combine them as needed.

So say I want to develop my world as system agnostic. This is the general history of it. This is the general timeline of it. These are the notable races and creatures within it, etc.

Then I want to export that and incorporate it into 5e adventures and Pathfinder adventures and Savage worlds adventures.

In other words, when importing and exporting, I want to mix and match game systems.

Question #1:, Is that possible? I'm pretty sure the answer is yes, because this is why import/export for 5e was delayed, right? Just asking to confirm, though.

Question #2: In converting from any one game type to any other, are there any caveats or gotchas?

Question #3: Is there any degradation in daisy-chaining imports/exports? Can I go back and forth and around the roundabout? Can I take a single realm from a generic system to Pathfinder to 5e to Savage Worlds, then back to 5e, then back to Pathfinder, then back to Savage Worlds and still be OK, or will there be a copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy effect?

Going from system neutral to system specific has a ton of gotchas.

I would not consider this ideal unless you really had to do this in order to publish your realm for multiple systems or the like.

I haven't tried going round and round the chain but in my limited experiments I haven't had any trouble but your mileage may vary.

But going from specific to neutral is ok? Or no?

I changed my oldest realm from "Other" to "System natural".
In the process the Race and Class/Role tags of the "Individual" topic changed from Tags to "Labelled Text".
Then I imported the realm into an empty 5E and Pathfinder realms, and both data points stayed as "Labelled text". Resynchronising the category adds an additional Race and Class Tags. So now I have them twice.

Re: Question 1
Import does try to convert to the game system of the importing realm.

Re: Question 2
Yes... as Avi's example shows, unrecognized tags become labeled text, for one.

Re: Question 3
I don't think full circle is practical. The various issues of conversion in each direction would compound each other. Also, because the Export/Import process preserves the Topic IDs from the originator, it would be more consistent for all of them to come from the same Realm, rather than having a mish-mash of some Topics originated in the System Neutral, some in Pathfinder, some in 5E, and some in Savage Worlds. I don't know of any practical effect this might have, but I am sure there could be one.

Best Suggestion:

• Create your initial realm as System Neutral. Avoid setting information that is not common to all game systems you plan to use.
• Create separate realm versions for each game system.
• Export from the System Neutral, and import into the others. Tweak as desired/needed.
• All future updates should flow in one direction .. from the System Neutral to each of the system-specific realms.

1. Going from System Neutral to any other game system is perfectly safe. Going the other direction is ill-advised. As mentioned above, fidelity of data is lost. :)

2. Converting from one game system to another will definitely change things around, with the actual extent of changes dependent upon the differences between the two game system structures. In general, you don't want to do this. If you are converting you game from one game system to another, you'll obviously want to do it. And if you are importing content created for one game into a realm for another game, it will be done for you. But that's about it.

3. Cycling through things is going to be very problematic. The mechanism is designed to support a unidirectional flow, so that's what you should stick to, if at all possible. And it sounds like what you'll be doing will allow for that very readily.

The process outlined by @Silveras is definitely what you should be leveraging. You'll find a bit more info on this approach in another thread/post:
http://forums.wolflair.com/showpost....79&postcount=8

Hope this helps!