Where to put example NPC dialogue?
 

How do people enter examples of NPC dialogue into Realm Works? What container, category, or field do you use? For example, if asked where he was last night, Johnny Splitnose will say: "Listen, I don't answer to you. You ain't the police and you ain't my boss. You say you have access to the camera footage--so you know where I was and where I wasn't. And, if you ain't got access--that's not my problem now is it?"

I would add it to the scene topic in case it is a scene. If these text passages belong to npc just to give examples on some random reactions - so they portrait him, I would just add the individual person topic and add it there. Where to add it you ask? Well how important are those text passages to you, if you want to see them first put them close to the top in one of the first descriptions, otherwise I would add them maybe near their character traits if you use the default topic.

Nobody is also stopping you in generating a custom individual topic yourself so you can only include the snippets you personally like & need, to avoid clutter or removing unnecessary snippets.

As Acenoid says if the dialogue is specific to a particular scene I put it in the scene. If its just dialogue a person might say anywhere that NPC might say anywhere that NPC might be encountered I put the snippet in the NPC topic.

One of the things people tend to struggle with as they start using RW is not being tied to the default format of the topic categories. You can add snippets anywhere you need them or entire sections to a topic if you need them, if you do want to add a snippet or section as a default to every topic in a category the best way to do that is to create a copy of the category you want to modify, modify that copy as you wish and then enter your data in that copy.

You can put this into either the direct NPC or the Scene, it depends on the usage. I have done both.

For example, in Shadowrun, one of the key components of the game is "legwork", where after the players are assigned a quest, they do research and reach out to their NPC contacts for information on their assignment.

Legwork sections I usually listed out directly in the NPCs section. I would have a Category for Legwork, and then I would have a separate Snippet for each piece of information that could be gleaned from that NPC. For example, let's say the players were trying to find information on Maria Mercurial, a famous singer. I might have snippets for legwork on the following:

- "Maria Mercurial, sure, who hasn't heard of her?"
- "I've got a friend, Jon Johnson, who told me he's got backstage passes to her show next week"
- *If players offer a bribe* "Okay, here's Jon's contact info. Maybe he'll sell you the tickets."

But then lets say the players are in a specific scene inside a club. They find information that there's a threat on Maria Mercurial's life, and someone at the club is a suspect. In that case, I wouldn't put those dialog lines in the NPC who says them, I'd have them as snippets as part of the scene itself.

Hopefully that makes sense?

Murrdox, that makes a lot of sense and also makes me more interested in Shadowrun. I'm focused on investigative campaigns (crime, mysteries, etc). I'll take a look at this "legwork" you mentioned! As for putting each piece of information in a separate "snippet", does that mean a separate text line? Or did you create some sort of custom snippet type?

Snippets are essentially separate pieces of information.

They can be a lot of different types of things.
But the important thing is that you can reveal them individually.
I use them for Monster Knowledge bits, in Pathfinder.

Depending on the checks of the players, I reveal knowledge for the monster.
Plus whatever they've observed with the current characters.
So they can ask what they know about a given creature, and I can display in Player View, whatever they've learnt.

Here's a great example of what I do for Shadowrun.

http://forums.wolflair.com/attachmen...1&d=1540124296

In Shadowrun, there's all sorts of different ways you can go about doing Legwork. When you perform Legwork, you're usually making a social test of some kind. Maybe a technical test if you're researching on the Matrix. Shadowrun uses a system of "successes", where each 5 or 6 you roll on a 6 sided dice is a success. More successes is better results, and characters can be throwing anywhere from 4 to 20 dice on a skill depending on how good they are.

So in this example you can see the NPC "Whiskey Finger" and the Legwork available for him. This was a mysterious NPC using an alias that the players needed to track down. Each bit of legwork describes where that information could be found, and the number of successes required to get that information.

Here in this example you can see that my players did Matrix research on Whiskey Finger, since I've revealed those two snippets to them. They never did any street research, or asked the local militia about him, so those tidbits of information remained hidden for them.