[Joe]

Originally Posted by salcor

Joe,
I have been watching the gencon videos which are great. I was wondering about your project into the leading space opera RPG. I would love to see how you are arranging your data. Also have you created herolabs data files or are you using oggdude's character generation? If you use oggdude's how are you including the data files in your realmworks?

Salcor

I should stress that this is a personal project. I've gotten word from the boss that I can be a little less evasive in talking about this than I was in the Gen Con seminars. However, we would need to have a license with Fantasy Flight and Disney to make this available to users. I'm talking specifically about the Edge of the Empire/Age of Rebellion/Force and Destiny RPGs, and not the earlier d6 or d20-based systems.

It's a work in progress. Right now, I'm working on the mechanics portion for the most part. So I haven't really given that much thought to how/whether I'm going to use any external tools for character data. I like to play these systems in a less crunchy style, and the character creation is fairly basic, so tool support is not the "must have" like it would be in other systems. In the past I've used the "fill in the form" pdfs that are floating around on the internet. I might just attach these. For now, I've been perfectly happy to just use a formatted table for basic statblocks and such. But who knows, I may expand on this in the future.

A lot of what I'm doing right now is "gruntwork" data entry. I'm basically using OCR on scans of my source books which while painful, is faster than me typing all of it. Even when the OCR works perfectly (it doesn't always), it still needs a lot of cleanup. Fortunately, "Paste Special" (ctrl+alt+v) is your friend here, as it lets you strip all the formatting and extra line breaks in one go.

As far as structure goes, I'm making use of the "General X Article" categories to form a sensible hierarchy. For example, under the Abilities grouping in Mechanics Reference:

Skills - General Abilities Article
- Combat Skills - General Abilities Article
-- Brawl - Skill Article
-- Gunnery - Skill Article
-- etc...
- General Skills - General Abilities Article
-- Astrogation - Skill Article
-- Athletics - Skill Article
-- etc...
- Knowledge Skills - General Abilities Article
-- Knowledge (Core Worlds) - Skill Article
-- Knowledge (Education) - Skill Article
-- etc...
Talents - General Article
- Adversary - Talent Article
- All-Terrain Driver - Talent Article
- etc...

Be careful when doing this. You must be sure that the hierarchy you're building is a STRICT hierarchy. For example, all skills belong to exactly one skill group (Combat/General/Knowledge), no more and no less. It might be tempting to group talents by career or specialization, but many talents can be accessed by multiple careers/specializations. I use tags for this purpose instead. If the list of talents gets very long, I may introduce a level of hierarchy for A-D, E-H, etc. These would also be General Abilities Articles for the purpose of alphabetically grouping into more digestable chunks. I'm not sure if this is a good idea, but I'm considering it. The takeaway here is to use the "General Article" categories to arrange things in a useful hierarchy rather than just as big pile of stuff.

You can either use our default, generic article categories (e.g. Talent/Feat, Skill/Ability, etc.) or make your own. I have made some of my own so as to have complete control over their structure, but both approaches are valid and serviceable. The same applies to tags and domains.

One of the things I'm having some genuine trouble with is figuring out how I want to design the different books such that they work together with minimal repetition. EotE and AoR have some of the same topics, but have somewhat different wording at times. Since the systems are designed to be used together, they have to be able to coexist in the same realm. Duplicate topics for each variant is the "highest fidelity" to each book, but results in a lot of clutter in the hierarchy for no real useful purpose. I could have each version's text in the same topic, but that clutters the topic itself for no real useful purpose. I may just settle on a "newest wins" approach, where if AoR rewords some text from EotE, I just use the new text and discard the old.

But there are other problems. EotE groups the Nebulon-B frigate under "captial ships" along with the CR90 corvette, while AoR puts the Neblon-B under "Cruisers" and the CR90 under "Gunships" Each grouping also has other ships that appear exclusively in that book alone. There's no way to be fully faithful to both hierarchies without either a) massive duplication of data, or b) using tags to represent the books' hierarchies and using some other entirely custom scheme for the Realm Works hierarchy. This is an open question for me now and I've not yet decided how I want to resolve it.

As far as other stuff goes, I've toyed with using plot diagrams for talent trees. It looks like it could work, but might need better software support to make it really worthwhile. Linkweb might be even better, but again would need some additional filtering features to make it really work.

The game system uses a lot of symbols, and there's a font available for free online (google the obvious terms) which gives you these symbols. I should stress here that I have no idea what the future looks like for custom font support in Realm Works. Right now, if you install the font it works just fine in Realm Works. Will this work flawlessly on the future web client? I just don't know. Initial basic tests look like it could be made to work, but I don't know how much work it will be in the end and whether it will be worth the trouble. Of course, I want it for myself so I'll be the first to try to get it in if it's feasible.

Sorry for the "stream of consciousness", but hopefully this gives you some ideas. If you have any follow-up questions, we can split this out into its own thread.