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Originally Posted by daplunk
I'm using Improved Initiative (II) for combat management.
II allows you to import monsters from CSV, thus I use the same CSV as I did for the RW import with a few tweaks and easily and VERY QUICKLY get the monsters into II as well.
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Cool, hadn't heard of it. I just played around with it a bit and I like how you can set durations to conditions. Nice also that players can join for remote play and that the player view only shows "healthy", "bloodied", etc.
It looks like the "encounter" link will stay active for an entire session, correct? With the number of encounters in a mega dungeon like Rappan Athuk it would be annoying to have to keep sharing links for each new encounter.
It seems like II would work well for me if I can figure out an easy way to add in all the custom RA beasties.
I don't see why you can load from CSV, just JSON. I also don't see any help files. I'll dig through the Patreon so see if I can figure it out.
I should probably just suck it up and learn Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds, but I find it much easier to prep with RW and simply share the map with RW and a shared window in Google Meet.
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How far as you through entering RA? What system are you using?
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Using 5e. I'm focusing on adding areas most likely to be encountered into the next few sessions and am not adding in all of the fluff, such as timelines.
I created a custom Adventure Area template form and created place holders for all levels and added maps for all level, include keyed maps as overlays. That way, even if the party gets ahead of me, I can still share maps with fog-of-war and run from book.
In terms of area and room text, I've entered all content, most of which include herolab portfolios embedded, for:
0A to 0E
1 through 2B
3C, 4 through 4C
10B
Herolab is what really slows me down. Another slog is on several occasions, I've had to remove links and do a bulk re-link as there is so much interconnection. What I should have done is created place holders for all scenes/rooms with room numbers so thinks would probably autolink as I added content. But that makes it harder to track my progress as I enter content.
As I add content I'm also creating the custom monsters, magic items, spells, diseases, etc. One problem now is that for monsters I wasn't bothering making creature articles for the monsters. I was just creating HL stat blocks. With HL no longer linking to RW, I no long have an easy way to pull up the creature stats. I've noticed that the viewer in RW for HL statblocks does not show all the content in the HL POR file, such as spells, special features, etc.
I started adding some creatures as articles, but I'm rethinking that as complex enounters would require opening up a lot of tabs in RW and switching among tabs is not very fluid. D&D Beyond is a bit easier, but you cant easily track combat, just reference stats.
So II could be what I need. Though, even with a CSV/JSON import, it will still be a lot of work to enter in all the stats.
Also, one thing I don't like about the Rappan Athuk monster appendix is that they strip all the flavor text where sometimes I'm not even sure what is it supposed to be, look or act like. I find I often have to go to Tome of Horrors or one of the other FGG bestiaries to understand the monster. For those, I have been adding in the flavor text and pictures in RW.