Quote:
Originally Posted by Sword_of_Spirit
Just got Realm Works, and I'm liking what I see so far (did the research first, so that is expected).
|
Welcome to the forum. My first bit of advice is to continue asking questions here. You'll find the users here to be active and helpful. The developers are also active in these forums. Be sure to check out some of the older threads. I think the following two are particularly helpful to those starting out:
How Has Your Work With RealmWorks Evolved
http://forums.wolflair.com/showthread.php?t=54536
I Want to See A Complex Realm
http://forums.wolflair.com/showthrea...=complex+realm
Quote:
|
I'm currently watching tutorial videos and reading the manuals, so I already have that base covered.
|
That's good, but I doubt you will absorb it all. When I started I watched all the videos and read all the manuals, but it doesn't really stick until you begin to use the program. For new users, I would recommend the quick-start guide and maybe the most recent GenCon Video (if you watch the GenCon 2015 video, I'm not sure you need to watch all the earlier ones).
Then start working in the program, looking up things as you need to. Re-read the manuals after you've worked in the program for a while.
Quote:
I have two basic questions, and I was hoping someone could share their thoughts as far as my best ways of accomplishing what I'm going for.
1) What should I *not* do?
|
First,
don't be overly concerned about getting it "right." Get in there and start working; almost nothing is unfixable. I would spend SOME time familiarizing yourself with the difference between topics and articles and understanding what the purpose of the various topic and article groups and categories are. That will save you from having to change articles to different types later on, but even if you have to make such changes, it is pretty simple to do.
Still, there are some things I would suggest avoiding...
Don't edit categories in Manage Categories until reading the manuals and forums about category management. RW is very customizable, but the LWD team did a really good job with the out-of-the-box categories. I would first make sure you understand WHY they organized things the way they did before you go crazy with customizing things. That way you'll be better able to determine when customizing categories is needed and how to best customize them.
Avoid huge images. RW is very forgiving and you can throw a lot of files into it, but when it comes to displaying in the player view, things can get unstable or sluggish if you have huge images. For more information on this, see the following threads:
Max pixel size 4096x3072 and
Crashing on Player View.
[*]
Don't try to put EVERYING in one smartmap. When I first started using the program, I had a huge known-world map where I put pins for all the cities, realms, regions, geographic areas, etc. It soon became very unwieldy. Now, I instead have world map with pins just for the reams or major regions and then have realm-specific maps in ream topics where you go into cities and drill down from there. Another approach is to break your map into grids. For a great example of this see Anna Meyer's blog post "How I use the Flanaess map in Realm Works" at
http://ghmaps.net/how-i-use-the-flan...n-realm-works/[/LIST]
CONTROL+Q is your best friend. I may have read about this hotkey in the manuals, but it didn't stick and I think I went half a year without using it. Where it really helps is creating topic stubs on fly. Say you are writing flavor text for a topic about a city and you mention that it was founded by Firstman Sodbreaker. You think that you'll eventually want to have a separate topic about this historical figure and maybe build an adventure around acquiring Sodbreaker's Magical Self-Propelled Plough. You can highlight Firstman Sodbreaker, hit CNTRL+Q, quickly have it create a topic that will be tagged "empty" and you can continue writing. It allows you to create placeholders to capture ideas without having to interrupt what you are currently in the middle of writing.
Customize your categories. Don't let my warning above scare you away from customizing your categories. One of RW's greatest attributes is its flexibility. Some tips on customizing categories:[LIST][*]
Hide, don't delete. If you want to import content from the content market when it is available, you will need to have certain default categories. RW does a good job at warning you when you try to delete things it may need, but it is easy to think you'll never want to import anything and ignore the warning. It is much safer to just hide categories that you don't want. [*]
It is safe to *add* snippets and tag fields to existing categories. You don't need to duplicate a category to edit it how you want it. If, however, you want to remove a lot of the default fields, it may make sense to duplicate a category and hide the original version.
[/quote]
An example in my realm is that I am using DnD 5e, so I created a new category for spells that has all the fields that I want for that system and none of the fields I don't want. I did the original spells topic category and only use my custom 5e one. But that is the only new category I created. I use the default categories for everything else, though I have added additional snippets and tags to some.
Hope this is helpful to you!