Food & Drink

[ruhar]

A Food & Drink category under Mechanics Reference would be good.

[rob]

It seems to me that Food & Drink would fall under the auspices of the Mundane Item category. Is there really a need for a separate category for these types of items?

Please note that our goal with the category structure to keep things relatively lean. It would be easy to create a hundred categories or more to handle all the varied nuances between things, and we've intentionally striven to avoid that. If users feel such a distinction is important for their style, they can readily define all the extra categories they want. However, we don't want to overwhelm users from the start. There's already a vast array of material to digest with Realm Works, and we're striving to avoid adding anything unnecessary to that list. But if this truly is necessary, we can add it.

[ruhar]

Good point, Rob. I guess I got thrown by the description of an item or piece of gear.

Since I posted the request a few months ago I looked at my Mechanics Reference to figure out how badly I wanted it. I didn't find a category or topic that would need a food/drink category. I did find, however, that I had created a potion/oil/salve category. I couldn't figure out an appropriate category for these kind of items.

[Parody]

FWIW, if I start messing with the snippets in a Topic or Article I immediately consider making a new category for it. I don't have a ton of categories in my most populated realm, but almost all of the ones I use are ones I've duplicated and modified. (I've also hidden most of the global ones at this point.)

[rob]

@ruhar: Magical potions would probably start out under the Special Items category. If you are implementing formally structured items a game like Pathfinder, where everything has an official "statblock", you might also create custom categories for those things. That's what we're doing for Pathfinder to achieve a match to the official rulebook presentation. Of course, if you plan using the structure we've put together, there's no need to go reworking everything immediately, as you can wait until we release that stuff early next year.

@Parody: If your edits purely involve adding new snippet types and and hiding existing snippet types, you can simply amend the existing categories for your purposes. That would be safe against problems if you want to leverage any shared/published content in the future. However, if you have no plans to leverage content from others in the future, there's no reason to limit yourself to adapting the existing categories, so you can go tailor things to exactly suit your purposes with impunity.

[Parody]

I chose the path of using only my own categories a while ago. It avoids the problem of changing global category definitions and lets me organize things in a way that makes sense to me. Since the system I've been entering is highly unlikely to ever be licensed for distribution on RW's marketplace, I doubt my adventures would do anyone any good in RW. My plan is to use RW to (re-)organize my adventures but share them as PDFs.

My issues with the global categories fall into two general areas:

Many of the global categories are nothing but a name and a text box (sometimes two). My custom categories share at least a little more than this, even the one that replaced "General Gameplay Article".

Most of the rest of the global categories have a large number of generic sections, much more than I need for their related topics/articles. (All of the "Group: [Type]" ones, for example.) These get replaced with either very specific categories (for things that are detailed in standard formats in the books) or less overwhelming ones (for things that are mostly my creations, like the two categories that replaced Individual).

The global Tags share similar concerns, but add a third: things that are tailored towards Pathfinder and/or D&D and are not helpful outside of it. I haven't spent much time hiding the global Tags, though I really should one of these days.

Something that isn't handled very well is wanting to share a snippet definition across categories. I add at least one "Source" snippet to every Topic and Article. These are Tag snippets that list which books or adventures were used to put together that article. In the text box I put the page numbers (for the books) to make it easy to refer back to the physical text. If there's more than one source, I add multiple snippets. All of my custom categories have this defined in the appropriate section(s).


I think this realm is on one end of the spectrum as far as using the RW predefined items goes; there's a lot of things that I just can't imagine trying to define by using the global items. One of my other realms (sadly neglected at present) is a fantasy world and it fits better with the suggested organizational scheme. I might wind up implementing the story as a computer game instead of a tabletop campaign, but RW doesn't care. :)

[GiacomoArt]

Originally Posted by Parody

FWIW, if I start messing with the snippets in a Topic or Article I immediately consider making a new category for it. I don't have a ton of categories in my most populated realm, but almost all of the ones I use are ones I've duplicated and modified. (I've also hidden most of the global ones at this point.)

I find myself using RealmWorks in a similar way. When I start a new realm, the first thing I do is go through and hide 90% of the global categories, and replace them with equivalent categories of my own. The global categories are pure information overload as far as I'm concerned: so many suggestions and options, so much noise and clutter that they shut down my creativity.

At first I tried to work with and modify existing categories, but a bad experience early on left me mistrustful of that option. Now if I like a category but want any modifications to its content, I create a new category with the same name plus an identifying suffix. I wish I had a way to port my changes between my own realms so I wouldn't have to systematically recreate my category base-line over and over.

Until I hit on this strategy, I had stopped trying to do anything with RealmWorks for months. The point of the application for me is not the content marketplace. I can see a use for it, certainly, but what I really want is a way to organize my own thoughts and games, recording my own information my own way. Anything beyond that is just icing.