Requesting help with Relationships & Families

[ragnaroktog]

Originally Posted by Nikmal

. These can be edited further to make a sister or bother or even step-brother or step-sister of.

Where do you go to edit those selection options?

[Hubrice]

Nikmal, I will have to check out your suggestion when I get a chance. That might work.

Eightbitz, I had toyed with the idea of using the plots section to roughly map out a family tree. If all else fails, that might allow me what info I need handy it nothing else.

Zarlor, you might be onto something. I might need to rethink how I approach using RW. I had a particular goal/process in mind and found it incredibly frustrating that I could not achieve the desired results. I'll play around with what options I have and maybe between the many suggestions I can get what I want.

Thanks everyone.

[rob]

I believe "Relationships" would provide a good way of solving what you're asking for, although I may not be fully understanding things. Here's how I'd get started with using relationships....

Start by creating topics for Mom, Dad, and each of the children. Do the same for Aunt and Cousin. You can use the Quick Create mechanism <ctrl+Q> to put the topics into place with just their names, which is all you need to get started.

View the Mom topic and click on the "+" button to the right of Relationships in the Transitions Pane at the far right to show the Relationships window. Select one of the children in the topic list on the left. In the droplist at the right, select "Family Relationship". Then in the droplist to the right of that, select "Immediate Ancestor Of". In the description area, you can enter details like "Oldest child", "Firstborn son", or whatever details you want. Then click the OK button.

You should now see the relationship in the Transitions Pane on the right. You can do the same for all the other children if you wish. Plus you can setup the same basic relationship from Dad to each of the kids.

You can create a different Family Relationship between Mom and Dad, using the "Union With" relationship type. This designates Mom and Dad as being co-parents of the children.

If you want to establish an explicit Sister relationship between Mom and Aunt, that would require creating a topic to serve as their shared parent - you only need one parent. Alternately, you would create a new Family Relationship using the "Other Family Of" type. The same would be done between the Cousin and Mom, but you'd create an "Immediate Ancestor Of" relationship from Aunt to Cousin.

If you prefer, you can use the "Parent Of" and "Child Of" relationship types instead of the ancestor versions. This distinction is important when dealing with things like step-children, adoptions, etc. If you have a bunch of mixed families and want to clearly track LINEAGE as distinct from the family unit (e.g. bastard children of nobility), then its critical to accurately choose between Parent/Child and Ancestor/Offspring, since those distinctions are important when viewing relationship diagrams.

Once the relationships are established, you should be able to view the Relationship diagram for the family by starting with Mom as the active topic. From there, click on the button in the header region of the topic (next to the edit/save/etc buttons) to show the relationship view for the topic. Then select Ancestor/Offspring for the relationship type.

The key benefits of using relationships like this are:
(a) They are individually revealable, so you can reveal each one as the players discover the relationships. This can be really handy for intrigue games with bastard sons of kings maneuvering to take the throne.
(b) You can annotate them with descriptions to detail the relationship more fully.
(c) They behave just like links within snippets, so you can click on them to navigate through your content.
(d) You can view relationship diagrams that can be extremely helpful in a variety of situations.

The key limitation of relationships is that our diagramming logic is good but not sophisticated at this point. So we aren't yet able to do complex family tree diagrams. That's on the todo list, but we haven't gotten there yet. The diagrams can be extremely useful, but they aren't as good as a dedicated genealogy program, since Realm Works offers lots more beyond what a genealogy program offers.

Hope this helps!

[Nikmal]

Originally Posted by rob

I believe "Relationships" would provide a good way of solving what you're asking for, although I may not be fully understanding things. Here's how I'd get started with using relationships....

Start by creating topics for Mom, Dad, and each of the children. Do the same for Aunt and Cousin. You can use the Quick Create mechanism <ctrl+Q> to put the topics into place with just their names, which is all you need to get started.

View the Mom topic and click on the "+" button to the right of Relationships in the Transitions Pane at the far right to show the Relationships window. Select one of the children in the topic list on the left. In the droplist at the right, select "Family Relationship". Then in the droplist to the right of that, select "Immediate Ancestor Of". In the description area, you can enter details like "Oldest child", "Firstborn son", or whatever details you want. Then click the OK button.

You should now see the relationship in the Transitions Pane on the right. You can do the same for all the other children if you wish. Plus you can setup the same basic relationship from Dad to each of the kids.

You can create a different Family Relationship between Mom and Dad, using the "Union With" relationship type. This designates Mom and Dad as being co-parents of the children.

If you want to establish an explicit Sister relationship between Mom and Aunt, that would require creating a topic to serve as their shared parent - you only need one parent. Alternately, you would create a new Family Relationship using the "Other Family Of" type. The same would be done between the Cousin and Mom, but you'd create an "Immediate Ancestor Of" relationship from Aunt to Cousin.

If you prefer, you can use the "Parent Of" and "Child Of" relationship types instead of the ancestor versions. This distinction is important when dealing with things like step-children, adoptions, etc. If you have a bunch of mixed families and want to clearly track LINEAGE as distinct from the family unit (e.g. bastard children of nobility), then its critical to accurately choose between Parent/Child and Ancestor/Offspring, since those distinctions are important when viewing relationship diagrams.

Once the relationships are established, you should be able to view the Relationship diagram for the family by starting with Mom as the active topic. From there, click on the button in the header region of the topic (next to the edit/save/etc buttons) to show the relationship view for the topic. Then select Ancestor/Offspring for the relationship type.

The key benefits of using relationships like this are:
(a) They are individually revealable, so you can reveal each one as the players discover the relationships. This can be really handy for intrigue games with bastard sons of kings maneuvering to take the throne.
(b) You can annotate them with descriptions to detail the relationship more fully.
(c) They behave just like links within snippets, so you can click on them to navigate through your content.
(d) You can view relationship diagrams that can be extremely helpful in a variety of situations.

The key limitation of relationships is that our diagramming logic is good but not sophisticated at this point. So we aren't yet able to do complex family tree diagrams. That's on the todo list, but we haven't gotten there yet. The diagrams can be extremely useful, but they aren't as good as a dedicated genealogy program, since Realm Works offers lots more beyond what a genealogy program offers.

Hope this helps!

Much better then how I explained it hehe

[rob]

Originally Posted by pyremius

. . . I hadn't noticed the lack of a "Sibling " option. I've not worked with anything yet involving family relationships but I can see where "Other Family" would become confusing if used too often.

On the other hand, almost every family tree I can recall tends to show only direct lineage and marriages, with the viewer left to identify the cousins, etc. on their own - so at least we've got the "standard" material covered.

I would definitely second a few more options for direct linking people (cousin, aunt, etc.), as it allows the immediately important people to be created and linked, without having to create all of the intermediate family before they're necessary. Second Aunt twice removed on your mother's side is a viable hook for an adventure, but would require an awful lot of additional NPCs just to show the relationship using only parent, child, spouse.

This is a slippery slope that becomes self-defeating almost immediately. Let's say we add "aunt", "uncle", and "cousin". What about "great aunt"? Or "great uncle"? Or "second cousin"? Or "cousin twice removed"? How about "stepfather", "stepmother", "stepson", and "stepdaughter"?

The list quickly gets completely out of control, and having all those distinct relationships honestly contributes nothing useful for diagramming anything (see below). It's just as easy to have a general "Other family" and then let the user spell out in the details the specific nature of the relationship (e.g. "favorite second cousin", "great uncle", etc.). Users have complete flexibility and the actual relationships themselves remain meaningful from a diagramming standpoint.

If we create separate relationships for "second cousin" and "great uncle", how would they be shown in a diagram? They wouldn't, since they are abstract concepts that skip critical nodes in the family tree and not concrete connections that can be diagrammed. That's why the genealogy programs (that I've seen) don't support them as anything more than an annotation. The same even applies for "cousins". If you want to see everything in a meaningful diagram, then you need to define all the interlocking connections in between.

All that being said, you CAN extend the assorted relationships provided in Realm Works. You can extend both the Comprises/Belongs relationships and the Generic relationships. Since there is no meaningful diagramming that can be derived from "cousin" or "great uncle" beyond the direct connection, you can define these as Generic relationships. To do this, go to the Mange ribbon bar, select Tags, then scroll to the bottom of the list on the left. Select the Generic Relationships and add whatever new relationship types you want to leverage. Once added, they will now appear in the Simple Connection To list.

Hope this helps...

[Hubrice]

Rob,
Thank you, that did the trick. I thought I could just connect two siblings together, but now I see the value in the way the system is designed.

Is there a way to change the order that the relationships are listed? It just so happens that they are laid out with the 2 main characters (PCs) listed at the top in birth order, and the rest (NPCs) are laid out in birth order as well.

I would like to reorder the names so that they are listed in birth order. (PC & NPC). I'm not sure why it is in the order that it is.

Here's what I have:
3rd born (PC)
8th born (PC)
1st born
2nd born
4th-7th born

Yes it is a rather large family.

I would prefer to have the option to display it as:

1st
2nd
3rd (PC)
4th - 7th
8th (PC)

I'm not sure why it's in that order, or how I can change/replicate it.

[rob]

I just talked to the developer that put the code into place. It turns out the order is driven in a way that is of zero usability to users, so it's been officially logged as a bug on our end. The first step will be to establish a consistent ordering across all relationship views. After that, we can look at instituting different ordering for different views, such as what you've requested here. So this will be a two-step process that probably won't all occur in the same release.

[Hubrice]

OK, well call me impressed! Rob, it is so refreshing to receive this level of communication, service, and commitment to quality. Thank you for the quick responses and help. I look forward to the fix. In the meantime I have plenty to keep me busy.

BTW, with your help I finished the initial family tree and was able to easily export it to the player view. It took a bit to figure out how to change the orientation so it would fit the way I wanted it to (ellipses are your friend). Can't wait to show this off at my next session.

Thank you, thank you.