Player Edition Look

[Dr_Automaton]

Will players be able to see which topics are in the story almanac as opposed to the world almanac?

PLAYER: Hey, why's that old BBEG back in the story almanac? Didn't we kill him ten sessions back?

GM: Um . . . uh, oh. . . .

[Exmortis]

Great news that players can make notes, thats HUGE!

In the future, having the players able to toogle "player share" "player/GM share" and "unshared" would also be great, but I understand thats tricky and something to be added in time as it is not a huge deal. Players talk and can share their notes when required, the fact they can make notes to keep track of their ideas, well thats just awesome in itself.

Keep up the good work Rob and Team! I just scrapped my campiagn I have been working on for a few years in lieu of a whole new ground up work. I was using other material as a base, but have decided its too constrictive, so ground up new world here I come. Three "civilized" continents and 6 unique playable races per, I have my work cut out for me. Already fired up CC3 and beginning to map the new world!

Little tip o the hat to HeroLab here, what a great tool, I can create all the races and their abilities, and pass around the user file! Now if you can add "herolab user file" sync with realm works campaign??? We would be in heaven...... No Rob put down the gun.....

[rob]

Originally Posted by Dr_Automaton

Will players be able to see which topics are in the story almanac as opposed to the world almanac?

PLAYER: Hey, why's that old BBEG back in the story almanac? Didn't we kill him ten sessions back?

GM: Um . . . uh, oh. . . .

We never considered that. Hmm. Does this mean you think we should do away with the distinction of story and world almanac for players? It would sacrifice usefulness and keeping things simpler for players in the interest of safeguarding against this one rather rare exceptional case.

If it were MY game, I'd simply tell my players: "Oops. I completely overlooked that. Thanks for flagging it." Then I'd move the topic to the world almanac and make a mental note not to move it back until I launched the surprise return. I know that I could sell that easily to my group. And then I wouldn't have to lose the separation of story and world for the players. But that's just one opinion.

What do you folks all think???

[rob]

Originally Posted by Exmortis

Little tip o the hat to HeroLab here, what a great tool, I can create all the races and their abilities, and pass around the user file! Now if you can add "herolab user file" sync with realm works campaign??? We would be in heaven...... No Rob put down the gun.....

That's already mapped out! We just need to reach the point of getting it implemented.

[AEIOU]

While I am normally in favor of simplification and a focus on the present, I think doing away with story/world distinction is necessary. To the players, anything they've learned is relevant information that may be applicable at any time. If we start deciding what is relevant and what is not for them, we're going to miss out on a lot of interesting gaming and I think railroading will become very obvious.

[killraven]

To all the staff and users which have been providing answers and contributing to this conversation:
Thanks for splitting this off and giving such a detailed answer. I was on vacation and didn't see this until I got back today.
I'll try and answer some of the questions I was asked and also clarify some of my meanings.

Originally Posted by Joe

Additionally, GMs can put GM Edition into "Player Mode" in order to see their realm from a player's perspective, with the appropriate information and functionality hidden. This would be much more difficult to do if GM and Player editions looked and navigated very differently.

That will really help me a lot once it gets pushed to the live product. I'd be nice to see what the players will see.

Originally Posted by Joe

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "like a wiki interface". Both GM and Player edition both allow searching, both allow link-based browsing, and both provide hierarchical containment and relationship-based browsing. It also provides other things which might not be provided by a wiki, such as filtering by tags, timeline, reveal history, etc.

The web version will necessarily look and navigate differently from the Windows desktop applications. It will also (initially) be focusing on presenting content to players more than GMs, so it will be geared towards that audience from a depth/complexity/ease-of-use perspective. My goal for it is that anyone comfortable using basic modern web apps (Facebook, Twitter, G-Mail, YouTube, etc) will have no problems using the web app.

I'm curious about your statement "There seems to be a pretty steep learning curve for the interface." While I agree with this and we're working to improve it, I think the majority of the difficulty and learning curve of using Realm Works centers around content creation rather than reading and browsing. This is primarily because content creation, organizing, arranging, and interweaving are intrinsically complicated actions, regardless of the tools you're using. Players won't be doing any creating (initially), so a lot of that depth and complexity gets discarded.

Part of my concern is presenting the information in an organized layout which would immediately make sense to the players.

There are many different ways you can enter your data and have it related to each other: Relations, Governed Content, Containing Topics, etc.
Because of this, there are a lot of different options for the view/layout settings.
I have been able to play with the settings to get the content viewable in a way which makes sense to me and I'm building my content based on those view settings.

I'm concerned about the players needing to really delve into the view/layout settings just to find the method to my madness.

From the responses, the web version will probably be much closer to what I'm imagining.
It would be nice if we could customize the layout of the web interface.
It would also be great if you could specify default view/layout settings which would be used when anyone opens the realm in the app.

Originally Posted by Joe

I want to know a little bit about specific pain points you foresee your players running into. So do me a favor: open a realm that you have a decent amount of content entered for. You will need to reveal some starting information beforehand (e.g. the starting region and town, famous NPCs, kingdoms, history, etc).

Now put the realm into "Player Mode" and browse the content. Put your player hat on and just focus on reading and navigation. What parts are you (imagining) your players will trip up on? What will they try to find and be unable to? What dead-ends will they hit, and what ways will they get lost and not know how to get back on track? Are there some advanced features that might get in the way, or are they tucked away safely enough that most players won't be tripped up by them? Let me know what you think.

As soon as this feature goes live, I will do exactly that and let you know what I think.

Again, thank you for all the feedback and responses.

[Dark Lord Galen]

Originally Posted by rob

We never considered that. Hmm. Does this mean you think we should do away with the distinction of story and world almanac for players? It would sacrifice usefulness and keeping things simpler for players in the interest of safeguarding against this one rather rare exceptional case.

If it were MY game, I'd simply tell my players: "Oops. I completely overlooked that. Thanks for flagging it."

Like you, I would move fast on my feet to camouflage the oversight...

Originally Posted by rob

Then I'd move the topic to the world almanac and make a mental note not to move it back until I launched the surprise return. I know that I could sell that easily to my group. And then I wouldn't have to lose the separation of story and world for the players. But that's just one opinion.

What do you folks all think???

I like the separation of the world versus the "story line" myself.... as I often plan various choices that the players PCs could take (we call them the probable, improbable and the WTF.. hehe) so there are many times the first choice may circle back to a "new first choice" that they had the option to do but returned to those old possibilities at a later date.

BUT this does lead me to a question...

Is your statement implying that Items Identified in the story side (checked green), then moved to the world side are no longer visible even if still checked on (ie Green)?
or
Are you removing the "flag" (toggling back to an off position) and relocating it back to the World to be "reallocated" and switched on at a later time?

[ibecker]

Originally Posted by AEIOU

While I am normally in favor of simplification and a focus on the present, I think doing away with story/world distinction is necessary. To the players, anything they've learned is relevant information that may be applicable at any time. If we start deciding what is relevant and what is not for them, we're going to miss out on a lot of interesting gaming and I think railroading will become very obvious.

+1 to this. I think that from the Player point of view, there should be no distinction between the current "Story" that they're in, and the wider "World" - that's a GM distinction, one that will break immersion for the players.

[ibecker]

Perhaps the Player Client could give the players the ability to categorize information in their own view as either "Currently relevant" or "Not currently relevant". This would allow them to organize information in a way that will be useful to them (or at least, that they think will be useful to them...), independently of the way that the GM has categorized it. This will give them some organizational ability, without tipping the GM's hand.

[ShadowChemosh]

Originally Posted by AEIOU

While I am normally in favor of simplification and a focus on the present, I think doing away with story/world distinction is necessary. To the players, anything they've learned is relevant information that may be applicable at any time. If we start deciding what is relevant and what is not for them, we're going to miss out on a lot of interesting gaming and I think railroading will become very obvious.

I am not sure I agree. When I explained Story vs World to my players who have the Player Edition they seemed to like the idea. Note I only run Adventure Paths. So I explained it to the players as the World contained everything they have done in the past few chapters of the AP and the Story contains the info from the current chapter.

From the point of view of a Paizo AP this separation is very nice as relevant info about the current chapter is in Story and other info is in World. This helps keep players focused on current story. I am of the school that it is very easy to overwhelm players with information so making them focus on a small sub-set of data is WAY better.