How do *you* do session prep?

[Mystic Lemur]

My group is doing a Dungeon Crawl, so when I'm doing my prep in RW I start with the last room/encounter they cleared. I try to guess where they're most likely to go from there and enter in a few rooms/encounters in that direction. Then, time permitting, I branch out to the other paths they might take. The smart image maps make it easy to add a pin, create a topic from that pin, and enter the encounter details and treasure. Then I go back to the map and start on the next room.

When I have time, I try to knock out sections of the map and link all the related encounters together. I can also go in and make allowances for the sections they've cleared and the response by the enemy (new patrols, collapsing the ceiling, factions expanding or contracting based on what they think they can defend). I haven't really come up with a good way to indicate "new" content in rooms already explored, so I've just been "un-revealing" locations that have had major changes. I don't use player view much, so it doesn't spoil it for them, but it seems like there must be a better way.

[rob]

@Mystic Lemur: Instead of concealing topics that have changed, you might consider tagging them with a custom tag. Then you easily identify those topics via a filter, plus you can pretty quickly spot those topics by the present of the tag. This approach would work smoothly in conjunction with Player View and with making revealed content available to your players via the upcoming Player Edition.

Hope this helps!

[monsterfurby]

Main issue I have is that my current campaign is more of an exercise in character interaction than a classic PnP campaign. Sure, we do have fights and missions (it's military themed), but more often than not my preparation involved figuring out how to get each individual player character motivated to undertake said mission. That said, I do have a long-term game plan in place, a metaplot if you will, and a billion NPCs will run that metaplot even if the PCs decide to be involved in other ways than those I can think of ahead of time. The world does not revolve around my PCs by default, but they are certainly in a position to make it if they want.

That said, I am currently in the process of porting 400 named NPCs (all with portraits and backstory to some degree) spread over three dozen organizations all over this fictional version of our world into RealmWorks. Let's say this is really the software I have needed for a long, long time.

[MaxSupernova]

Originally Posted by monsterfurby

Main issue I have is that my current campaign is more of an exercise in character interaction than a classic PnP campaign. Sure, we do have fights and missions (it's military themed), but more often than not my preparation involved figuring out how to get each individual player character motivated to undertake said mission. That said, I do have a long-term game plan in place, a metaplot if you will, and a billion NPCs will run that metaplot even if the PCs decide to be involved in other ways than those I can think of ahead of time. The world does not revolve around my PCs by default, but they are certainly in a position to make it if they want.

That said, I am currently in the process of porting 400 named NPCs (all with portraits and backstory to some degree) spread over three dozen organizations all over this fictional version of our world into RealmWorks. Let's say this is really the software I have needed for a long, long time.

This sounds almost exactly like where I am, and it sounds like you are having the same issues about your prep as I am (fitting more nebulous things like motivations and generic notes in to the RW structure).

Having all of the factual data in a cross-referenced database is going to a huge bonus.

[Venger]

Thanks for the feedback. And thanks for the info Rob!

Yesterday was the first time I had some significant hands-on with RW. I'd like to say thanks for this tool, its impressive and I for one will get a lot out of it.

After learning the gist of it and fiddling around a little I decided that putting "things" in should come first, for me anyways. Primarily because when I filled out topic by topic first, I would have to go back and edit them to link info in previous ones, which is easy to do but I might have to do it several times.

So the approach I took was to input the People, Places and Things and establish their hierarchies first.
So when I go back and started populating the snippets, RW will began establishing links. I will be quite happy with that!

We are playing The One Ring, by Cubicle7 so it is a Middle Earth setting. The upcoming adventure is taking place in the eastern part of the Iron Hills in a place I call "The Valley of the Shadow". Its a huge valley and qualified to be like a mega complex with numerous adventure sites.

I mapped the valley in Campaign Cartographer. Its a huge map similar to a maze as befitting broken lands with river canyons dividing it into 3 Areas. So for resolution and .jpg size I made 3 maps that are defined as Area 1, 2 & 3.

The denizens of Area 1 include Bands of Orc Raiders, Hill Giants, Ettin, who have their own agendas and motives and terse relationships.

A bridge connects to Area 2 where there is a Dead forest, Broken Lands with a Mountain and a Swamp, each a sort of its own maze.

Area 2 also has a "Safe" zone for the Fellowship to rest, hunt and recoup. Its the only place in the entire Valley they can do so.

Denizens of Area 2 include Restless Ones (Zombies), Swamp Troll, Marsh Dwellers and a Drake in the Mountain. They have no real interaction or relationships.

Area 3 is the domain of Gog, with his agendas, minions and economy.
Pig farms, Wild Grain Granary, Iron Mine, Coal Mine, Pitch Refinery, Tannery, Wood Mill, Orc Villages and Gog's Keep. Each site has their own levels.

Area 3 also has the MacGuffin that I call the Bell Tower with a Mystic Bell. I say MacGuffin but thats not quite accurate because thats what drew the Fellowship here, but it actually exists. It is another multi-level site.

And also there is the secret Nest of Growcrow a "wizard's tower" type of setting. Gorcrow is an Entity, he is the "Shadow", thus the title, "The Valley of the Shadow". It's been there since the first age of the world and is the real mastermind of the Valley, although the other inhabitants quite believe they are the masters of the Valley.

Gorcrow keeps them in line with terror and oppression as he has done for 10,000 years. His nest is another multi-level site.

Gorcrow's interaction with the Fellowship will not be to kill, but to turn them to the Shadows if possible through various nefarious means, including rendering aid which if accepted will invoke corruption tests. muuahh, so I have quite a number of ideas for Gorcrow's strategies and tactics, since I never know what the players will do or how they will react.

These will end up as snippets and/or plot points for later as I learn how the story boarding works.

In Word I have nearly 20 pages of info outlined with Headings so I can utilize the document map.
So when I considered bringing it all into RS I started looking my notes differently. I have paragraphs of ideas, basically if, then, else, kind of notes that I can break up into snippets and later use as plot points.

So to start building I started with Planet Arda and input down from there and established the regions and area's hierarchies via the Container links.

I input these areas into the Story Almanac but in hindsight I maybe should have put them in the World Almanac. I will fix that later.

I'm still not sure about the correlation between the Story and World almanac yet.

The Creatures I input into the World Almanac though.

I created the areas, but did not populate with much info.
Arda
->Rhovanion
-->Iron Hills
----> Azanulinbar-Dum
----> The Valley of the Shadow

-------> Area 1
----------> Secret Tunnel (Entrance)
----------> Orc Raiders Territory
----------> Ettin Territory
----------> Hill Giants Territory
----------> Bridge

-------> Area 2
---------> Dead Forest
---------> Dark Swamps
---------> Broken Lands

-------> Area 3
---------> Gog's Keep
------------> Level 1
------------> Level 2
------------> Level 3
---------------> Secret Tunnel
------> Gog's Pig Farms
------> Gog's Pitch Refinery
------> Gog's Iron Mine
------ --> Level 1
----- ---> Level 2
------> Bell Tower Adventure
--------> Level 1
--------> Level 2
--------> level 3
------> Gorcrow's Nest
--------> Level 1
--------> level 2
--------> Level 3

I am thinking I should rename the Levels or adding tags to follow the parent, because I can imagine when populating the database a hundred dungeons from now each one having "Level 1" as a name will get confusing. SO I will look into trying auto-tagging as Rob mentioned or at the very least coming up with a naming convention.

Next I input the adversaries, added a few notes for the creatures they will encounter this weekend and added statblocks.
TOR statblocks are fairly difficult to format, so for now I used windows snipping tool to capture images of the statblock tables I made in Word to pull into RW.
I added all the creatures but didn't group anything yet.

Next I started populating the Area's topics from my notes and adding tags but divided my Word descriptions into snippets to leverage fog of world. It was awesome to see RW start to link everything together once all the pieces were in place.

Since this game we will be exploring Area 1, that's the only section I will completely flesh out by Sunday.

Lastly before I went to bed last night I started playing with the story board for Sunday's game, making several story groups and placing a few plot points as I could envision the story playing out in the very beginning of the adventure. One part started looking like a flow chart of possible events invoked by the player's actions, all from just clicking them together. Genius!

I saw that story board plot points are limited in size so I started adding topics in the Story Almanac that I could just link to if I needed more info for a particular plot point.

I imagine that player's actions might even take us outside the story board's plot points but could easily be incorporated into the flow.

It will be interesting to see the connections when everything is finally wired up! And especially the revealed story line after the adventure is played out!

All this and I really don't know RW inside and out yet!

If anyone has suggestions to improve my workflow or anything please reply or PM me! Thanks!

[Giorgio]

Rob, you answered my question how to tie things together, I was basically using MaxSupernova's approach.

I watched all the tutorials, but its honestly a bit overwhelming. I was placing all my word documents into the "user notes" section until I figure out where they should really go, and I was using the Storyboard plot points to work on my scenes (text is WHAY to small and you cant resize windows).

Hopefully after reading your post above I can do better.

[davidp]

Originally Posted by Venger

TOR statblocks are fairly difficult to format, so for now I used windows snipping tool to capture images of the statblock tables I made in Word to pull into RW.
I added all the creatures but didn't group anything yet.

Have you tried copying and pasting the tables from Word into the statblock text? Realm Works supports embedded tables similar to Word.

[Venger]

Have you tried copying and pasting the tables from Word into the statblock text? Realm Works supports embedded tables similar to Word.

Hey DavidP
Yes I tried that first and ended up with unusable unformatted text in the snippet panel for statblocks. I assumed it is because I used split cells when formatting the statblock in Word.

Also, since I was trying to copy only one section of a larger table could be the problem. I may have to do stat blocks as individual tables.

I got a popup message that formatting would be removed.

When I get home I will post a statblock here, maybe there is something I am missing.

[Viral Platypus]

I'm still trying to decide how to handle running Fate in Realm Works myself. Since it's quite a bit more free form, I'm trying to decide if I just want to set up people, places, and things; or if I want to also try and add elements into the storyboard.

Part of the problem I'm having right now is I'm not sure where the game is headed, so I'm not sure how to experiment yet. Waiting on a stroke of inspiration.

[Nikmal]

Originally Posted by monsterfurby

Main issue I have is that my current campaign is more of an exercise in character interaction than a classic PnP campaign. Sure, we do have fights and missions (it's military themed), but more often than not my preparation involved figuring out how to get each individual player character motivated to undertake said mission. That said, I do have a long-term game plan in place, a metaplot if you will, and a billion NPCs will run that metaplot even if the PCs decide to be involved in other ways than those I can think of ahead of time. The world does not revolve around my PCs by default, but they are certainly in a position to make it if they want.

That said, I am currently in the process of porting 400 named NPCs (all with portraits and backstory to some degree) spread over three dozen organizations all over this fictional version of our world into RealmWorks. Let's say this is really the software I have needed for a long, long time.

What is cool about this is that you can set up how each NPC interacts with other NPC's through the relationship panel using the story board as well. It will show smiley emoticons for the relationship with other NPC's. It is kind of cool to see and one of the more cool features of Real Works. To me this is what makes Realm Works Shine!!