Arranging Data

[salcor]

Joe,
I have been watching the gencon videos which are great. I was wondering about your project into the leading space opera RPG. I would love to see how you are arranging your data. Also have you created herolabs data files or are you using oggdude's character generation? If you use oggdude's how are you including the data files in your realmworks?

Salcor

[Joe]

Originally Posted by salcor

Joe,
I have been watching the gencon videos which are great. I was wondering about your project into the leading space opera RPG. I would love to see how you are arranging your data. Also have you created herolabs data files or are you using oggdude's character generation? If you use oggdude's how are you including the data files in your realmworks?

Salcor

I should stress that this is a personal project. I've gotten word from the boss that I can be a little less evasive in talking about this than I was in the Gen Con seminars. However, we would need to have a license with Fantasy Flight and Disney to make this available to users. I'm talking specifically about the Edge of the Empire/Age of Rebellion/Force and Destiny RPGs, and not the earlier d6 or d20-based systems.

It's a work in progress. Right now, I'm working on the mechanics portion for the most part. So I haven't really given that much thought to how/whether I'm going to use any external tools for character data. I like to play these systems in a less crunchy style, and the character creation is fairly basic, so tool support is not the "must have" like it would be in other systems. In the past I've used the "fill in the form" pdfs that are floating around on the internet. I might just attach these. For now, I've been perfectly happy to just use a formatted table for basic statblocks and such. But who knows, I may expand on this in the future.

A lot of what I'm doing right now is "gruntwork" data entry. I'm basically using OCR on scans of my source books which while painful, is faster than me typing all of it. Even when the OCR works perfectly (it doesn't always), it still needs a lot of cleanup. Fortunately, "Paste Special" (ctrl+alt+v) is your friend here, as it lets you strip all the formatting and extra line breaks in one go.

As far as structure goes, I'm making use of the "General X Article" categories to form a sensible hierarchy. For example, under the Abilities grouping in Mechanics Reference:

Skills - General Abilities Article
- Combat Skills - General Abilities Article
-- Brawl - Skill Article
-- Gunnery - Skill Article
-- etc...
- General Skills - General Abilities Article
-- Astrogation - Skill Article
-- Athletics - Skill Article
-- etc...
- Knowledge Skills - General Abilities Article
-- Knowledge (Core Worlds) - Skill Article
-- Knowledge (Education) - Skill Article
-- etc...
Talents - General Article
- Adversary - Talent Article
- All-Terrain Driver - Talent Article
- etc...

Be careful when doing this. You must be sure that the hierarchy you're building is a STRICT hierarchy. For example, all skills belong to exactly one skill group (Combat/General/Knowledge), no more and no less. It might be tempting to group talents by career or specialization, but many talents can be accessed by multiple careers/specializations. I use tags for this purpose instead. If the list of talents gets very long, I may introduce a level of hierarchy for A-D, E-H, etc. These would also be General Abilities Articles for the purpose of alphabetically grouping into more digestable chunks. I'm not sure if this is a good idea, but I'm considering it. The takeaway here is to use the "General Article" categories to arrange things in a useful hierarchy rather than just as big pile of stuff.

You can either use our default, generic article categories (e.g. Talent/Feat, Skill/Ability, etc.) or make your own. I have made some of my own so as to have complete control over their structure, but both approaches are valid and serviceable. The same applies to tags and domains.

One of the things I'm having some genuine trouble with is figuring out how I want to design the different books such that they work together with minimal repetition. EotE and AoR have some of the same topics, but have somewhat different wording at times. Since the systems are designed to be used together, they have to be able to coexist in the same realm. Duplicate topics for each variant is the "highest fidelity" to each book, but results in a lot of clutter in the hierarchy for no real useful purpose. I could have each version's text in the same topic, but that clutters the topic itself for no real useful purpose. I may just settle on a "newest wins" approach, where if AoR rewords some text from EotE, I just use the new text and discard the old.

But there are other problems. EotE groups the Nebulon-B frigate under "captial ships" along with the CR90 corvette, while AoR puts the Neblon-B under "Cruisers" and the CR90 under "Gunships" Each grouping also has other ships that appear exclusively in that book alone. There's no way to be fully faithful to both hierarchies without either a) massive duplication of data, or b) using tags to represent the books' hierarchies and using some other entirely custom scheme for the Realm Works hierarchy. This is an open question for me now and I've not yet decided how I want to resolve it.

As far as other stuff goes, I've toyed with using plot diagrams for talent trees. It looks like it could work, but might need better software support to make it really worthwhile. Linkweb might be even better, but again would need some additional filtering features to make it really work.

The game system uses a lot of symbols, and there's a font available for free online (google the obvious terms) which gives you these symbols. I should stress here that I have no idea what the future looks like for custom font support in Realm Works. Right now, if you install the font it works just fine in Realm Works. Will this work flawlessly on the future web client? I just don't know. Initial basic tests look like it could be made to work, but I don't know how much work it will be in the end and whether it will be worth the trouble. Of course, I want it for myself so I'll be the first to try to get it in if it's feasible.

Sorry for the "stream of consciousness", but hopefully this gives you some ideas. If you have any follow-up questions, we can split this out into its own thread.

[salcor]

Joe,

Thanks for the quick response. The stream of consciousness is great, it gives me a lot to think about. I can definitely see where RW rewards a lot of pre-prep, and unfortunately I really haven't had the time to dedicate to it. I don't know if you listen to the Order 66 podcast, but one of the things I have wonder about RW is could create modular encounters in there world and the copy them into more specific encounter? I think sometimes powerful tools don't get used because of the front end investment.

The fonts for the symbols was another question. It is great to know that they will worm if installed on you computer.

As to star wars specific questions, the challenge for me is determining what to include and how. Formating at work is always challenging, so figuring out how to format stats is difficult. If you have any suggestions it would be appreciated .

Salcor

[Joe]

Originally Posted by salcor

Joe,
I can definitely see where RW rewards a lot of pre-prep, and unfortunately I really haven't had the time to dedicate to it [...] I think sometimes powerful tools don't get used because of the front end investment.

It's important to keep in mind that while the main core of Realm Works is currently available, we still have a lot of work to do to achieve the complete vision. Creating a realm from scratch is a big undertaking, and we realize that not everyone wants to do all of that work themselves. The reason we started here is that it allowed us to establish the core foundation for all of Realm Works and still release something that will be useful to people.

In the future, the Content Market and its supporting content packaging features will make a number of things much, much easier on a lot of people. For example, it's currently very hard to create a campaign story and run multiple groups through it. Some of the same features that will allow you to package your content for sale (or free) on the Content Market will also allow you to easily create and reuse "copies" of a given realm or smaller parts of it.

Of course the Content Market's main purpose is to acquire (for free or pay) content created by other people, from big publishers that sign a license deal with us to individual community members. Downloading some content as a starting point and modifying it to suit your needs can obviously be a huge jumpstart for a campaign. Since whole campaigns will also be available, these will easily cut your pre-prep time down to virtually zero if you want to run them "as-is". This is a major component of the complete vision of Realm Works that we are working towards.

Originally Posted by salcor

I don't know if you listen to the Order 66 podcast, but one of the things I have wonder about RW is could create modular encounters in there world and the copy them into more specific encounter?

I don't, but I may check it out. I'm not sure I entirely understand your question, so I'll rephrase it to match what I *think* you're asking, and answer that:

"Is there a way the people from Order 66 could create generic, modular encounters in Realm Works, and then subsequently allow me to utilize them in my own campaign but with my own specific modifications?"

Right now? No. But as I described above, this is exactly the vision for the Content Market. A group like Order 66 could publish content (e.g. stock encounters) they've created with Realm Works via the Content Market, either for free as a community offering, or for some amount of payment. You would then be able to get this content from the Content Market and either import in into an existing realm or create a new realm based on it. From there, you could use the content as-is, or modify it to suit your needs.

Originally Posted by salcor

As to star wars specific questions, the challenge for me is determining what to include and how. Formating at work is always challenging, so figuring out how to format stats is difficult. If you have any suggestions it would be appreciated .

Now that we have our own thread, feel free to ask specific questions about the areas you're having difficulty with, and I'll do my best to answer.

[salcor]

Joe,

Thanks for the stand alone thread. First if you are playing EOTE, AOR, or FnD, definitely checkout the Order 66 podcast. However, specifically for our discussion and the future of Realmworks check out episode 11 The GM Holocron 2.0. The basic idea it to make pre-created set piece encounters, and npcs, as a skeleton for game early game prep. Then when you need say a bar fight you bring in your basic bar room brawl set piece and add more specific descriptions for where the players are at the moment. The modular encounters from Sons of Fortune are an example of this, but with the flesh on the skeleton.

I will admit that I started using RW for my personal campaign which was an episodic "Firefly" like game. Where I got away from RWs is that I could not use it solely my game screen if you will. I had to have PDFs of the npc states open because I could not get it imbedded into my encounters. Seeing your data arrangements for the Paizos files you were using as an example at Gencon was helpful. If you could star screen shots of your Star Wars stuff that would be great.

I am currently using the OggDude's Character Generator
(http://bit.ly/15dSR5g) for characters and npcs creation. I would love any suggestions on how to upload stats from this generator to RW. It would be amazing if there was a herolab file out there, but understanding LucasArt's digital rights I know that is wishful thinking.


Salcor

[Joe]

So like I said, I'm working on mechanics stuff at the moment, so I don't have any NPC's per say. But I did start entering some "Adversaries". The Stormtrooper Sergeant has some decent complexity, so you can kinda see what my general layout is like.

Example Image

This is also really only the "first pass" attempt. There are probably some improvements to make. One I can see immediately is probably having the skills be a 2-column table, so that all the numbers left align nicely.

[Pollution]

Originally Posted by Joe

So like I said, I'm working on mechanics stuff at the moment, so I don't have any NPC's per say. But I did start entering some "Adversaries". The Stormtrooper Sergeant has some decent complexity, so you can kinda see what my general layout is like.

Example Image

This is also really only the "first pass" attempt. There are probably some improvements to make. One I can see immediately is probably having the skills be a 2-column table, so that all the numbers left align nicely.

Ugh, tables....This looks like it would take a ton of time to put in, if you're doing more than 20 or so basic NPCs. I can't even imagine doing ships like that.

I did something similar with traps in RotRL http://imgur.com/E2atieq

Tables aren't that bad, but it's the lack of Tab support (just like in word) and enter only doing line breaks that make me cringe with this kind of thing.

A better solution, IMHO for your skills, would be to reverse the number with the skill and bullet it.

So you'd have
* 2 Athletics
* 2 Discipline
* 3 Leadership
etc....

it would save you the effort of doing tables and making yourself crazy.

[Joe]

Sorry I've left this lie around for a while. Between the Player Edition release and traveling to see family for the holidays, I've not had a chance to get back to it.

Originally Posted by Pollution

Ugh, tables....This looks like it would take a ton of time to put in, if you're doing more than 20 or so basic NPCs. I can't even imagine doing ships like that.

Oh it's not as bad as all that. You'd be right if Copy and Paste didn't work on the tables. But as it stands, I can just copy and paste a snippet with tables (like those in my Stats section) from an existing article to a new article. So then it just becomes a matter of changing the numbers.

Of course, that leaves some room for mistakes, forgetting to change some stats, etc. So you can make a dummy "template" monster or NPC with all the tables and formatting, but with the actual numbers stripped out. Then you can just copy out of the template and paste into your new monster.

If you want to get really efficient, you can make a complete NPC/Monster/Ship "template" article, then use the "Duplicate Article" option. I haven't done this yet, but I just thought of it and it sounds like it would be a really efficient way of handling formatting.

Originally Posted by Pollution

Tables aren't that bad, but it's the lack of Tab support (just like in word) and enter only doing line breaks that make me cringe with this kind of thing.

The tab thing sounds like a bug. Word and Excel both support tab to move between cells. I'll see what we can do about it.

As for Enter, it seems like there's not a universal standard within tables. Word and Excel both do it differently, and I'm sure other apps do too. We could make enter move down one cell, and shift+enter or alt+enter do a new line. I'll see if that's possible.

In the meantime, the arrow keys can also navigate the cells. If the cells have content, ctrl+arrow key will allow you to jump quickly over cell contents. It's not perfect, but it's probably an improvement over what you're dealing with now.

Originally Posted by Pollution

A better solution, IMHO for your skills, would be to reverse the number with the skill and bullet it.

So you'd have
* 2 Athletics
* 2 Discipline
* 3 Leadership
etc....

Good idea. I'll give this a try when I get back to entering content.

[Teresa]

Originally Posted by Joe

As for Enter, it seems like there's not a universal standard within tables. Word and Excel both do it differently, and I'm sure other apps do too. We could make enter move down one cell, and shift+enter or alt+enter do a new line. I'll see if that's possible.

I'm sorry to drop in on this thread, but I'm not sure I understood: Pollution is asking about having Enter move down one cell in tables in text snippets?

If so, how would you have line breaks inside a cell?

[AEIOU]

ALT-ENTER is the standard for line breaks within a cell for Excel. That works. I'm an Excel user so it's the natural choice to me. ENTER moves down. TAB moves sideways.

Whatever you choose, stay consistent. Pick Word or Excel methodology and use that logic for everything throughout. I'd say pick the one that is most RW-like but there are good arguments for either case -- database entry is similar to spreadsheet so Excel; formatting paragraphs and sentences for logical presentation of segments of information so Word.