Best Practices Guide: Overall

[Zaphod Beebledoc]

Originally Posted by rob

I respectfully disagree with you here. My expectation is that, for TOPICS, there will be VERY LITTLE customizing for a particular game system, with the tailoring that's done primarily being handled through tags. For ARTICLES, there WILL be customization for each game system (e.g. Feats and Archetypes for Pathfinder vs. Cybergear and Advantages for Shadowrun), but those will almost exclusively be ADDITIONS unique to each game system. There won't be wholesale changes to the provided structure IMO.

FYI, lots of people told us we were crazy with how we did Hero Lab when that first came out. They said it would never work with our approach. Eight years later, we're the only tool still standing other than PCGen. Folks said the same about Army Builder before that. We have a vision and we think it will work. Please give us the benefit of the doubt until it's proven we're wrong.

What I described in my post above was almost exclusively Articles and I agree with you Rob.

[hicksms]

Originally Posted by immotus

For fantasy campaigns I prefer a very similar structure to what enrious posted. Mine is

World->Region->Realm->Province->Settlement->Structure->NPC->Item

Like some of the others here I am a bit lost in HOW I am going to use Realmworks to manage my campaigns. At this point, it looks like it's going to be a ton of work just figuring out how to get the heirarchy I want and to cull or alter the extraneous fields realmworks provides that I am not interested in.

It appears that it is possible to alter categories and tags BUT one needs to be careful as the program can't track the changes you make into another copy of the program. SO, if you change the people category into books and try to share it you will just have someone somewhere with their own version of realmworks tryng to figure out why the people category has a list of books rather than people.

This stops me cold. It leaves me wondering how much I can alter and how much it will break the program if I do and whether or not it can still link and track relationships in custom categories with custom tags.

I'll be honest and tell you right now, the ONLY reason I am still trying to figure out how to wrangle this data manager into a form I want it to have is because of the 'Fog of World' it promises it can do. I can't say I am happy with the 'we've thought of everything' structure it tries to push on me. Supposedly you can hide EVERYTHING and start from scratch BUT, can the program deal with it? I can only hope that it can because I am using it for a sci-fi campaign also and I have to change a significant amount of stuff for that. I'd really rather have it be blank than full of all this stuff I have to change. Not to mention that I don't even know if it will work when I do change it all.

I originally used a very similar structure to the one you listed above, but decided that for my ongoing campaign (as opposed to 2 to 3 connected fantasy adventures) it would work better if I organized the campaign by "Chapters" I could easily change the containing topic for Regions, Cities, NPC's etc if needed as the story progressed or simply let the content links with Realm Works make the connections for me.

This has made for a very nice flow of information and the adventure both for myself and my players. I know this won't work for everyone, but it solved my problem of "feeling like" my World was not organized.

And yes, Fog of World is great. Even without the Player Edition it is very useful that I can see in an instant exactly what information the players have gained access to.

I would encourage you to experiment and find the best layout for you. I am no expert, but I will be glad to offer what I can from my own experience with the software.