Content Market: Initial Reactions, Experiences, Tips

[MNBlockHead]

So, I opened my wallet and bought about $100 in content from the Content Market. Mostly this was Kobold Press Material that I already have in print format. I also imported the SRD.

This thread is to post your experiences with the new Content Market and to share tips on how to best integrate purchased content into your Realm(s).

This thread is NOT meant to be for review of specific items sold, I think it would be better that each product have its own thread.

Some initial reactions:

The web site is easy to navigate and the information provided with the products are sufficient to understand what the product is.

I do wish that there were some previews of content, though I'm not sure how that would be accomplished. It isn't like you would just show X pages like a PDF product preview.

Purchasing was smooth.

Only being able to download one purchased product at a time was a small annoyance, but I don't expect it to impact me much going forward as I'll likely only being buying one or two items at a time.

Import when smoothly.

I recommend importing an item into a realm of its own and checking out how it is organized before importing into a "live" realm. Often, you may find that you only need certain topics or articles from a purchased work.

I'm not sure how duplicates are going to work. For example, I have the SRD. If the full content of the official core books for 5e are ever made available, I expect there to be lots of duplicates.

Overall the organization of the materials I bought are well done and work fine within my existing realms. But it is causing me to go back and rethink some things and once again play around with the navigation pane view settings.

For example, I notice that large lists of items, like monsters, spells, equipment are often organized into containers to break up by alphabetic range. E.g. Monsters A-C, Monsters D-G, etc. My preference is to just have all monsters listed alphabetically. I'm assuming there are some performance reason to organize them into containers. I suppose to minimize scrolling.

So now I'm thinking how to integrate imported material with material I already have entered. For example, I now have all SRD magic items organized in their containers. But all my custom magic items are outside any container. I moved the SRD magic item container so that it shows under Magic Items instead of General Equipment Articles.

The more I play around with CM content, however, to more I am convinced that the creators are using different navigation view settings than me. I think I need to revisit the help materials and relearn the settings for the nav pane.

Share/View Imports is a handy way to see all the imports you made for a given realm and to jump to that import's "Getting Started" topic/article. It would be nice if there was a way to see this across all realms in your account.

On that note, in the future it would be nice if I could just import content and apply it to different realms without constant export/import jobs. I realize that may not be technically practical. And I don't have a big issue with how it is handled now, but it would be nice if more of this were in the background. For example, when you purchase content on the CM, instead of downloading, when you next login and sync realmworks, it would show up as realm (or better a new Content tab) and then from a realm you could simply import from the content synced to your account.

Overall, I'm very happy with the Content Market. I'm glad that it is finally out. I'm happy with the content that I bought and I look forward to a lot more content being available, including, hopefully official WoTC 5e books, EN World EN5ider material, Critical Role's Tal'dorei setting, and content from other major publishers like Goodman Games.

I'm also looking forward to users being able to post their own material to share and sell.