Running different groups through the same content at the same time

[neologiker]

Greetings!

I've recently taken the plunge and purchased RW. I'm enjoying the product so far and can't wait to get my realms into a usable state.

As I've been playing around and trying different strategies for organizing my content, I've come up with a question I haven't been able to solve by referring to the documentation or by searching the forums. I'm about to begin running a the same campaign, concurrently, for a different group of players. So far, I've been adding topics to a single realm. This seems to be exactly what RW does best: keeping track of all this information and of what I've revealed to my players. However, it occurs to me that once I start running a second group through the same content, I will need the ability to hide or reset, selectively, the revealed topics and snippets.

I've been reading about individual player reveal and the marketplace/sharing, and perhaps those hold the solution to my problem. Does anybody know for sure if those will help me when they're released? If so, how exactly? And what are people doing now as a stopgap? Or is there a current solution I'm unaware of?

I don't like the idea of duplicating all this data, at least not manually, into a separate realm for each group. To avoid that, I've considered duplicating every topic within my existing realm and using suffixes to disambiguate them. For example, if I have a Bandit Ambush scene, I would duplicate that topic and call it Bandit Ambush (Group 2), or something. I suppose this could be done over time as I need to add pieces from the first-use campaign to the second. One drawback to this is that if I encounter errors or wish to update one or many topics, I'll need to make the changes in every copy of the topic, won't I?

Thoughts or suggestions?

Also, thanks for a great product!

--neologiker

[AEIOU]

Once the Market is released, you will be able to clone a realm to re-use it for another group.

Until the Market is released, you could run multiple groups using a single realm, but reveals would show for everyone so it could be difficult.

And as an aside as it may come out before the Market, individual reveals is on the to-do list which would actually make a single realm doable for multiple groups. Though that would get a bit schizophrenic I would think.... But I wanted to offer you options....

[AEIOU]

Another thought since you are creating duplicate topics. You can create multiple views. So you could add a suffix to each topic and then put all of suffix "Monday Night" into one view and "Saturday Afternoon" in another so you keep your groups separated for your own sanity. That would actually work pretty well.

This is a great use of suffix actually.

[Pollution]

Originally Posted by AEIOU

Another thought since you are creating duplicate topics. You can create multiple views. So you could add a suffix to each topic and then put all of suffix "Monday Night" into one view and "Saturday Afternoon" in another so you keep your groups separated for your own sanity. That would actually work pretty well.

This is a great use of suffix actually.

Beat me to it.

I was going to say, you could duplicate all the topics and have them ID'd for different groups.

And with the Custom Views, you'd be able to set it so you'd only see one anyway.

The problem you hit is where Monday Night reveals all of Glassworks, and Saturday hasn't gotten there yet.

Then a player could see that info in Player View....

it's tricky til the market comes out.

[rob]

Or maybe tags? You know, the things that are instantly filterable at any time?

Just a suggestion.

There is no good solution for running two different groups through the same campaign right now. As indicated above, that's going to require the content market and sharing to be in place, which is a primary thing we're working on now. Duplication is probably the only viable solution at the moment, and I would encourage you to look at using tags for differentiating between the two versions of each topic. You can quickly filter on the tag for "GroupA" or "GroupB", which will ensure that you are only operating on the correct topics at any point in time. It's probably much less error prone and less cumbersome than the suffix and/or views solutions, although those approaches would also work.

[Kendall-DM]

I know for my campaign I have not been using the reveals except on the common knowledge known between the two groups I run in the same game world. Otherwise, I've just been cutting and pasting to Word documents and printing out what each individual or playing group knows. That has worked for me so far until the individual reveal is out there.

[neologiker]

Thank you all! Sorry for the delayed response. RL strikes again. All great suggestions. I think I'll experiment with tags for now.