How do you use Relationships?

[Teresa]

I'm having some trouble visualising how to use relationships, so I would like to see how others are using them.

So far I have been dealing with time/place settings and containers are all I have needed. But whenever I start steering into characters I find myself fretting over how to set relationships - Tips and Tricks says not to go overboard and stick to the needs of the campaign... but I don't have a game, I'm happily worldbuilding. And I'm a naturally "let's go overboard" person.

So, I was thinking about creating five types of relationships:
Blood connections: parent/child, sibling/sibling, aunt-uncle/niece-nephew, cousin/cousin
Law/family connections: stepparent/stepchild, stepsibling/stepsibling, godparent/godchild, union (defining types)
Vampire-style: creator/creation, type of master/type of property
Groups: affiliation/member, employer/employee, etc.
Places: residence/resident

I know that saying "what to do" ultimately is all up to me, but I'd like to know how others are doing this.

Thanks.

[ryntak4536]

Hi, before I go into too much, there is a resident type already, I think it's under 'comprises'.

I, too, have some difficulty working with relationships, but here's sort of how/what I do:
I've using the pathfinder rules for 'contacts' in my campaign, and have set each NPC that is a contact for a PC in my group to have a relation with the PC's. I think I used the arbitrary type.

For those NPCs that are members of various organizations or groups, I've set them up as members (under the 'comprises' type, I believe).

For NPCs that have certain types/bits of knowledge about other NPCs, I've given them a connection, I believe 'arbitrary'.

Husbands/wives and other familial connections, I've set up relations for.

Everyone that is from any given location, I've set as resident's of that location.

But, I too would prefer to have more detail on how to relate things....

[Silveras]

Well, as noted, whatever works for you is "best".

Don't forget that you can put a note in the relationship, so that if there isn't one named specifically what you want. "Offspring of" is a choice under the "Belongs to" group, for example, and with a note of "Creator/Created" that might be enough; or not, as needs dictate. Likewise, a simple relationship with a note of "Cousins" might be sufficient for other things.

Where the part about letting the campaign needs drive the scope comes in, I think, is that you can always note all of the relationships in text snippets, and you might then only want to create Relationship entries for the ones that you want to call out.

Relationships are also good for showing hierarchies when a given Topic can be a member of more than one hierarchy. You can only have one Containing Topic at a time, so adding Relationships helps illustrate concisely other active connections relating to that Topic.

Some of them may be redundant.. you can make an Individual a "Resident" of a Location/ Community, make the Community the Containing Topic for the Individual, and refer to the Individual and the Community in the text snippets of each referring to the other.

The Relationships are most useful, I think, when you want to be able to overlay that on another display. I have not used it much, but it can be useful to show cases such as a "Master/Minion" relationship that bypasses the organization of another hierarchy.

[dakuth]

So I'm only new but I've found myself using Relationships heavily.

I have a strongly historical/medieval world... (who doesn't?) but it does mean things like titles, counties, duchies, and which county is part of which duchy and all that business is important. It also links various characters together nicely.

And as a final advantage, when I press "relationship view" it shows a lovely tree structure of how all the various holdings form up.

SO. To that end I actually have my topics of "political regions" and then use the "belongs to" relationship a lot. I have set one up that is simply "holdings" which defines when a particular holding is part of a high-level holding. (i.e. which counties fall within a particular duchy.)

I originally was planning on doing this with content links, but even if I add a tag of "county" or "duchy" it doesn't give me a nice content link. I'd have to type something like "vassal to XYZ duchy" to link it. In the end I used relationships to form those links and if I happen to mention a particular holding, the content link is a secondary way of linking (i.e. "The Barony of Dracula is the capital of the whole Dracula County, thus the holder has the title of Count Dracula.")

Furthermore, when I build NPCs, if they happen to live there I can use the built-in resident/residence relationship...

I also use master/minion a bit (i.e. the Count's servants, his captain of the guard... also Barons that are part of his County are his minions, and the Duke is his master.)

Once again, if I go to the relationship view, I can see a nice graphic of everyone that lives in a particular barony!

So I find I use relationships less for creating a network of lines between a village of people, but more as a manual way to create links between people and places. I then only really use content links "organically." If I happen to mention a piece of content and it is flagged as a content link, then great, but if I want to create structure, I use relationships.

Family - parent/offspring
Geographically (or politically) "in" - e.g. The Barony of Dracula is within the County of Dracula. The old forest is in the County of Dracula. Etc.
Master/minion - e.g. Igor reports to Count Dracula, who reports to Duke Transylvania.
Arbitrary - e.g. To link County of Dracula to a topic explaining Counties, or a link to the title that goes with this political area (e.g. The Count of Dracula). I can then also have an arbitrary link from Count Dracula to the title The Count of Dracula. Then from the title I can go to either the tract of land, or current holder of that title (or even historical holders should I have them created.)

[Teresa]

@ryntak4536: "there is a resident type already, I think it's under 'comprises'." thanks, I hadn't noticed it yet. Your approach is very straightforward, so it might actually be the best way to start and get the hang of it.

@Silveras: "Don't forget that you can put a note in the relationship, so that if there isn't one named specifically what you want." thanks for this idea.

I had seen the description but never really thought about it. I suppose it could help with the lack of multilayering, in that I wouldn't detail the relationship's tags (just pick a simple relationship as you say) but use comments to define them. Then I can have lots of different relationships in the same layer to help me understand social and family tension.

By the way, I decided to start practicing to see how I could play with your ideas in practice and, as geographical topics are mostly what I have done so far, I tried to set up some relationships between them. But RW crashes every time I try to save a topic after creating a relationship. I've tried three different types of relationships, but it always crashes.

The thing is I have used relationships before starting this thread (I only play with RW from time to time) and nothing like it happened. Are the geographical topics off the relationships scope?

[AEIOU]

"Are the geographical topics off the relationships scope?"

Uhhhh... What happens between a forest and mountain in the privacy of their own wilderness is their personal business and I'm not going to judge.

I had an issue with "" marks in categories recently. But other than odd characters, there isn't any reason relationships wouldn't work with everything to my knowledge. Does it happen with other topics or just specific ones? If it's repeatable, that's a very good bug to report.

[Teresa]

LOL
I've just quickly added a new person (and realised the only other two I had created are connected via relationship) and created a relationship. RW crashed when I tried to save it. So I managed to do it before, but now I can't.

"that's a very good bug to report." does it mean automatic bug reports don't do the trick?

[AEIOU]

That's a good question and I honestly don't know what the LW programmers prefer.

If you gave good info with the auto-crash reports, that's probably enough. Since this one is preventing a normal feature from working, it's consistent and it wasn't acting like that in the past, I'd send them a bug report with steps I do to make it happen and an offer to use my database to track it down.

Here's the support page with the bug reporting link:
http://www.wolflair.com/realmworks/support/

[Teresa]

Thanks, I've followed your advice and posted a bug report.

I actually went to my other Realm to see what happened, and there was no crashing. So, I've no idea what is going on...

[Teresa]

OK, problem has been solved (had to rebuild index, one simple click and that was it).

Now I'll start playing with relationships a bit.