Usage of groups

[martinmaster]

Hello fellows Realms Workers,

In the help files (manuals) , RW staff recommends:

• Group Membership: It is generally a bad idea to nest individuals within groups. Individuals often belong to multiple groups, at which point you’ll have to decide which group to assign as a container. If you do that, then you no longer have a consistent model across all your content.
• Group Structure: Chapters of an organization are almost always geographically driven. As such, they are typically a poor match for nesting within the organization. When you think of visiting a guild or a corporate office, you think about where that location is geographically, so that’s how the nesting should usually be modeled.

My question is....
What if you are creating a modern military warfare inclined game ?
Per example, based upon the vietnam war.

Almost all characters i would create are part of definite and almost permanent and very defined military structure. Most of them wont change side, or change group within the army.

I was thinking of using people list in people, just to log all the neutrals...

And for both sides of the war, i was thinking of mimicking the historical military infrastructure of both sides and sort every individuals in the military hierarchy sub categories.

As such , 90 % of my character swould be under GROUPS... as is not recommended by the above advice...

Would you advise against this ? What are the pros.. and cons... of doing so ?

Thanks Realm Workers !

[Farling]

In your situation the using groups would probably be fine :-)

As long as you don't have people infiltrating one group from another group. Then where do you put the person. If you have players using the player version of RW, then I guess you'd put the character under the "infiltrated" unit.

[Bobifle]

While you could use groups in this specific configuration, I'd advise not to if you plan to run other game type with RW.

Try to be consistent in the way you manage individual memberships. Find a way that work for all kind of games and use this one.

This way you'll have a very strong, well know indivudual management accros all your realms.

[martinmaster]

The actual problem I'm attempting to resolve, is that I have the feeling of having to do the work twice.

I have a large number of Characters in the military structure of both organization (Side of the war) structured by HQ,Battalions,Squads, etc....

To sort them in PEOPLES I followed the manual advice at first and decided to sort them for each army by: Main Characters, Minors, Extras and tough about using sub categories of regions. This is quickly proving to be an inefficient way for my two military style campaign underconstruction (one is warhammer 40k).
It is not rare that a character would switch categories, or change region. Furthermore, the sheer number of characters to sort trough is slowing down the game considerably. What was working better was to start splitting the main and minors by element of military structure. However doing this , i'm doing the job twice since I then have to also make it a member of the same group i built under GROUPS. So i tought to save me the job of doing all the structure twice and attach directly all individuals to their related groups.

But I'm still new and learning while constructing my world and might need more advices on using people and groups properly before embracing this practice that i might regret in the future.


Thanks

[Agyess]

Have you concidered either, 1) putting the names into the group topic which will hyper link to the proper entry still oragnized as the people list, or 2) the contained/belongs to relation ship that will establish a link on the right side panel.??

Either of those option would allow the individuals to stay under people but still be readily accessible from the group they are part of and easily be moved if they switch side, assignments, duty stations etc. just a thought

[meek75]

Agyess beat me to the punch on this.

Here is a pic of one the groups I have set up to illustrate. I use relationships to place people in groups (the same person can be in multiple groups) and then use the "Relationships" in the Table of Contents to navigate to the person I want. The actual entry for each person lives in the "People" Category.

[kbs666]

The way I'd handle it, as a veteran, is to assign each person to their physical duty assignment and then give them a relationship to their unit.

For instance:
Corporal Jones would be contained by Fort Dix and have a relationship to 2nd battalion, C company.

Which more accurately reflects how military units work. This would make it very easy to find specific individuals since you could find them based on either their unit or where they are assigned.

[AEIOU]

I use a method similar to Agyess but I agree with kbs666 if you are running military specific scenarios primarily to use the structure that is already tried and tested -- that's a wheel that works extremely well so no point in reinventing. Bobifle makes a really good point that if you run other types of games like D&D or whatever, it may be best to develop a system that works well across all your games to make your life easier for finding info.

I add a table to each cast group like the one below which gives me flexibility to identify who, where and what. For me, the more important thing is that I can put bit-players like the janitors and farmers and random guys on the street into RW and track where they are normally without creating separate entries for every single NPC.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3...lJ6T3I5RC1hT00

[kbs666]

That does bring up something, and maybe the calendar will help with this, most people aren't at the same place all day every day. Having them contained by where the PC's are most likely to interact with them and relationships to the rest of the places they go works but it would be nice if there was a way to set the time of day, and day of week/month, and have RW adjust where everyone is for me.

[AEIOU]

Even with a calendar, it is highly unlikely RW will do that level of automation automatically. You can of course create snippets that identify locations for NPCs based on time which you can track and throw a die to determine where they are at any given time.