Missing Items in Tips & Tricks Document

[rob]

With the imminent release of Realm Works, a preliminary version of the Tips & Tricks (aka Best Practices) document is being included. If there are subjects not covered in this document (AND not identified as subjects planned for subsequent inclusion), please flag those subjects here in this thread. I'll then get placeholders in for those subjects and get them covered in a future version.

If you want to lobby for specific sections to be covered sooner than others, please do so over in the separate thread for that purpose.

[Parody]

Thanks for putting this together; there's a lot of good information to go through.

Here's a couple of homophones:
Page 12, 3.4.1, paragraph 3: "Since you're focus" -> "Since your focus"
Page 31, first paragraph: "order, there locations" -> "order, their locations"


Section 4.20: I think you do your content creators a disservice. If you're only using Realm Works, then I agree that you don't need to number locations. However, if your content is coming from a source with them or if it will be distributed in a non-Realm Works form (even if you're using Realm Works as your designing application), then you should put the map codes into Realm Works. You want to keep that easy link between the physical/digital document and what's in Realm Works.

I agree that location names should be used both for linking and for better descriptions, but anyone who isn't running that adventure purely from Realm Works or who is familiar with it in its non-Realm Works form will have an easier time using your content if they can see the map codes if they want. (Elsewhere the document talks about using them as prefix identifiers. Maybe a reference to that section would be good here?)

I bring this up because this section, while titled as if they're optional, reads to me as if they're completely useless. Maybe it doesn't come across to others that way. Maybe that's the intent. I just think that a best practices type document should say "we think you should do it this way" as well as "but here's why you might not".

Hope this helps.

[meek75]

I'm a visual person and I would love to see more screen shots in the Tips and Tricks document. It helps me enormously when I can see it.

[Bidmaron]

In section 4.14 on p. 24, the last bullet talks about a Source tag domain. There is no Source tag domain (at least in my installation). I suppose this is the correct thread to report bugs in the documentation?

Edit: When I went to add the Source domain, I found out that it does, in fact, exist. However, it is not available for use in a tag snippet for some reason (when you go to set the facet of the snippet, source does not show up as an option for tag domains.

[Parody]

Did you add any tags to the Source domain? You can't pick any domain that has no tags. Earlier in 4.14 it talks about extending the domain; adding tags is what they mean by extending.

For Sources specifically, I've been making my own tag domains to keep my works separate from works published by the original company.

[Bidmaron]

Parody, you are right - source wasn't showing up because there were no tags under that domain. I consider this a bug, however, as you shouldn't have to go to Manage Tags to add your first domain tag, but it is so infrequent, it is low priority (however, the infrequent means I probably won't be the last person to make the mistake I did).

[AEIOU]

Since RW is system agnostic, the only source that is common across all genres is what you create. Could RW tap into our registered name to populate Manage Tags with that as the initial entry?

[Parody]

My recommendation to the RW folks is to explicitly say that you must add tags to the domains that start empty in order to use them. Compare how an empty domain is used to how one that starts with the Pathfinder items is used (almost the same if you're not using Pathfinder) to one that's more generic.

In the future I believe they expect most people to base their campaigns on shared system campaigns that come with a baseline set of information for the system, much like you buy game systems in Hero Lab. When you start with at least a system realm many of the empty global tag domains are going to have entries already.

I'd do this in layers, so there might be a Pathfinder base realm with basic rules, races, classes, items, maybe generic NPCs from those books, and such. On top of that you'd have a Golarion campaign world realm with locations, NPCs, items, prestige classes, and whatnot added to the base realm. Then your Rise of the Runelords AP realm would be built on top of that. This lets GMs start with what they intend to use.

Aside: This sort of design has been an issue for me. I've been hesitant to start adding my own adventures to my Paranoia realm because I don't really want to go back and redo the whole mess to split the base system and my creations once sharing becomes available. Once upon a time I'd said that we're all likely to have to either throw out or redo our work once sharing was available. I don't really want to do that, but it still seems likely. :(

[AEIOU]

Building on Parody's aside, I'd like to see a section for merging sources.

If I have Golarian and add RotRL and both of these commercial sources have content for Magnimar or Varisia, how will these materials be handled?

If I have entered RotRL and purchase the official release of RotRL, how easy will it be to merge my data into the official data?

Are plans in place to merge two topics or should we copy/paste?

How do you recommend tracking multiple copyright sources?