Best Practices Guide: Overall

[Silveras]

Actually, I think Acenoid's question in THIS thread is similar.

And my response there holds true here as well.. how we approach entering data NOW may be very different than how we do so when the Repository/Marketplace is available.

[pjrichert]

@Ruhar: If you look at the descriptions of each of the "Places" group, you can get a better idea of what the lodge should be.

An adventure area is a "large area containing many adventure locations". The lodge is a single location that may contain several rooms, so it doesn't fit that.

A location is a kind of a catch all, in that it can be ONE room, or a single point of interest, building, etc: The lodge fits this decscription

The adventure that takes place in the lodge then falls under the "Events" category.

This is just the way I look at the events, and may not work for you.

Incident: This would be some "happening" that that occurs to the players, or to the environment that the players can interact with (Assasination attempt, fire, lightning strike, random monster attack) but doesn't necessarily have to be tied to a location.

Quest: This would be a series of events that tie together, USUALLY in a single place like a dungeon. This is where I think the best fit for the Encounters in your lodge would fall.

Scene: Really very much like an incident, but really something that can take place anywhere at anytime that's convienient

Time Period: I use this to detail out holidays, festivals, or historical events.


So in your case, Ruhar, I would enter in the Lodge as a location, but in the descriptions that you put in that location, connect that to the "Quest" of the lodge. So that way when you're using the program, and players get to the "Location" you open that, and have all your descriptions and general knowledge information. Once your PCs start to interact with the lodge, you click to the "Quest" which has the internal maps and each encounter within the lodge detailed.

Hope that helps.

[AEIOU]

Over the course of the Kickstarter, I changed my data structures, linkages and hierarchies over a dozen times. One topic per room or all rooms in one topic? NPC's belong to businesses or adventure locations or storyline or town or or or? Total revamps of re-writing and re-organizing vast swaths of material. It was frustrating to start over (and over and over). But each iteration I became more confident and happier.

My advice is to learn RW with a single module. Try different things and give yourself permission to be wishy-washy. Try different ways to organize or present information side-by-side and make informed decisions on what works best for you. Once you have decided on a hierarchy for containers, it gets easier but.....

If I focus on one adventure, RW is easy. If I focus on a campaign setting, RW is easy. But when I tie multiple adventures together and/or include a campaign setting, things get complicated quickly.

Originally Posted by enrious

   Universe
       World
           Continent
                 Nation
                     City
                         District
                              Business
                                    People in the Business

Enrious's hierarchy is similar to how I have organized campaign information. I find this pretty intuitive for how to set up the world. Each piece fits nicely into another piece. This works well for static content.

But I've also realized that once the game gets going, I need to keep rethinking containers and relationships and tags and where things shift in the hierarchy. I have given myself permission to change my mind. My games evolve. This is especially true as we start interweaving modules, adventure paths, plotlines, etc together. That nice static hierarchy we created at first has to be malleable and flexible.

RW requires a lot of initial prep work, eliminates a lot of upkeep work and creates a totally new kind of maintenance work. And by work, I mean fun. For me, the data entry helps me think and re-think and refine content. I always end with a richer entry than the material I started from had provided.

Silveras touches on a critical piece we need to consider too. How will we use RW differently once we can recycle, reuse, buy, mash-up, modify, bend, fold, manipulate our old material and everyone else's material? I've started thinking about how to best build a "stable" of NPC's that I can quickly copy/paste. And maps, buildings, plot stubs, locations. Things that aren't immediately tied to something else or that can be copied and recycled later.

Now if I could just find more time to actually DO all these things instead of just think about them....

[immotus]

For fantasy campaigns I prefer a very similar structure to what enrious posted. Mine is

World->Region->Realm->Province->Settlement->Structure->NPC->Item

Like some of the others here I am a bit lost in HOW I am going to use Realmworks to manage my campaigns. At this point, it looks like it's going to be a ton of work just figuring out how to get the heirarchy I want and to cull or alter the extraneous fields realmworks provides that I am not interested in.

It appears that it is possible to alter categories and tags BUT one needs to be careful as the program can't track the changes you make into another copy of the program. SO, if you change the people category into books and try to share it you will just have someone somewhere with their own version of realmworks tryng to figure out why the people category has a list of books rather than people.

This stops me cold. It leaves me wondering how much I can alter and how much it will break the program if I do and whether or not it can still link and track relationships in custom categories with custom tags.

I'll be honest and tell you right now, the ONLY reason I am still trying to figure out how to wrangle this data manager into a form I want it to have is because of the 'Fog of World' it promises it can do. I can't say I am happy with the 'we've thought of everything' structure it tries to push on me. Supposedly you can hide EVERYTHING and start from scratch BUT, can the program deal with it? I can only hope that it can because I am using it for a sci-fi campaign also and I have to change a significant amount of stuff for that. I'd really rather have it be blank than full of all this stuff I have to change. Not to mention that I don't even know if it will work when I do change it all.

[MaxSupernova]

I'm pretty lucky. I'm working in a world of my own creation for a homebrewed system, so I don't really have to worry about future-proofing my data entry.

Despite that, I'm still terrified of data entry en masse, because of the possibility that I screw myself for later. It's a lot of manual gruntwork to move a pile of snippets to another section, or to go through my almanac and change tags on a bunch of items. I can't imagine the stress you folks that are expecting to use pre-entered data are going through in trying to plan your data entry with no idea how the official stuff is going to be organized.

The release of an (any!) official data package (and the ability to import it...) will be a massive step in making people comfortable with the RealmWorks idea.

[Silveras]

@MaxSupernova: Yes, I expect that the notion of "standard topics" will probably not outlive publisher involvement. I think each of them will want to establish the topic definitions that match their print products, and 3rd parties/users will want to use those anyway in order to promote compatibility.

As a result, I expect each game system will wind up with publisher-defined category structures. I advocated in the past that whatever core mechanics package would be the best place to store the category definitions for re-use (assuming the OGL model.. that may not work for other setups). 3rd party publishers would then be able to use the category definitions to publish their add-on content with some assurance that it would integrate nicely with the original publisher's contents.

[rob]

A preliminary version of the Tips & Tricks (aka Best Practices) guide will be part of today's release. It's not complete, but it should be a good starting place, and I'll be continuing to evolve it.

Please give it a read-through and let me know what's missing, as well as what order you want me to flesh out the still-empty sections (that show what I'm planning to add). You'll find threads for this purpose in the Feature Requests forum and a general thread for discussing the guide stickied at the top.

Thanks, Rob

[rob]

Originally Posted by Silveras

@MaxSupernova: Yes, I expect that the notion of "standard topics" will probably not outlive publisher involvement. I think each of them will want to establish the topic definitions that match their print products, and 3rd parties/users will want to use those anyway in order to promote compatibility.

As a result, I expect each game system will wind up with publisher-defined category structures. I advocated in the past that whatever core mechanics package would be the best place to store the category definitions for re-use (assuming the OGL model.. that may not work for other setups). 3rd party publishers would then be able to use the category definitions to publish their add-on content with some assurance that it would integrate nicely with the original publisher's contents.

I respectfully disagree with you here. My expectation is that, for TOPICS, there will be VERY LITTLE customizing for a particular game system, with the tailoring that's done primarily being handled through tags. For ARTICLES, there WILL be customization for each game system (e.g. Feats and Archetypes for Pathfinder vs. Cybergear and Advantages for Shadowrun), but those will almost exclusively be ADDITIONS unique to each game system. There won't be wholesale changes to the provided structure IMO.

FYI, lots of people told us we were crazy with how we did Hero Lab when that first came out. They said it would never work with our approach. Eight years later, we're the only tool still standing other than PCGen. Folks said the same about Army Builder before that. We have a vision and we think it will work. Please give us the benefit of the doubt until it's proven we're wrong.

[Silveras]

Originally Posted by rob

I respectfully disagree with you here. My expectation is that, for TOPICS, there will be VERY LITTLE customizing for a particular game system, with the tailoring that's done primarily being handled through tags. For ARTICLES, there WILL be customization for each game system (e.g. Feats and Archetypes for Pathfinder vs. Cybergear and Advantages for Shadowrun), but those will almost exclusively be ADDITIONS unique to each game system. There won't be wholesale changes to the provided structure IMO.

FYI, lots of people told us we were crazy with how we did Hero Lab when that first came out. They said it would never work with our approach. Eight years later, we're the only tool still standing other than PCGen. Folks said the same about Army Builder before that. We have a vision and we think it will work. Please give us the benefit of the doubt until it's proven we're wrong.

I dunno, Rob. So far, I have correctly predicted every time I did not win the lottery. With a record like that, you could be in trouble.

[Zaphod Beebledoc]

Originally Posted by immotus

For fantasy campaigns I prefer a very similar structure to what enrious posted. Mine is

World->Region->Realm->Province->Settlement->Structure->NPC->Item

Like some of the others here I am a bit lost in HOW I am going to use Realmworks to manage my campaigns. At this point, it looks like it's going to be a ton of work just figuring out how to get the heirarchy I want and to cull or alter the extraneous fields realmworks provides that I am not interested in.

It appears that it is possible to alter categories and tags BUT one needs to be careful as the program can't track the changes you make into another copy of the program. SO, if you change the people category into books and try to share it you will just have someone somewhere with their own version of realmworks tryng to figure out why the people category has a list of books rather than people.

This stops me cold. It leaves me wondering how much I can alter and how much it will break the program if I do and whether or not it can still link and track relationships in custom categories with custom tags.

I'll be honest and tell you right now, the ONLY reason I am still trying to figure out how to wrangle this data manager into a form I want it to have is because of the 'Fog of World' it promises it can do. I can't say I am happy with the 'we've thought of everything' structure it tries to push on me. Supposedly you can hide EVERYTHING and start from scratch BUT, can the program deal with it? I can only hope that it can because I am using it for a sci-fi campaign also and I have to change a significant amount of stuff for that. I'd really rather have it be blank than full of all this stuff I have to change. Not to mention that I don't even know if it will work when I do change it all.

I've been entering some mechanics data for a little game called Engine Heart.

I took an article template and made a copy of that category. I started entering data and changed the category a lot. There are now 3 different categories that I have created for it.

I went through a couple of iterations of each category before settling on a template for each that suited the game.

What I have done is create all the articles, so that the auto-linking works. Before copying the text, I then "Synchronised the Structure to Match the Category Definition", then bit-by-bit copied the info out of the rulebook.

After I had the data in the article, I "Removed Empty Snippets and Sections."

Once I got into the swing to things, this worked for me.

(Bit a ramble, but I hope I've conveyed what I did well...)