Realm Works - Lerchanth video

[LeeSmith]

Hi all, I did a 8 min video of my Home Brew world of Lerchanth some time ago, and thought I'd share it here.

https://www.facebook.com/TheMadCarto...75433601366515

Comments welcome.

[MNBlockHead]

Thank you so much for this. I think one of the most useful resources for new user is videos of other users showing how they have set up their worlds.

You asked for comments. My first is whether you have entered in any of the mechanics? I didn't see any links to rules. Also when you show the dragon NPC, there is no link to a dragon article. For monsters, now that I use and integrate HeroLabs, I rarely crate monster articles in RW. I'm wondering if you are doing the same thing with monsters.

Also, you seem to be really into maps. Do you have a world map that you can then click on continents or regions to bring up the topics for those smaller areas and continue to drill in? If found that after using RW for a while, I went back and redid all my maps because I was trying to put too many pins on my world and country maps. So I carved them up so I can "drill down" in them via pins. I'm wondering what your approach is.

Again, thanks so much for sharing!

[Jay_NOLA]

Thanks, great video & love your CC3 map.
Really like that you showed off how you set up your world.

[Exmortis]

Always great to see how others use RW, organize and handle the information within it.

It is these types of posts that give others ideas on how they can achieve the same goals.

[Silveras]

Originally Posted by MNBlockHead

You asked for comments. My first is whether you have entered in any of the mechanics? I didn't see any links to rules. Also when you show the dragon NPC, there is no link to a dragon article.

I will comment on this from my experience.

After my first "scratch-pad" Realm, I tried entering a Paizo Adventure Path (Second Darkness), and I entered the mechanics after I had completed the initial adventure entry. I learned a lot by doing things, and am currently revising how this is entered.

Actually having the Mechanics in the Realm is a mixed blessing.

Pros

• Having the ability to open any Rules topic in a new Tab during play is fantastic.
• Seeing Rules topics highlighted as links helps make it easy to remember that there may be specific issues in a given encounter.
• Monster entries are a good place to put "what the PCs know about this creature type" (Knowledge check results)

Cons

• Many Rules Article titles are common words (such as "Cover", "Concealment", "Movement", "Small", "Large", etc.) that occur again and again in non-rules contexts. The need to click through repeated suggestions of these is frustrating, and it is easy to miss and "Skip" when you meant "Accept" (or the other way around). Using case-sensitivity is not a help, though, as the terms are not capitalized in the text most of the time.
• The need to manually create plural versions of some terms is mildly annoying. I don't know that there's anything LoneWolf can actually do about it.. but that doesn't stop it from being a minor annoyance.
• At the time I was doing the entry, this was well before the ability to pick a Game System at Realm creation was implemented. Even so, there are a lot of things to categorize separately (so I made a number of local, custom Article types), and the available icons are just not enough to visually flag the variety properly.

[MNBlockHead]

@Silveras. I agree that having rules articles as common words is an annoyance. I've thought of using ALL CAPS in all rules articles, or at least those with titles that are more likely to cause this issue. Then the case-sensitivity settings might help.

[Joe]

Keep in mind you can control automatic linking on a per-name basis in the Manage Names dialog. Setting a name to "Never" priority will never have that name bother you for links ever again (though you can still manually create them).

Of course, if you still want intentional rules references to be automatically linked, you can set up an alternate name to indicate you DO want it to link. For example:

Public Name: Cover, Priority: Never
Alternate Name: [Cover], Priority: Normal

This will cause all instances of "Cover" and "cover" in the text to be ignored, but allows you to type "[Cover]" if you mean to refer to the specific rules construct. Of course, I picked square brackets for no reason in particular. You can probably come up with your own special syntax in combination with the case sensitivity settings to make it unambiguous when you want to reference the rules article vs just using the English word.

There's extensive explanation of how it works by clicking the blue info icon in the upper right of the Manage Names window. Be sure also to click the "Show More" button for even more information, explaining each option in detail.

As far as pluralization goes, we do have a feature coming in the next release to address this. It probably won't solve all problems (as seamlessly solving it would be a LOT of work). But we found a way to use an existing .NET feature with minimal effort on our part that should alleviate some of the burden.

[Dhrakken]

Is it the end of next week yet?

[MNBlockHead]

Thanks Joe. Good points. I find I'm often stuck in habits developed before recent releases. I don't make nearly enough of the new(er) link settings.

[dentaa]

Quick note: Lee, THANKS. Just started Realm Works and wanted to get some ideas since the Demo file is not active....