How has your work with RW evolved?

Parody said:

Anecdote

At Christmas I was talking to my Uncle about gaming. He's the one who got me into RPGs and complicated board games back in the 80s, and he still runs campaigns today in his own world complete with papercraft buildings and dungeons. I asked if he'd looked at Realm Works and he said that he had heard a bit about it. We talked a bit and he sounded interested at the various features, but as soon as he learned he can't print or export he said it wouldn't work for him.

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I'm not sure who previously had said that they had said something similar about discussions with their friends.

I suspect these people are telling their friends their own reasons for why they think exporting and/or printing are essential, and thus putting off their friends from trying RW. Their friends might well not actually need export/printing since RW probably provides everything that they'll need at the table.

Farling said:

I suspect these people are telling their friends their own reasons for why they think exporting and/or printing are essential, and thus putting off their friends from trying RW.

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It is hard to keep your own biases out. FWIW, in this case I believe I did a decent job doing so, but it's hard to know. I did not mention anything about why printing or exporting aren't features or why I would like exporting, just that they are not currently features.

Farling said:

Their friends might well not actually need export/printing since RW probably provides everything that they'll need at the table.

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In this case the features Realm Works does have did not sound advantageous enough to change his GMing habits. As far as I know he does not use a computer at the table. (I know he uses it extensively when planning, and it can still be helpful in that role.)

Hopefully, though, it helps to share our experiences talking with others about the product.

Farling said:

I'm not sure who previously had said that they had said something similar about discussions with their friends.

I suspect these people are telling their friends their own reasons for why they think exporting and/or printing are essential, and thus putting off their friends from trying RW. Their friends might well not actually need export/printing since RW probably provides everything that they'll need at the table.

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Definitely a possibility, and likely a probability in some cases. However, it could also be a simple matter of similar ways of thinking. That IS why most friends become friends in the first place, right?

There are plenty of GMs who've been doing it a particular way for 20+ years. Heck, I've been GMing for 39 years now! Yikes! And it's not always easy to shift to a new paradigm. Why change things when it's working fine?

The reality is that gamers like me represent the past, and the younger generation is the future. In a world of tablets and phones that possess more computing power than desktop PCs had a few years ago, not to mention an effort to avoid cutting down even more trees, electronic distribution is steadily becoming the standard. Many will argue that it already HAS become the standard - just ask the folks at Barnes & Noble. And the shift is only going to accelerate in the years ahead.

The vision for Realm Works was always a purely electronic concept. A meaningful number of users asked for printing, so we put it on the todo list, and I wholly understand those folks. There are members in my gaming group (old like me) that are very grudgingly embracing digital. The biggest luddite in my group is finally coming around because his KIDS are pushing him. Like I said, the future...

Anyways, the bottom line is that printing is something that we can't drop other things to add. We've investigated various options for printing, and we've mapped out one that we believe can be implemented this coming year without a huge amount of work. That will hopefully make my "old school" brethren happy while still keeping us firmly on track for the future.

So, I am a Johnny come lately to the "let me print/export" side of the fence. I don't have any desire to rehash that debate here, but did want to take a moment and add my perspective (one I have not seen on the forums too much). My main reason fro wanting this feature is for guaranteed access to my data. Since the major update I have lost all access to my realms 3 times. One of them was very short and one was (to me) quite long. I depend on that data to run games and want to be able to have some way of accessing the data if my RW is down. LWD has always been great about getting my issues sorted out, but it does sometimes take a little while.

I 100% agree with Rob's comments about the future being digital. I haven't bought a paper book in years. Even for gaming I now prefer the .pdf and get miffed at companies (looking at you Wizards of the Coast) that don't sell stuff in that format. At first I didn't care one iota about this feature, but the experiences I mentioned have swayed me a bit.

rob said:

Definitely a possibility, and likely a probability in some cases. However, it could also be a simple matter of similar ways of thinking. That IS why most friends become friends in the first place, right?

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I don't intend to turn this into a "OMG WANT PRINT!!!1!!1!1!" thread, but as this point was raised, I just wanted to post my experience with it. I'll shut up after this post.

When someone asks my opinion about software, I try to be as honest and fair as I can about strengths and weaknesses. The obvious template for that is "This software does a great job with feature x, feature y and feature z. Not so great with this other feature, but it can do it, sort of." Then I'll let the other person make their own judgments for what they want. They know better than I do which features are important to them, and if their judgments or needs are different than mine, well that's their business.

And I often will get responses, when I tell people about shortcomings, of "well that feature isn't important to me." or "that's no big deal" or "well, that would be nice, but I can do without that."

With Realm Works, I never say, "OMG, it sucks because you can't print!" I mention all its great features, then mention "but you can't print". Most people have crossed it off their list for that reason alone.

The few people who've gotten past that have turned it down for the price (these people have been unemployed or otherwise on a limited budget and are looking for something cheap or free to begin with).

I do agree not being able to print is a pain in the keester.
Mostly due to having no reasonable way to provide a text hand-out to folks.
This would be fixed with the forthcoming web-view if sync was more seamless, but it's not.
So it will continue to be a strong wish item for me.

Back to the topic of the thread...

When I started entering the Skulls and Shackles adventure path during beta, I fully intended to use Combat Manager to run the combats. When I raised a question to the developer of Combat Manager, a future release of that tool even provided the ability to load just the monsters for the encounter; and a way to delete the monsters - functions essential to work alongside RW.

However, a year or so later when I actually started running the campaign, HL had been updated to the point where we could import the encounter portfolio easily into the currently loaded portfolio - and the little suggestion for a "delete all monsters" option also greatly speeded up encounter management.

I've been running the adventure path for 6 or so months now, and I saw very early on that just copying text verbatim from PDFs doesn't work very well for running during the game, or for revealing snippets of information that the PCs have uncovered. This even applies to topic titles, which I'm renaming as I go along, so as not to give additional clues to the players as to the meta-plot(s).

Farling said:

This even applies to topic titles, which I'm renaming as I go along, so as not to give additional clues to the players as to the meta-plot(s).

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Yes, I found I had to do that, too, in my Call of Cthulhu campaign. At least one of the topic titles would have given the whole plot away.

I'm a bit of a "by the seat of my pants" GM: unless I'm running a published adventure, I'm making it up as I go along.

When I first got RW, I spent a long time inputting the things I thought I'd need (and most of it I did!), and prepping my plotlines, and it was great... right up until my players went off-script and I had to improvise.

Right now, my use of RW is mostly as a GM notepad, I can quickly create the topics I need (usually people and places), and then add detail after the session. I have some vague plotlines planned out, but not as detailed as my first set of work. I'm literally building the database as we play, and it works wonderfully for me, because I can bring up information for my players very quickly and easily.

Shame today's New Year's Eve, otherwise I'd spend it adding things. Or drawing maps (yay for new hobbies - fantasy cartography). Or working on a spreadsheet. Or playing games.

I thought I would post an image of our Shadowrun realm as a point of reference.
Unfortunately all the action is in the nested folders on the left side of the interface that are all closed in this picture (opening them would ensure almost nothing fits in the image as there are SOOOOOO many items).

I created custom categories for the Shadowrun Characters and Scenes to ensure they hew more closely to the original source material and to maintain consistency across sources.

A lot of the bulk background content is copy-pasted from Srun sourcebooks on the various areas.

The missions themselves are either self-authored or adapted from commercial Srun missions with the details filled out with images and floor plan culled from the google.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zci9r53afb7hynl/realmworks_shadowrun.png?dl=0

adzling said:

Unfortunately all the action is in the nested folders on the left side of the interface that are all closed in this picture (opening them would ensure almost nothing fits in the image as there are SOOOOOO many items).

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Take screenshots and edit them down and/or post multiple images. If you need an image editor, I recommend paint.net.

Also, you can use Dropbox with the IMG tag, but you need to remove any query string in the URL (the question mark and text after it, normally "?dl=0" for Dropbox public links) and use "?raw=1" instead. Like so:



(Ow! Too huge! Breaks out of the forum layout! Sorry about that. Remember when posting pictures that the most common screen resolution is 1366x768, and the forum layout takes up ~200 pixels of that width.)

I still think you're better off with attachments, though. No need to worry about storage.

We now return you to the actual topic of the thread. :)

thanks for the tips Parody!

I realised why using a separate snippet for each paragraph is a good idea (aside from everything else, way fewer formatting hassles!)

here's another image post nicely illustrating why having all those items in the left column always show up expanded, without the ability for realmworks to save folder states is such a nightmare of U.I. design.