Senior Member
Join Date: Mar 2013
Location: Greater London, UK
Posts: 2,623
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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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#21 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Jan 2013
Location: Rochester, MN
Posts: 1,516
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Hopefully, though, it helps to share our experiences talking with others about the product. Last edited by Parody; December 29th, 2015 at 05:40 AM. |
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#22 |
Senior Member
Lone Wolf Staff
Join Date: May 2005
Posts: 8,232
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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. |
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#23 |
Senior Member
Join Date: May 2007
Location: Louisville, Ky
Posts: 330
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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. |
#24 |
Senior Member
Join Date: May 2013
Posts: 1,458
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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). |
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#25 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Apr 2015
Posts: 343
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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. |
#26 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Mar 2013
Location: Greater London, UK
Posts: 2,623
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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). |
#27 |
Senior Member
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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.
-- Lexin GM from Gwynedd, Wales - seriously old school - playing RPGs since 1980! Tools: Realm Works, HeroLab, Campaign Cartographer 3+ |
#28 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Aug 2012
Posts: 432
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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. Chief Calendar Champion Chemlak Join the unofficial Realm Works IRC channel! Join #realm-works |
#29 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Apr 2015
Posts: 343
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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/zci9r53afb...owrun.png?dl=0 Last edited by adzling; December 31st, 2015 at 12:47 PM. |
#30 |
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