Realm Works and Hero Labs - GM Tour

[Barwickian]

Originally Posted by Dhrakken

You know, after watching your videos; what really struck me is how much time it must have taken you to enter all that data. I'm not going to lie, as a new user that is barely scratching the surface, the task ahead of me feels truly daunting.

Hurry up content market and take my money already!

While I share your desire for the content market, it's mainly so I can get a damned good look at how others have organised their content.

Like daplunk I have a huge amount of information in my various realms. All I can say is that it's much easier if you have PDFs to cut and paste from. You quickly learn keyboard shortcuts to ease the process, and the very act of going through information, cutting and pasting it, doing little bits of reorganisation in Realm Works, actually serves as prep time - you remember a lot of it.

Some of the pain is in working out how you're actually going to organise the content. That you really learn by doing - I scarcely touch the plot and relationships windows, for instance, preferring a slightly more traditional structure of storylines combined with containers for places, people and things - the hyperlinks tie everything together.

Since I'm more interested in setting and background, and since my players know the rules system pretty well, I've concentrated more on getting setting details into RW than game mechanics.

It *can* be a pain. It is, after all, a form of data entry. There are times I don't want to do it, and times I enjoy it. So long as I keep a couple of steps ahead of the players, I can happily go off and play a computer game instead of prepping.

Initially, getting in the background information took a few weeks of solitary effort. Since then, I've just kept adding to the plot information as necessary. I try to keep a few sessions ahead of the players.

For example, my players have just reached the Graul Farm in Rise of the Runelords - I've got that and Fort Rannick already in Realm Works, and once I stop typing here I'll add some more plot entries from the rest of the Hook Mountain Massacre. I doubt I'll get that chapter finished this evening, but you never know. You get quicker the more you do it.