New to RW - Not getting how to use storyboard

[Ceodryn]

Thank you all, that has been extremely useful as well as the videos from Josh Plunkett.

I have setup my scenes as described above, and while I have not set up a storyboard to help me navigate, I just I got the idea from one of the video.

What I am now puzzled about is statbocks/running encounters: I don’t have herolab since I am using real works to run wfrp4 d100, therefore my statblocks are in RW as their integrated word processing. Currently, I have setup my entire encounter participants in there, which works but it means I can’t reuse easily those monsters for later.

I’d like to setup monsters in realmwork, and say have one entry for a gobelin. However, then, when I run an encounter and say I have 5 Gobelins, there doesn’t seem to be a way to quickly duplicate statblocks or open them 5 times... basically what I am trying to get at is how do I use RW for efficiently planning encounters with re-usable monster blocks versus specific to that encounter? How do I somehow recreate in a dirty way the ease of use of HeroLab encounter planning?

[kbs666]

This is pretty easy but does require some copying and pasting.

Create an article on the mechanics side for each monster, under Dangers->Creatures with the statblocks. Then when you build your encounters simply copy the statblocks you need into the encounters.

[MNBlockHead]

Originally Posted by Ceodryn

Thank you all, that has been extremely useful as well as the videos from Josh Plunkett.

I have setup my scenes as described above, and while I have not set up a storyboard to help me navigate, I just I got the idea from one of the video.

What I am now puzzled about is statbocks/running encounters: I don’t have herolab since I am using real works to run wfrp4 d100, therefore my statblocks are in RW as their integrated word processing. Currently, I have setup my entire encounter participants in there, which works but it means I can’t reuse easily those monsters for later.

I’d like to setup monsters in realmwork, and say have one entry for a gobelin. However, then, when I run an encounter and say I have 5 Gobelins, there doesn’t seem to be a way to quickly duplicate statblocks or open them 5 times... basically what I am trying to get at is how do I use RW for efficiently planning encounters with re-usable monster blocks versus specific to that encounter? How do I somehow recreate in a dirty way the ease of use of HeroLab encounter planning?

Before HL had the community content for 5e, I used a text-expander/universal-macro program called Phrase Express to create a formatted stat block.

So, in RW, I would just type "statblock" in the snippet where I wanted the statblock and it would creat a nicely formatted statblock table. I would just edit the numbers and type the ability descriptions. It saved A LOT of time and looked nice. I played around with having it prompt me to enter info before creating it so that I wouldn't have to edit, but found that to be less convenient.

There are other programs that do this, ActiveWords comes to mind.

I have some old threads where I go into a LOT more detail on this. Search for "PhraseExpress"

Once HL had 5e content, I stopped putting statblocks into RW. Much easier to include a HL snippet instead.

[MNBlockHead]

Originally Posted by Dark Lord Galen

Personally, I find the storyboard woefully underpowered and archaic. Even 1997 visio was better than it is....If it were not for the autolink feature it would be DOA.

I'm all for giving people more features, but there are so many things that should take development priority.

The story map is very basic, but it is functional, and I find it to be very useful.

If they ever do add to the functionality of the story map, I hope the formatting options are easy to ignore and they that they first focus on making it easier to navigate when editing.

I do a lot of business-process modeling for my work and I hate Visio. Switching to IBM Blueworks was one of the best things I've done to improve my productivity.

Visio is very fiddly and cumbersome. It feels like a graphic-design program. Blueworks is smooth as butter. It makes it simple to create standard-compliant BPM documentation. But it doesn't give you a lot of options.

I realize that Visio is used for far more use cases than BPM. That's my point. Visio is a kitchen sink program. It isn't really the best for any of its use cases but it provides an adequate solution for a great many use cases.

I would rather the RW storyboard be more like Blueworks than Visio.

[kbs666]

There are many things that would be nice to have in the storyboard but the only major annoyance, for me, is the lack of bidirectional arrows, That single things causes a great deal of graphical clutter is so many of my adventures.

[Dark Lord Galen]

Originally Posted by MNBlockHead

Visio is very fiddly and cumbersome............

I would rather the RW storyboard be more like Blueworks than Visio.

Oh I agree on both assessments.. just most of the general public doesn't know about Blueworks and are more familiar with the attached microsoft products such as Visio...

For years Wordperfect, Harvard Graphics, and Lotus123 were far superior even after the "coming out party" of Microsoft office in the day.. but the "total package concept" put all of those basicly in the ground.

Again was making reference to what most of the community is probably familiar with.