A question or two about things and relationships

[glassboy]

Hi there, I'm a little bit confused by the relationships.

If I create a thing - let's say the Necromonicon it should have a relationship to its creator. It doesn't belong to its creator and the simple relationship doesn't seem to have the right qualifiers.

I can then have a place, let's say the British Museum, and it can have a "belongs to or within" relationship with the Necromonicon. Which seems simple enough, and reflects that the BM may have a copy.

Then I want to create piece of information\knowledge and other things like rituals and link them back to the Necromonicon. Which I haven't quite sussed.

Then say Friedrich von Junzt’s Nameless Cults. Is an arbitrary relationship between Nameless Cults the most appropriate as describing it as a derivative work?

Perhaps I seem a bit pedantic but I spend a lot of time modelling in UML.

[Silveras]

UML may be overkill for this.

You have more options than the relationships. RealmWorks offers several ways to establish links between things. I find relationships most useful for reflecting less obvious connections... and containment useful for more obvious ones. Sometimes, both are desirable.

For example.. if each ritual is its own topic, you can use the book as the Containing Topic. Then each Ritual will appear in the Book's entry as "Governed Topics", and the Book will appear in the Ritual entries as the Container.

For another... a Snippet in the Book entry can list the names of the rituals.. which will then be auto-linked by the software. The link will appear in each Ritual entry as an "inbound" link, so you can navigate back.

As a rule, I find containment useful for "tangible", simple, and direct connections.. like location, or membership in a group.. and the Relationships useful for more complicated or less tangible ones (family ties, ownership, rank hierarchies, etc.).

Hope that helps.

[glassboy]

I'll have a play with using a book as a container of rituals. That should handle the many to many relationship between books and rituals. I'm yet to come to grips with snippets.

I think that RW does need a specific qualifier for creator tho'.

[Silveras]

Your usage sounds like it may be fairly specific to the game (Call of Cthulhu, I take it?) you're working with.

[Bidmaron]

Relationships aren't limited, right? I ask that because, in the example cited, it seems to me that the 'container' is the British Museum (the book is in it), and the rituals (it seems) derive from the book. It would seem you MUST have a derivation relationship. Jabel was born in Anzibar; that's a derivative relationship. Jabel lives in Jacaba; that's a containing relationship (although there may be several other levels -- town, district, street, house). This kind of relationship is so common as to warrant its own kind.
What would really be nice is to be able to attach keywords or qualifiers to the database relationship. Thus if we were to put movies into RW (this is just a real-world example of course), each movie would be linked to its genre (a KIND relationship); optionally its tradition (e.g. Orwellian); its Director, producers, screenwriter, and major talent (CREATOR relationships); its locale(s) (a PLACE relationship; its shooting locations (PLACE relationships).... You get the idea.

I suppose these could be handled by data fields, as long as they are filterable/sortable (show me all the NPCs born in Brazil).

[rob]

@Bidmaron: There are a LOT of different ways to slice and dice things within Realm Works. The following are all ways of organizing information:

• Grouping related topics via the same category, which also gives them the same structure
• Assign tags to content, which allowing fast and easy filtering/searching
• Using containment to specify a physical ownership between two topics (e.g. city of Paris is in the country France) - note that a given topic can only have one physical container
• Embedded links within the content of topics that are automatically detected to make all the interconnections easy to follow
• Explicit relationships between two pieces of content that allow for any type of logical (or physical) connection, whether it be family, belonging, membership, attitudes, or whatever else you can think of

Let's look at some examples now:

• Jabel was born in Anzibar - that's probably just handled as an embedded link, since a birthplace of an NPC is often not of pivotal important to an RPG, but you could easily establish a formal relationship, or you could simply assign Jabel an Anzibar tag
• Jabel lives in Jacaba - as above, any of those three options could be used, although a formal relationship is probably less useful due to the often transient nature of where someone lives
• Movies and genres/traditions - these are probably best handled as tags, since the genres are generally a fixed list and basically understood
• Movies and directors/screenwriters/etc - these can either be handled as simple embedded links or as formal relationships, with the key deciding factor probably being whether you (a) want to view diagrams derived from these relationships and/or (b) want to selectively reveal the relationships to the players through the course of play
• Containment is primarily intended for physical ownership, such as geographical relationships (tavern to the town it resides within, city to the country it resides within, etc.)

Hope this helps!