Player Edition Content, Sync Required?

Hi all,

This might be something of a silly question, but I could not find the answer on the main realm works page, the FAQ, the Manual or from searching the forums.

If I am running a game, and my players are synced and have my realm open, do they see the changes;

1) Once I have saved.
2) Once I have saved and synced.
3) Once I have saved and synced and the players have then synced.
4) Other!

Which of the above is true?

JDH

Door #3.

During the actual game, we're assuming you're going to be using the Player View mechanism to instantly show information to the players. The use of Player Edition during the game is largely focused on enabling players to lookup information independently. Let me cite an example from one of our games...

The GM mentions something that triggers a memory a player had from many sessions ago. He just mentioned that we find some text in a language that looks vaguely familiar. The player remembers a placard in an ancient church that was written in an unknown language. This can play out two different ways.

Without Realm Works, the player stops the GM and recounts his memory of the sessions many months previous. That memory is vague and the GM isn't sure what the player is talking about. Which old church? What placard? After lots of back-and-forth discussion, he's finally pieced the cryptic fragments together and nailed down what the player is actually referring to. Now he spends 5 minutes flipping through his notes to find the details about an old ruined temple, then he reads through them to find out if there was an actual placard and, once that's done, determine what was actually on it. Finally, he informs the player that "no, it wasn't an old church, it was temple ruins, and it wasn't a placard you remembered, but there was writing beneath a statue and it was quite different from what you're seeing now." Almost 30 minutes after the player interrupts things with a potentially good idea, we find it was a wrong theory and resume the game.

With Realm Works, the player does a quick search for "church" and finds nothing that matches his memory. So he looks up the haunted forest where he remembers the church being to find good prospects therein. He sees old temple ruins that sound promising. The temple ruins match what the player remembers, so he dives into the details of that location and what we learned there. There's a few snippets about finding strange writing carved beneath a statue. Roughly two minutes after having the idea, the player stops the GM to inquire if the writing we saw beneath the statue in the temple ruins matches the language we see now. The GM instantly locates the temple by its name (given by the player), scans through his notes to refresh his memory, and says that the writing is in a very different language from what we see now. Two minutes of distraction for the player to independently pursue the idea and only one minute of interruption of the overall game to confirm or disprove a potentially good idea from the player. The flow and energy of the game are maintained.

I'm sure every player (let alone GM) can recount a dozen or more similar situations where having the revealed information from past game sessions quickly available for reference would save significant amounts of time and avoid unnecessary interruptions that derail the fun of the game. That's the focus of Player Edition from our perspective.

Hope this helps!

Thank you for the detailed run through of a real life situation! You clearly demonstrate some of the advantages of using Realm Works with a Player Edition.

As much as I would love an 'on the fly' updating Player Edition, the practicality is probably quite poor correct? It would presumably have to involve both GM and Players running off a single cloud based database, with live information being read each time a new article is selected.

In a VTT setting, using Roll20, Player View is a little more troublesome. Is there an easier way to do this than Skype screen sharing? That's the only method I am currently aware of.

Even with two monitors I would rather not give one up to the purpose!

I am not familier with roll20, but by their very nature a VTT is to share the game map or table. They shoudl be able to connect to your VTT instance and get their players view.

I use D20 Pro, When I run it in GM mode I am the game, players use the "player" veriosn to connect to my game, once setup they see exactyl what their player sees as I unvii the fog of view.

You should not need to use another sharing program if you use a VTT. Now they do usually require licenses, I have 6 guest licenses attached to my D20 pro GM license, so 6 guests can connect to my game with out them owning a player license.

You are correct, everything I need is in Roll20 and there is no requirement to use Player View.

The only disadvantage is it means duplicating a lot of content over into Roll20, such as all character portraits and so forth.

So the option for me really is, do I want to 'lose' a monitor while playing, or spend a lot of time adding duplicate content!

My players using the player edition can't find the sync button in realms works...they have to exit to the realms loader and sync from there. Is there an easier way, or is that the only one?

You can only sync in the Launcher.

zazaodh said:

In a VTT setting, using Roll20, Player View is a little more troublesome. Is there an easier way to do this than Skype screen sharing? That's the only method I am currently aware of.

Even with two monitors I would rather not give one up to the purpose!

Click to expand...

My gaming group does not use a VTT, so I'm not familiar with all the particulars of what you're striving to do. You'll likely need to explain things to me a bit so that I can fully understand and best answer your questions here. But I'll take a stab based on what I'm guessing might be going on.

1. Is it possible to use the same screen for both Player View and the VTT? You should be able to designate a particular monitor as the target for Player View, but then you don't have to show stuff on it continuously. You can toggle Player View on and off very easily, allowing you to switch back and forth between the VTT and Player View.

2. Since Player View simply needs a display to point to, you could utilize a tablet for showing Player View. I can't remember the names of the various tools, but there are a number of options on both iPad and Android tablets. Basically, you setup the tablet as a separate, virtual display connected to your computer. Then you simply point Player View to that display. Now the players can view Player View content on the tablet and pass it around.

I just realized that you might be running your game remotely. If so, #2 won't be viable. But I'm not sure of your actual "use case" based on your posts here thus far. Please give me some more concrete info if the above ideas won't work for you.

rob said:

I just realized that you might be running your game remotely. If so, #2 won't be viable. But I'm not sure of your actual "use case" based on your posts here thus far. Please give me some more concrete info if the above ideas won't work for you.

Click to expand...

I believe option #2 in conjunction with screen sharing software such as Skype, Google Hangouts, or join.me, could be used to allow remote viewing of the virtual display.

Since I ran into the same troubles, here my thoughts to this, hope it helps a little and doesn't make things too confusing.

1. On roll20:
One of the things that make roll20 different from other VTTs is the fact that it's completely run on a remote server.

- In a "normal" VTT the GM runs a Server-Version (or host license or something like that) of the VTT on his own Computer while the players run the player (or guest/client) version on theirs. The players have to connect directly to the GMs computer (kind of a peer to peer thing) with all the possible technical drawbacks like misconfigured routers, ports someone forgot to open and so on.
- In roll20 everything is run on a Webserver. So everybody (including the GM) is connecting to a WebSite using his/her Browser.

While this has some big advantages (one of them that no one has to buy/download/install/keep-up-to-date any software) there are as well some things that make it a little more complicated.
e.g. you have to manually upload everything and sort it into roll20 in order to show it to your players. Especially on a slow internet-connection this may take a while and may interrupt the flow of the game if you didn't do it beforehand. And even if you do it in advance it's still some double work if you're using RW as well.
On the other hand if you already have all the content uploaded and organised then it's quite easy to just show it to the players and your Internet-connection-speed is no factor at all (which is great for people like me who have to live on a relatively slow Internet-connection).

2. On running games online:
I'm running my "Rise of the Runelords"-Campaign on roll20 (just started not far through the story yet), and though i really like roll20 I start realising that its a great VTT, but not so great for storytelling. Especially when it comes to things like managing a lot of Information things start to get a little (for my taste too) complex.
This of course is where RW really shines. I would love to use it more for my online-game, but up to now it's mostly been a tool for the GM only. So up to now i keep track of everything in RW and use another tool (namely roll20) for showing stuff to the players.

This could change with the Player Edition, which is already great for in-between-session issues and some things like rob explained above. The only thing i'm missing is the player-view functionality being more usable for online-gamers like me.

In an online Game (by which i mean a remote online game so no face-to-face at all) things already got a lot of virtualization. You have to get all the stuff that's intended for the players into your computer at some point, otherwise it's not gonna work at all since you need the computer to show the stuff to your players. (Since i can only play online I didn't buy the Pathfinder Print-Books but the PDF-Versions of them which makes it much easier to get the artwork, Handouts and so on into the computer for further use).

In an Online-Game Scenario everything is virtual allready and has to be virtual. That means the usage of a computer in an online-game is different from its usage in a face-to-face session. While it's a quite handy and convenient tool and addition to a face-to-face game it's completely vital to an online-game.
This as well means in a face-to-face session you can make good use of an additional display because everybody can use it by just looking at it.
In an online-game nobody but you can make use of that additional screen.

And thats why this "#2 option" davidp pointed out is quite cumbersome to use in an online-game, because
- You have to Install additional software to use a tablet as a second (or additional) screen.
- That screen is connected via WiFi (which makes it a little slow sometimes).

So if you use this option #2 in remote-play you have a lot of hassle
- setting up everything
- having your tablet running uselessly during game sessions
- having to have a tablet in the first place!
only to artificially create a virtual display on an physically existing device in order to project (share) the contents of this display back into a virtual playing room (using Skype or something similar). - Wow, what a roundtrip

So what we actually need is the online-gaming equivalent of an additional Display. And thats nothing more than a separate Window.
Since Skype can share single windows instead of a whole screen as well a window with the player view in it would IMHO already solve the problem. You just share this window to your players and everything is fine. They can move it wherever they want, make it fullscreen, display it on an additional screen (if they have one), and so on. How they use it you can't control, but you never can in an online-game anyway.
But you as a GM can just move the window out of view, minimise it or whatever and continue work as if you had an additional screen with player view on it facing to your players in a face-to-face setting.

So if possible please give us the option to display player view not only in fullscreen and on another Display, but also in a separate Window (which is something i allready suggested somewhere on another thread – I think, it was in the features request section).

IMHO this in combination with software like Skype would be kind of a killer feature for online-gamers. With this you could use RW for both online-game-sessions as well as face-to-face sessions in almost the same way. And as a benefit it would save the online-GM a lot of work and time putting information into roll20 or other VTTs, because you could use roll20 for the battle maps (what it's really made for) and leave the information management and the storytelling part to RW (things it really is superior at).

Hope my explanation wasn't too confusing.
Best regards
Daniel

DWeiers said:

So if possible please give us the option to display player view not only in fullscreen and on another Display, but also in a separate Window (which is something i allready suggested somewhere on another thread – I think, it was in the features request section).

Click to expand...

If I'm understanding you correctly, I think this is already possible, although the window has to be full-screen in size. Here are the steps that I think will achieve what you want...

1. Enter Player View
2. Shown the Player View Window via the button in the upper right region.
3. Use <alt+tab> to switch to Realm Works while leaving the Player View Window open and visible.
4. Click the button just to the right of the "Show/hide Player View" toggle that moves the Player View Window to behind all other windows.
5. Tell Skype to share a window and select the Player View Window that is now behind everything else.
6. Control what is shown within the Player View Window normally. It all gets shared over Skype, but it's behind everything else, so it's not competing with Roll20 for display control.

The only limitations of this approach are:

a. You have to run it in full-screen mode (which could be the smaller of your two monitors).
b. The Player View Window has to remain visible at all times, so it will be visible behind any other windows shown on the same display (but you could maximize the Roll20 window on top of it and never see it bleed through).

Please confirm whether this provides a workable solution for you, as I'm sure there are others who could leverage this if so.

If the above approach doesn't work, here's a link to an inexpensive tool that sounds like it might do the trick...
http://www.ishadow.com/vdm/?doing_wp_cron=1416564120.9835669994354248046875

Hi rob,
thank you for your (as always) quick response.

I just tried it out and it indeed looks promising. I don't know why i didn't figure it out myself (maybe it's because it all runs in a virtual machine on my mac, which of course makes it all one step more complex than for most others). Just right know i have no one online in Skype to test it out, but as soon as there is someone i'll give it a try and will report back here how things worked out.
That link of yours is actually a website i was reading already, but it looks like thats not exactly whats needed. If i got it right then the application they offer can divide your screen in several virtual displays. While it should work with that, you will loose quite a lot of screen real estate.
I think the solution with the window is better, because you can just move the window to the back (behind all other windows) and use your full screen size for something else.
After all you (as the GM) are not interested in what is displayed in the player view windows, because you already manage it via RW (and do not need to see it twice).

Ill test this out and report back here how it works out.

Thanks a lot so far
best regards
Daniel

Had some test-runs with your solution rob.

Well it works, kind off. You actually can select the player view window and share it via Skype, but for some reason my Skype on windows doesn't stick with the assigned window (meaning, its switching windows as soon as i give focus to another window, thus rendering it useless).
If i use Skype for mac to share the player-view-window (which is from my virtual windows machine) then it sticks to the assigned player view window, but i have to give focus to the player view in order to update what the players see (otherwise it stays the same the whole time until i shortly switch to the player view window which results in an instant refresh on the players side).

So the technique you describe is actually working, but the result is still far from being perfect (at least in my setting). Of course one has to keep in mind that this is not the exact user-scenario which player view was made for in the first place. Additionally there might be some issues on my side, because everything here is running in a VM (which complicates things even more) and on an old version of windows (XP SP3).

For me personally it's still too "ugly" in terms of player-experience and usage. So for the time i'll stay with what I'm using right now:
i.e. RW as a powerful GMs backend solution and Storytelling support and roll20 as the presentation tool for the players. And, of course, RW-Player-Edition as another enhanced Informationbase for my players (if I get them to adopt it, some of them are not too tech-savvy).
But since everyone has different needs, ideas and goals I definitely recommend to just give it a try. Its not hard to set up (it's exactly the way rob described), and maybe it's working good enough for others (especially on less complicated configurations than mine where it might run better).

Hope this helps
Daniel

DWeiers Keep us abreast of how this all turns out as they add features, though my current gaming group is face to face, I have been in contact with my old group, which would be playing just like you, virtual only using D20 Pro , RW and Teamspeak; essentially exactly the way you run.

I would be very interested in undertstnding how you over come and work within this gaming evironment.

One advanatge I have I pay for a static IP, so connecting to me for D20 Pro is not hard, sae as every game we all play that I host.

Rob,
I just purchased a Player account (already own a GM account via kickstarter) only to find out it doesn't do me much good.

Similar to what the others want to do for "Online" games, we use a virtual table top for our weekly face to face game (6 players around a table with a 50" TV embedded). The GM controls the VTT (maptool) via Laptop. The TV has it's own dedicated PC. Additionally I planned on running Realm Works on a 2nd laptop (Surface Pro 3).

I was hoping to run the player view on the TV so that "During the game session", I could "reveal" NPC's, places, magic items, etc and the players could in real-time view said items, portraits, etc.

There's no convenient way to share the "player view" from the GM client to an another PC. I'm hoping this isn't set in stone and you could take a look at some options to help us VTT users?

I experimented with one possible approach to sharing the Player View screen with other computers over the network. I did this without extra hardware or buying any additional software, just using Windows 7 along with free software/services.

I ran Realm Works on my laptop. My laptop supports hooking up external monitors, but I didn't have any hooked up. I right-clicked on my desktop background and selected "Screen Resolution" to get to the control panel. There is a "Detect" button. I clicked that. It said "Another display not detected". I clicked on this and it showed a drop-down for "Multiple Displays" with "No display detected". Other options in the drop down are "Try to connect anyway on: VGA" (repeated three times). I selected one of these and clicked apply. I then was able to extend my display to that second screen and set up the resolution.

Next, I started Realm Works and showed player view. I could then select that second screen. I used the free service join.me to share that second screen with my other computer in a web browser over the network and it kept it live as I made changes.

So this might be an option for some people to accomplish what you want and you may have all of the tools available to do this right now.

davidp said:

I experimented with one possible approach to sharing the Player View screen with other computers over the network. I did this without extra hardware or buying any additional software, just using Windows 7 along with free software/services.

I ran Realm Works on my laptop. My laptop supports hooking up external monitors, but I didn't have any hooked up. I right-clicked on my desktop background and selected "Screen Resolution" to get to the control panel. There is a "Detect" button. I clicked that. It said "Another display not detected". I clicked on this and it showed a drop-down for "Multiple Displays" with "No display detected". Other options in the drop down are "Try to connect anyway on: VGA" (repeated three times). I selected one of these and clicked apply. I then was able to extend my display to that second screen and set up the resolution.

Next, I started Realm Works and showed player view. I could then select that second screen. I used the free service join.me to share that second screen with my other computer in a web browser over the network and it kept it live as I made changes.

So this might be an option for some people to accomplish what you want and you may have all of the tools available to do this right now.

Click to expand...

Hmmm, that may be a workaround (until maybe we can get some realtime RW going). I'll have to see how much trouble it is to set up and how much I'll have to "redo" each session.

The realmworks definitely has to show as a window on the VTT (vs remote desktop), so will check out the join.me.

Note to Rob, I'm still hoping for more real-time integrations with HeroLab (with itself and RW). I'd be more willing to pay for "Cloud services" if that meant more real-time updates from GM to PC to GM integrations. I'd like to see my PC's AC/HP/XP realtime as conditions are applied and share info via RW realtime.

I know it's a small shop and willing to wait, but is this pie-in-the-sky (for-get-about-it) stuff or something that you are looking into eventually(tm)?

Exmortis said:

DWeiers Keep us abreast of how this all turns out as they add features, though my current gaming group is face to face, I have been in contact with my old group, which would be playing just like you, virtual only using D20 Pro , RW and Teamspeak; essentially exactly the way you run.

I would be very interested in undertstnding how you over come and work within this gaming evironment.

One advanatge I have I pay for a static IP, so connecting to me for D20 Pro is not hard, sae as every game we all play that I host.

Click to expand...

Well If you have a static IP that will make things somewhat easier. I’m from Germany and here most people have a dynamic IP because most ISPs here cut the line after 24h of usage (no big deal since you can immediately reconnect and most routers do it automatically somewhen in the middle of the night to prevent discos in the middle of something). But it leaves us with an IP that changes on a daily basis, therefore I rather went for Web-based services than self hosted ones. Thats one of the reasons why I use roll20, but of course that doesn’t make such a big difference.

Alright so this is my online-gaming setup right now:

-Roll20 for the VTT
I only use the VTT for BattleMaps, rolling dice, and some Handouts. Basically all the stuff that you would have on the game table or would need when running a battle or Encounter were miniatures would be involved in a face-to-face Game.

-Realtimeboard (www.realtimeboard.com) as a Player Infobase and visualisation tool.
I only recently discovered this service and have to admit that I (and my Players) love it. It’s like having a limitless, endless zoomable PinBoard (or magnetic whiteboard) in your gaming-Room where you and all the players can put notes on, draw arrows, scribble something down, move it around and so on. It supports pictures, Text, PDF-Files (Which everybody can read just from the board), I think even Videos (which I never used), Google-Docs and maybe even more. Everybody can make comments on everything (which everybody can answer to) and so on. The possibilities of this are almost endless, although there ist little to no automation. So you have to take care of everything for yourself (no automatic links or so), but the players can do this as well - any time they like, anywhere they are, during the game and outside of it.

-freeconferencecall as voicechat
we use the phone for voice chat, just because some of us don’t have proper headsets yet and we wanted to get rid of those echos. But we will move to something else soon (maybe Skype, maybe one of the voice chats implemented in roll20 or so.

-Hero Lab as Tool for character-Generation and Maintenance
Doesn’t need explanation, there simply is nothing better for that purpose. I usually „print out“ the Character-Sheets as PDF-files which I put on our „Whiteboard“ for better reference (Players and I can look up things quite quickly during game).

-RW as GM-Tool for Storytelling and Managing of the Campaign
Right now I only use it as a GM tool. I just haven’t had the time to adjust all my entries for proper „revealability“ if you know what I mean. For me as the GM its very helpful. At least for the things i already entered. It’s very good to use when you have your stuff in it, but getting it in definitely takes some time. I’m really looking for the content-market and hope that the Paizo stuff will get in it quickly. Until then I have to input the things manually, and right now I’m just not yet ready for showing my stuff to the players without risking to reveal more than I want because I did something wrong.

So although I’m very excited about Player Edition it will take a while before my players and I will be able to really make use of it as a player tool as well. One Problem here is that some of my players are not too tech savvy and another one is that they use different Computer-systems. Most of us (like me) are using Apple Computers and thus its not possible for them to run RW on their computers natively. As you might imagine it’s one thing to convince them to buy a software (well I would even buy it for them if they would use it) and use it but it’s another thing to make them install a virtualisation-software und run windows in it in order to be able to use that software. Especially if (at least from their point of view) everything is already working perfectly on web-based services that they
a) don’t have to pay for
and that
b) run on every System with a more or less up-to-date web browser.

Of course this solution I’m using right now is subject to change if there comes some more functionality to RW. The things most interesting for me are of course content market (if the „right“ stuff is in it) and Player-Web-Access (since my players would more likely accept another web-Service than a special software). So I’m very curious about whats to come next.

The extra work that has to be done by providing the players with Information is definitely more compared to a „single-software“ solution, but since the players can contribute to the work (for them its quite similar to taking notes) this is not too bad. At least right now.

So thats my situation right now (which, of course, is special to me and my players for – someone else it might look entirely different).

Hope this is helpful
Best regards
Daniel

P.S.: maybe we should consider to open up a new thread for Onine-gaming? Might get interesting to get the thoughts of other on this subject.