Spell and Monster Organization

[meek75]

OK,

I am in the process of building a DnD 5e realm. I am thinking about ways to organize spells and monsters. My issue is that I sort these categories differently depending on my purpose at the moment. For example, sometimes I want an alphabetical list of all spells and other times I want to see all only spells of a particular level. The same is true with monsters. Sometimes alphabetical is best and sometimes I want to see only certain challenge ratings. I see three options for doing this.

1- Use tags and then filter by spell level or CR when I need to do so. This is way makes a lot of sense and seems to be the intended way of doing it in RW. However, I find the filtering process to be a bit cumbersome and I use these filters very often.

2- Place the CR and level as a suffix and then sort by suffix when I want to do so. I think I am leaning towards this method.

3- Create groups and use the relationships feature. For example, all 2nd level spells would go in a group called "Level 2 Spells". When I want to see the spells of that level I open the group and use the content links.

Are there other options I'm missing? What solutions have you guys found most helpful? I'd love to here how others accomplish this.

[ruhar]

I would use 2 and maybe 3. If you know you'll be looking at one specific group a lot including 3 with 2 would be helpful. I don't know of other ways and would like to hear about them if there are.

[meek75]

So, I went with all three options. I put the level as a suffix, created groups for each spell level and created a "Member" relationship for each spell. I also created the alphabetical list. On question, is there a way to sot by suffix? I can sort by prefix, but can't seem to sort by suffix.

I attached a screen shot.

[ruhar]

Looks good. I'm curious why you have the individual snippets in Overview instead of one snippet.

[Acenoid]

Looks good, I will also update my realms and add such lists...

[meek75]

Originally Posted by ruhar

Looks good. I'm curious why you have the individual snippets in Overview instead of one snippet.

In order to let me filter by each tag I have them all entered as separate snippets. Putting them in a "Overview" section just made sense to me.

[ruhar]

Originally Posted by meek75

In order to let me filter by each tag I have them all entered as separate snippets. Putting them in a "Overview" section just made sense to me.

<CUT> This response was meant for a different discussion.

[Gord]

Originally Posted by meek75

So, I went with all three options. I put the level as a suffix, created groups for each spell level and created a "Member" relationship for each spell. I also created the alphabetical list. On question, is there a way to sot by suffix? I can sort by prefix, but can't seem to sort by suffix.

I attached a screen shot.

Very nice job with this. I liked the workaround with the spell level group with the (I assume) link to the alphabetical list. This approach would work well with creatures too. Tags for the levels would be another way around the problem but I find them somewhat time consuming to set up and then filter the data. (I know this is probably just me).

Since I am working on a 5th ed campaign too, I'm curious as to how easy you found it to enter all the data and import it quickly. I find it very time consuming even if I do have a source I can cut and paste from. Since I own all the books, this is particularly irritating to me.

[meek75]

Originally Posted by Gord

Very nice job with this. I liked the workaround with the spell level group with the (I assume) link to the alphabetical list. This approach would work well with creatures too. Tags for the levels would be another way around the problem but I find them somewhat time consuming to set up and then filter the data. (I know this is probably just me).

Since I am working on a 5th ed campaign too, I'm curious as to how easy you found it to enter all the data and import it quickly. I find it very time consuming even if I do have a source I can cut and paste from. Since I own all the books, this is particularly irritating to me.

Yes, it does take too much time, especially if you want to set up all the individual snippets. The fastest way is to simply cut and paste the whole block of text into a single snippet. That also looks fine if you take s moment to do some formatting, but then you don't have the tags. You can still go in and manually tag the entry though, if you find that easier. I like having the tags so I can use the filters if I so choose. If you want it to be prettier you can format a topic entry exactly as you want, with colors and formatting, and then duplicate the topic over and over. The draw back with doing that is losing the quick create feature (and I use quick create a lot).

[MNBlockHead]

Originally Posted by meek75

In order to let me filter by each tag I have them all entered as separate snippets. Putting them in a "Overview" section just made sense to me.

I did the same thing. The "overview" section of my spell articles are, for the most part, just tags. This allows me to slice and dice them in the filters easily.

ScreenClip.png

I just have all my spells under the spell category, appearing alphabetically. I like what you did with the lists, but to me it seems duplicative to the tags. Also, I rarely need to see just "2nd level" spells. Instead, I want 2nd-level cleric spells. Tags allow me to list them as I need them. I do agree, however, that it takes a little longer to build a filter than to just exand a list. But I already put so much time in entering the spells that creating relationships to multiple list articles is more extra work than I want to deal with—I'd rather spend a few more seconds running a tag filter when I need a specific grouping.

As for prefix and suffix, I don't use prefix. For suffix, I just put "Spell". I did that to help differentiate a spell article from other articles and topics with the same or similar names when creating autolinks.