Moving entries from Almanack to Mechanics

[Exmortis]

Originally Posted by Aaron

Undead aren't people? That's vitalist!

No that's racist dude! (sounding like our favorite Big Bang character)

[Lexin]

Originally Posted by Aaron

Undead aren't people? That's vitalist!

No, it's not!

Obviously some undead are people, like liches and vampires. Not so sure about undead you can't converse with like skeletons and zombies. In AD&D terms, it's probably the number of hit dice they have.

Vitalist indeed! I have plenty of vitailty, despite my advanced age!

[AEIOU]

Corporations often act like the undead. So therefore, undead are people.

[Vargr]

Lol!!

[Aaron]

Originally Posted by AEIOU

Corporations often act like the undead. So therefore, undead are people.

If you're applying the transitive property:

Corporations = People
Corporations act like Undead = Undead

Therefore:
People = Undead

You'd also have to incorporate every undead being in existance, as well as all living mortals who have every participated in a Zombie run or dressed up as dracula for Halloween.

I'll leave the paperwork on your desk, have fun!

[AEIOU]

@Aaron: Orcus would be proud to count you as a minion. You do him proud.

[meek75]

Originally Posted by rob

Assuming that you are using a pre-defined category, try the following...

1. Go into the Category Manager and create a new category called Transfer (or some such).
2. Make sure the category only has a single section type with the same name as the first section of the current category your monsters are built from (e.g. Overview).
3. Convert each monster entry to the new Transfer category. There is an option to do within in the menu for each topic.
4. Go back into the Category Manager and designate the "Transfer" category as an Article category instead of Story.
5. At this point, all your creatures will appear as articles instead.
6. Convert each monster entry to the desired article category using the same method you used in step 3.
7. Once all the monsters are migrated, delete the no longer necessary "Transfer" category.

Please note that I haven't actually tried this, but I'm pretty darn sure this technique will work. Just in case, try it for only one monster first.

OK, so I want to do this in reverse. I have a monster called "Cloud Giant". I want to create an NPC Cloud Giant and just change a few stats. I then want the NPC in the People Topic. So, I created a "transfer" custom article and moved a duplicate of the cloud giant entry to it. Then I tried to moved the "transfer" article into the "Topics" section. I keep getting an error that tells me I am not allowed to do this?

The error says:

Unable to move category. Topics may not contain Articles, and Articles may not contain topics. Moving this category would violate one or both of these rules . . .

So, what am I doing wrong? I am not sure about step #4 from Robs post. Is there a way to do that I'm missing?

[davidp]

Sounds like you have your duplicate Cloud Giant article contained under another article. Remove the container (edit the topic and clear the containing topic). Then go back and move the category.

[meek75]

Originally Posted by davidp

Sounds like you have your duplicate Cloud Giant article contained under another article. Remove the container (edit the topic and clear the containing topic). Then go back and move the category.

Thanks, that was indeed the problem. Also, just creating a "transfer" category wasn't sufficient. I needed to duplicate the original custom category or I lost a lot of formatting stuff. I ended up with a bunch of empty labels. Duplicating the original and re-naming it "transfer" worked though.

I would suggest:

1. We need a better way to do these sorts of things. I don't understand why articles and topics have to have such strict separations? I'm assuming there is a reason for the rule, but I do this sort of thing fairly often and this is a very cumbersome way to do what seems like something that should be a built in feature. Surely I'm not in the minority of DMs that find it advantages to copy a stat black and re-name it as an NPC rather than creating it from scratch?

2. The current method should be added to one of the manuals for easy reference.

Thanks for the quick reply David!

[Parody]

Originally Posted by meek75

We need a better way to do these sorts of things. I don't understand why articles and topics have to have such strict separations?

I never understood that either, as they are functionally identical. The only real difference between Almanacs and Mechanics is which Categories go where; it seems like it'd be simple to change the Simple Group for a Category appears and have all of its items appear in the new place. For individual items, though, their organizational unit is still a Category, and the way they've chosen to organize Categories is Almanac/Mechanic then Simple Grouping. Hmm...something to think about.

Originally Posted by meek75

Surely I'm not in the minority of DMs that find it advantages to copy a stat black and re-name it as an NPC rather than creating it from scratch?

Yes, a Stat Block. The intent was that you wouldn't enter stat blocks as a bunch of snippets in Realm Works; you'd use Hero Lab or Statblock snippets to store the game definition of a character/creature/etc. Those can be copied (or quickly recreated and altered, for external tools) to create an individual if the individual needs their own custom stats. (Plenty of NPCs in my adventures would have character and story bits but use a generic stat block to which I could just link.)