Is realmworks worth the buy right now?

[Astraithious]

Hello there I am a DM looking for a system to put my universe into and detail our adventures but also show players the information without revealing too much at a time.

So I have to ask with no player edition out right now can i show maps areas only they are supposed to see, information about the town, etc. I really like the look of this so far but I do notice there is no print option and I have no idea of what the session mode would do for me, thank you to anybody who replies

 

[BoomerET]

I really don't understand why people keep harping about the no-print option, really doesn't make any sense to me.

Now, if there was additional content available either first or third-party, then it might be an issue, but due to the fact that I'm typing everything in, don't I already have access to it to print if I wanted to.

All that aside, there is a player-view that you can toss onto a 2nd monitor should you choose to do that, and it works quite well. (You do use dual monitors when you play, right?)

BoomerET (Howler)

 

[AEIOU]

Even if RW never had a calendar, never came out with player access, never allowed sharing of content and never had another update, it would be worth it. That said, the devs have affirmed all of those are actively being worked on and I think some are in beta testing for pending release.

Printing and exporting material would certainly be useful but are not deal breakers. You can read through the forums and see that many of us harp on the little things; but overall, I'm willing to bet none of us would give it up now that we've seen what it can do. Being able to organize the game behind the scenes, automatically link places and people and things, identify who like who and to outline plotlines is simply invaluable.

 

[Parody]

Hello there I am a DM looking for a system to put my universe into and detail our adventures but also show players the information without revealing too much at a time.

So I have to ask with no player edition out right now can i show maps areas only they are supposed to see, information about the town, etc. I really like the look of this so far but I do notice there is no print option and I have no idea of what the session mode would do for me, thank you to anybody who replies

As BoomerET said, there's a Player View you can use. It is designed to be on a player-facing dedicated screen, so it might not work for you if you don't have a second screen for it. You can use it to reveal parts of maps and bits of information from your entries as you go; that all works. The Session mode remembers what changes while it's enabled, so the GM and players can review what happened last week (or whatever).

My recommendation is to only buy it if you like what you see so far and you'd like to learn more by working with it. You can enter your campaign(s), work with the Player View, and keep track of what happens in each session. If you mostly want to use it as a personal way to keep track of your campaign, it's right there for you.

Unfortunately, there's some major missing features (sharing, two of the three planned clients, game world calendars, printing/exporting, and a whole forum of others) that limit what you can do. I fully expect to see the major ones in time (the Player client is supposed to be out soon, for example) but right at this moment you might want to wait. It's your call.

Hope this helps.

 

[Parody]

I don't normally multi-post, but this floats off-topic so I kept them separate.

I really don't understand why people keep harping about the no-print option.... Now, if there was additional content available either first or third-party, then it might be an issue, but due to the fact that I'm typing everything in, don't I already have access to it to print if I wanted to.

Not if it's something you're creating; not everything comes from PDFs, you know! :) Also not if you're changing things, perhaps adapting a published adventure to fit your group/campaign/rules system and adding what's happened in your group's run of a published adventure to the realm.

(You do use dual monitors when you play, right?)

Not all of us are using multiple-monitor computers to run their campaigns. I don't even use a computer at the table, and at my current location there wouldn't be extra monitors available for Player View.

Maybe in my next campaign I will have integrated a computer and Realm Works for at the table use, but unless I set up a gaming space with it in mind I doubt I will be able to. Most of the places where I've run or played were kitchen tables or game rooms without extra electronic distractions.

The player/web client, though, will likely be used if I'm using Realm Works to create and track the campaign. That fits my usage better.

You can read through the forums and see that many of us harp on the little things; but overall, I'm willing to bet none of us would give it up now that we've seen what it can do.

If Realm Works was never going to have printing, exporting, or a way for players to see things on their own I'd uninstall it right now. Exporting alone is likely a deal-breaker for me, but we'll see. There are plenty of other ways to keep track of a campaign, like the physical notepads I've been using for years. :)

 

[monsterfurby]

I think it very much depends on how digital you want to get with the management of your campaign. As someone who does everything in a digital format and has done away with paper altogether (to the point where I do little video cutscenes in Sony Vegas for my players from time to time), I found the software to be a perfect fit.

If you use both analog and digital media, things may require some thinking through to save you some unnecessary work. Thinking about what you want on paper and what you want to save digitally definitely helps.

It should be noted, however, that LWD will implement printing and the ability for players to view the database via their browser or the player edition, making it at the very least a great off-session quest/world journal in addition to its obvious advantages for preparation.

 

[mirtos]

I don't normally multi-post, but this floats off-topic so I kept them separate.

Not if it's something you're creating; not everything comes from PDFs, you know! :) Also not if you're changing things, perhaps adapting a published adventure to fit your group/campaign/rules system and adding what's happened in your group's run of a published adventure to the realm.


Not all of us are using multiple-monitor computers to run their campaigns. I don't even use a computer at the table, and at my current location there wouldn't be extra monitors available for Player View.

Maybe in my next campaign I will have integrated a computer and Realm Works for at the table use, but unless I set up a gaming space with it in mind I doubt I will be able to. Most of the places where I've run or played were kitchen tables or game rooms without extra electronic distractions.

The player/web client, though, will likely be used if I'm using Realm Works to create and track the campaign. That fits my usage better.



If Realm Works was never going to have printing, exporting, or a way for players to see things on their own I'd uninstall it right now. Exporting alone is likely a deal-breaker for me, but we'll see. There are plenty of other ways to keep track of a campaign, like the physical notepads I've been using for years. :)

I have to agree. I love Realms Works, but if it were to stay in its current state, without printing/exporting ever, I'd probably cut my losses (and I'm backer that put in 500.00). Its defintiely useful as campaign management, and makes life easier, but right now im doing a lot of dual work. Im entering things into realms works, and also entering things into PDFs to be distributed at the table when needed. Im willing to do this temporarily, but for me, the ease of organization does not make up for the need to be able to export/print content. I play at a location without monitors, and I bring my laptop to take notes during the game, but none of my players do. They also dont want to, as they feel it distracts from the game. High quality printouts are very much appreciated by all the players I have ever played with. The tactile feel sometimes helps.

When the player account/web access comes out, that will enable my players to see offline the various things that have happened in game, but that still wont alleviate my need for printing. Its funny the reveal / character is important, but the player account is less so to me.

The reason some of us are "harping" about printing is that thats the style of game play we do. As said by others, if you run an all digital game, thats great, or your players will have access to electronics during the game, thats also great, but dont assume everyone does the same type of game style. It gets annoying that people on here assume that everyone runs games in the same way.

 

[Pollution]

Buying and using RW is the best decision I ever made as a GM.

Putting in a few hours a week before game to input the next sections (details, room descriptions, scenes, etc...) will make your game run much smoother, especially with an extra monitor/TV for the player view.

I've always been an ST for Vampire LARP games, but not often did I run tabletop. When I ran LARPS, I used grapevine, and all my thoughts, rumors, and plots were in there for use. For Pathfinder/SR4/5 I had trouble tracking everything in the story. Even with PDF's, One Note, and even some PowerPoint for various runs/stories.

With RW, I have ULTIMATE knowledge at my fingertips.

Example: Last week, we finished chapter 1 of RotRL. My players took out the BBEG, finished the final dungeon levels and found some stuff on the BBEG (amulet, books on Thassolonian Magic, etc..).

Now, I put in ALL the unique magic items in RW, and a writeup on T.Magic for my own use as quick reference. Thinking that they'd probably never see it. But, my party's cleric actually spoke Thassolonian, and rolled a nat 20 (with a +9 skill bonus) on T.Magic knowledge check from spellcraft. Erm... Wait...

Reveal T.Magic writeup, Reveal Amulet (another REALLY high roll for the Identify). Display on Player View.

While she read and took notes in her paper journal, I helped the Bard with some of the wands he found on that level. Oh, look at that, Bone Wand of Shield...What's shield do? Well, I linked it to the PRD. Click, and spell stats...

Once things settled down, and they decided on who got what from the incident, I opened the BBEG's portfolio from RW into Hero Labs (merged with the party). Clicked items>>Give to Hero>>Hero. Now the hero has the item he wanted, and it's already in the party's portfolio.

Searching a room, they find XXX items. Created a blank portfolio with JUST the items in the room. Merge with the party's from RW, and give to the party treasurer.

They ask about shops in town who deal with potions/alchemy. Click World Topics, Sandpoint tree, Sandpoint Merchants... Search for Potions. There's their list.

Dungeon crawling? Open the smart image of the map. reveal fog of world for each room, read pin for location, open location in new tab, description in italics, GM info under that, creatures, traps, secrets, treasure, it's all right there. They face any challenges, and display treasure on the player view as I import into HL.

In a paper book, I take about 30 seconds to 5 minutes to find stuff they want.

In RW, it takes 3 seconds at most.

Is it worth it? YES.

If you have a monitor/small TV you can move to your table, you don't need to print (I haven't found a need yet). Even if you just have a laptop, you can still use the player view for weird/detailed info (turn the screen).

is it a problem that the Player edition isn't out? No, not at all. Will it be AWESOME to have the web ui for that so they can go to www.pollutionsPFRotRLgame.com and look at everything they know, and contribute? YES, but not needed for this weekends game.

Pick up the software, spend a few hours getting used to it. Put in We be Goblins, or Carrion Hill, or some other 1 shot adventure to see how the software works, and find the best method for you.

You WILL NOT regret doing so.

 

[Pollution]

I have to agree. I love Realms Works, but if it were to stay in its current state, without printing/exporting ever, I'd probably cut my losses (and I'm backer that put in 500.00). Its defintiely useful as campaign management, and makes life easier, but right now im doing a lot of dual work. Im entering things into realms works, and also entering things into PDFs to be distributed at the table when needed. Im willing to do this temporarily, but for me, the ease of organization does not make up for the need to be able to export/print content. I play at a location without monitors, and I bring my laptop to take notes during the game, but none of my players do. They also dont want to, as they feel it distracts from the game. High quality printouts are very much appreciated by all the players I have ever played with. The tactile feel sometimes helps.

When the player account/web access comes out, that will enable my players to see offline the various things that have happened in game, but that still wont alleviate my need for printing. Its funny the reveal / character is important, but the player account is less so to me.

The reason some of us are "harping" about printing is that thats the style of game play we do. As said by others, if you run an all digital game, thats great, or your players will have access to electronics during the game, thats also great, but dont assume everyone does the same type of game style. It gets annoying that people on here assume that everyone runs games in the same way.

out of curiosity, you're printing handouts for the table, if they're handouts like you find in RotRL, or PFS, or Missions! why not just screenshot those handouts as a jpg, and load the pic into RW. Even if they're self created, you can still print to jpg, and import that.

If you're using a laptop at the table, you could always turn it around so they can see the handout, get up for a soda, come back, turn the laptop around again and Bob's your uncle. Otherwise, if you're not using a laptop at the table, I can see where you really need to be able to print.

I agree, many people want printing, and enough want it that it needs to be in the program. but there are ways around it. personally, I have zero need of dead tree tech at my table (laptop with RW + HL, Monitor for players, even all the books I bought from Paizo are on PDF on a Google drive which is shared with my players for their own reference). The only paper we use anymore is printed HL character sheets and journals for note taking (I take all my notes in RW now).

 

[Lexfire]

So far I have found RW a great tool as a DM. I am starting out slow - a crawl, walk, run approach with program. The campaign setting is Greyhawk so I am populating RW with details on Hommlet and the surrounding area.

I will start to test out the use of separate monitor for player visuals. The campaign is once a month so it provides enough time to add details.

 

[EightBitz]

I really don't understand why people keep harping about the no-print option, really doesn't make any sense to me.

Now, if there was additional content available either first or third-party, then it might be an issue, but due to the fact that I'm typing everything in, don't I already have access to it to print if I wanted to.

All that aside, there is a player-view that you can toss onto a 2nd monitor should you choose to do that, and it works quite well. (You do use dual monitors when you play, right?)

BoomerET (Howler)

Doesn't matter if you don't understand why. Those of us who want the print option do understand why we want it. And there are enough of us who want that LWD has put it on their list, so we will have it.

 

[EightBitz]

Hello there I am a DM looking for a system to put my universe into and detail our adventures but also show players the information without revealing too much at a time.

So I have to ask with no player edition out right now can i show maps areas only they are supposed to see, information about the town, etc. I really like the look of this so far but I do notice there is no print option and I have no idea of what the session mode would do for me, thank you to anybody who replies

I would say yes, it's worth buying right now. It's going to take some time to get to know it, then it's going to take some time to figure out how you want to structure your world, then it's going to take some time to do the data entry, during which you might discover better ways to do things and might want to go changing things around.

If you're planning to buy it anyway, you may as well get that whole process started sooner rather than later. Then when the features you want are ready, you'll be better prepared to use them.

 

[mirtos]

I would say yes, it's worth buying right now. It's going to take some time to get to know it, then it's going to take some time to figure out how you want to structure your world, then it's going to take some time to do the data entry, during which you might discover better ways to do things and might want to go changing things around.

If you're planning to buy it anyway, you may as well get that whole process started sooner rather than later. Then when the features you want are ready, you'll be better prepared to use them.

This I agree with. I was never suggesting that its not worth the buy.

 

[Mjprogue]

Yes, but...

If you think its something you WILL want when its complete....you're best bet is to start now. There is a pretty huge learning curve and you will likely sink a ton of time into inputting everything you want in there.

Waiting for the player stuff to buy the program means you won't be getting much practical use of it for awhile after that.

 

[phloog]

If I am using it the way I'd HOPED to use it when I first learned about it, then printing is important to me, because my plan was to write INTO it. I wanted to use it to manage relationships, and essentially act as the "Continuity" watchdog for my stuff. I had aspirations of potentially taking the more successful content and packaging it into a PDF for possible sale.

To answer the main question: clearly each person has their own view, and my view at this point is that it isn't at all worth it as-is. I have a bug that prevents syncing of all of my realms, which means that 1) that content is not portable, and more critically 2) I cannot trust that content will not be LOST.

I want to assume the best of all these great people who gave me the wonderful HeroLab software, but if I want to write my adventures on your product (as the storyboards and other tools imply is a feature) and not do things twice, then I am not about to do that if there is a risk that the content will go poof. When I have bizarre sync errors, that may not mean there is ANY risk of content loss/corruption, but I'm not a programmer, so I want to feel secure - right now I don't.

I would want print/export even after the Player Edition is ready, but without the PE the fact that I can't export is particularly painful.

 

[rob]

To answer the main question: clearly each person has their own view, and my view at this point is that it isn't at all worth it as-is. I have a bug that prevents syncing of all of my realms, which means that 1) that content is not portable, and more critically 2) I cannot trust that content will not be LOST.

Have you reported the syncing errors to us via a bug report? My understanding is that there are a couple of issues that are still plaguing a handful of users with regards to syncing. We're working on those in parallel with all the effort on Player Edition, but we need to know you're affected in order to make sure we get things sorted out for you.

As for whether your content will be lost, we take great pains to safeguard against that. The reason your sync is failing could very well be due to those safeguards. If we can't guarantee that everything is going to be synced up perfectly and will behave perfectly when synced back down, then the sync will fail. If this occurs, we need to look at the nature of the problem, and in a number of cases we've even asked for the databases from users to help us figure out the exact problem so we can get it fixed.

As long as you are making backups yourself, then your data is safe until the syncing issue is resolved. If something has been messed up in your local database, we'll sort it out and fix it to ensure your data is preserved. There have been a dozen or so cases where we've had to do that since the start of this year. The important thing is that we've worked with users to ensure their data is preserved.

Hope this helps...

 

[Gord]

I was probably one of of those dozen users. I couldn't even start the program without crashing at one point and was quite concerned about the data file. Yes, I had it backed up but had no idea how much work would be lost.

Sent a bug report, they asked for the file, and voila, it got fixed with a link to the repaired file.

This was a beta version and I have not seen any issue like this since.

It's definitely worth the money.

 

[Magnatude]

I just got it, been using it for just over a week.

I'm using Fantasy Grounds to run my games over the internet, and I run fairly intricate campaigns with complex NPC relationships and a lot of tangled webs...

If you need a campaign manager, this works really great. I'm happy to have got it just before my second campaign started because now I can enter stuff as I go.. my other campaign has 3 years of real-time history so its a little bit more work getting my former notes into it, though it is smooth.

If you just run one shot dungeons with little thought, then anything else works well to journal the game.
If you like to make complex plots and inter-NPC/PC situations for long term campaigns, then this is a must-have tool, (other than writing your own database).

It should work fine with even RL tabletop gaming.
I had previously used NBOS Keep, which is fine and basic, works well for small projects.
But I had problems with keeping track over everything after 2 years of gaming as notes get strewn all throughout the program. THIS (Realm-works) works excellent in this respect, as I can see all the relationships of material at a few clicks.

Works great for me because I write my campaigns THAT way, with tons of NPC/NPC inter-connective intrigue. IF you don't write things that way or just run one-shot games, or have players with little care of who/what/where/ when it comes to your game's npc's personalities and uncovering the mystery of it all, then something else will suit just fine.

As it stands as a product now, its great. I don't care about printing anything from it, its just all notes for MY sake and keeping things consistent. And that's what it should do for you as well if you buy it now.
Hope this helps.

(Edit: As far as losing data fears... I learned long ago backup, backup, backup... I have several externals that I backup to. The Cloud is nice, but I don't trust it yet, even though its supposed to be foolproof. I thought backing up is a give-in as far as data is concerned)

 

[bodrin]

Have you reported the syncing errors to us via a bug report? My understanding is that there are a couple of issues that are still plaguing a handful of users with regards to syncing. We're working on those in parallel with all the effort on Player Edition, but we need to know you're affected in order to make sure we get things sorted out for you.

As for whether your content will be lost, we take great pains to safeguard against that. The reason your sync is failing could very well be due to those safeguards. If we can't guarantee that everything is going to be synced up perfectly and will behave perfectly when synced back down, then the sync will fail. If this occurs, we need to look at the nature of the problem, and in a number of cases we've even asked for the databases from users to help us figure out the exact problem so we can get it fixed.

As long as you are making backups yourself, then your data is safe until the syncing issue is resolved. If something has been messed up in your local database, we'll sort it out and fix it to ensure your data is preserved. There have been a dozen or so cases where we've had to do that since the start of this year. The important thing is that we've worked with users to ensure their data is preserved.

Hope this helps...

(Beta User)
I still have a local backup that won't even load onto the cloud.

I've sent it multiple times and it still won't load.

I've used the restore from backup option multiple times after each iteration of the program, however the cloud sync still doesn't work.

I deleted the cloud data, out of desperation so there is nothing left, and I still can't upload my master realm local copy.

However I won't delete my local data as I'm hopeful that the file is still usable.

 

[rob]

I still have a local backup that won't even load onto the cloud.

<snip>

However I won't delete my local data as I'm hopeful that the file is still usable.

You local data is still safe. That's the important thing. Keep a backup of that data.

Most likely, something has occurred that's broken one record somewhere within your local data. Once that occurs, all the verification logic on the server fails and you aren't able to sync your realm up to the server. However, everything continues to work fine on your local database until the error gets corrected.

You'll need to submit a bug report to us. You'll also need to provide us with a copy of your local database so we can take a look at it and see exactly what's wrong. This entails giving us a link where we can download the file from somewhere. Once we can examine your database, we can (a) fix the bug within Realm Works that caused it in the first place and (b) manually fix your database so that it will work again.

I'm not surprised that you're a Beta user. The problems like this that we encounter are usually in the databases of Beta users and often tied to a special case situation we didn't foresee when automatically converting your data through all the various evolutionary stages we've gone through. We'll get things sorted out once we have your database to look at.