Keep the Content Market Alive!
 

Dear Rob,

Even though LWD will no longer support RW, I believe many users will continue to use RW and would like to have access to the CM. Since the CM has been set up to link with our Paizo account for realm purchases, I propose that you allow users to post the realms they create to the CM for others to download for free. The realms that are copyright by Paizo and other companies would still require proof that the PDF was purchased, which is already in place.

There are a lot of us who will continue to use RW, and many of those users aren't interested in entering all the information of a module or sourcebook. On the other hand, there are a lot who have already done so and will continue to do so. Why not allow us to share the realms in the CM, which is already set up to ensure the PDF version was purchased?

I believe that offering the users the CM to share their realms will help encourage those who already have RW to continue using it. It may even bring in more customers to purchase RW so they too can have access to the CM.

Please consider this proposal. You and your LWD team invested a lot in RW as well as those who purchased the program. It's an excellent tool for GMs, so I would hate to see all of our investments wither away.

Thank you.
Ruhar

Sounds like a good idea to me.

I am in favour too.

Dear Rob,

I've wondered often why the Content Market has been closed to third-party submissions. The stated reason is basically "quality control," but it seems to me like that could be handled with a simple statement to the effect that material not developed by LoneWolf is not guaranteed to have the same publication standards as material that is developed by LoneWolf. Nor the same formatting practices.

Given that such a statement could be posted in the CM, I think ruhar's suggestion is a fantastic one!

I think the biggest problem with 3PP content is Rob had a vision of how RW would be used. The Fog of World stuff with players connecting etc. This required content to not just be input but changed in order to align with the RW content guidelines. Problem is, how many users were actually using all that?

Honestly, I just want to buy Realm Works copies of PDFs.

Fog of world comes up maybe once every 6 months for me. I'm far more likely to draw a "dungeon" out on battlemats and cover the unknown sections with paper and let the players move their minis around on that.

What I'd really want from an RW module is the plot setup for RW use so if the plot isn't linear I can just use the visual plot to navigate it, map pins as navigation, HL integrated encounters and showing the players any useful visual content from the module (pics of the NPC's for instance).

By fog of world im referring the the player revealing of snippets. It was a lot more work than initially thought I'd imagine. Having to have pdfs modified so that lines of text that are OK to be revealed to the player are separated out from the original paragraph structure.

Instead of just copying content from existing pdfs, you need to stop and redesign the paragraph structures and in some cases rewrite sentences.

It was a lot of work for little benefit IMO and it assisting in topping content being prepared efficiently for sale.

I use that a lot. I reveal the stuff the players know, because I've told them (I just click the button while I'm speaking, and then every time they speak to an NPC, visit a location etc. I show that topic and they see everything they know about it. It saves me a tremendous amount of time answering questions my players would know if they took notes or paid enough attention but players.

Of course I write my own content for my own world and almost always enter it into RW first. But I still frequently find myself breaking up long paragraphs into sentences that can be revealed separately.

This was always one of the reasons I had doubts about automatically converting PDF's to realms.

I use images a lot, as I can share them on the player view (DM Client, as a "handout").

The bestiaries are still somewhat of a use, since the group can do knowledge checks and I can share the snippets of what they "recall" based on the check.
I can leave the snippets shared for anything they've learnt, until the campaign ends.
And then either hide it all, if it's the same world, or import the Bestiary's again into the next Realm for a different world next.

I massively used the encounters build in RW and being able to jump from one encounter to another, not necessarily in a linear order.
But still able to add the encounter to the open Hero Lab (with the active characters portfolio running).
When done and loot was moved, delete the enemies and continue.
Unfortunately that seems to be broken, which sucks.
I can still put the porftolios in RW (and view them in RW) but cannot integrate into HL with either the 32-bit or 64-bit clients.
I can also save the portfolios on a dropbox folder, and just import into HL from the folder, but it was very nice to use RW for that.

As far as Smart Maps go, I basically don't use them.
If I need a (battle) map, I build it in Dungeon Designer 3+, and use it in d20Pro (a VTT).

Having a Realm Works of an adventure is great, as you can share what you want.
Creating the Blight into RW, is a lot of hassle as I'm doing it myself... important NPCs... and then locations etc.
I'd have gladly paid anyone to have done that for me for any campaign I've run or any campaign I'm going to run.

It's the same as Hero Lab.
It is free to use the Editor and put a 196 page book into HL, and with a massive amount of practice and initially community assistance/research, could probably script it all.
But I value $9.99 or $12.99 less than I do two months of evenings after work and weekends.
I'll happily pay $40 for content I'll use a lot, if the alternative is spend hundreds of hours of my time.
Or for lesser used content then maybe $10 or $20, depending how useful it is to my group or me.

Sorry, newbie here, is there a way we can create our own site to push/store Realms that can be shared?

Nothing prevents you from doing so. The only gotcha is that you should not put copyrighted content there. Otherwise - there is no restriction to provide RW content. We already have from AAW products that are compatible to some extent with RW on DrivethruRPG.

They should be fully compatible.

I think you're right and Rob's idea also went against what was constantly said during the testing and after the release. How many times has someone posted some sort of question about the layout and what should go where? And the answers have always been examples of what someone did then followed with "but do what works for you." This thread proves that with someone saying how they use it and what doesn't work for them then someone else saying that feature does work for them and how they use it. RW is a tool that is flexible enough to work for everyone in whatever manner they want and need it to work.

I think Maidhc O Casain has the right idea:
Post a statement like this and use the required proof that the original PDF has been purchased and allow us to share our works with each other. You could even charge a small maintenance fee for each realm initially "purchased" to offset the cost of maintaining the CM.

At least give it a try.

The general idea of a developer trying to force his view of how a product should be used on the users has time and time again been proven to be flawed...

I also support the notion of Maidhc O Casain!

Let's hope the lesson was learned and if RW development ever opens again, it will be new dawn, no past mistakes repeated. A lot of business mistakes were done, but nothing can't be salvaged as the thing that is the unique selling point of the product still remain and there is no competition there.

Frankly, Drivethrurpg.com beat them to the punch. We can just publish there.

I would consider changing it from free, to a small fee. Depending on the amount of material, I'd be fine for a $1 to $5 sale price, just kick back half to the content creator. Reserve free things to single character or item creations.

Sad part is I approached Drivethrurpg years ago, with regards to publishing RW modules. Since I was neck deep in entering 1st and 2nd edition adventures.

Never received a response.

We told people recently they could publish to Drive Thru RPG.

That's how I use player reveal as well. It was immensely helpful for me when playing Shadowrun to keep track of which clues and information the characters had learned over the course of the adventure.

In regard to what daplunk said:

I agree very much. If this standard is keeping adventures out of the Content Market, the standard needs to be ditched.

I've been working on an Infinity adventure on and off for awhile to put into Realm Works as an example of a "best practice" adventure. It's hard. There is a lot of copy/paste from the PDF. Sometimes though, there are paragraphs of the adventure that have player information and GM information sprinkled within the same paragraph. So then I have to decide if I split out the paragraph and make some sentences GM Instructions and some sentences Player Viewable. Sometimes when you do this you might have to rephrase a sentence or two so that the whole thing makes sense grammatically.

Given that there are a million different game systems out there and a million different PDF authors, some adventures are going to lend themselves more to this style than others. I don't think it makes sense to force a Realm Works GM to do extensive re-writing on a PDF just to make sure every instance of Player / GM snippets are 100% correct. It's important, sure. But it's MORE important to have adventures in the Content Market to begin with.

I couldn't agree more. Let's hope that Rob will too.

I just bought the Rise of the Runelords package. It's not all how I would have entered it, but it saved me so much time it's worth it.

I'm still hoping they resume development, and I'm voting with my $$$ to say so.

Since they've publicly stated that should they go out of business on some horrible future date, that the servers would be unlocked so we could use existing realms and create new ones...

With that, I'm confident in purchasing anything from the Content Market that I'd actually use.

My largest hesitation is Bestiary sources, which were my primary interest a while back. That is because my Realm Works cannot integrate an existing (stored in RW) portfolio into either the 32-bit or 64-bit versions of Hero Lab (classic), as of 8.9x versions of Hero Lab.

Realm Works is still an amazing tool, at what it does. I bought it, post kickstarter, based on what it could do as demonstrated by Joshua Plunkett's assorted videos on YouTube.

I'm in favor of this proposal!

I guess I was expecting too much for Rob to respond. :(

Well, BJ answered and the answer basically was: use Drivethrurpg

I love BJ, but unfortunately, she's not the one who can make that decision, Rob is. And I don't think DriveThru can sell or give away realms that are from Paizo or other companies copyright materials, which was my argument of why the Content Market should be kept alive.

(Emphasis added.)

The Content Market is designed to ensure the copyright PDF is purchased BEFORE the realm is purchased. I'm not sure DriveThru is.

Reading the whole thread or at least the beginning does help in understanding the argument before contributing $.02 to it. :D

The downloads from DriveThru also won't be locked to a particular person's Realm Works account - thus, in theory, they could be shared without purchase.

Damn! I didn't even think about that. I doubt DriveThru would accept any realm from copyright materials. That means only homebrew materials would be available.

Rob, you need to seriously consider the suggestion! At the very least, it would bring in revenue. Give it a try; those of us who supported this project deserve at least that much.

Trying to sell a realm based on copyright material should be considered to be equivalent to someone trying to sell a PDF that contains a scanned copy of a regular book.

It would have to be the content owners who upload it to Drive Thru.

Unfortunately, even if Rob approved doing this and had time to set it up and we had the resources to review all the material and make sure it wasn't infringing on copyright material, it still wouldn't allow you to share intellectual property. Just like on DTRPG, only the companies, like AAW, who own the content could upload copyrighted material. Sorry, folks. :(

Is this version number issue with the xml version checked ? It seems to be a bug that was introduced in the last patch...

Damn! With no ability to get more content and Rob no longer supporting RW it's going to die a lingering death. As much as I have supported and cheered this on this is a huge disappointment and it really pisses me off. I'll still use it because it's a great tool, but I don't see other companies creating materials for it. :mad:

Thanks for the heads up, BJ. :(

I'll still use it "as is," of course! What there is of it is still a great tool. I am, like pretty much everyone, very disappointed that RW will never live up to it's potential.

for homebrew stuff sure. But honestly a product needs a few patches here and there...

Ah always makes me sadder every second we write about it :D

Sorry all, I wish I had happier news for you.

Why not open the CM to user submissions?

The original plan was to have a group of users verify the quality and lack of infringement of the items and then put them on the CM. So go to that model. Charge a nominal amount, $2?, and split the income with the author.

That gets everyone on LWD's payroll out of the pipeline, except maybe for the upload, but gives you at the least some good PR and maybe some income.

Just to be clear LWD badly needs good PR and I can't see how some income isn't a good thing.

Their shop and they are probably responsible for any mishaps and errors happening there.

That's what's so great about the DCMA. Every web host site/service is immunized against legal action as long as the promptly respond to take down notices. So even if the volunteers were terribad and let copyrighted/trademarked material on the store they would face no jeopardy as long as they investigated and took down infringing content when notified.

But come on really, they could easily find 2 or 3 volunteers who are passionate about RW and would be willing to spend the few hours a week/month to examine and approve/disapprove submitted realms who wouldn't let infringing material go up.