Do Category Edits Extend across Realms?
 

Really digging Realmworks...

but I find the extensive lists within categories a speed bump to creativity rather than a tool. I create a character, place, etc. and then try to decipher how, for instance, a government type is different than a government role. I'm sure they fit for some people, but for my game and style, it slows me down.

I want to change them. My concern, however, is that if I start ripping stuff out that those changes will extend across any new realms for future games I make where they may be suitable.

So, like the topic asks: Do Category Edits Extend across Realms?

Not at present. Each Realm has its own copy of everything, and any changes have to be made in each Realm where you want them.

In the future you should be able to reuse your own realms, so if you decide you want to reuse some of your custom Categories you can. My recommendation is to make new Categories if you want to customize them rather than alter the Global ones, so you don't have to worry about how they'd interact with the existing Globals in new Realms when you start combining things. If you want to start from an existing Category, you can Duplicate it and change the new one however you want.

Good idea! Thanks.

Yeah, to much of a choice is a huge slow down to me, too.

What I did was creating copies aff categories interesting to me. I tanslated them to German and have only about 3 - 5 bullets in there. For an Individual e.g.
1. Overview
2. Description (Appearance, obvious character traits, ticks, etc..)
3. Reputation (What players can find out without ever talking to the NPC)
4. Background (What players can find out by talking to the NPC or digging much deeper or... well... what they will never find out. Also, I put my plot hook ideas here)
5. Other (Well, other stuff ;) )

I don't make use of most of the tags either. I have some for age, race and stuff. But for the purpose of describing my character, they are usually to limited and I can not imagine a situation when I am searching my realm for a "big", "slow" and "strong" person. I know, that is Frank the Troll ^^

This used to really bog me down but once you find the Quick Edit > Remove Empty Snippets and Categories it becomes a null issue.

I'm also finding a performance bump when loading pages where the empty snippets have been removed.

Creating an entirely separate category structure is basically the sledgehammer approach. You might first consider a more surgical solution before going brute force. :)

If you simply find the default structure to be information overload, you can easily "turn off" the stuff you find extraneous. That will likely be much faster and easier than creating a whole new structure. It also gives you the option to easily add stuff back in again if you decide you want to leverage something you previously turned off.

For each category, section type, and snippet type, you can uncheck the "Shown" box to hide it entirely. Or you can uncheck the "Auto Add" checkbox on section and snippet types to instead just omit them from newly created topics. This latter approach allows you to selectively add them to topics where you want the greater detail, since they are simply not automatically added - you can manually add them to any topic at any time.

Hope this helps!

That is true, rob ^^ Unfortunately, I had to choose brute force for another reason. Our operative playing language is German and, although all my players are capable of speaking and reading English, it somewhat distracts me and the players and we start speaking in a mix of English and German.

But this gives me the chance to ask for another feature ^^
Is it possible to add a feature like "display language"? It doesn't have to translate the whole menu stuff and everything that only the GM sees. It's just about displaying section captions etc. in another language.

For example, in edit mode a section could display as

1. Overview (displayed as: Überblick)
This way, one could keep the names of the sections (and maintain the original category structure) but still customize for a native language, without you having to add support for every language RW is used with.

Great tip! I'm going to look more into the customization features. Very powerful piece of software. There is definitely a learning curve at the start, but it opens up so many options to creating a world and playing it.

Funny you should happen to ask for this right now. I've been up to my eyeballs instrumenting just this very feature over the past week. Well, technically, I've been enabling all sorts of adaptability across different game systems, but I've wired in language support as well. It's just another axis, after all. :)

We won't be doing the language translation work right away, but all the plumbing will be in place so it becomes readily doable. Just to be clear, the focus here is on allowing translations of the structure elements (e.g. categories, domains, etc.), as you suggest. That's a vastly smaller task than translating the entire product!

One additional aspect of what I'm working on is a decoupling of cosmetics from behavior. Currently, they are lumped together, so you need to "remove protection" on structure elements just to change their name. You should soon be able to change the text with impunity, as long as you leave the behavioral aspects alone. This is exactly what it sounds like you're seeking - simply renaming categories and sections. As long as you stick to just hiding stuff you consider "too much", there won't be any behavior changes, so you can just hide what you don't want and rename the stuff you do want.

That is great!

So I can move back to the original structure, hide whatever section I don't need, use it and change the displayed name of each section later globally in the manage categories tab?

If that's the case, I would create all future content in the original structure.