First of all, congratulations everyone! The long wait is over, and we can sink our teeth into the delicious steak that is the Realm Works product. Yummy!
Kinda wish the timer on the cloud service didn't start until I knew what I was doing, probably going to lose 1-2 months over that, but meh, such is life.
Also, I installed my first copy on a Windows 8 machine, with plans to put it on my Windows 7 desktop later and kinda work between the two, but it said something scary about binding my key to a Microsoft account or something. What's up with that? Will it get in the way when I go to put this on 7?
Anyway, on to the program itself. At first glance it's definitely got a lot of potential, the interface is mostly intuitive and there seems to be unlimited potential for customization. Also, whoever set up the Hero Lab integration needs a HUGE kudos, that's the most seamless transition to another program's data I've EVER seen, it's outstanding, loads fast, and I'm starting to suspect you don't even need to have Hero Lab installed on the computer running Realm Works to read the files! The only thing that would make it better would be the ability to target a single hero inside the portfolio rather than loading the whole thing, but honestly, wicked small price to pay, especially if you're like me and just make one hero per portfolio most of the time anyway. I was strongly considering the back breaking task of redundantly loading stat blocks and skill bonuses and such into the Realm Works program, but the speed and power of that integration makes it completely unnecessary, saving me tons of time AND validating my purchase of Hero Lab even though I GM a heck of a lot more than I PC.
Now, some concerns:
1) There doesn't seem to be any obvious choices to display an item's truth level, nor is there a seperate spot to reveal the truth later on. Take, for example, a demon disguised as a young boy attempting to trick adventurers into committing evil acts. I can mark his race and age as "Untrue" but unless I know to look in there later, there seems to be no place to clearly see on my screen that they're untrue. And short of making new snippets with the truth, there's no spot for the reveal.
In my pipe dreams, the Green dot you see on a reveal would change to Red for false and Yellow for partially true, and there'd be a "sub snippet" to put the truth into whenever you set something untrue/part true. Just for the suggestion box.
2) Working with Categories: Despite the advertisement in the tutorial that says it would be easy to switch approaches midstream, it seems like a TON of thought has to go into customizing the categories before any work can be done on the world. I got scared away from removing the protection on the pre-created categories by the warning message, so I made duplicates of a few for the changes I wanted.
First example, in this case: For Region: Political, I wanted a snippet "Government Style", for which I made tags for Monarchy, Theocracy, Oligarchy, etc... so I made them, then made my first country for a minute or so, nothing too heavy yet cause I'm still experimenting/exploring. Then I decided, "Hey, I want to include the date the country was founded in that section" so I went to add another snippet... only to find that spot now greyed out on my duplicate, warning me that I could no longer edit the template once it was in play on an entry.
Now, there's nothing to stop me from adding the snippet on the fly, but I don't want to have to do that for every single country I make from now on, that would get tedious.
Pipe dream: It would be awesome if, when adding a snippet to an entry, a dialogue popped up asking if you wanted to add it to all other entries of that type and the template as well (except of course not for the protected ones because of warning yadda yadda).
Also, there definitely needs to be a "export to realm/import from realm", because I got very sad when I realized that any custom categories and entries I made would have to be done over again from scratch if I ran a second world.
Side note: While I was experimenting and writing this, I actually managed to crash the program. Not criticizing that - I expected a few bugs since we kinda rushed you all, and I /am/ experimenting heavily with it. I actually want to compliment you on the error reporting procedure, because it was a lot cleaner than what I see on most programs.
Couple of random questions and thoughts (and yes, I know I could probably find some of these answers in the manual, but hey, isn't it useful to know what people who are too lazy to read manuals might need a video for?
):
- What's the difference between story almanac and world almanac?
- After my crash, it said I was already in under another session and asked if I wanted to kick the old me. Does that mean I was eating up a connection on your server for the last 29 hours straight while I had the program running idle? Would it be better for you guys if I made "Work Offline" the SOP until I was ready to sync stuff?
- This space used to encourage the Dev Team to prioritize the calendar.
Soooo eager for this.
Think I'm definitely gonna do some "Let's Play" style videos as I explore more, I think it might be fun.
Sorry for all the rambling, can you tell I'm excited to have the program?