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Parody
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jan 2013
Location: Rochester, MN
Posts: 1,516

Old December 26th, 2015, 08:15 AM
I've had a hard time getting good use out of the Storyboard because it's difficult to usefully represent anything that varies much from a straight line. Let's look at one of my Plots. My apologies for all the graphics.

This example is the main section of an adventure. In it, the PCs go to a place where there are a number of things they can do. Each thing takes time. After an amount of time, a forced event happens, then they return to doing the things they haven't done yet. Once they do them all, or if real time is running out, they are kicked along to the finale of the adventure. Here's how I currently represent this in Realm Works:

Sample Plot 1 - Actual.png

There's a couple of things I don't like about this diagram. First, the exit node isn't at the bottom. It's in a box, above something that happens earlier. This is closer to how I'd actually diagram it:

Sample Plot 1 - Desired.png

...but you don't have that sort of control in Realm Works diagrams. I could have done something like this:

Sample Plot 1 - Possibility.png

...which works, but isn't my preference.

Second, "Wandering the FAIR" is a substitution for the various places they can go. I'd love to show them in this Plot, but you end up with this:

Sample Plot 1 - Fail Loop Friendly.png

Not useful at all. You'd want to put these in a block, but that's not an option. Floating them won't help because they all end up next to the start node (and go off the screen, and look like start nodes). It'd be cool if we could do something like this:

Sample Plot 1 - Desired 2.png

...adding density while still linking directly to all of those "Location" events.

So far I've kept my Plotting to simple steps with straight lines, and it works fine for that. I'm wary of doing anything more complex because I know I'll be bothered by the automatic diagrams, so the Storyboard mostly sits unused. :(

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