[zarlor]

For me the .1st file serves two primary purposes. First, it provides a consistent source. What I mean by that is if I go into the Editor and just add a source there by selecting -New Source- and typing one in, it seems to me its not completely consistent on saving that source. I feel it provides a nice, standardized method, but that's obviously not a huge thing.

The second things it does, however, is provide a format for grouping. That part is pretty huge, IMHO. Take a look at something that has a Companion book, for example. Say Deadlands Noir. If you just set something with the default of "User Setting" it gets lumped in with every other "User Setting" in a nice long list on your Character Configuration screen. Even that might be fine if you have "Deadlands Noir" and "Deadlands Noir Companion" since they'll still at least line up next to each other, so being able to have a separate section for those might be nice but not critical. However, take something like Deadlands Reloaded and a separate setting file for it like "Stone and a Hard Place". If you wanted to group those you have to rename Stone to something like "Deadlands: Stone and a Hard Place" and your names start getting longer and longer. The .1st file can take care of groupings like that for you.

Actually you can do even more than that with it, make some setting exclusive in a group as well, so you can set things so that maybe you could never use Deadlands Noir and Hell on Earth together because they are too crazily different or something. You may have grouped all of those settings under a Deadlands group but then made them exclusive from each other so only one of the main Deadlands settings could be selected out of all of them. Things like that.

If you get a chance I might suggest hitting up Dartnet and some of the other folks in the Settings thread just to grab any and all of the settings files you can. Some of those guys have gotten pretty creative with setting things up with .1st files. All of that is more advanced than would be needed for the main post here, mind you, but setting the groundwork for using .1st files more creatively by getting folks in the habit of setting it up even for a basic setting to begin with is, IMHO, a good thing. Then if you ever needed to build on it, the basics of what you need are already there.