What RW features have become your unexpected favorites?

[MNBlockHead]

Many of use bought RW for certain reasons, without truly understanding everything that the program offered. Over time, many of us have found that while our initial list of requirements may or may not still hold true, it is features that were never on our original list of must-haves that have become our current "can't live withouts."

When I was a perspective buyer of RW, I was looking for basically two things: (1) a way to create and manage my home-brewed world and campaign and (2) customer calendars. As for #1, I wanted something that offered more structure than I would have using a Wiki from scratch or trying to manage in Evernote, Google Docs, Onenote, etc., but would still allow for a lot of flexibility. For #2, I wanted to manage dates in a number of very different calendars, including back dating time lines.

Nothing on the market met #2, though RW was tantalizingly close. There were even video demos (by users with the beta, not from LWD) showing the unreleased feature. For #1, RW seemed to be the most mature product on the market that I could use offline. So I took the plunge.

Having used RW for well over a year, I've made do without custom calendars (though really would love to seem them finally made available), but there are a number of features I would find it very difficult to DM without.

1. AUTOLINKING

Seemed like a "neat" feature when I was looking into RW, but had little to no influence on my decision to buy. Now, I can't imagine building a campaign in a tool where I would have to link manually. The autolinking in RW and the granular control it gives you, with autolinking options, capitalization requirements, aliases, etc. is amazing.

2. STORYBOARD

You'll find some folks hating on the storyboard in the forums. I agree that for very complex plot lines, it can get unwieldy, and initially I thought it was just eye candy—something that looked cool in demos but not something particularly useful to me in creating a running adventures. I was wrong. The story board has become essential to helping me run any adventure that has a specific plot. True sandbox dungeon craws and hex maps may not make use of it (see below for more on this), but anything with a story and some railroading will benefit from the story board. Putting the story board for your adventure in the navigation pane, makes it really easy to run through the adventure. SO MUCH BETTER than flipping through a book or jumping around multiple tabs.

3. MAP AS NAVIGATION

When you run sandbox sessions or dungeon/hex crawls, putting the map in the navigation pane allows you to click on pins and have the associated content in the main pane. My god is this a nice feature! Again, so easy to pull up the content you need on the fly without lots of tabs open.

4. PLAYER VIEW

Really didn't think I would use it. Eventually I gave it a try and hooked up a large plasma TV that was set up above and behind me during the game. Players like having the map on the big screen. Being able to reveal as they progress and not making them have to map things out keeps the game flowing. Some people want to map things out, but I find it slows the game and takes away from the story. Sometimes, I'll make them map things out for a special challenge, but most of the time we have the map up in players view. It is also go to show symbols and riddles, etc. without having to have a stack of printed handouts.

5. HERO LAB INTEGRATION

This had no bearing on my decision to buy. There was no 5e support, so I had no intention of buying HL. Now that the SRD is in HL and the community has filled the gaps in the SRD, I am REALLY liking the ability to have the stats being managed by HL and not having to paste and format statblocks in RW. The integration with HL works very well and I can see it quickly becoming a cannot-live-without feature.

6. USER COMMUNITY

This isn't a feature but boy does the user community add to the value of RW (and HL). The engagement of the developers with the community is also great.


Anyway, that's my list. Any features that didn't figure much into your decisions to buy that you now couldn't live without?