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karpomatic
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Old November 9th, 2023, 04:41 AM
Anyone looked at Amsel Suite on Kickstarter? Think it can compete with Realm Works? I love RW but not having any support from the company is worrisome.

What do you think?

http://kck.st/3MuUFPa

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daplunk
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Old November 11th, 2023, 02:56 PM
Already left years ago for the greener pastures provided by Obsidian.md. Don't see anything that jumps out as being fresh or new that Obsidian can't already do. I have a lot less concerns of dev time stopping given the userbase is significantly larger than anything the TTRPG market will ever attract.

The Amsal ui doesn't look appealing and while the concept of the decision tree looks cool on paper, I just can't see it working at my table. Means you would basically need to code those decision trees in before a game for it to be useful and that voids the point of playing a ttrpg in the first place as they are meant to be collaborative stories.

What they aren't saying is how will you get data into the tool. For me that's the most important question. Monsters, spells, items, etc. They are the building blocks of a campaign, how efficient is it to get all of that content into the tool?

Takes me 30minutes in Obsidian lol.

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Parody
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Old November 11th, 2023, 08:12 PM
I took a look around various places where they've said they'll make information available: their website, Kickstarter, Reddit, and Discord.

The website and Kickstarter are full of pretty pictures presented in an overly artistic style, but no substantive descriptions of how their software will work. Some features are described: typical things like links and tags and ones I haven't seen much like tracking party decisions and having that automatically reflected at other places in the adventure. They also put particular focus on tracking what multiple parties have done at the same point in the adventure, which seems like a very niche feature to me, but whatever.

Their Reddit only has cryptic image posts they've made which don't appear to relate to anything. Some are supposed to be about the Kickstarter's stretch goals, I guess?

The best source was (unfortunately) Discord, where they said explicitly that they won't have any sort of demo, video, or other more detailed information available to show their backers how they intend it to work before the end of the Kickstarter. They have answered a few questions there, at least. (Some are reflected from the Kickstarter comments.)

At present there isn't enough detail for me to want to put more time or money into looking at their project.

As far as competing, Realm Works isn't currently being developed or widely marketed so there's not much of a competition in that way. Without more concrete information on their Suite we can't make a good comparison with other existing applications and online services. The Kickstarter has already reached its goal, if that's worth anything. (It usually isn't.)


A petty annoyance: their website changes the mouse cursor to a floating <div> moved by JavaScript which contains an .svg (vector image) of a glowing green dot. CSS already allows you to set the cursor to an .svg while still letting the browser easily override it. (Accessibility settings.) :P


Last edited by Parody; November 11th, 2023 at 08:17 PM.
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Farling
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Old November 12th, 2023, 01:28 AM
Wow - coding decision trees "Did they kill the whale?" looks like so much more work than just editing the page to say YES or NO.

Farling

Author of the Realm Works Import tool, Realm Works Output tool and Realm Works to Foundry module

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Parody
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Old November 12th, 2023, 12:57 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Farling View Post
Wow - coding decision trees "Did they kill the whale?" looks like so much more work than just editing the page to say YES or NO.
Playing Devil's Advocate for a second: it is, but they also emphasize it changing other things later in the adventure for you like speech blocks, information the party gets for free, which NPCs are present, and similar things. It could be very useful when combined with their "remembering which groups did which things" feature: I've seen GMs run a longer adventure multiple times over a convention weekend, one part per day, and that could be a big help for them. The same would apply to something like a Pathfinder Society adventure you're running a bunch of times, but you're less likely to need it when each instance is a single session.

Anyway, I imagine the authors of this software do something where it's a useful feature.


Last edited by Parody; November 12th, 2023 at 01:01 PM.
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