Time, Timelines and Past Events

[Dark Lord Galen]

Originally Posted by MNBlockHead

I'm absolutely stalling. All my historical time-line stuff is keep outside of Realmworks for now. I just don't want to go through the work of trying to fit square pegs into round holes only to find that I need to do it all again once calendars are eventually released.

Could not have put it better... I have a genuine hatred for double or repeat work. Especially if I can avoid it to begin with.

[Aaron]

I'm also holding back on a timeline until I can use the custom calender I want.

[Chemlak]

I've put a few dates in: while my campaign is officially set in the Forgotten Realms (and thus I'm waiting for the calendar of Harptos), I've done some crossover stuff to early 21st century Earth, so I have a date match-up I can use.

I've been quiet lately, but I'm still desperately anticipating calendars.

[AEIOU]

It's good to see that I didn't miss something totally obvious. Lots of great ideas for how to adapt. I'm going to put this on the back burner and hurry up and wait again. If I move forward now, I know I'll have to make major changes later and without the ability to export, restructure in Word/Excel and re-import/paste to correct categories, that'll be mucho painful.

As many of us can affirm, it's amazingly frustrating to not be able to build backstory effectively in RealmWorks. Especially because roleplaying is absolutely tied to the history of a campaign.

Keep plugging away Rob and team!

[ArgoForg]

Originally Posted by MNBlockHead

I'm absolutely stalling. All my historical time-line stuff is keep outside of Realmworks for now. I just don't want to go through the work of trying to fit square pegs into round holes only to find that I need to do it all again once calendars are eventually released.

Sad to say, I'm sort of in this boat as well, as I pigeonholed myself with a custom calender. I've really enjoyed RW from the outset, but I don't think I've even opened it in the past two weeks, as the vast majority of what I have left to do requires me to craft and cross-reference a lot of the world's history. And while I've looked into Aeon Timeline, I'm really doubting I can handle everything in the trial period-- and even though it's not a prohibitive cost, we're simple not in a financial position to buy a lot more ancillary programs to handle bits and pieces.

So for now, I've been mucking around with Campaign Cartographer, building up more maps of towns and cities and dungeons that I hope to eventually link in to with RW... but I'm sort of at an impasse at expanding beyond what I've already entered.

[Erdrix]

Originally Posted by ArgoForg

Sad to say, I'm sort of in this boat as well, as I pigeonholed myself with a custom calender. I've really enjoyed RW from the outset, but I don't think I've even opened it in the past two weeks, as the vast majority of what I have left to do requires me to craft and cross-reference a lot of the world's history. And while I've looked into Aeon Timeline, I'm really doubting I can handle everything in the trial period-- and even though it's not a prohibitive cost, we're simple not in a financial position to buy a lot more ancillary programs to handle bits and pieces.

So for now, I've been mucking around with Campaign Cartographer, building up more maps of towns and cities and dungeons that I hope to eventually link in to with RW... but I'm sort of at an impasse at expanding beyond what I've already entered.

Same boat as you guys. I put an AP on hiatus until we get calendar support. My group is doing a lot of time sensitive crafting and we're using Kingdom building rules that need date recording. Maybe we'll go back to it if calendars ever come out.

[MNBlockHead]

@Argoforge, I also looked into Aeon Timeline and didn't find that it met my needs. Really, what would be most helpful is a simple script that will allow me to enter a date in one of my custom calendars and have it convert it to all of the others as well as Gregorian.

I'm using RW heavily and am enjoying building my world in it and running my games from it. But I am also getting to the point where history is becoming increasingly important. What I'm probably going to do is just enter all the dates in Gregorian and just use vague phrases like "253 years ago..." rather than give specific historical dates. At least when custom calendars are supported, I should be able to set them up and then be able to have my dates converted/displayed in the custom format.

So I'm kinda in a weird place. I always put the current dates up using the custom calendars, both on a white board, on my campaign calendar (a Google Docs spreadsheet) and in my session summaries. But I'm recording all my historical dates in Gregorian, trying to avoid giving a specific custom-calendar dates for historic events.

[Dark Lord Galen]

For me the current calendar tool is 99% useless.
I only use it to record actual game date sessions and the highlight milestones. Significant events, etc that could be visited by players by game date w/o a lot of sorting.
But then that isn't particularly useful for details since players can't use the thier versions at the character level and character journals are a one way street.
So i have even abandoned that approach.
So in RW, time (and history) don't exist unless u live in a gregorian world.

So that concludes my calendar rant for the day......

This soap box provided by
<the coalition for custom calendars >,

a non-profit group of diversely patient RW users

[ArgoForg]

As I've been using RW as more of a whole world database so far than a true game one (no PC's have yet been entered, for instance, and almost everything has been placed in the World Almanac rather than the Story Almanac or a Custom), I'm not even that lucky yet.

Sadly, the two things that would really help me move forward beyond where I am would be calendars and export capability. Don't get me wrong, I'm very happy to see everything moving forward-- content marketplace, sirynscape/3P add-on capability, player and web versions-- because it shows that the LWD team is working hard on this and not sitting on their laurels and letting it grow stagnant... but sadly, none of these things are really going to do anything for my personal work in RW, so I feel sort of resigned to just work with other bits of my world while I wait around on the sidelines.

[Acenoid]

Maybe the beta version could be opened up for interested parties, then you could use this unwieldy advanced calendar?