Calendar

[Zanth]

I'm newish to the product (I purchased this summer) and have been rather slow in building up my campaign for various reasons. One of the main ones is my use of OS' other than Windows. That means running in a VM and there were hiccups for a while. That all said, I am OCD when it comes to maximizing productive workflows and minimizing time and effort (in all things, even if I never end up using the workflow).

For a while now, I have been using a cool "mind mapping" package called TheBrain (it used to be called Personal Brain). I won't get into all the features but it is a robust and expansive application that towers above all other options (such and Mindjet's Mind Manager) in terms of unique data elements, visualization and mimicking how humans think and store data.

I also use Evernote and devonThink Pro (for you Mac users out there) to organize and collect notes, clippings etc.

I have used these three programmes (and still do) for almost everything I have needed to do electronically, from storing code, to organizing multiple doctoral dissertations, keeping track of the bulk of my life.

When I set out to run my own game for my friends, I figured I would end up doing what I had always done: brainstorm, map and link all things with TheBrain, gather and organize data (resources, pdfs, pics, vids etc) with Evernote or devonThink and then write in Ulysses or Scriviner. Each of these apps are available for desktop and iOS devices and they sync across machines and are hosted online. There is quite a bit of overlap between some of them and in some cases, all of them. As such, I was trying desperately to avoid replicating content generation or collection, but most of all I was desperate to reduce the time and effort needed to get my ideas down and ready to be used during a session.

I began researching campaign management applications. RW came up early in my searches and from the reviews, it stood out as the top product despite some of the rumblings I encountered on forums. So I bought it almost sight unseen and even went against my better judgement and installed Windows in a VM in order to run it.

I have been slow to work RW entirely into my workflow as I said, because of the Windows bit, but over the last month I have really dug my heels in and mapped out my world. I run Numenera (a Monte Cook Games product) and although it takes place on Earth, it is 1 billion years in the future. This was never a problem for me and I went happily along c/p'ing content from my other apps and growing my world.

Tonight I set out to create my timeline and also reference the 8 prior worlds and the event that ended each (the game takes place during the 9th iteration of humanity). I have seen the timeline button but never clicked it, I never had a need. When I set out to enter a date that was outside the range of 20000 CE, I couldn't. When I set out to change the BCE/CE identifiers, I couldn't. How was I to properly document my created history if I couldn't edit the names and ranges of the calendar? Would I need to create my own elements in some other section to shoehorn it? Ugh... I didn't like that idea. So I came here to discover if I was missing some glaringly obvious option so I could get back to developing my own timeline.

Calendar.

Gosh, I had read so many negative things about the calendar feature and the forthcoming updates and some declaring the whole package as useless without it, etc. I never knew what that was about. Was it a calendar to invite players and track our games? I thought I saw that in a tab somewhere? "Oh well" I thought, I'll encounter it at some point, but I doubted it would be a big deal.

Calendar.

I get it now. Wow, this does suck! We can't document our own history in a *what is to me* reasonable way. Like others, I'm saddened, mainly because I don't want to go through a double workload. Like others, I think RW is the best content management system (that I know of) and it could replace a well oiled but really inefficient content generation workflow I have going AND I can synchronize AND I can share with my players AND I can hide stuff.

WOW! I want this to replace everything I have been using but I do understand now: Calendar.

This is very very very important for me. I'm keen on creating and making the game my own. Monte Cook purposely made the world very open and ambiguous in many ways in order to foster the type of work I get a kick out of. The inability to map this to a timeline won't break my campaign, but it throws a pretty large kink in my workflow and that means I'm less likely to go through the effort to load up RW.

This is a long post considering it is my first one that isn't about a bug fix, but I wanted to detail a bit of my background and how I came to purchase RW and why I did so and how I use it and why a calendar feature is important to me. I don't know enough about the promised features nor about other hopefuls, but if there is a camp one might place themselves in or a spot where one might cast a vote, please show me the way so that I might strengthen the argument that a working custom calendar is essential for creating and tracking a truly immersive campaign. Of course there are other applications I could create a timeline in, and then I could throw the data into RW once the feature comes alive, but if said feature has dropped in priority or has never been considered a truly important one, I hope it might rise up a few rungs on the feature list ladder. Heck, even something as simple as permitting one to edit the names of the calendar for those not using the Gregorian calendar and expanding the time range to essentially unlimited (or give us the option to take a long value or a string!). In my case, although there is no such thing as a Gregorian calendar (in the Ninth world), my players would understand if I used 10000000022 CE.

As others have expressed, RW is awesome and its utility will increase greatly with this one feature alone.