How does one manage various Pathfinder sources

[joepacelli]

So Pathfinder is made up of many sources, for example
Inner Sea World Campaign Setting
Inner Sea Gods
Inner Sea Magic
Bestiary 1 through 6
Core Rulebook
etc...

And then you get into your Adventure Paths
Rise of the Rune Lords
Curse of the Crimson Throne
etc...

So how does one manage all this data within Realm Works?
Do you enter the sources separately into there own Realm, which makes no sense, or do you enter these into one overall Realm for Pathfinder? which would be huge then and could easily become unmanageable.

But then when it comes to an Adventure Path like Curse of the Crimson Throne, do you create the new Realm and import this content into this Realm, bloating the Database even more.

The problem I see is if I create separate Realms for each reference I'll end up with so many Realms, and of course if I go to enter something like Curse of the Crimson Throne it says it references several Pathfinder products;
Advanced Class Guide
Advanced Player's Guide
Bestiary 2, 3, and 5
Inner Sea World Guide
Occult Adventures
Ultimate Combat
Ultimate Equipment
Ultimate Intrique
Ultimate Magic
I would need to import all this into the Adventure Path, and importing 3 Bestiary references would seem overkill for a handful of creatures. But if I enter another Adventure Path in the future and it also uses creatures from one of these Bestiaries, then it makes sense since I'm not entering the same data multiple times, I'm just importing it.

But while I have all of these in both physical copy and PDF version's I don't have time to input all of the content from these references, and I'm sure there is content which definitely comes from the Core Rulebook.

While I would love to wait for the content market to go live and hope that most of this content will be available to purchase right away, I need to start entering data now since I will be starting the Adventure Path Curse of the Crimson Throne.

The hardest thing also will be I spend the next 1 to 2 months entering this data and then this adventure path is made available in the content market and I then purchase it. Then I'll need to transfer any relevant data from my created Realm into the Content Market one

 

[EightBitz]

What I've been working on is entering all the core and OGL stuff in one realm. The only published adventure path I've run (and didn't even complete) was Rise of the Rune Lords. I put that in its own, separate realm.

I usually run my own adventures. Right now, I'm putting relevant data for an adventure into its own realm. Whatever I need from the OGL stuff, I'll export that from the core realm, and import it into the adventure realm.

Whether you make each adventure its own realm or put all adventures in the same realm depends on how you want to build your world.

 

[Happydevil43]

I think its personal preference, but you are right that to put all this in to a single realm would be unmanageable.

I have one realm per AP.
I had two Ideas, still working on them to be honest.

First Idea was to go through and look at the monsters and anything that was referenced to one of the other source books (luckily I only have older AP's right now) and created an article for them.

I then would tag them for export and then reimported them for the next AP. The idea was to build a common use export that had things like the standard goblins, orcs, rings of protection etc etc that are common across a lot of the AP's.

My second Idea was to just hyperlink anything through to the online SRD. Works well when I have internet connection

Haven't landed on which idea is any better or worse than the other. I am sure there are much more proficient people here that have better ideas than me.

Hope that gives you some ideas.

 

[kbs666]

A single AP, RotRL in my case, was as large as my entire homebrew campaign realm which makes some sense since it is meant to take characters from 1 to late teens. Adding in just the campaign setting material for the areas covered, Sandpoint and the rest of Varisia blew that up even further.

Adding in just the monsters and named magic items in the actual AP added quite a bit more to the realm.

Even with views that was unwieldy. Adding in all the spells and feats strikes me as both a waste of effort and of limited utility.

The question is what use will you get from the data entered? Do you really need the Trip rules in RW or the Bard class description? If you won't ever need the info then don't put it in.

 

[Farling]

For my S&S campaign, I only entered the spells which were going to be used by foes - and only those that had complicated rules.

 

[joepacelli]

A single AP, RotRL in my case, was as large as my entire homebrew campaign realm which makes some sense since it is meant to take characters from 1 to late teens. Adding in just the campaign setting material for the areas covered, Sandpoint and the rest of Varisia blew that up even further.

Adding in just the monsters and named magic items in the actual AP added quite a bit more to the realm.

Even with views that was unwieldy. Adding in all the spells and feats strikes me as both a waste of effort and of limited utility.

The question is what use will you get from the data entered? Do you really need the Trip rules in RW or the Bard class description? If you won't ever need the info then don't put it in.

While deciding whether or whether not we will need a rule is not that easy, because there are plenty of times we keep re-looking up the same rules over and over again because we either forget them or something comes up and again we are questioning it.

So I will problem enter these rules

Another question, Knowing I'll be doing Curse of the Crimson Throne and I enter the City Korvosa into RW. I input the map and tag all the places;
Government and Military Buildings
Homes and Inns
Restaurants and Taverns
Shops and Services
Temples and Schools
Sites of Interest

Now Korvosa is a large city, and the players will come from different sections most likely so they each will have different locations which I would reveal to them. But how do I accomplish this with RW, there is no way to only reveal certain areas to different players, it's all or nothing.

How do you handle this scenario?

 

[kbs666]

While deciding whether or whether not we will need a rule is not that easy, because there are plenty of times we keep re-looking up the same rules over and over again because we either forget them or something comes up and again we are questioning it.

So I will problem enter these rules

Another question, Knowing I'll be doing Curse of the Crimson Throne and I enter the City Korvosa into RW. I input the map and tag all the places;
Government and Military Buildings
Homes and Inns
Restaurants and Taverns
Shops and Services
Temples and Schools
Sites of Interest

Now Korvosa is a large city, and the players will come from different sections most likely so they each will have different locations which I would reveal to them. But how do I accomplish this with RW, there is no way to only reveal certain areas to different players, it's all or nothing.

How do you handle this scenario?

What is the benefit of entering the rules into RW over looking the rules up in the SRD or having the PDF's on the same device?

There is n9 easy solution to not having individual reveal. However do you actually have players that make that much use of RW?

 

[daplunk]

I'm not a Pathfinder player but I'm probably qualified to answer this.

Put everything in it's own single individual realm. Leave it in that realm as a master. Create an export from it.

For your game create a new realm. Import everything you want to use for that campaign into that realm.

In my experience this is the cleanest way to do things. This way if you need to make a change to a module you know exactly where to make that change and you can create a new export file and import it where you are using it and it will update accordingly.

Realms with lots of content have poorer performance than those with less content. This is a hard truth. If you enter everything into one realm you may create performance issues that become painful to work with.

Tip: Topics with more snippets take longer to load than topics with less snippets. Reduce the amount of snippets where possible.

What is the benefit of entering the rules into RW over looking the rules up in the SRD or having the PDF's on the same device?

This is a valid question and something I expect we will see discussed aggressively once a rule book comes out. The 5e SRD for example. Having the rules in Realm Works is both a blessing and a curse. The time to complete linking once you have rules entered goes up dramatically. Rules use common words and common words are used a lot. This is something each person will need to consider.

For me it's worth entering the rules that I always need to reach for the book for. Grappling for example. But for everything else it's a real pain in the ass.

Monsters you want entered. Spell's if you don't use Hero Lab. Traps. But rules for everything gets painful.

And yes, I have complete Monster Manuals and Rule Books entered.

 

[kbs666]

I completely agree about entering monsters. I entered a lot of spells and then I deleted them. It was an absolute mess. Pathfinder has hundreds of spells and I doubt I looked any up in RW up ever and I don't think I intentionally linked any either. The same with feats. It just added a lot of bulk to my main realm for no real gain.

Maybe others would get use out of that sort of thing but I really wonder about it. I'd strongly recommend limiting the data entry just to things you actually reference somewhere else in your realm, in a statblock or in a monster entry for instance.

 

[Happydevil43]

I completely agree about entering monsters. I entered a lot of spells and then I deleted them. It was an absolute mess. Pathfinder has hundreds of spells and I doubt I looked any up in RW up ever and I don't think I intentionally linked any either.

Have to totally agree with this. In fact I found myself unlinking spells more than I linked.
Especially when some PDF's put a space between F and l so every instance of Flight became f light and subsequently became a link, and took me ages to sort out.

I am putting in Starfinder at the moment, and wont be putting spells or feats. We have the core rule book or the SRD's to look that up in. The only thing is monsters, special magic items and a few things that I look up all the time. Such as Undead Traits, Construct Traits, etc.

Saved me a bucketload of data input.

One day when I have time I'll work out how to create an import CSV, but just don't have the time.

 

[kbs666]

Undead traits, construct traits and the like I've gotten quite a lot of use from.

 

[Acenoid]

For my SR3 camapign I have entered a lot ofrules and references. Some stuff is unsorted and needs furter attention to become useful. A lot of stuff has never been looked up (yet). But I still think that it's good to be handy. The advantage will become bigger, the more books will be integrated. Manual re-visits are necessary to see whats useful.

Advice --> Try to keep rules references as short as possible. Imho a book offers a faster overview if I know the section I have to look at. In RW if information is distributed over several topics , it takes longer to find its way around.

That is why it's very important to have the search functionality in RW to do it's job with as few lcicks as possible. (meaning there could be still some improvement over the current functionality. Should already be in the suggested features)..